The right to interpret a signal passing through your property would fall under Universal Rights.
The "right" to claim that the signal cannot be interpreted without permission is a misnomer. It is actual a property arbitration issue and would fall under Social Contract, more specifically under Law.
As for God? I'm not sure how that has any bearing on the discussion at all.
-Hope
I'd agree that any rights to television would fall under law. Which means that, by definition, they cannot be inherent.
Why would you pay a tax on something that is an inherent right. I think honestly you need a tax on government. Let's call it a government tax, The government must pay this tax to the people because without the people the government is nothing.
You have an inherent right to watch television? Seriously?
How do you know you do? Did God write it down on a tablet of stone and give it to Moses? If not, where did this 'inherent right' come from?
One should definitely use a persistence library instead of concatenating strings to help mitigate the possibilities of being victim of SQL injections. They are pretty good at it. Hibernate is a widely used one.
Speaking as someone who has used both approaches, Hibernate is a lot of overhead for, in many cases, very little gain, and having used it on a number of large projects my team has decided not to use it in future. Of course you must sanitise all values passed in from untrusted clients carefully before they are spliced into any SQL string, but there are a number of frameworks which do this which are far lighter weight than Hibernate.
Netbooks are supposed to be those things too small to work like a real computer but too big to be really portable! How could Steve Jobs be wrong? Is it true that they are small enough to be more portable than a laptop but big enough to be more useful than a cellphone/PDA?
I wonder how long I will go on musing for, before I break down and buy one...
I bought one a year ago - a Dell Mini 9 with a 1.6GHz dual core Atom processor, 2Gb RAM, and a solid state device in place of disk. My desktop machine which I use for development is a dual processor Athlon 1.6GHz with 2.5Gb or RAM and a SCSI raid array. Both run Ubuntu 9.10. Which is faster? Well, for jobs like compiling, the netbook tends to be, because the SSD is a lot faster than physical disk. For everything else except 3d graphics, they're about equal. The ATI graphics card on the desktop does 3d better and faster than the Intel on board graphics chip on the netbook.
But the only places the desktop really has it over the netbook are graphics and disk capacity. The netbook has it over the desktop in terms of noise, size, weight, power consumption, portability.
Now, OK, mine's an Atom, not an ARM. But there really isn't that big a difference in performance between a dual core 1.6Ghz Atom and a dual core 1.2GHz ARM, and a four core 1.2GHz ARM will scare the pants off it. These days, a netbook really can give you all the compute power you need, and five plus hours battery life.
O, and we know where you live. What a wonderful wife you got. And such lovely kids! It would be ashamed if...
But I digress. What was it you wanted to say again?
That's right, you do know where I live. If you click on the 'Homepage' link on this post, you'll get my home page, and if you click on the CV link on that you'll get my home address. The CVs a bit out of date, but the address is right. This is a problem because?
This is no infringement on free speech. Yes, anonymity may be useful if you're blowing the whistle on wrong-doing by the powerful, but in normal political debate anonymity is a bad thing. When you see a thousand comments with a thousand different names all supporting the same view, how do you know whether it's a widely held view or one loon with nine hundred and ninety nine sock puppets? How do you know whether it's astroturf by a foreign corporation or foreign government meddling in your affairs?
You don't.
This law doesn't stop anyone expressing any political opinion they like. All it does is require that they are prepared to put their name to it.
This isn't denying freedom: it's protecting freedom by preventing manipulation.
According to various things I’ve read on the Web this morning, it is not ARM. It’s developed by PA Semi, now wholly owned by Apple, and previously a second source for PowerPC processors. So, you have an operating system which runs nicely on an ARM, which is nicely low powered and would run your new device just fine. What possible reason would you have for porting to a new processor architecture? My guess: because ARM is not 64 bit, and I'm guessing this is.
Of course, the iPad does not need 64 bit. Which means, the new processor core was not designed to the iPad. Which means, the next generation Apple desktops will use A64 chips (probably quad or eight core). But, given that this thing consumes roughly the same amount of electricity as an ARM and delivers at least as many MIPS per watt (possibly more), it’s heat output per MIP is going to be way less than Intel. Which means Apple are aiming at the server farm market, where disposing of waste heat is a big issue.
Microsoft bungs hundreds of millions at "usability" & we end up with the stupid ribbon
I'm not convinced that "the stupid ribbon" is the best example of your thesis. Perhaps it is easier for novices to learn a program's tabbed toolbar than a program's menu bar. For one thing, recasting a pull-down menu as a toolbar keeps a class of actions on the screen where the user can see them rather than overlapping the document and disappearing once the user chooses an action. As I understand it, most of the whining about Ribbon came from 1. people who rely on muscle memory from previous versions of the product, the same sort of people who would get confused between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org anyway, and 2. people concerned about the legal fees of putting up prior art from 2002 to invalidate the patents that Microsoft engineers were applying for over tabbed toolbars. Sure, Ribbon has room for improvement, but it took a couple iterations for Apple to get pull-down menus right too.
To be honest I think the problem Microsoft has is that if it doesn't actively look different, people won't see it as a new version, so they won't pay for it again. I know this from programs I've written - if you make changes customers can't see, they're very unwilling to pay for them, even if they make significant improvements to speed, usability, stability or something else important to the customer. Word 2007 really isn't any better than the previous version - it isn't more reliable, it doesn't have any useful new features. Why should anyone who has the existing version pay for the new one?
Because it looks different. They can see it has changed. It doesn't matter that this burdens them with new training costs for no actual benefit: they can see it's new, and, therefore, must be improved.
If a game is multi-platform, then you will play it more (if you don't it's not worth any more to you).
Frankly I doubt this. Most of the games I play would not be enjoyable to play on my phone - the screen is much too small, and the phone hasn't got appropriate controls. I would prefer to be able to buy the games I play for Linux rather than having to keep a Windows box just for playing games, but I don't need any game which I do play to run on multiple platforms, because I'm only going to play it on one. Of course, if a game is Mac only (or Wii/Playstation/X-Box only) then I won't play it because I don't have those platforms. Making a game multi-platform expands the market for the game, but it doesn't make individual players play it more.
If a game is good, then you will play it more.
Oh, absolutely. I've played The Witcher at least 150 hours; Dragon Age about the same. Probably over a thousand of hours of Neverwinter Nights (which I only bought to support the Linux port) in its various incarnations and community add-ons. Certainly hundreds of hours of Sid Meier's Civlization, Alpha Centauri (both of which, again, I only bought because there were Linux ports and I wanted to support them), Pirates! and Railroads! Hundreds of hours on Settlers II, III and IV. And, back in the day, thousands of hours playing Elite, the video game sans pariel. In terms of hours of entertainment per unit currency, good games are extraordinary value for money.
I fins that about half the games I buy I only play once or twice. I don't resent that in the least, because the games that do work for me give me so much fun.
If a game gets extra content, then you will play it more.
Again, agreed, particularly if it comes with good modding tools and allows community-made content. After all, modding (and playing other people's mods) is half the fun of things like NWN and The Witcher.
In any case, if you supply a closed source license, you're going to need to take out professional indemnity insurance for a very large amount, and maintain that insurance for many years. So you need to cost the premiums, the likely rise in premiums over the years, and the hassle of organising it into your fee.
When someone uses your open source software there is in law no implied contract between you and them, because they haven't supplied you with anything of value in return for your software. So if they sued you, they would (in sane jurisdictions) lose (provided you could afford to defend yourself, and people like FSF and EFF would probably help). However as soon as you accept anything of value in return for your software, you have a contract and so you're potentially liable if failures in the software cause damage to the user. You might or might not win in court if sued, but no-one would help you so you're likely to be bankrupted if you lose. So you need insurance. So you need to cost for it - and that means the cost of your licensed software is going to be quite high.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, particularly not in whatever jurisdiction you are in. But I have been in exactly the position you describe, and those are my conclusions. In practice you're probably going to be put to quite a bit of work and inconvenience working out exactly what is would cost you to provide a closed source license, and when you do your potential customer will back away rapidly.
Dragon Age camera is full of fail. It more or less caused me to stop playing the game.
IMO the scroll limitation in the isometric view is the most atrocious of all.
A character must remain on the screen at all times, which means the most you can scroll is half a screen-width, which means you can't see shit.
Personally, I very much like the Dragon Age camera. It's not quite as good a The Witcher camera, which gives you a choice of modes, but the DA:O camera is most similar to the 'over shoulder' mode I prefer in The Witcher. Overall, though, if you want just one immersive RPG, The Witcher has better story, better development and better scenery. DA:O seems to be very much Neverwinter on steroids (although to be fair they've fixed some of the problems with Neverwinter, like the implausible amounts of loot you used to accumulate).
Sorry, wasn't this in The Art of Computer Programming? That is not in any way shape or form an obscure text in the field of computer science. In any sane world, any patent examiner dealing with patents in computer science would have the set on their desk.
The Art of Computer Programming is a pretty big book. I have the first three volumes on the shelf behind me; they have my scribbles all over the margins. But I couldn't tell you from memory every algorithm that's in there. This is just one of the many places where searchable hypertext scores over flattened dead trees.
Not entirely true. This was certainly the case in the early '90s, and is again now in the portable market, but it certainly isn't in the high end (ARM has nothing that competes with the Xeon, for example, and certainly nothing that competes with something like IBM's POWER6) and not really much that competes with desktop chips (maybe a quad-core 2GHz Cortex A9, if you can find one). For much of the intervening period, ARM and Intel were in entirely different markets - Intel had nothing that came close to ARM power consumption and ARM had nothing that came close to Intel's performance.
So put more processors in the box (or possibly on the die). Sheesh, how hard is that? As you say, for the price or the electrical power consumption of an Intel chip you can have half a dozen ARMs.
The advantages, IMHO, of ARM are all tilted for use in the mobile space. Being 5, 15, whatever watts more efficient than an Atom is a high price to pay for breaking x86 compatibility when you're hooked to a wall outlet, considering your choice in monitor likely has as much impact on your final power bill as your ARM/Atom choice.
I don't get this. Mind you, I first used ARM powered desktop machines (running BSD) in 1989, so it doesn't seem that new or revolutionary to me. But unless you're tied to legacy proprietary applications, what does it matter what the processor is? The ARM processor family has always been a competitive alternative to Intel, if you were not tied to Windows. And with Debian and Ubuntu available for ARM, I shall be very keen to have one of these babies as a useful mobile workstation.
Does anyone know where we can get hold of the text of this consultation, and where we respond to it? I'd very much like to give Ofcom my contribution on this! I've searched their website but thus far I haven't found it, and the Grauniad article doesn't give a URL. Basically my view is that if the BBC ceases to be a public broadcaster funded by the license fee, then they can do what they like. But until they do that they are owned by and answerable to their public, and they can't. And one of the things they specifically can't do is stop the owners of their content - us - from viewing it on whatever device we choose.
The whole point of the BBC is that it is not a private corporation. It is a public corporation, owned by the people. Public corporations cannot behave in self-interested ways. It's tough, but that's how it is.
Newest Android OS supports Exchange ActiveSync which Microsoft's recommend way of pulling data off Exchange server for mobile devices. I haven't been able to fully test it though since our demo model from Sprint hasn't arrived at the office. We are hoping to support it but it depends on how much Google implemented it. For those who don't know, Microsoft licenses Activesync to companies and Google bought it to use with GMail and Android.
I have it on my (Cyanogen) G1 - it works very well. It is a separate app from the GMail app, though, so you end up with two separate inboxes.
The point that was being made is that goods marketed by US companies often have the same sticker price in UK pounds as in Euros as in US dollars. Mind you the UK/Euro price typically does include VAT (European sales tax) whereas the US$ price may not include sales tax... but there's a pretty common practice of charging European customers more, because, well, we're on average richer and prepared to pay more. Or else Americans are stingier. Or something.
Otherwise, why not exercise some self-constraint and try products from Yahoo, or even host your own?
I'm sort of in the same position as the question asker; I use a huge range of Google services (my personal pictures are on Picasa, I use Latitude and MyTracks on my Android phone. I even use Google DNS). Google knows virtually everything about me - including things I wouldn't share with my best friend. But...
Yahoo knows virtually nothing about me. Microsoft knows virtually nothing about me.... EBay/PayPal/Skype also know, collectively, more about me than I'm strictly comfortable with, but that's a slightly different matter (and I'm moving from Skype to Google Chat for just this reason)
If we are to use the Web as it currently exists to the fullest we have to share information. You can either use a scattergun approach which spreads your data across a range of potentially unscrupulous companies, or you can pick one company which you hope will remain moderately honest. If Google turn out to have a bad security breach, or suddenly decide to sell my information to the highest bidder, I'm in trouble. But if you spread your information around then a security breach at any of the big search engine companies puts you in trouble.
Even if you trust Microsoft to be honest, do you trust them to be competent?
In summary: relax, Lintilla, and enjoy your shoes.
I saw a prototype Pegatron machine that looked like it would meet all of these, but it's not available yet... every time I search, I keep hearing that these machines are just around the corner. In summer, they were coming about for Christmas 2009. Now that it's December, I hear they are coming out in Q1 2010.
H'mmmm... one of these, you mean? Yes, I'd definitely buy one!
3. Full-sized keyboard Some netbooks take little to inappropriate lengths, as it were, with keyboards that are just slightly smaller than full size: generally about 90 percent as large.
Wrong. My favourite 'laptop' ever was a Toshiba Libretto, about the size of a paperback book. My favourite laptop now is a Dell Inspiron Mini 9. What's great about these machines is they're small - the Libretto slipped easily into a jacket pocket, yet (running Debian) it was a full blown machine on which I ran everything from Apache to Oracle. The Mini 9 isn't as small, but it still fits easily into my bicycle bag - which wouldn't take a full laptop. Some users who are poor typists and have fat, pudgy fingers may have difficulty with small keyboards. Good typists adapt. And when on the move small trumps big every time.
A standard VGA graphics-out port is a given, since you'll want to use your smartbook as a presentation tool (although that may require running Windows -- horrors! -- in place of Android).
Wrong. It's key to giving this machine decent off-power-grid performance that it runs a processor very much more frugal than an Intel. It needs to be an ARM (my preference), or a MIPS, or something new. Whatever it is, you will be able to run presentations - either Open Office will be ported (very probable), or something new will be written. You will not run Windows.
Kinda interesting they didn't have the dimensions of the solar plane readily available. From the pictures it looks like the wingspan is an easy 100 feet to carry how much, one guy? Wonder how big the wings would be to carry 200 passengers, oh, and where would get the energy to carry them at 600mph? Seems to me solar and flight are fundamentally at odds simply because you need vast surface area to get the energy to reach high speeds...but then, maybe it can work, almost like you optimize
solar powered plane energy = kw * wing area meters ^ 2 - kw * motor * mass * velocity ^ 2. and mass = wing density * wing area meters ^ 2
would have to factor in wind resistance from the giant wings, but that's cross sectional area, I thought, that causes drag, so if you made the wings really thin...
I half agree with you. Half. None of our grandchildren are ever going to fly at 600 miles per hour. There isn't enough energy, and they won't be able to afford to use it. We're burning all the cheap energy there's ever going to be, right now. A plane which could provide practical flight at one hundred miles an hour and that they could afford to use might be useful to them. I'm sceptical, though, about whether this is the right way to go about providing that - hydrogen from electrolysis of seawater looks to me a potentially better fuel, because the amount of sunlight you can capture that way isn't limited by the wing area of the aircraft and because the fuel, even if somewhat compressed, is lighter than air and aids buoyancy.
The very high ratio of exotic materials structure to payload on this aircraft represents a lot of embodied energy in itself.
Slashdot Mirror
The right to interpret a signal passing through your property would fall under Universal Rights.
The "right" to claim that the signal cannot be interpreted without permission is a misnomer. It is actual a property arbitration issue and would fall under Social Contract, more specifically under Law.
As for God? I'm not sure how that has any bearing on the discussion at all.
-Hope
I'd agree that any rights to television would fall under law. Which means that, by definition, they cannot be inherent.
(2) These rights are limited only by the general laws for protection of the youth and protection of the personal honor.
So they will state that the “honor” of the “church” must be protected. Whatever “personal honor” means. (My guess: Stretchable beyond imagination.)
The soi-disant 'church' is by definition not a person and thus does not have personal honour.
Why would you pay a tax on something that is an inherent right.
I think honestly you need a tax on government. Let's call it a government tax,
The government must pay this tax to the people because without the people
the government is nothing.
You have an inherent right to watch television? Seriously?
How do you know you do? Did God write it down on a tablet of stone and give it to Moses? If not, where did this 'inherent right' come from?
One should definitely use a persistence library instead of concatenating strings to help mitigate the possibilities of being victim of SQL injections. They are pretty good at it. Hibernate is a widely used one.
Speaking as someone who has used both approaches, Hibernate is a lot of overhead for, in many cases, very little gain, and having used it on a number of large projects my team has decided not to use it in future. Of course you must sanitise all values passed in from untrusted clients carefully before they are spliced into any SQL string, but there are a number of frameworks which do this which are far lighter weight than Hibernate.
Netbooks are supposed to be those things too small to work like a real computer but too big to be really portable! How could Steve Jobs be wrong? Is it true that they are small enough to be more portable than a laptop but big enough to be more useful than a cellphone/PDA?
I wonder how long I will go on musing for, before I break down and buy one...
I bought one a year ago - a Dell Mini 9 with a 1.6GHz dual core Atom processor, 2Gb RAM, and a solid state device in place of disk. My desktop machine which I use for development is a dual processor Athlon 1.6GHz with 2.5Gb or RAM and a SCSI raid array. Both run Ubuntu 9.10. Which is faster? Well, for jobs like compiling, the netbook tends to be, because the SSD is a lot faster than physical disk. For everything else except 3d graphics, they're about equal. The ATI graphics card on the desktop does 3d better and faster than the Intel on board graphics chip on the netbook.
But the only places the desktop really has it over the netbook are graphics and disk capacity. The netbook has it over the desktop in terms of noise, size, weight, power consumption, portability.
Now, OK, mine's an Atom, not an ARM. But there really isn't that big a difference in performance between a dual core 1.6Ghz Atom and a dual core 1.2GHz ARM, and a four core 1.2GHz ARM will scare the pants off it. These days, a netbook really can give you all the compute power you need, and five plus hours battery life.
Speak up, man!
O, and we know where you live. What a wonderful wife you got. And such lovely kids! It would be ashamed if...
But I digress. What was it you wanted to say again?
That's right, you do know where I live. If you click on the 'Homepage' link on this post, you'll get my home page, and if you click on the CV link on that you'll get my home address. The CVs a bit out of date, but the address is right. This is a problem because?
This is no infringement on free speech. Yes, anonymity may be useful if you're blowing the whistle on wrong-doing by the powerful, but in normal political debate anonymity is a bad thing. When you see a thousand comments with a thousand different names all supporting the same view, how do you know whether it's a widely held view or one loon with nine hundred and ninety nine sock puppets? How do you know whether it's astroturf by a foreign corporation or foreign government meddling in your affairs?
You don't.
This law doesn't stop anyone expressing any political opinion they like. All it does is require that they are prepared to put their name to it.
This isn't denying freedom: it's protecting freedom by preventing manipulation.
(And no, I'm not going to 'post anonymously')
According to various things I’ve read on the Web this morning, it is not ARM. It’s developed by PA Semi, now wholly owned by Apple, and previously a second source for PowerPC processors. So, you have an operating system which runs nicely on an ARM, which is nicely low powered and would run your new device just fine. What possible reason would you have for porting to a new processor architecture? My guess: because ARM is not 64 bit, and I'm guessing this is.
Of course, the iPad does not need 64 bit. Which means, the new processor core was not designed to the iPad. Which means, the next generation Apple desktops will use A64 chips (probably quad or eight core). But, given that this thing consumes roughly the same amount of electricity as an ARM and delivers at least as many MIPS per watt (possibly more), it’s heat output per MIP is going to be way less than Intel. Which means Apple are aiming at the server farm market, where disposing of waste heat is a big issue.
You heard it here first.
Microsoft bungs hundreds of millions at "usability" & we end up with the stupid ribbon
I'm not convinced that "the stupid ribbon" is the best example of your thesis. Perhaps it is easier for novices to learn a program's tabbed toolbar than a program's menu bar. For one thing, recasting a pull-down menu as a toolbar keeps a class of actions on the screen where the user can see them rather than overlapping the document and disappearing once the user chooses an action. As I understand it, most of the whining about Ribbon came from 1. people who rely on muscle memory from previous versions of the product, the same sort of people who would get confused between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org anyway, and 2. people concerned about the legal fees of putting up prior art from 2002 to invalidate the patents that Microsoft engineers were applying for over tabbed toolbars. Sure, Ribbon has room for improvement, but it took a couple iterations for Apple to get pull-down menus right too.
To be honest I think the problem Microsoft has is that if it doesn't actively look different, people won't see it as a new version, so they won't pay for it again. I know this from programs I've written - if you make changes customers can't see, they're very unwilling to pay for them, even if they make significant improvements to speed, usability, stability or something else important to the customer. Word 2007 really isn't any better than the previous version - it isn't more reliable, it doesn't have any useful new features. Why should anyone who has the existing version pay for the new one?
Because it looks different. They can see it has changed. It doesn't matter that this burdens them with new training costs for no actual benefit: they can see it's new, and, therefore, must be improved.
I was about to say almost exactly this.
If a game is multi-platform, then you will play it more (if you don't it's not worth any more to you).
Frankly I doubt this. Most of the games I play would not be enjoyable to play on my phone - the screen is much too small, and the phone hasn't got appropriate controls. I would prefer to be able to buy the games I play for Linux rather than having to keep a Windows box just for playing games, but I don't need any game which I do play to run on multiple platforms, because I'm only going to play it on one. Of course, if a game is Mac only (or Wii/Playstation/X-Box only) then I won't play it because I don't have those platforms. Making a game multi-platform expands the market for the game, but it doesn't make individual players play it more.
If a game is good, then you will play it more.
Oh, absolutely. I've played The Witcher at least 150 hours; Dragon Age about the same. Probably over a thousand of hours of Neverwinter Nights (which I only bought to support the Linux port) in its various incarnations and community add-ons. Certainly hundreds of hours of Sid Meier's Civlization, Alpha Centauri (both of which, again, I only bought because there were Linux ports and I wanted to support them), Pirates! and Railroads! Hundreds of hours on Settlers II, III and IV. And, back in the day, thousands of hours playing Elite, the video game sans pariel. In terms of hours of entertainment per unit currency, good games are extraordinary value for money.
I fins that about half the games I buy I only play once or twice. I don't resent that in the least, because the games that do work for me give me so much fun.
If a game gets extra content, then you will play it more.
Again, agreed, particularly if it comes with good modding tools and allows community-made content. After all, modding (and playing other people's mods) is half the fun of things like NWN and The Witcher.
I
In any case, if you supply a closed source license, you're going to need to take out professional indemnity insurance for a very large amount, and maintain that insurance for many years. So you need to cost the premiums, the likely rise in premiums over the years, and the hassle of organising it into your fee.
When someone uses your open source software there is in law no implied contract between you and them, because they haven't supplied you with anything of value in return for your software. So if they sued you, they would (in sane jurisdictions) lose (provided you could afford to defend yourself, and people like FSF and EFF would probably help). However as soon as you accept anything of value in return for your software, you have a contract and so you're potentially liable if failures in the software cause damage to the user. You might or might not win in court if sued, but no-one would help you so you're likely to be bankrupted if you lose. So you need insurance. So you need to cost for it - and that means the cost of your licensed software is going to be quite high.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, particularly not in whatever jurisdiction you are in. But I have been in exactly the position you describe, and those are my conclusions. In practice you're probably going to be put to quite a bit of work and inconvenience working out exactly what is would cost you to provide a closed source license, and when you do your potential customer will back away rapidly.
All the voice acting rules. They really did well on that front.
It's fun to walk around with Alistair, Morrigan, and Leliana. Good cross section of bickering, mostly Morrigan's fault :D
Morrigan and Leliana certainly get into some good Intelligent Design debates.
Try sha^W romancing both Morrigan and Leliana. You can do it, and the bitching between them is priceless.
Dragon Age camera is full of fail. It more or less caused me to stop playing the game.
IMO the scroll limitation in the isometric view is the most atrocious of all.
A character must remain on the screen at all times, which means the most you can scroll is half a screen-width, which means you can't see shit.
Personally, I very much like the Dragon Age camera. It's not quite as good a The Witcher camera, which gives you a choice of modes, but the DA:O camera is most similar to the 'over shoulder' mode I prefer in The Witcher. Overall, though, if you want just one immersive RPG, The Witcher has better story, better development and better scenery. DA:O seems to be very much Neverwinter on steroids (although to be fair they've fixed some of the problems with Neverwinter, like the implausible amounts of loot you used to accumulate).
But I shall definitely be buying this expansion.
Sorry, wasn't this in The Art of Computer Programming? That is not in any way shape or form an obscure text in the field of computer science. In any sane world, any patent examiner dealing with patents in computer science would have the set on their desk.
The Art of Computer Programming is a pretty big book. I have the first three volumes on the shelf behind me; they have my scribbles all over the margins. But I couldn't tell you from memory every algorithm that's in there. This is just one of the many places where searchable hypertext scores over flattened dead trees.
Not entirely true. This was certainly the case in the early '90s, and is again now in the portable market, but it certainly isn't in the high end (ARM has nothing that competes with the Xeon, for example, and certainly nothing that competes with something like IBM's POWER6) and not really much that competes with desktop chips (maybe a quad-core 2GHz Cortex A9, if you can find one). For much of the intervening period, ARM and Intel were in entirely different markets - Intel had nothing that came close to ARM power consumption and ARM had nothing that came close to Intel's performance.
So put more processors in the box (or possibly on the die). Sheesh, how hard is that? As you say, for the price or the electrical power consumption of an Intel chip you can have half a dozen ARMs.
The advantages, IMHO, of ARM are all tilted for use in the mobile space.
Being 5, 15, whatever watts more efficient than an Atom is a high price to pay for breaking x86 compatibility when you're hooked to a wall outlet, considering your choice in monitor likely has as much impact on your final power bill as your ARM/Atom choice.
I don't get this. Mind you, I first used ARM powered desktop machines (running BSD) in 1989, so it doesn't seem that new or revolutionary to me. But unless you're tied to legacy proprietary applications, what does it matter what the processor is? The ARM processor family has always been a competitive alternative to Intel, if you were not tied to Windows. And with Debian and Ubuntu available for ARM, I shall be very keen to have one of these babies as a useful mobile workstation.
Does anyone know where we can get hold of the text of this consultation, and where we respond to it? I'd very much like to give Ofcom my contribution on this! I've searched their website but thus far I haven't found it, and the Grauniad article doesn't give a URL. Basically my view is that if the BBC ceases to be a public broadcaster funded by the license fee, then they can do what they like. But until they do that they are owned by and answerable to their public, and they can't. And one of the things they specifically can't do is stop the owners of their content - us - from viewing it on whatever device we choose.
The whole point of the BBC is that it is not a private corporation. It is a public corporation, owned by the people. Public corporations cannot behave in self-interested ways. It's tough, but that's how it is.
Also simply not true since the communication channels ARE ENCRYPTED.
And - seriously - you know this how?
I certainly hope you're right!
That video is copyright! It's piracy! The government must issue Al Qaeda with a DMCA takedown notice immediately!
Newest Android OS supports Exchange ActiveSync which Microsoft's recommend way of pulling data off Exchange server for mobile devices. I haven't been able to fully test it though since our demo model from Sprint hasn't arrived at the office. We are hoping to support it but it depends on how much Google implemented it. For those who don't know, Microsoft licenses Activesync to companies and Google bought it to use with GMail and Android.
I have it on my (Cyanogen) G1 - it works very well. It is a separate app from the GMail app, though, so you end up with two separate inboxes.
Sorry but your math fails. 1 usd != 1 euro
1 U.S. dollar = 0.684134911 Euros
1 Euro = 1.4617 U.S. dollars
500 Euros = 730.85 U.S. dollars
500 U.S. dollars = 342.067456 Euros
Yes dear, we know this. Go back to sleep.
The point that was being made is that goods marketed by US companies often have the same sticker price in UK pounds as in Euros as in US dollars. Mind you the UK/Euro price typically does include VAT (European sales tax) whereas the US$ price may not include sales tax... but there's a pretty common practice of charging European customers more, because, well, we're on average richer and prepared to pay more. Or else Americans are stingier. Or something.
Otherwise, why not exercise some self-constraint and try products from Yahoo, or even host your own?
I'm sort of in the same position as the question asker; I use a huge range of Google services (my personal pictures are on Picasa, I use Latitude and MyTracks on my Android phone. I even use Google DNS). Google knows virtually everything about me - including things I wouldn't share with my best friend. But...
Yahoo knows virtually nothing about me. Microsoft knows virtually nothing about me.... EBay/PayPal/Skype also know, collectively, more about me than I'm strictly comfortable with, but that's a slightly different matter (and I'm moving from Skype to Google Chat for just this reason)
If we are to use the Web as it currently exists to the fullest we have to share information. You can either use a scattergun approach which spreads your data across a range of potentially unscrupulous companies, or you can pick one company which you hope will remain moderately honest. If Google turn out to have a bad security breach, or suddenly decide to sell my information to the highest bidder, I'm in trouble. But if you spread your information around then a security breach at any of the big search engine companies puts you in trouble.
Even if you trust Microsoft to be honest, do you trust them to be competent?
In summary: relax, Lintilla, and enjoy your shoes.
I saw a prototype Pegatron machine that looked like it would meet all of these, but it's not available yet... every time I search, I keep hearing that these machines are just around the corner. In summer, they were coming about for Christmas 2009. Now that it's December, I hear they are coming out in Q1 2010.
H'mmmm... one of these, you mean? Yes, I'd definitely buy one!
Wrong. My favourite 'laptop' ever was a Toshiba Libretto, about the size of a paperback book. My favourite laptop now is a Dell Inspiron Mini 9. What's great about these machines is they're small - the Libretto slipped easily into a jacket pocket, yet (running Debian) it was a full blown machine on which I ran everything from Apache to Oracle. The Mini 9 isn't as small, but it still fits easily into my bicycle bag - which wouldn't take a full laptop. Some users who are poor typists and have fat, pudgy fingers may have difficulty with small keyboards. Good typists adapt. And when on the move small trumps big every time.
Wrong. It's key to giving this machine decent off-power-grid performance that it runs a processor very much more frugal than an Intel. It needs to be an ARM (my preference), or a MIPS, or something new. Whatever it is, you will be able to run presentations - either Open Office will be ported (very probable), or something new will be written. You will not run Windows.
Kinda interesting they didn't have the dimensions of the solar plane readily available. From the pictures it looks like the wingspan is an easy 100 feet to carry how much, one guy? Wonder how big the wings would be to carry 200 passengers, oh, and where would get the energy to carry them at 600mph? Seems to me solar and flight are fundamentally at odds simply because you need vast surface area to get the energy to reach high speeds...but then, maybe it can work, almost like you optimize
solar powered plane energy = kw * wing area meters ^ 2 - kw * motor * mass * velocity ^ 2.
and
mass = wing density * wing area meters ^ 2
would have to factor in wind resistance from the giant wings, but that's cross sectional area, I thought, that causes drag, so if you made the wings really thin...
I half agree with you. Half. None of our grandchildren are ever going to fly at 600 miles per hour. There isn't enough energy, and they won't be able to afford to use it. We're burning all the cheap energy there's ever going to be, right now. A plane which could provide practical flight at one hundred miles an hour and that they could afford to use might be useful to them. I'm sceptical, though, about whether this is the right way to go about providing that - hydrogen from electrolysis of seawater looks to me a potentially better fuel, because the amount of sunlight you can capture that way isn't limited by the wing area of the aircraft and because the fuel, even if somewhat compressed, is lighter than air and aids buoyancy.
The very high ratio of exotic materials structure to payload on this aircraft represents a lot of embodied energy in itself.