The dystopian future of Demolition Man might have been without sex and booze, but the Brave New World kept the populace happy with a weekly drug ration and regular orgies.
Indeed. There is a direct Perth-Singapore transit, but most East Coast-Singapore data goes via some combination of Guam, Japan, and Hong Kong, and the latency is the same or worse than to US West. I believe Internode set up some special routing via Perth for one particularly latency-sensitive application that is hosted out of Singapore for Australian customers (Starcraft II).
There's a new Perth-Singapore cable due to come online next year, though I can't find any information about progress of the build. When that cable lights up we should see more traffic taking this route, and hopefully better latency to Singapore for all Australian users.
Publishers love to push apps in your face because it gets their branding on your home screen. When I worked in agency-land we were approached by a client who wanted an iPhone app. The RFP was basically "We need an app. We don't really care what it does, just get our icon on the phone."
Technicolor wants to sue companies to force them to license their patents. (this is how the patent system is supposed to work)
Apple wants to sue companies to prevent them from creating competitive products (THIS is an example of a broken patent system)
What? You have it completely backwards.
The patent system is exactly designed to prevent the creation of competing products. You invent something and you get to sell that thing exclusively for a limited time, in return for donating the "secret" of its construction to the public domain at the end of that period.
It's the concept of passively sitting on a idea and then trying to extort money from anyone who actually brings a product to market that stifles innovation and acts against the interests of society. If I had my way, the patent system would be use-it-or-lose-it. If you don't make a genuine effort to utilize a patent, you'd have to sell it (not license it) to someone who will or it would become void.
Find the "likers" on facebook. Find out what other things they like from their profiles. Introduce legislation to make all of those things illegal. Mwahahahaha!
The thing is, these valuations are based on users, not technology. If I had an app that all it did was show you a random picture of poop every day, and 27 million people turned on that app and looked at the poop each day, I could probably sell that for $1B too.
I believe you can turn off unified menu (by uninstalling the packages) independently of switching window/session management from Unity. At least, that was the case in 11.10.
Unity has other quirks that make it irksome to me though. For example, the single icon for all windows of the same app makes it very difficult when working with sets of similar-looking windows - terminal emulators, for example. Also having no option for a second click on the launcher icon to hide the application is annoying. Sometimes it's handy to have an app that you want to look at for reference then close quickly. In GNOME you can click-read-click without moving the mouse and get back to what you were doing before. With Unity you have to jump through more hoops.
It does look like they've fixed a few of problems I had with Unity in 12.04. For example, alt+tab cycles windows on the current workspace only, and the default "spread" of windows behaves likewise. Sadly, icons for applications running only in other workspaces still appear, cluttering up the launcher wherever you are.
The thing you have to remember through all of this is that in the photon's frame of reference, all these events occur simultaneously. The measurements of Alice and Bob, the configuration of Victor's apparatus, and the point of creation of the photons are a static system, existing at a single point in time. No causality is violated as far as the light is concerned.
Just like the EPR paradox, this only becomes interesting from a practical point of view if it can be used to transmit information. Show me a machine containing Alice and Bob that prints letters on a ticker tape based on correlated polarization, and let the delay be such that a message is printed, in its entirety, before the other photos reach the experimental station manned by me, Victor, which is situated right by the tape (but sight of which is blocked). After the printing stops, I input my message, then compare with what was printed on the tape. If and only if this experiment works can you be said to have sent information back in time.
There is one other problem: TCP assumes that dropped packets mean the link is saturated, and backs off the transmit rate. But Wireless isn't like that: frequently packets are lost because of noise (especially near the edge of the range). TCP responds by backing off (it thinks the link is congested) when actually it should be trying harder to overcome the noise. So we get really really poor performance(*).
In this case, I think the kernel should somehow realise that there is "10 MB of bandwidth, with a 25% probability of packets returning". It should do forward-error correction, pre-emptively retransmitting every packet 4x as soon as it is sent. Of course there is a huge difference between the case of lots of users on the same wireless AP, all trying to share bandwidth (everyone needs to slow down), and 1 user competing with lots of background noise (the computer should be more aggressive). TCP flow-control seems unable to distinguish them.
Shouldn't this be handled at the datalink level by the wireless hardware? If there's transmission errors due to noise, more bits should be dedicated to ECC codes. The reliability is maintained at the expense of (usable) bandwidth and the higher layers of the stack just see a regular link with reduced capacity.
The EB games at Broadway in Sydney actually had some real gamers on staff - at least for a while. I had a good chat with a guy there about where to buy retro games (PS1 and earlier stuff) and he seemed knowledgeable and interested.
The retial price of games here is crazy though. It's a relic from the days of poor exchange rates. The dollar went up 50% in value, but the price of games stayed the same. It doesn't surprise me that physical game stores that don't work hard to add value are in trouble though. Most people evaluate games through reviews and downloadable demos - not by browsing a shop and reading box covers. Even if prices were comparable to online, the stores need to do more with in-store events, playable demo boxes, maybe the odd LAN party. The kinds of things that pen-and-dice and miniature gaming shops do.
Indeed. And according to the ITU, HSPA+ is "4G" and you can use the iPad 4G on Telstra's HSPA+ network, thus achieving a "4G" connection.
The problem stems from the fact that in Australia only Telstra's LTE network is advertised as "4G", and it is this network that the iPad is not compatible with. So, technically you can get a 4G connection on the new iPad, but Apple may be in trouble if it is determined that their advertising leads customers to believe that the device is compatible with the Telstra-advertised "4G" network.
I didn't see any mention in the linked article about what makes these features particularly odd. It says parts of the crust are tilted and raised by several kilometers in places. This is pretty commonplace geology caused by plate tectonics here on Earth (we call them mountain ranges). If Mercury has a liquid mantle, would we not expect to see similar folding and up-thrusting there? Is this different because of the size, shape, speed of movement?
I once saw an ad for a digital bathroom scale that claimed it "never needs calibrating" and was "accurate to 0.1%". I immediately called bullshit* on this in my head and am glad to know that I was justified in doing so.
* Note that this was in Australia where we actually measure our mass in kg, rather than our weight in lb. It may well have been that accurate as a weighing machine, but not as a "massing" machine.
In Sydney $20/day is the "early bird" rate for people who arrive before 9:30 and want to park all day. Casual hourly parking in the city during the day is much more expensive - anything from $10-20 per hour for a private car park, and $7/hr for government-metered street parking. In any case, parking your car costs more than any return bus or train ticket, before you even count the cost of fuel.
Honestly, I'm not sure. I think it depends a lot on what part of the city you live in, and what other options there are. If the bus is a horribly inefficient but cheap way to get around, then only desperate people will use it. If you have bus-only lanes, pre-paid ticketing and other things to make the bus as fast or faster than a private car, the demographics change. In places like Sydney or London, most of the city's white-collar workforce come in to the city by bus or train/metro.
then raise the (guess) 100 trillion to build it. Maybe 200-500 years.
That's actually rather optimistic, in my opinion. The catastrophic devastation that would be caused by a collapse is enough to prevent such a structure from ever being built. And unless we suddenly develop some kind of miracle material that makes nanotubes look ordinary, we'll never have the material needed anyway.
The amount of damage caused by a falling cable would depend very much on its composition and geometry. A thin "tape" of high-strength material would rapidly slow down due to air friction, and a large proportion of it may simply burn up.
I know you're joking, but in a lot of large cities a car is unnecessary, and commuting by car is a very expensive option even if you have one (due to high fuel price, $20+/day parking, opportunity cost of driving yourself when you could be reading Slashdot on the bus, etc.) My wife and I earn enough to keep a nice car, but choose not to own one. We both have bicycles for commuting, and sublet our appartment's car spaces which more than covers membership in a car share program and rental cars when we go on holiday.
Lets pretend I am just a normal IE, firefox, or chrome user who has never heard of Gate One before. I do not even have an admin account and I am in a library that locks down their computers from change. Can I use Gate One? or does something need to be installed?
Gate One is something that is installed on a server, not your computer.
Nothing needs to be installed on your computer to use it, other than a compatible, modern web browser.
The administrator of the website using Gate One can install Gate One modules (not browser plugins) on the server, and you the user will immediately have access, via your web browser, to the funcationality that those modules provide.
Slashdot Mirror
Brave New World ... no sex
I think you need to go and read it again.
The dystopian future of Demolition Man might have been without sex and booze, but the Brave New World kept the populace happy with a weekly drug ration and regular orgies.
Indeed. There is a direct Perth-Singapore transit, but most East Coast-Singapore data goes via some combination of Guam, Japan, and Hong Kong, and the latency is the same or worse than to US West. I believe Internode set up some special routing via Perth for one particularly latency-sensitive application that is hosted out of Singapore for Australian customers (Starcraft II).
There's a new Perth-Singapore cable due to come online next year, though I can't find any information about progress of the build. When that cable lights up we should see more traffic taking this route, and hopefully better latency to Singapore for all Australian users.
Publishers love to push apps in your face because it gets their branding on your home screen. When I worked in agency-land we were approached by a client who wanted an iPhone app. The RFP was basically "We need an app. We don't really care what it does, just get our icon on the phone."
If it's not programmer incompetence, it's usually a push from the product manager to have "email me my password" as the password recovery mechanism.
Australia reporting in here.
Technicolor wants to sue companies to force them to license their patents. (this is how the patent system is supposed to work)
Apple wants to sue companies to prevent them from creating competitive products (THIS is an example of a broken patent system)
What? You have it completely backwards.
The patent system is exactly designed to prevent the creation of competing products. You invent something and you get to sell that thing exclusively for a limited time, in return for donating the "secret" of its construction to the public domain at the end of that period.
It's the concept of passively sitting on a idea and then trying to extort money from anyone who actually brings a product to market that stifles innovation and acts against the interests of society. If I had my way, the patent system would be use-it-or-lose-it. If you don't make a genuine effort to utilize a patent, you'd have to sell it (not license it) to someone who will or it would become void.
As a pedestrian, longboarder and cyclist, I wonder how do those AIs fare with obstacles that are moving but are not cars.
Why are you walking, longboarding, or cycling on the freeway?
Voluntary administration is like Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the USA.
Find the "likers" on facebook.
Find out what other things they like from their profiles.
Introduce legislation to make all of those things illegal.
Mwahahahaha!
The thing is, these valuations are based on users, not technology. If I had an app that all it did was show you a random picture of poop every day, and 27 million people turned on that app and looked at the poop each day, I could probably sell that for $1B too.
I believe you can turn off unified menu (by uninstalling the packages) independently of switching window/session management from Unity. At least, that was the case in 11.10.
Unity has other quirks that make it irksome to me though. For example, the single icon for all windows of the same app makes it very difficult when working with sets of similar-looking windows - terminal emulators, for example. Also having no option for a second click on the launcher icon to hide the application is annoying. Sometimes it's handy to have an app that you want to look at for reference then close quickly. In GNOME you can click-read-click without moving the mouse and get back to what you were doing before. With Unity you have to jump through more hoops.
It does look like they've fixed a few of problems I had with Unity in 12.04. For example, alt+tab cycles windows on the current workspace only, and the default "spread" of windows behaves likewise. Sadly, icons for applications running only in other workspaces still appear, cluttering up the launcher wherever you are.
The thing you have to remember through all of this is that in the photon's frame of reference, all these events occur simultaneously. The measurements of Alice and Bob, the configuration of Victor's apparatus, and the point of creation of the photons are a static system, existing at a single point in time. No causality is violated as far as the light is concerned.
Just like the EPR paradox, this only becomes interesting from a practical point of view if it can be used to transmit information. Show me a machine containing Alice and Bob that prints letters on a ticker tape based on correlated polarization, and let the delay be such that a message is printed, in its entirety, before the other photos reach the experimental station manned by me, Victor, which is situated right by the tape (but sight of which is blocked). After the printing stops, I input my message, then compare with what was printed on the tape. If and only if this experiment works can you be said to have sent information back in time.
There is one other problem: TCP assumes that dropped packets mean the link is saturated, and backs off the transmit rate. But Wireless isn't like that: frequently packets are lost because of noise (especially near the edge of the range). TCP responds by backing off (it thinks the link is congested) when actually it should be trying harder to overcome the noise. So we get really really poor performance(*).
In this case, I think the kernel should somehow realise that there is "10 MB of bandwidth, with a 25% probability of packets returning". It should do forward-error correction, pre-emptively retransmitting every packet 4x as soon as it is sent. Of course there is a huge difference between the case of lots of users on the same wireless AP, all trying to share bandwidth (everyone needs to slow down), and 1 user competing with lots of background noise (the computer should be more aggressive). TCP flow-control seems unable to distinguish them.
Shouldn't this be handled at the datalink level by the wireless hardware? If there's transmission errors due to noise, more bits should be dedicated to ECC codes. The reliability is maintained at the expense of (usable) bandwidth and the higher layers of the stack just see a regular link with reduced capacity.
Whippersnappers!
/me gets out Osborne Computer Adventure Games book and starts typing BASIC code into ZX Spectrum
The EB games at Broadway in Sydney actually had some real gamers on staff - at least for a while. I had a good chat with a guy there about where to buy retro games (PS1 and earlier stuff) and he seemed knowledgeable and interested.
The retial price of games here is crazy though. It's a relic from the days of poor exchange rates. The dollar went up 50% in value, but the price of games stayed the same. It doesn't surprise me that physical game stores that don't work hard to add value are in trouble though. Most people evaluate games through reviews and downloadable demos - not by browsing a shop and reading box covers. Even if prices were comparable to online, the stores need to do more with in-store events, playable demo boxes, maybe the odd LAN party. The kinds of things that pen-and-dice and miniature gaming shops do.
The ITU
Indeed. And according to the ITU, HSPA+ is "4G" and you can use the iPad 4G on Telstra's HSPA+ network, thus achieving a "4G" connection.
The problem stems from the fact that in Australia only Telstra's LTE network is advertised as "4G", and it is this network that the iPad is not compatible with. So, technically you can get a 4G connection on the new iPad, but Apple may be in trouble if it is determined that their advertising leads customers to believe that the device is compatible with the Telstra-advertised "4G" network.
I didn't see any mention in the linked article about what makes these features particularly odd. It says parts of the crust are tilted and raised by several kilometers in places. This is pretty commonplace geology caused by plate tectonics here on Earth (we call them mountain ranges). If Mercury has a liquid mantle, would we not expect to see similar folding and up-thrusting there? Is this different because of the size, shape, speed of movement?
I once saw an ad for a digital bathroom scale that claimed it "never needs calibrating" and was "accurate to 0.1%". I immediately called bullshit* on this in my head and am glad to know that I was justified in doing so.
* Note that this was in Australia where we actually measure our mass in kg, rather than our weight in lb. It may well have been that accurate as a weighing machine, but not as a "massing" machine.
In Sydney $20/day is the "early bird" rate for people who arrive before 9:30 and want to park all day. Casual hourly parking in the city during the day is much more expensive - anything from $10-20 per hour for a private car park, and $7/hr for government-metered street parking. In any case, parking your car costs more than any return bus or train ticket, before you even count the cost of fuel.
how do you do it?
Honestly, I'm not sure. I think it depends a lot on what part of the city you live in, and what other options there are. If the bus is a horribly inefficient but cheap way to get around, then only desperate people will use it. If you have bus-only lanes, pre-paid ticketing and other things to make the bus as fast or faster than a private car, the demographics change. In places like Sydney or London, most of the city's white-collar workforce come in to the city by bus or train/metro.
then raise the (guess) 100 trillion to build it. Maybe 200-500 years.
That's actually rather optimistic, in my opinion. The catastrophic devastation that would be caused by a collapse is enough to prevent such a structure from ever being built. And unless we suddenly develop some kind of miracle material that makes nanotubes look ordinary, we'll never have the material needed anyway.
The amount of damage caused by a falling cable would depend very much on its composition and geometry. A thin "tape" of high-strength material would rapidly slow down due to air friction, and a large proportion of it may simply burn up.
I know you're joking, but in a lot of large cities a car is unnecessary, and commuting by car is a very expensive option even if you have one (due to high fuel price, $20+/day parking, opportunity cost of driving yourself when you could be reading Slashdot on the bus, etc.) My wife and I earn enough to keep a nice car, but choose not to own one. We both have bicycles for commuting, and sublet our appartment's car spaces which more than covers membership in a car share program and rental cars when we go on holiday.
Lets pretend I am just a normal IE, firefox, or chrome user who has never heard of Gate One before.
I do not even have an admin account and I am in a library that locks down their computers from change.
Can I use Gate One? or does something need to be installed?
Gate One is something that is installed on a server, not your computer.
Nothing needs to be installed on your computer to use it, other than a compatible, modern web browser.
The administrator of the website using Gate One can install Gate One modules (not browser plugins) on the server, and you the user will immediately have access, via your web browser, to the funcationality that those modules provide.
So basically they are NOT a currency at all.
They are about as much "currency" (defined as "a widely accepted medium of exchange") as cancelled postage stamps or baseball cards.
or gold
That would be an interesting claim to file. "They stole my bits! I demand that you replace them."
Do you think that when you deposit money in the bank they put a pile of cash in the safe for you?
Almost all modern currency is bits.