The more you watch that video, the more you'll realise how unrealistic it is to turn humidity into water. The video covers a specific case, but the generalities are true enough for any approach (e.g. conservation of energy)
Also, as pointed out in the video, most people (and animals) gravitate to and settle near a supply of water (even in arid climates), the problem is however: making/keeping that water clean, safe and drinkable. Please solve that!
I was (am?) always a big Lego Technic fan. Although I've not bought any this side of the year 2000.
I've had Minecraft PE on my phone/tablet, which I mostly play in creative mode (the controls are awful for reacting and moving quickly) every now and again, when bored.
However a couple of weeks ago I decided to jump in and get the "Real thing"; buying the java client for laptop/desktop.
It's fun, but I was shocked at how bad the server eco-system is: There is 1) The official server, which I use, but I am very worried about making it accessible from the internet. I'd feel like I'm putting a rabbit on the motorway, and hoping it doesn't get run over. Then there is 2) Bukkit, which tries to add features that make running an internet accessible server more feasible; but the project has been killed. (Majong hired some key developers and then shut the original down); next I found 3) Spiget, that is a clone for (2) the one of the community keeps alive. Finally 4) you can "rent" a "realm" from majong, basically paying them a monthly fee to run a server for you.
All these servers appear to become daemons by running a jre in GNU Screen! With various scripts that execute commands to the "server" via screen cli echos. Other functionality works by just copying key files around. I guess such Rube Goldberg server setups matches the in-game way of doing things
And I though Banking application web servers were terribly put together...
I had thought that after so many years, and money that the server side things would be rock-solid, and these days it would just about adding new things to play with in the world.
I'd expected a something near to a proper DB for the world data, with methods like transactions to prevent corruption; audit records that let you roll the state of a particular area or thing back to some previous state. Or the ability for users to claim (or be assigned) an area, that only they can break, but others can visit. Maybe a set of reasonable tools and features to identify and deal with misbehaving users, either via their own in world action, or via "modded" clients.
If you think I am being paranoid, search for "minecraft griefing", e.g. on youtube.
Despite all that I would still consider making my server internet accessible, probably only to people I know IRL. (Not to say my server is something special, that would be of any interest to anyone. Its of interest to just me, because its "my world")
So, bought into the whole Thunderbolt monitor thing from Apple? Might want to collect a few right now, while you still can. It appears that the Thunderbolt monitor is going the way of the analog [headphone] jack over at Apple. Isn't it fun to be part of an unsuccessful experiment?
Unlike headphones, I think you'll find that Thunderbolt display owners will find their displays still functioning tomorrow. In fact I would not be surprised if their display continues to do what they paid for, for many years to come.
If I bought a product that does (and continues to do) what I bought it for, how is that a failed experiment?
Maybe he's got the FBI job, and the first order of business is to discredit the possibility of being able to hack into an iPhone.
I am surprised by how accepting the/. community is of the 'fact' that he was indeed lying.
On a less factious note: In the days when iPhones had exploitable boot loaders, one could boot a version IOS in RAM, that let you brute force the PIN as long as you wanted to without wiping the phone. On iPhone 4 it took about 29 minutes to try all 4-digit combinations from 0000 to 9999. (The default PIN length at the time)
The only two things stopping you today from still doing this is: 1) the lack of a known vulnerability in the boot loader, thus requiring your "Special IOS" to be signed by Apple; and 2) changes to the H/W crypto chip in new models that force longer and longer time outs before you can try another PIN.
Although retries get longer, I don't think there is any limit set, in hardware, on how many retries you can have (yet); that's still handled by IOS.
While watching it, I felt it paralleled a new hope a little too much. I guessed it was trying to keep the 'fans' happy.
After watching it, I took a look at few reviews (I was trying to avoid spoilers before); many pointed out that it's difficult to rate the film on its own. It's clearly there to provide a transition from the old to the new. As such it could be forgiven for its heavy use of nostalgia, but only if Star Wars VIII really is something new and amazing.
It's a city within a city, within a country that's within a country.
It's also semi independent of the UK and its laws; an artefact of existing longer than the UK does.
For the same size SSD and advertised bus speed, there is already a huge price performance variance. SSDs vary greatly in both IO operations per second and total IO operations (lifetime).
There are SSDs that have worse IOPS than a HDD, but in most cases HDDs cann't touch SSD IOPS specs.
On the other side: A great SSD might have a better lifetime (IO operation total) than a cheap HDD; however it is still to be proven that an SSD could match a quality HDD in lifetime.
Whenever these price comparisons come up, I get the feeling that there is a huge bias in favour of the statement that article wants to make. i.e. If its about the falling price of SSDs, then compare a low spec SSD with a high spec HDD. If you want to argue for HDD, do the reverse.
As things stands both have their place, and you should be careful about what you buy in both cases. e.g. WD-Green for laptop, but WD-Red for a NAS (yes there is a difference). For SSDs only my budget would force me to buy an EVO instaed of an EVO Pro. (I only mention WD and Samsung to be able to give concrete examples).
In my (humble) opinion neither SSD nor HDD will be able to replace the other, before some other storage technology comes along and blows them both away. Although that tech might be a descendant of one or the other (memristor? crystal/optical?).
Why don't they just install night-time pop up urinals, like other cities have done.
I know them from London, Paris and Amsterdam, but here's a video for one in Watford
Fairly straight forward solution, and no more stinky city.
It's stable as in terms of features and changes. i.e. No longer under development and will only receive fixes.
However! Kernels from kernel.org are not for end users, if someone is using these kernels directly then they do so at their own risk.
They are intended for integrators (distributions), whose integration will include their own patches/changes, testing, QA and end user support
There is a reason that RHEL 7 is running Kernel 3.10 and Debian 8 is running 3.16. Those are the 'stable' kernels you were expecting.
When kernel development moved from 2.5 to 2.6 (that later became 3.0), they stopped their odd/even number development/stable-release cycle. Now there is only development, and the integrators are expected to take the output of that to create stable-releases.
It's been said before, but bares repeating: If you're using Google's "services" for free, then you are the product and not the consumer/customer.
Such an antitrust case is about protecting Google's consumers/customers from Google's de-facto monopoly in the market.
You (the product) switching from google to another search provider only means that Google has 0.00000001% less product to sell, and is unlikely to impact anyone.
However a business (the customer) switching to another provider, could (and would) cut that business off from over 90% of its potential customers (you). Something that is likely to impact them greatly (if not kill the business).
Do Android devices have a hardware encrypter/decrypter built into the DMA bus, like iPhone does?
I would guess without something like that, encryption would have a high latency and battery life cost. Encryption accelerated via special CPU features/instructions, like what dm-crypt is able to use, would only partially alleviate those costs.
My guess the problem isn't to do with features in the Andriod software, but rather hardware costs. i.e. Development and Manufacturing costs. Does the lack of encryption really affect sales enough to justify those costs? One thing is clear: The perception of improved battery life does affect sales.
I think in the end Android will get a botched job. Encryption in SW for those that want to turn it on, but off by default as to not affect the phone's vital statistics; especially early benchmarks.
I have been mulling similar question for myself for some time. i.e. where should I spend my limited hobby time: learning Obj-C or C++?
In the last few months Rust has caught my attention. Even then it's not yet at verstion 1 (at time of writing its at alpha-1), I really like the concept and what they are try to achieve with the language.
My comment will probably be burried, but if you do read it, spend a few minutes wondering around their web site. For exmaple their 30 minute introduction to Rust.
The reference point is 3.0. Kernel development is now 'inline' (as opposed to the old even=release, odd=development system). That means the minor number just gets bigger and bigger, and the kernel gets further and further away from what 3.0 was.
This means at somepoint one should bump the major version number; the question is when? Linus has the answer for this: Basically when the minor number gets asthetically displeasing to him, he'll bump the major number and start the minor number again at 0.
One might ask what will Linus do when the major number gets too big (e.g. >20) ?
Others might ask, why don't they just use a year/calendar based version number? Like Ubuntu does.
I know you were joking, but I'd like to make the following point anyway:
How long until we have fusion power is not a function of time, but a function of investment.
Insufficient/deacreasing investment results in increasing the amount of time needed to complete the required R&D.
In fact a Q&A here on slashdot covered this.
It even provided the following graphic as clarification of "50 years until fusion":
I have a Debian HTPC system tracking testing and systemd tried to save from the indignation of PulseAudio. Given configuring ALSA for AC3 S/PDIF is not as easy as it should be, I let PulseAudio stay on my system.
Then came systemd and any application (Flash, KDE itself, VLC) would hang as soon as it attempted to output sound. "PulseAudio --start" instances would just multiply and multiply.
My girlfriend was somewhat annoyed that she couldn't watch her programmes, and trying to work out what was happening was getting to me too.
After battling PulseAudio and ALSA settings, I was started to question if it was a mistake to leave PulseAudio installed all this time. Systemd was trying to help me see my error.
However given my girlfriends mood and lack of patience, as well as the fact that everything worked before Debian switch my init system, I tried apt-get install sysvinit-core and reboot (mostly out of desperation). From that moment on we've had no problem with sound, PulseAudio nor any of the other 'bugs' that showed up recently.
Given my sense of humour, I find it hilarious that systemd seemingly broke PulseAudio. Beyond making me laugh it also induces a sense of nostalgia. As I was in Uni all those years ago, I remember playing CoreWars. This was a game where two users would to develop a programmes that tried to avoid and eradicate the other users program.
Up until I removed systemd I imagine a similar battle being waged on my HTPC. PulseAudio battling with PID 0 and spawning many copies of itself as protection. On the other side systemd using it ultimate control of the system to hijack dbus and udev in order to isolate PulseAudio and to prevent it from communicating with the outside world.
If it weren't for the non-amused look on my girlfriends face, I might have let the two battle it out. However as it stands PulseAudio has won, as systemd is no longer running on the system. Did good or evil win? We'll never know. Suffice to say during the whole affair systemd said nothing, not a single peep to stdout nor stderr.
I have an instance of OwnCloud setup at home. I use it mostly for syncing contact and calendar data. I'm even subscribed to my girlfriends calendar and vice versa. The WebDav part I only really use as a quick way to get files from one device to another, and by device I mean smartphone, tablets as well as proper computers.
When Google announced the closure of Reader, OwnCloud started work on a news reader app too. I've been running it since the beta and I'm very happy.
Slashdot Mirror
Every time I try to go to blogs.skype.com I get redirected to a microsoft.com landing page?!
Tried in firefox and chromium..
Turning humidity into drinking Water at suitable rate/quantity is a) completely impractical, and b) ignores the real issue of water treatment.
Here is a case in point
The more you watch that video, the more you'll realise how unrealistic it is to turn humidity into water. The video covers a specific case, but the generalities are true enough for any approach (e.g. conservation of energy)
Also, as pointed out in the video, most people (and animals) gravitate to and settle near a supply of water (even in arid climates), the problem is however: making/keeping that water clean, safe and drinkable. Please solve that!
I was (am?) always a big Lego Technic fan. Although I've not bought any this side of the year 2000.
I've had Minecraft PE on my phone/tablet, which I mostly play in creative mode (the controls are awful for reacting and moving quickly) every now and again, when bored.
However a couple of weeks ago I decided to jump in and get the "Real thing"; buying the java client for laptop/desktop.
It's fun, but I was shocked at how bad the server eco-system is: There is 1) The official server, which I use, but I am very worried about making it accessible from the internet. I'd feel like I'm putting a rabbit on the motorway, and hoping it doesn't get run over. Then there is 2) Bukkit, which tries to add features that make running an internet accessible server more feasible; but the project has been killed. (Majong hired some key developers and then shut the original down); next I found 3) Spiget, that is a clone for (2) the one of the community keeps alive. Finally 4) you can "rent" a "realm" from majong, basically paying them a monthly fee to run a server for you.
All these servers appear to become daemons by running a jre in GNU Screen! With various scripts that execute commands to the "server" via screen cli echos. Other functionality works by just copying key files around. I guess such Rube Goldberg server setups matches the in-game way of doing things
And I though Banking application web servers were terribly put together...
I had thought that after so many years, and money that the server side things would be rock-solid, and these days it would just about adding new things to play with in the world.
I'd expected a something near to a proper DB for the world data, with methods like transactions to prevent corruption; audit records that let you roll the state of a particular area or thing back to some previous state. Or the ability for users to claim (or be assigned) an area, that only they can break, but others can visit. Maybe a set of reasonable tools and features to identify and deal with misbehaving users, either via their own in world action, or via "modded" clients.
If you think I am being paranoid, search for "minecraft griefing", e.g. on youtube.
Despite all that I would still consider making my server internet accessible, probably only to people I know IRL. (Not to say my server is something special, that would be of any interest to anyone. Its of interest to just me, because its "my world")
So, bought into the whole Thunderbolt monitor thing from Apple? Might want to collect a few right now, while you still can. It appears that the Thunderbolt monitor is going the way of the analog [headphone] jack over at Apple. Isn't it fun to be part of an unsuccessful experiment?
Unlike headphones, I think you'll find that Thunderbolt display owners will find their displays still functioning tomorrow. In fact I would not be surprised if their display continues to do what they paid for, for many years to come.
If I bought a product that does (and continues to do) what I bought it for, how is that a failed experiment?
A number of sites are posting this story; and I really don't get why this is news of any interest to anyone...
A basic DVD-R is about 4GB and you'd have to be a hoarder to still have USB sticks smaller than 4GB.
I could also assume that the majority do not do offline installs anyway...
Despite all that, how is the size of some OS' install media attracting so much attention? And why Ubuntu? How about OS X or MS-Windows?
Maybe he's got the FBI job, and the first order of business is to discredit the possibility of being able to hack into an iPhone.
/. community is of the 'fact' that he was indeed lying.
I am surprised by how accepting the
On a less factious note: In the days when iPhones had exploitable boot loaders, one could boot a version IOS in RAM, that let you brute force the PIN as long as you wanted to without wiping the phone. On iPhone 4 it took about 29 minutes to try all 4-digit combinations from 0000 to 9999. (The default PIN length at the time)
The only two things stopping you today from still doing this is: 1) the lack of a known vulnerability in the boot loader, thus requiring your "Special IOS" to be signed by Apple; and 2) changes to the H/W crypto chip in new models that force longer and longer time outs before you can try another PIN.
Although retries get longer, I don't think there is any limit set, in hardware, on how many retries you can have (yet); that's still handled by IOS.
If you really want to know how bad things actually are, see this 32c3 talk from people who work in the industry.
The film is 50% nostalgia and 50% new 'content'.
While watching it, I felt it paralleled a new hope a little too much. I guessed it was trying to keep the 'fans' happy.
After watching it, I took a look at few reviews (I was trying to avoid spoilers before); many pointed out that it's difficult to rate the film on its own. It's clearly there to provide a transition from the old to the new. As such it could be forgiven for its heavy use of nostalgia, but only if Star Wars VIII really is something new and amazing.
In case the difference between London (City) and the "City of London" is not clear to some, here's a great video on the topic.
It's a city within a city, within a country that's within a country.
It's also semi independent of the UK and its laws; an artefact of existing longer than the UK does.
For the same size SSD and advertised bus speed, there is already a huge price performance variance. SSDs vary greatly in both IO operations per second and total IO operations (lifetime).
There are SSDs that have worse IOPS than a HDD, but in most cases HDDs cann't touch SSD IOPS specs.
On the other side: A great SSD might have a better lifetime (IO operation total) than a cheap HDD; however it is still to be proven that an SSD could match a quality HDD in lifetime.
Whenever these price comparisons come up, I get the feeling that there is a huge bias in favour of the statement that article wants to make. i.e. If its about the falling price of SSDs, then compare a low spec SSD with a high spec HDD. If you want to argue for HDD, do the reverse.
As things stands both have their place, and you should be careful about what you buy in both cases. e.g. WD-Green for laptop, but WD-Red for a NAS (yes there is a difference). For SSDs only my budget would force me to buy an EVO instaed of an EVO Pro. (I only mention WD and Samsung to be able to give concrete examples).
In my (humble) opinion neither SSD nor HDD will be able to replace the other, before some other storage technology comes along and blows them both away. Although that tech might be a descendant of one or the other (memristor? crystal/optical?).
http://blog.visual6502.org/2015/11/the-visual-arm1.html
Who RTFA anyway? A badly edited summary should be enough for anyone (tm).
Venus should be a candidate for colonisation, it would probably be much cheaper and easier:
Should We Colonize Venus Instead of Mars?
We need a catchy media name for this spate of car hacks that have inundated us this last week or so.
Of all the XYZ-gate names contrived for controversies since watergate, "Circumnavigate" is the first one I actually like.
The Circumnavigate Controversy of 2015, costing Chrysler Millions of USD and Tesla Thousands (in bug bounties)!!
Why don't they just install night-time pop up urinals, like other cities have done.
I know them from London, Paris and Amsterdam, but here's a video for one in Watford
Fairly straight forward solution, and no more stinky city.
Mind-Control TV or Mind-Controlled TV ?
There is a significant difference, and the first pretty much already exists.
It's stable as in terms of features and changes. i.e. No longer under development and will only receive fixes.
However! Kernels from kernel.org are not for end users, if someone is using these kernels directly then they do so at their own risk.
They are intended for integrators (distributions), whose integration will include their own patches/changes, testing, QA and end user support
There is a reason that RHEL 7 is running Kernel 3.10 and Debian 8 is running 3.16. Those are the 'stable' kernels you were expecting.
When kernel development moved from 2.5 to 2.6 (that later became 3.0), they stopped their odd/even number development/stable-release cycle. Now there is only development, and the integrators are expected to take the output of that to create stable-releases.
It's been said before, but bares repeating: If you're using Google's "services" for free, then you are the product and not the consumer/customer.
Such an antitrust case is about protecting Google's consumers/customers from Google's de-facto monopoly in the market.
You (the product) switching from google to another search provider only means that Google has 0.00000001% less product to sell, and is unlikely to impact anyone.
However a business (the customer) switching to another provider, could (and would) cut that business off from over 90% of its potential customers (you). Something that is likely to impact them greatly (if not kill the business).
Do Android devices have a hardware encrypter/decrypter built into the DMA bus, like iPhone does?
I would guess without something like that, encryption would have a high latency and battery life cost. Encryption accelerated via special CPU features/instructions, like what dm-crypt is able to use, would only partially alleviate those costs.
My guess the problem isn't to do with features in the Andriod software, but rather hardware costs. i.e. Development and Manufacturing costs. Does the lack of encryption really affect sales enough to justify those costs? One thing is clear: The perception of improved battery life does affect sales.
I think in the end Android will get a botched job. Encryption in SW for those that want to turn it on, but off by default as to not affect the phone's vital statistics; especially early benchmarks.
I have been mulling similar question for myself for some time. i.e. where should I spend my limited hobby time: learning Obj-C or C++?
In the last few months Rust has caught my attention. Even then it's not yet at verstion 1 (at time of writing its at alpha-1), I really like the concept and what they are try to achieve with the language.
My comment will probably be burried, but if you do read it, spend a few minutes wondering around their web site. For exmaple their 30 minute introduction to Rust.
Big step from 3.19: No
Same work as 3.20: Yes
The reference point is 3.0. Kernel development is now 'inline' (as opposed to the old even=release, odd=development system). That means the minor number just gets bigger and bigger, and the kernel gets further and further away from what 3.0 was.
This means at somepoint one should bump the major version number; the question is when? Linus has the answer for this: Basically when the minor number gets asthetically displeasing to him, he'll bump the major number and start the minor number again at 0.
One might ask what will Linus do when the major number gets too big (e.g. >20) ?
Others might ask, why don't they just use a year/calendar based version number? Like Ubuntu does.
I know you were joking, but I'd like to make the following point anyway:
How long until we have fusion power is not a function of time, but a function of investment.
Insufficient/deacreasing investment results in increasing the amount of time needed to complete the required R&D.
In fact a Q&A here on slashdot covered this. It even provided the following graphic as clarification of "50 years until fusion":
I have a Debian HTPC system tracking testing and systemd tried to save from the indignation of PulseAudio. Given configuring ALSA for AC3 S/PDIF is not as easy as it should be, I let PulseAudio stay on my system.
Then came systemd and any application (Flash, KDE itself, VLC) would hang as soon as it attempted to output sound. "PulseAudio --start" instances would just multiply and multiply.
My girlfriend was somewhat annoyed that she couldn't watch her programmes, and trying to work out what was happening was getting to me too.
After battling PulseAudio and ALSA settings, I was started to question if it was a mistake to leave PulseAudio installed all this time. Systemd was trying to help me see my error.
However given my girlfriends mood and lack of patience, as well as the fact that everything worked before Debian switch my init system, I tried apt-get install sysvinit-core and reboot (mostly out of desperation). From that moment on we've had no problem with sound, PulseAudio nor any of the other 'bugs' that showed up recently.
Given my sense of humour, I find it hilarious that systemd seemingly broke PulseAudio. Beyond making me laugh it also induces a sense of nostalgia. As I was in Uni all those years ago, I remember playing CoreWars. This was a game where two users would to develop a programmes that tried to avoid and eradicate the other users program.
Up until I removed systemd I imagine a similar battle being waged on my HTPC. PulseAudio battling with PID 0 and spawning many copies of itself as protection. On the other side systemd using it ultimate control of the system to hijack dbus and udev in order to isolate PulseAudio and to prevent it from communicating with the outside world.
If it weren't for the non-amused look on my girlfriends face, I might have let the two battle it out. However as it stands PulseAudio has won, as systemd is no longer running on the system. Did good or evil win? We'll never know. Suffice to say during the whole affair systemd said nothing, not a single peep to stdout nor stderr.
With the close of google reader I switched to OwnCloud News running on my own hardware.
Pro: Not reliant on others, Con: I only have myself to blame if I go offline =)
In the US because of the Mickey Mouse Protection Act or rather the Copyright Term Extension Act.
Basically every time Mickey Mouse is about to go out of copyright and into the public domain, Disney lobby for copyright to be extended.
Given that they actively use MM, their Trade Mark on him will never expire. Isn't that enough? Why continuously extend copyright?
I have an instance of OwnCloud setup at home. I use it mostly for syncing contact and calendar data. I'm even subscribed to my girlfriends calendar and vice versa. The WebDav part I only really use as a quick way to get files from one device to another, and by device I mean smartphone, tablets as well as proper computers.
When Google announced the closure of Reader, OwnCloud started work on a news reader app too. I've been running it since the beta and I'm very happy.