Re:Surely you must be joking Mr Feynman
on
Steel Bolt Hacking
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· Score: 1
That happened to me once on a physics exam. Not having any idea about the answer to part a, but needing that answer to work out part b, I took a complete guess. Something like 2*10^-3. And got it right, to my surprise several months later.
I don't think it is a troll. The energy to turn the turbine has to come from somewhere - in this case the wind. The wind will slow down on the other end of the turbine, and if there are a hell of a lot of turbines, there might be a macro effect on the climate. Might be. I figure these effects are probably outwieghed by the changes to the atmosphere caused by burning oil, but you never know until you've tried it (or at least simulated it).
Is suppose an easier way of putting it is: "you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't".
Unless, of course, we choose to do something sensible like reduce our energy consumption needs... but I don't see that happenening in the current social climate (pardon the pun)
Sorry if I'm being ignorant, but wouldn't this be as easy as removing the USB mass storage driver from the kernel? It sure would be easy to do in linux...
Maybe GSM is different to whatever you have in the US, but GSM has a range of 30km (90,000 or so feet). My phone at home normally connects to a tower about 20km away.
I think I read this stuff on another slashdot story a year or two ago when the concept of picocells was first floated.
The cell phone can interfere with the navigation and communication equipment on the flight deck. The phone's signal strength gets prgressively stronger when it can't contact a tower, and this strong(ish) radio signal can screw things up for you and the other couple of hundred people on board. The thing about the pico-towers they are talking about is they prevent the phone from seeking out the tower on the ground by providing a signal nearby, thus lowering the phone's signal strength.
I agree with you here, but I think the argument is that by reducing injuries (by seatbelt, helmet, whetever), society as a whole does not have to cover the cost of your recovery, so it is everyone benefits. Oh wait, you Americans don't have universal health cover...
When digital radio (music + sub-band containing song information) becomes mainstream, won't this type of software bring 'piracy' to the masses? Save every song onto your computer with appropriate ID3 tag, scan through every day and find the ones you like, delete the ones you don't. Even easier than recording internet radio.
I agree that tar has its problems, but I would have to disagree with zip being better. Better for what? tar + gz gives better compression that zip (bz2 even more so). The file format of tar will eventually need to be updated, but really, as an archiving format, it does the job - and keeps things small. Although I suppose disk space is cheap these days...
A disk image system would be nice; you can do this already using the loopback device, although the image file size is fixed to what ever you create it as.
Now that I think about it, the main problem would be with programs knowing that files can also be accessed as directories. tar would work fine provided that the readdir() system call (or whatever you'd use to get a directory's contents) returns both a file and a directory for each file.
Using files are both files and directories is really nice - throw ACLs, metadata, whatever in a directory the same name as the file: access it as a file and it is the file, access it as a directory and it provides access to the metadata. It doesn't break things. Well, not much. As mentioned, this will break things like tar a bit. But the VFS has managed to deal with resource forks from HFS, albeit in a slightly ugly fashion. This is a little nicer, and perhaps with time will be the framework for slowly abandoning outdated filesystem concepts.
How would you mofidy tar to deal with this? Add a.reiser_meta folder in each directory to store the corresponding file directories? Or is there another way?
And what makes this more interesting is that SCO just might not be breaking the GPL. The GPL states: "Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License". SCOs continued distribution probably doesn't technically break this, so it may still hold. As someone pointed out on groklaw, the GPL does not cover Darl's mouth.
This scenario would, however, lend credence to IBM's other arguments (the GPL being valid etc).
Rest assured, they are _not_ doing it for the warm fuzzy feeling you get by doing something nice. OSS and GNU/Linux are part of their business strategy. They are in it for the money. That they happen to help us geeks is certainly nice, but at the end of the day, Linux and such would survive anyway.
But if you really want to get them something fitting, how about some code?
So did anyone see any mention of IP law, DMCA, or any such provisions in the Herald-Scum article? No. Because there is little or no debate on this issue in Australia, save the occasional opinion piece in the newspaper, to be read by the AB demographic only.
In fairness to the Labor Party, they have mentioned these things in the attachment to their press release yesterday, which provides some remarkably non-commital statements such as 'examining options for broadening fair use' etc etc. Typical politician stuff.
As painful as it is to vote Liberal, the only way to effect real change is to put Labor _last_. By keeping them out of government for longer, they will have to provide a real alternative. This is a long term solution. Sure, in the short term, Labor is slightly better than Liberal. But look to the future, since the politicians sure as hell aren't.
I was working on an irrigation controlling system, which involved a test rig with a water pump and tank sitting beside the controlling computer. Unfortunately the water return hose hadn't been properly fixed, and once the pump got up to pressure (this was an actual pump to be used on a farm) the hose popped out, spraying the entire room with water. Needless to say, keyboard, computer, monitor, everything got a good soak. Linux froze up, but no smoke was forthcoming, and after drying the lot out, it all came back to life.
As I understand it, bad block checking is obsolete; I thought the hard drive firmware takes care of this nowadays and re-maps bad blocks when it detects them.
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That happened to me once on a physics exam. Not having any idea about the answer to part a, but needing that answer to work out part b, I took a complete guess. Something like 2*10^-3. And got it right, to my surprise several months later.
I don't think it is a troll. The energy to turn the turbine has to come from somewhere - in this case the wind. The wind will slow down on the other end of the turbine, and if there are a hell of a lot of turbines, there might be a macro effect on the climate. Might be. I figure these effects are probably outwieghed by the changes to the atmosphere caused by burning oil, but you never know until you've tried it (or at least simulated it).
Is suppose an easier way of putting it is: "you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't".
Unless, of course, we choose to do something sensible like reduce our energy consumption needs... but I don't see that happenening in the current social climate (pardon the pun)
... just use windows 98, which doesn't support usb drives to start with...
Sorry if I'm being ignorant, but wouldn't this be as easy as removing the USB mass storage driver from the kernel? It sure would be easy to do in linux...
And how, exactly would you keep them proprietary once anyone else has access to the code?
You are completely free to write your own levels for and GPL'ed game engine.
Repeat after me, kiddies: Free speech, not free beer. It _is_ possible to make money from GPL'd software.
Maybe GSM is different to whatever you have in the US, but GSM has a range of 30km (90,000 or so feet). My phone at home normally connects to a tower about 20km away.
I think I read this stuff on another slashdot story a year or two ago when the concept of picocells was first floated.
The cell phone can interfere with the navigation and communication equipment on the flight deck. The phone's signal strength gets prgressively stronger when it can't contact a tower, and this strong(ish) radio signal can screw things up for you and the other couple of hundred people on board. The thing about the pico-towers they are talking about is they prevent the phone from seeking out the tower on the ground by providing a signal nearby, thus lowering the phone's signal strength.
I agree with you here, but I think the argument is that by reducing injuries (by seatbelt, helmet, whetever), society as a whole does not have to cover the cost of your recovery, so it is everyone benefits. Oh wait, you Americans don't have universal health cover...
I'm guessing that there is a health danger with reflective surfaces. You probably don't want that shit reflecting onto your retina.
When digital radio (music + sub-band containing song information) becomes mainstream, won't this type of software bring 'piracy' to the masses? Save every song onto your computer with appropriate ID3 tag, scan through every day and find the ones you like, delete the ones you don't. Even easier than recording internet radio.
And since then they seem to have proofed another 52 books - that's not a bad rate considering...
I agree that tar has its problems, but I would have to disagree with zip being better. Better for what? tar + gz gives better compression that zip (bz2 even more so). The file format of tar will eventually need to be updated, but really, as an archiving format, it does the job - and keeps things small. Although I suppose disk space is cheap these days...
A disk image system would be nice; you can do this already using the loopback device, although the image file size is fixed to what ever you create it as.
Now that I think about it, the main problem would be with programs knowing that files can also be accessed as directories. tar would work fine provided that the readdir() system call (or whatever you'd use to get a directory's contents) returns both a file and a directory for each file.
This looks very cool.
.reiser_meta folder in each directory to store the corresponding file directories? Or is there another way?
Using files are both files and directories is really nice - throw ACLs, metadata, whatever in a directory the same name as the file: access it as a file and it is the file, access it as a directory and it provides access to the metadata. It doesn't break things. Well, not much. As mentioned, this will break things like tar a bit. But the VFS has managed to deal with resource forks from HFS, albeit in a slightly ugly fashion. This is a little nicer, and perhaps with time will be the framework for slowly abandoning outdated filesystem concepts.
How would you mofidy tar to deal with this? Add a
And what makes this more interesting is that SCO just might not be breaking the GPL. The GPL states: "Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License". SCOs continued distribution probably doesn't technically break this, so it may still hold. As someone pointed out on groklaw, the GPL does not cover Darl's mouth.
This scenario would, however, lend credence to IBM's other arguments (the GPL being valid etc).
Rest assured, they are _not_ doing it for the warm fuzzy feeling you get by doing something nice. OSS and GNU/Linux are part of their business strategy. They are in it for the money. That they happen to help us geeks is certainly nice, but at the end of the day, Linux and such would survive anyway.
But if you really want to get them something fitting, how about some code?
You'd have to be wary of something claiming 100% success rate - particularly of false positives.
So did anyone see any mention of IP law, DMCA, or any such provisions in the Herald-Scum article? No. Because there is little or no debate on this issue in Australia, save the occasional opinion piece in the newspaper, to be read by the AB demographic only.
In fairness to the Labor Party, they have mentioned these things in the attachment to their press release yesterday, which provides some remarkably non-commital statements such as 'examining options for broadening fair use' etc etc. Typical politician stuff.
As painful as it is to vote Liberal, the only way to effect real change is to put Labor _last_. By keeping them out of government for longer, they will have to provide a real alternative. This is a long term solution. Sure, in the short term, Labor is slightly better than Liberal. But look to the future, since the politicians sure as hell aren't.
Then where would Microsoft pull its software from?
I was working on an irrigation controlling system, which involved a test rig with a water pump and tank sitting beside the controlling computer. Unfortunately the water return hose hadn't been properly fixed, and once the pump got up to pressure (this was an actual pump to be used on a farm) the hose popped out, spraying the entire room with water. Needless to say, keyboard, computer, monitor, everything got a good soak. Linux froze up, but no smoke was forthcoming, and after drying the lot out, it all came back to life.
As I understand it, bad block checking is obsolete; I thought the hard drive firmware takes care of this nowadays and re-maps bad blocks when it detects them.
Well, DVD-R, DVD+R, and DVDRAM are all still around, and there are readers and writers for all formats, that also read and write CDs.
More likely is that drives will support all formats before too long.
Actually, Visual Basic for DOS appeared _after_ Visual Basic for Windows.
And it's even easier to talk about costs when you are part of the force that is increasing them as we speak: I refer to the slashdot effect.