Which is great if all you need to do is crank out grunt work, but a bit hairy if you are trying to do anything innovative that won't fit into a two week period. In creative organizations or fields of endeavor, nothing kills your chance of coming up with a great product as cutting things into two week deadlines.
I used to work at a pizza chain where we had to ring in orders using a touchscreen.
Most touch screens for data entry are layers on top of the glass. This is capacitive, and can go under the glass. If it were under the glass, you'd have a much harder time wearing it out than if it were a simple touch screen like the type they use at Pizza Hut.
Personally, I was disappointed that they wanted contact information, and gave zero information on where to obtain engineering samples, since I's really like a 27" touch screen iMac (my iPhone has already got me trained to the point I am leaving fingerprints all over every display I own). They are really only interested in talking to people already interested in buying quantity, sight unseen.
The idea to me is ridiculous. Seems to me that by the time we can actually terraform another planet, we'll also be completely capable of "terra re-forming" Earth.
I'd be more comfortable with the idea if we had some practice beforehand...
You can change the NASA budget all you want, but the major impediments to commercial space launches are still the FAA and the EPA. If you can't get a license for a launch, you aren't going anywhere.
But the applicable regulatory provisions of the Banking Act of 1933 (the Glass-Steagal Act) , enacted by Franklin D. Roosevelt (D): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass-Steagall_Act were repealed in two parts under the democratic administrations of Jimmy Carter (via the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980) and the Bill Clinton administration (the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999).
However, you can lay the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 (BAPCPA), which converted the outstanding non-collateralized credit card lending debt into collateralized debt square on George W. Bush's administration.
Of all of these, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (under Carter) was by far the worst, by allowing bank holding companies to get into speculative financial instruments, which in turned allowed them to create the current crisis.
So if you want to blame a particular political party, you'll have to blame democrats, but the president to blame is Bill Clinton.
The X server sits between your display driver and your window manager and does not communicate sufficient information about the underlying devices to the client program, which in this case is the window manager itself, that it's able to distinguish the real estate boundaries between the displays. Because it doesn't know the boundaries, it can't make good decisions on mapping a workspace (a window manager abstraction) onto a display (an X Server abstraction which is being intentionally glossed over by the X Server or by the display itself).
I've often complained that the X abstraction of the window management from the server software did a big disfavor to the overall capability to pick a window server and have all you applications adopt a uniform "look and feel" based on the window manager selected: the window manager being integral to the server would have prevented this.
I've also complained about the need to load display drivers into what is effectively user space resulting in a loss of state information to the kernel, since it has a very hard time with "putting the display back into a known, reasonable state", either because the user space driver is making state changes to write-only registers in the card, and these are not shadowed into the kernels idea of the card state, or that even being shadowed, the kernel driver doesn't know what to do about it. I first brought this up in the context of debugging kernel panics in FreeBSD write running X windows, in the 1990's. You could address this a couple ways, including the hardware itself allowing for a kernel to reset to a "known good state" (most won't), or moving the driver into the kernel and breaking the X server/driver integration (and several projects have done this).
Another project which attempted to put the abstractions where I thought they should be was "Saluatation", but it got bogged down in commercial encumberment by companies like HP and Ricoh for its standards, and by the license (GPL) on what reference implementations they did make available.
Really, it's about time we decided to rethink the use of X windows at all.
The proposal says they would only use the first three octets. And users could just use a different DNS server if they had a restrictive servers that blacklisted Iran or whatever.
Or as someone upstream, I could redirect all the requests in a 252 machine block to force them through a transparent proxy server so that I can monitor them. It sure makes it easier on my monitoring servers to not have to monitor everything, and on my network infrastructure, if I can monitor things with a high locality, instead of doubling or tripling my traffic to proxy things non-locally.
This seems to be Googles answer to the China problem; by making it an infrastructure issue rather than a source-filtering issue, they get to be the "do no evil" people once again, offloading the nefarious actions onto the Chinese government, so that they can have a "clean conscience", without losing access to the Chinese market.
To: DNSEXT (DNS Extension Working Group, Internet Engineering Task Force) From: Paul Vixie Date: Thu, 28 Jan 2010
"I don't think that's a general enough solution to be worth standardizing. please investigate the larger context of client identity, beyond the needs of CDN's."
I also agree with his later statement in the same thread:
"it may be too dangerous in any form but that's a separate issue."
For the sake of whoever is getting sent up, I hope that they build spacecraft better than they build software, because all of the software I've seen written over there has been pretty damn awful.
I hope EVERYBODY builds spacecraft better than they build software. India does not have a monopoly on crappy software by any means; it's pretty much the status quo for almost everyone.
Also, if you have any kind of music as your ringtone (except for the harp sound on the iPhone) you should be shot. A phone should sound like a phone, not a disco.
Actually, the first day we (all Apple employees at the time)m got our iPhones, we immediately hacked different ring tones onto them. Like less than an hour after we had them. With only the 25 original ring tones and a cafeteria that holds 1600 people, well you do the birthday paradox math.
The problem with your online advertising supported model is that most of the advertising is not regionally relevant, and so does not generate income for your advertisers proportional to your readership. Regionalizing your advertising would fix this, and prevent you "needing" to throw up a pay wall.
Micro payments aren't going to save you because no one but the connection-based telephone companies has really got the transaction cost down to under the micropayment cost, and they only do it by amortizing the costs of processing over a number of transactions, and then doing transaction accounting. This is either done by pre-pay and good accounting on the back end (I can't see someone signing up for a micropayment service plan the way they do for a cell phone service plan), or by good accounting on the back end and post-billing (e.g. like the sub-$0.10 charges per minute for long distance land line calls).
This is why there are so many small markets like iTunes, or Verizon's bill-me-for-taking-my-phone-out-of-my-pocket services, or other cellular ring tones in the $0.99 range: to get the costs down proportionally.
If you throw up a pay wall, you are simply going to marginalize the NYT out of existence (worst case) or into regionally bound world irrelevance (best case). There are other people who provide wire service aggregation, and frankly your non-wire, non-regional content at the NYT is such a small fraction of the overall content that you're not going to be able to get by on selling into anything but a regional market that cares about the ads and non-wire content enough to pay. I can get my AP and UPI anywhere, and maybe your problem there is trying to support their own outdated model (which should convert to pay-more-for-earlier-access).
Personally, I value your journalists writing unique content, and I value your editors and their editorial standards and decisions. But I have to say, I very much do NOT value the rest of your infrastructure that you keep around to no benefit to me. That includes your presses, your large buildings, and other things which act only as anchors to tie you to the brick-and-mortar world like the Albatross around the neck of the Ancient Mariner. I have no idea why you need an office other than your laptop, or an editorial meeting room to pitch ideas in other than iChat or some other video chat tool.
This has been well known in psychiatric social workers circles for many years (I have had two relatives working in the field). The first year "Tab" with Aspartame came out, and was picked up by a population that typically has body image problems in the first place, ad so immediately grab onto "diet anything", there was about a 70% increase in psychiatric intakes by the local County Mental Health as it (effectively) blocked the action of most Lithium medications in Schizophrenics who had previously been doing fine on their medication levels. Some people they took off the diet drinks, and others, they had to adjust the medications upward to compensate for it.
They haven't built an 8-bit adder, and the single linkage requirement for sliding or rotating to do the switching is obviously intended to be a hard requirement to allow thermodynamically reversible computing (otherwise, waste heat would limit the rate at which it would be able to switch without breaking down from its own waste heat, seriously limiting its utility).
It's somewhat hardware also because of the 50nm cubic sweep requirement for the arm; the device demonstrated doesn't fulfill that requirement either, but I suppose it could, if it incorporated more degrees of freedom (i.e. the arm was made longer in order to increase its sweep). The prize also requires 32 copies of each device for destructive testing by the judges (I imagine the panel will include Freitas, Merkle, and Drexler, at least). This lets out the C60 transistor based adder done by R Stadler, S Ami, M Forshaw and C Joachim in 2001, which I guess was more or less the point of specifying the dimensions they did.
"You didn't get a job in Apple Retail expecting to move up to working on Apple products did you? If so that would be the saddest thing I've heard in a while"
Obviously, you aren't an Apple employee, and you haven't really used Google without declaring this.
If you are an Apple Retail employee already, ask your HR person about the "Apple Retail Corporate (ARC) Exchange program". I know at least seven people who are working in Core OS, or on products like "Numbers" or "Final Cut Pro", etc., who started out as Apple Retail employees, and those are just the people I know personally. If you are qualified, it's relatively easy to get what is effectively an internship, either coming from the store to corporate, or going from corporate to the store. If I recall correctly, in fact, an HR manager from corporate is now the manager of the "flagship" New York Apple Store.
When an application is available in a given countries App store, it's not necessarily available in every countries App store. In most cases, in fact, it's not. So the only way to get the app is to jailbreak your phone, and install it fom one of the pirate installer applications, which only run on jailbroken phones.
In order to get an account on the US App store, and therefore have access to all the Apps there, you have to establish an account with a US credit card with a US address; the account is fairly easy, but to set up a US billing address on the thing is impossible, unless you are willing to rent a trans-shipping PO Box, or unless you have a friend in the US willing to let you use their physical address as a residence address for the credit card.
So even if you wanted to pay for the thing, there's no way you could possibly do so, without a huge amount of risk and hassle.
I imagine most of this "piracy" is down to "people whom we are unwilling to enable to buy the App getting ahold of it despite the obstacles we are placing in their way".
Infrastructure is only good if it's already in place prior to the disaster.
Building/Rebuilding infrastructure is actually not frequently a good response to a disaster, beyond getting basic communications up and running to support other disaster relief efforts, which can generally be provided by mobile/temporary radio emplacements.
As an example, in the US Virgin Islands, they tend to have extreme hurricanes every couple of years. You can walk around in Christiansted or Frederiksted on St. Croix afterwards, and a lot of what counts as infrastructure is practically demolished. When this happens, the US Congress inevitably votes to pay the costs for burying the necessary utilities so that telephone, power, sewer, etc. (most houses have cisterns for water) never go out again.
The money inevitably goes to the local utility company owners, who happen to be the same people or in the same circle of people, who own the casino, the airport, the Carombola golf course, the hotels, etc.. The take the money, spend 10% of it balancing the wires back up on the poles to wait for the next hurricane/payday, and then pocket the remaining 90%.
Spending on infrastructure in Haiti at this point to get things back up and running likely won't get them anything better than they already had before the Earthquake, won't prepare them any better for the next disaster, and will likely only serve to line the pockets of corrupt local officials (or corrupt local gang leaders, at least until the corrupt local officials can get back on their feet).
Slashdot is a technical site, and thinks of technical infrastructure as being important, but communications for anyone not directly involved in disaster relief at this point is a luxury, not a necessity.
If you plan on doing anything, the priority has to be on water, food, and shelter (in that order), then medical care for the injured (this is triage ordering, to save the people who survived or have already been dug out first from dying in the next few days or weeks). After that, you can try to figure out how to get non-temporary infrastructure built with a minimum of corruption, and hey, if you figure that out, maybe you can try it in the USVI, too, and then Florida, and eventually, California.
What DirectX does that OpenGL/SDL don't...provides sound and frame sync. I could moderate in this thread (I have points), but no one had mentioned this crucial issue. Sure, if you are doing scientific visualization, you're going to use OpenGL, either on a Mac or on incredibly budget Linux-running white box hardware because you don't have the $ for anything else. But if you want to d games, it's important to have both the sound and the image (and haptic feedback, and anything else) synchronized. Same for using it for video playback or video chat. Apple goes out of its way to provide Apple-specific APIs for this, just as Microsoft provides DirectX, and the code you write using them is no more portable to other platforms than DirectX code is.
For very high frame rates, which are used to allow speculative pre-calcualtion and discard (i.e. pre-computing "the road not taken" in a multipathed decision tree, and throwing it away if a different road is taken), it's even more important to have the ability to combine work lists for speculative rendering along with audio etc. for the work, should it be used.
OpenGL is a graphics language. It's good at what it does, but it's not good at what DirectX does on top of that.
Disclaimer: I work for Apple, and yes, I'm making more or less positive comments about "DirectX vs. OpenGL" when considered for a particular use related to what the article author proposes to use OpenGL for...
Or you could photoshop their existing pictures to put their subjects into compromising or illegal situations.
The resolution on these things and the typical images uploaded to the server is low enough that you could probably make it very hard for even an expert to detect that they were fakes, just by looking at the picture.
Tthe OS reboots periodically if there's no communication to ensure that it doesn't hang because of the OS. It's a hardware watchdog, which is NOT shut down when the rover is put to sleep, so it will wake periodically over the winter, try to establish communications, ask for a software update (if any), and then go back to sleep. Given that the original mission anticipated a 90 life expectancy, expect these reboots to be relatively frequent.
"The rovers run a VxWorks embedded operating system on a radiation-hardened 20 MHz RAD6000 CPU with 128 MB of DRAM with error detection and correction and 3 MB of EEPROM. Each rover also has 256 MB of flash memory. To survive during all of the various mission phases, the rover's vital instruments must stay within a temperature of 40 C to +40 C (40 F to 104 F). At night the rovers are heated by eight radioisotope heater units (RHU) which each continuously generate 1 W of thermal energy from the decay of radioisotopes, along with electrical heaters that operate only when necessary. A sputtered gold film and a layer of silica aerogel are used for insulation."
FWIW, the important parts of reentry are laminar...
They actually had to go out of their way to make it turbulent in the STS-119 experiment by attaching a modified tile to the Discovery's left wing, in an experiment last March. See:
Goodyear Aerospace Corp. in the early 1980's built a 16,384 node parallel computer system that was used in modeling laminar airflow and thermal expansion over the space shuttle air frame by NASA's Goddard Spaceflight Center. The division was later acquired by Loral Space & Communications Ltd. in the 1980's, which was then acquired (piecemeal) by Lockheed Martin.
Except most piracy is by their own manufacturing contractors in other countries running a so-called "Third Shift", also known as a "Midnight Shift" or a "Ghost Shift" on the same production lines with the same equipment and workers who were used for the legitimate production of authorized copies. If they kept their manufacturing in their own political jurisdiction, they could expect some enforcement by the politicians they've bought; they don't, and so they have to go to the politicians they own and plead with them to talk to the politicians they don't own.
"He that lieth down with Dogs, shall rise up with Fleas."
- Benjamin Franklin
60% of U.S. oil imports are from non-OPEC nations; OPEC nations. The single largest supplier, by volume, is Canada, followed by Mexico.
Of the OPEC nations, the biggest supplier is currently Venezuela, though they were edged out by Saudi Arabia for a couple months this year (last April and July).
Basically, if it was about the oil, we could tell them to pound sand today; we simply aren't getting that much oil from them. What the U.S. gets of of the relationship is a more or less stable Middle East.
Slashdot Mirror
And puts a two week horizon on your creativity
Which is great if all you need to do is crank out grunt work, but a bit hairy if you are trying to do anything innovative that won't fit into a two week period. In creative organizations or fields of endeavor, nothing kills your chance of coming up with a great product as cutting things into two week deadlines.
-- Terry
Try reading the article and their web site.
I used to work at a pizza chain where we had to ring in orders using a touchscreen.
Most touch screens for data entry are layers on top of the glass. This is capacitive, and can go under the glass. If it were under the glass, you'd have a much harder time wearing it out than if it were a simple touch screen like the type they use at Pizza Hut.
Personally, I was disappointed that they wanted contact information, and gave zero information on where to obtain engineering samples, since I's really like a 27" touch screen iMac (my iPhone has already got me trained to the point I am leaving fingerprints all over every display I own). They are really only interested in talking to people already interested in buying quantity, sight unseen.
-- Terry
Terraforming a post-apocalyptic Earth...
The idea to me is ridiculous. Seems to me that by the time we can actually terraform another planet, we'll also be completely capable of "terra re-forming" Earth.
I'd be more comfortable with the idea if we had some practice beforehand...
-- Terry
NOT environmental monitoring; that's NOAA's job.
Environmental monitoring?
http://www.noaa.gov/about-noaa.html
-- Terry
FAA and the EPA stopping commercial launches
You can change the NASA budget all you want, but the major impediments to commercial space launches are still the FAA and the EPA. If you can't get a license for a launch, you aren't going anywhere.
Fine.
After I launch, they can come up and arrest me.
-- Terry
You've turned me into a Republican apologist!
I can't tell you how much I detest that.
But the applicable regulatory provisions of the Banking Act of 1933 (the Glass-Steagal Act) , enacted by Franklin D. Roosevelt (D): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass-Steagall_Act were repealed in two parts under the democratic administrations of Jimmy Carter (via the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980) and the Bill Clinton administration (the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999).
However, you can lay the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 (BAPCPA), which converted the outstanding non-collateralized credit card lending debt into collateralized debt square on George W. Bush's administration.
Of all of these, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (under Carter) was by far the worst, by allowing bank holding companies to get into speculative financial instruments, which in turned allowed them to create the current crisis.
So if you want to blame a particular political party, you'll have to blame democrats, but the president to blame is Bill Clinton.
-- Terry
X server abstraction makes this hard.
The X server sits between your display driver and your window manager and does not communicate sufficient information about the underlying devices to the client program, which in this case is the window manager itself, that it's able to distinguish the real estate boundaries between the displays. Because it doesn't know the boundaries, it can't make good decisions on mapping a workspace (a window manager abstraction) onto a display (an X Server abstraction which is being intentionally glossed over by the X Server or by the display itself).
I've often complained that the X abstraction of the window management from the server software did a big disfavor to the overall capability to pick a window server and have all you applications adopt a uniform "look and feel" based on the window manager selected: the window manager being integral to the server would have prevented this.
I've also complained about the need to load display drivers into what is effectively user space resulting in a loss of state information to the kernel, since it has a very hard time with "putting the display back into a known, reasonable state", either because the user space driver is making state changes to write-only registers in the card, and these are not shadowed into the kernels idea of the card state, or that even being shadowed, the kernel driver doesn't know what to do about it. I first brought this up in the context of debugging kernel panics in FreeBSD write running X windows, in the 1990's. You could address this a couple ways, including the hardware itself allowing for a kernel to reset to a "known good state" (most won't), or moving the driver into the kernel and breaking the X server/driver integration (and several projects have done this).
Another project which attempted to put the abstractions where I thought they should be was "Saluatation", but it got bogged down in commercial encumberment by companies like HP and Ricoh for its standards, and by the license (GPL) on what reference implementations they did make available.
Really, it's about time we decided to rethink the use of X windows at all.
-- Terry
Googles answer to the China problem?
The proposal says they would only use the first three octets. And users could just use a different DNS server if they had a restrictive servers that blacklisted Iran or whatever.
Or as someone upstream, I could redirect all the requests in a 252 machine block to force them through a transparent proxy server so that I can monitor them. It sure makes it easier on my monitoring servers to not have to monitor everything, and on my network infrastructure, if I can monitor things with a high locality, instead of doubling or tripling my traffic to proxy things non-locally.
This seems to be Googles answer to the China problem; by making it an infrastructure issue rather than a source-filtering issue, they get to be the "do no evil" people once again, offloading the nefarious actions onto the Chinese government, so that they can have a "clean conscience", without losing access to the Chinese market.
-- Terry
To: DNSEXT (DNS Extension Working Group, Internet Engineering Task Force)
From: Paul Vixie
Date: Thu, 28 Jan 2010
"I don't think that's a general enough solution to be worth standardizing.
please investigate the larger context of client identity, beyond the needs
of CDN's."
I also agree with his later statement in the same thread:
"it may be too dangerous in any form but that's a separate issue."
-- Terry
Space vs. Software
For the sake of whoever is getting sent up, I hope that they build spacecraft better than they build software, because all of the software I've seen written over there has been pretty damn awful.
I hope EVERYBODY builds spacecraft better than they build software. India does not have a monopoly on crappy software by any means; it's pretty much the status quo for almost everyone.
-- Terry
Music as a ring tone...
Also, if you have any kind of music as your ringtone (except for the harp sound on the iPhone) you should be shot. A phone should sound like a phone, not a disco.
Actually, the first day we (all Apple employees at the time)m got our iPhones, we immediately hacked different ring tones onto them. Like less than an hour after we had them. With only the 25 original ring tones and a cafeteria that holds 1600 people, well you do the birthday paradox math.
-- Terry
Peter: Have the NYT buy Craig's List
Seriously.
The problem with your online advertising supported model is that most of the advertising is not regionally relevant, and so does not generate income for your advertisers proportional to your readership. Regionalizing your advertising would fix this, and prevent you "needing" to throw up a pay wall.
Micro payments aren't going to save you because no one but the connection-based telephone companies has really got the transaction cost down to under the micropayment cost, and they only do it by amortizing the costs of processing over a number of transactions, and then doing transaction accounting. This is either done by pre-pay and good accounting on the back end (I can't see someone signing up for a micropayment service plan the way they do for a cell phone service plan), or by good accounting on the back end and post-billing (e.g. like the sub-$0.10 charges per minute for long distance land line calls).
This is why there are so many small markets like iTunes, or Verizon's bill-me-for-taking-my-phone-out-of-my-pocket services, or other cellular ring tones in the $0.99 range: to get the costs down proportionally.
If you throw up a pay wall, you are simply going to marginalize the NYT out of existence (worst case) or into regionally bound world irrelevance (best case). There are other people who provide wire service aggregation, and frankly your non-wire, non-regional content at the NYT is such a small fraction of the overall content that you're not going to be able to get by on selling into anything but a regional market that cares about the ads and non-wire content enough to pay. I can get my AP and UPI anywhere, and maybe your problem there is trying to support their own outdated model (which should convert to pay-more-for-earlier-access).
Personally, I value your journalists writing unique content, and I value your editors and their editorial standards and decisions. But I have to say, I very much do NOT value the rest of your infrastructure that you keep around to no benefit to me. That includes your presses, your large buildings, and other things which act only as anchors to tie you to the brick-and-mortar world like the Albatross around the neck of the Ancient Mariner. I have no idea why you need an office other than your laptop, or an editorial meeting room to pitch ideas in other than iChat or some other video chat tool.
-- Terry
Since you brought up Aspartame....
http://www.mindfully.org/Health/Aspartame-Adverse-Reactions-1993.htm
This has been well known in psychiatric social workers circles for many years (I have had two relatives working in the field). The first year "Tab" with Aspartame came out, and was picked up by a population that typically has body image problems in the first place, ad so immediately grab onto "diet anything", there was about a 70% increase in psychiatric intakes by the local County Mental Health as it (effectively) blocked the action of most Lithium medications in Schizophrenics who had previously been doing fine on their medication levels. Some people they took off the diet drinks, and others, they had to adjust the medications upward to compensate for it.
-- Terry
Not a Feynman prize candidate (yet)
They haven't built an 8-bit adder, and the single linkage requirement for sliding or rotating to do the switching is obviously intended to be a hard requirement to allow thermodynamically reversible computing (otherwise, waste heat would limit the rate at which it would be able to switch without breaking down from its own waste heat, seriously limiting its utility).
It's somewhat hardware also because of the 50nm cubic sweep requirement for the arm; the device demonstrated doesn't fulfill that requirement either, but I suppose it could, if it incorporated more degrees of freedom (i.e. the arm was made longer in order to increase its sweep). The prize also requires 32 copies of each device for destructive testing by the judges (I imagine the panel will include Freitas, Merkle, and Drexler, at least). This lets out the C60 transistor based adder done by R Stadler, S Ami, M Forshaw and C Joachim in 2001, which I guess was more or less the point of specifying the dimensions they did.
-- Terry
Moving from Apple Retail to Apple products...
"You didn't get a job in Apple Retail expecting to move up to working on Apple products did you? If so that would be the saddest thing I've heard in a while"
Obviously, you aren't an Apple employee, and you haven't really used Google without declaring this.
If you are an Apple Retail employee already, ask your HR person about the "Apple Retail Corporate (ARC) Exchange program". I know at least seven people who are working in Core OS, or on products like "Numbers" or "Final Cut Pro", etc., who started out as Apple Retail employees, and those are just the people I know personally. If you are qualified, it's relatively easy to get what is effectively an internship, either coming from the store to corporate, or going from corporate to the store. If I recall correctly, in fact, an HR manager from corporate is now the manager of the "flagship" New York Apple Store.
-- Terry
Note: Speaking only for myself, here...
Like DVD "region coding"...
When an application is available in a given countries App store, it's not necessarily available in every countries App store. In most cases, in fact, it's not. So the only way to get the app is to jailbreak your phone, and install it fom one of the pirate installer applications, which only run on jailbroken phones.
In order to get an account on the US App store, and therefore have access to all the Apps there, you have to establish an account with a US credit card with a US address; the account is fairly easy, but to set up a US billing address on the thing is impossible, unless you are willing to rent a trans-shipping PO Box, or unless you have a friend in the US willing to let you use their physical address as a residence address for the credit card.
So even if you wanted to pay for the thing, there's no way you could possibly do so, without a huge amount of risk and hassle.
I imagine most of this "piracy" is down to "people whom we are unwilling to enable to buy the App getting ahold of it despite the obstacles we are placing in their way".
-- Terry
Infrastructure is only good if it's already in place prior to the disaster.
Building/Rebuilding infrastructure is actually not frequently a good response to a disaster, beyond getting basic communications up and running to support other disaster relief efforts, which can generally be provided by mobile/temporary radio emplacements.
As an example, in the US Virgin Islands, they tend to have extreme hurricanes every couple of years. You can walk around in Christiansted or Frederiksted on St. Croix afterwards, and a lot of what counts as infrastructure is practically demolished. When this happens, the US Congress inevitably votes to pay the costs for burying the necessary utilities so that telephone, power, sewer, etc. (most houses have cisterns for water) never go out again.
The money inevitably goes to the local utility company owners, who happen to be the same people or in the same circle of people, who own the casino, the airport, the Carombola golf course, the hotels, etc.. The take the money, spend 10% of it balancing the wires back up on the poles to wait for the next hurricane/payday, and then pocket the remaining 90%.
Spending on infrastructure in Haiti at this point to get things back up and running likely won't get them anything better than they already had before the Earthquake, won't prepare them any better for the next disaster, and will likely only serve to line the pockets of corrupt local officials (or corrupt local gang leaders, at least until the corrupt local officials can get back on their feet).
Slashdot is a technical site, and thinks of technical infrastructure as being important, but communications for anyone not directly involved in disaster relief at this point is a luxury, not a necessity.
If you plan on doing anything, the priority has to be on water, food, and shelter (in that order), then medical care for the injured (this is triage ordering, to save the people who survived or have already been dug out first from dying in the next few days or weeks). After that, you can try to figure out how to get non-temporary infrastructure built with a minimum of corruption, and hey, if you figure that out, maybe you can try it in the USVI, too, and then Florida, and eventually, California.
-- Terry
What DirectX does that OpenGL/SDL don't ...provides sound and frame sync. I could moderate in this thread (I have points), but no one had mentioned this crucial issue. Sure, if you are doing scientific visualization, you're going to use OpenGL, either on a Mac or on incredibly budget Linux-running white box hardware because you don't have the $ for anything else. But if you want to d games, it's important to have both the sound and the image (and haptic feedback, and anything else) synchronized. Same for using it for video playback or video chat. Apple goes out of its way to provide Apple-specific APIs for this, just as Microsoft provides DirectX, and the code you write using them is no more portable to other platforms than DirectX code is.
For very high frame rates, which are used to allow speculative pre-calcualtion and discard (i.e. pre-computing "the road not taken" in a multipathed decision tree, and throwing it away if a different road is taken), it's even more important to have the ability to combine work lists for speculative rendering along with audio etc. for the work, should it be used.
OpenGL is a graphics language. It's good at what it does, but it's not good at what DirectX does on top of that.
Disclaimer: I work for Apple, and yes, I'm making more or less positive comments about "DirectX vs. OpenGL" when considered for a particular use related to what the article author proposes to use OpenGL for...
-- Terry
Or you could photoshop their existing pictures to put their subjects into compromising or illegal situations.
The resolution on these things and the typical images uploaded to the server is low enough that you could probably make it very hard for even an expert to detect that they were fakes, just by looking at the picture.
-- Terry
Tthe OS reboots periodically if there's no communication to ensure that it doesn't hang because of the OS. It's a hardware watchdog, which is NOT shut down when the rover is put to sleep, so it will wake periodically over the winter, try to establish communications, ask for a software update (if any), and then go back to sleep. Given that the original mission anticipated a 90 life expectancy, expect these reboots to be relatively frequent.
http://www.flightsoftware.org/files/FSW08_Deliman.pdf
-- Terry
"The rovers run a VxWorks embedded operating system on a radiation-hardened 20 MHz RAD6000 CPU with 128 MB of DRAM with error detection and correction and 3 MB of EEPROM. Each rover also has 256 MB of flash memory. To survive during all of the various mission phases, the rover's vital instruments must stay within a temperature of 40 C to +40 C (40 F to 104 F). At night the rovers are heated by eight radioisotope heater units (RHU) which each continuously generate 1 W of thermal energy from the decay of radioisotopes, along with electrical heaters that operate only when necessary. A sputtered gold film and a layer of silica aerogel are used for insulation."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Exploration_Rover
-- Terry
FWIW, the important parts of reentry are laminar...
They actually had to go out of their way to make it turbulent in the STS-119 experiment by attaching a modified tile to the Discovery's left wing, in an experiment last March. See:
http://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts119/090329blt/
-- Terry
Not enough processing power on Earth?!?
Goodyear Aerospace Corp. in the early 1980's built a 16,384 node parallel computer system that was used in modeling laminar airflow and thermal expansion over the space shuttle air frame by NASA's Goddard Spaceflight Center. The division was later acquired by Loral Space & Communications Ltd. in the 1980's, which was then acquired (piecemeal) by Lockheed Martin.
Here is a reference on the computer: http://en.allexperts.com/e/g/go/goodyear_mpp.htm
If you can model that 25 years ago, you can model a composite aircraft with modern computers today.
-- Terry
Except most piracy is by their own manufacturing contractors in other countries running a so-called "Third Shift", also known as a "Midnight Shift" or a "Ghost Shift" on the same production lines with the same equipment and workers who were used for the legitimate production of authorized copies. If they kept their manufacturing in their own political jurisdiction, they could expect some enforcement by the politicians they've bought; they don't, and so they have to go to the politicians they own and plead with them to talk to the politicians they don't own.
"He that lieth down with Dogs, shall rise up with Fleas."
- Benjamin Franklin
-- Terry
You're aware that only 8.5% of US oil imports come from Saudi Arabia, right?
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_impcus_a2_nus_ep00_im0_mbbl_m.htm
60% of U.S. oil imports are from non-OPEC nations; OPEC nations. The single largest supplier, by volume, is Canada, followed by Mexico.
Of the OPEC nations, the biggest supplier is currently Venezuela, though they were edged out by Saudi Arabia for a couple months this year (last April and July).
Basically, if it was about the oil, we could tell them to pound sand today; we simply aren't getting that much oil from them. What the U.S. gets of of the relationship is a more or less stable Middle East.
-- Terry