Exactly, this is the reason that my Windows Mobile Pocket PC Phone runs with a "white" theme I created (plus it increases readability in sunny locations).
However, there are new LCD's coming out with a matrix of LED's acting as the backlight. For those, running black would probably give you a net power saving. However, that would be offset by the cost of the things, they are not cheap.
A lot of hyperbole from the IFPI, as usual. The important thing to remember is that this is Mechanical copyright. That is, the copyright on the actual recording of a song. In many cases, the people lobbying for these extensions (i.e., the "Artists") were also the composers so also own the copyright to the song/music itself. They will still own that as it only expires at death+70 years.
This means that people who wish to cover said works will still be a source of income.
The artists knew when they recorded these works that they had a finite amount of time to exploit them (and if they didn't they should have hired better solicitors), yet they are now turning around and trying to change the rules; That sounds a lot like the behaviour of young children, not grown men and women.
The reason the road signs haven't changed is more one of practicality than anything else.
Items in shops are in the supply/usage chain for a few months (at most). Cars are in the supply chain for many years.
Some speedos on cars would need a new decal, which wouldn't come cheap (removing the glass panel, applying, calibrating). This is less of a problem on cars with digital speed displays, all that takes is a firmware change to the european version.
More problematic is that every single speed limit sign, distance sign and mile marker would need to be changed at a cost of many many millions of pounds (when I saw the number I couldn't quite believe it). You couldn't even phase it over a few years as you'd just end up confusing people (maybe distance signs, but not speed signs).
Personally I'd rather that money go on improving public transport and the NHS than a pointless exercise to realign our distances with the rest of the world, it's not as if it's a big problem any more - we use metric for all of the important things these days already as you pointed out.
when the public decides that they'd like to go back to waiting for a page-refresh to be able to do anything. When I first got a Gmail account I re-activated a long-dormant HoTMaiL account to compare it with and the difference in speed was like day and night.
Web 2.0 may be quite wasteful in the amount of traffic being sent, but in these days of streaming video sites like YouTube we're talking about a drop in the ocean.
IMHO the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks. To all the naysayers that opine about what to do when you don't have any net access, we're also moving into an era where you can, with a few caveats, be always on the net wherever you are. I live in the UK and with HSDPA, 3G and GPRS coverage I have a link to the internet about 98-99% of the time as I move about throughout the day. Accessing Web 2.0 apps via Opera Mobile on my Vario II is more than bearable (esp. with the new "grab and scroll" feature in 8.65). With the new crop of mobile AJAX apps being developed for the iPhone things could start getting very interesting.
A few HTC Smart Phones use Qualcomm Chips IIRC. The new HTC Kaiser (slide out keyboard w/flip up screen, GPS, WM 6) has a Qualcomm Chip core powering it, doing the GPS and also Graphics, so unless this is overturned people in the states are going to miss out on a funky little device.
So Use SVK, which uses the base libraries of Subversion (the atomic, versioning filesystem ones which are heavily tested and work very well) and uses them to build a distributed SCM.
FX!32 was for running applications, not the operating system. Think of it like rosetta for Mac OS X Intel.
NT was actually built from the ground up to be portable cross-platform (in fact, the dev platform was the Intel i860 an then the MIPS R4000, both RISC chips). Everything runs on top of a Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) that takes care of the differences between various platforms.
NT was a very elegant operating system, which isn't surprising seeing as it was the brain-child of Dave Cutler famous for VMS.
IIRC, Microsoft licenses Sql Server per "slot" and not per core, so if you have a fancy Core Quad (or whatever it's called) in your DB server it's still counted as 1 processor.
I highly doubt the jmonkeyengine actually does the heavy 3D lifting in java itself. It probably uses Java3D which is a wrapper to native OpenGL calls. So the bits that need the most speed are still native, but the rest of your core game logic etc. is in Java.
The performance overhead of using Java3D is pretty negligible compared to accessing OpenGL from C/C++.
Of course, writing a game in Java has other problems. It's much more trivial to extract the original source from compiled bytecode for one (although this can be overcome to some extent with obfuscation, but that's just security through obscurity).
For Windows there's either the paid route (Adobe Acrobat Suite), or you can use PDFCreator which uses ghostscript. GS used to produce really nasty looking output years ago on Windows (circa the late 90's), but that's not the case anymore.
For linux, print to ps then use something like ps2pdf (once again GhostScript).
The federal parliament probably doesn't "understand" free speech as it's not enshrined in your constitution. As affirmed by Australian Capital Television Pty Ltd v Commonwealth, only Political speech is protected.
Whilst Oz is a signatory to the Convention on Human Rights, they've never created an act of parliament specifically related to Freedom of Speech, so in theory the government can censor anything they please (except protected political expression).
The real problem is Scalix doesn't currently support an open method for syncing calendar data (it's currently stored in a proprietary IMAP object container).
They are saying that we should see full CalDAV support in an upgrade to version 11, which is meant to arrive this quarter. Once that is here you've got IMAP for the mail, and CalDAV for the scheduling/syncing of the calendar.
Add that to the Funambol Scalix connector being released shortly and it's shaping up to be a damn good Exchange challenger (I hate the term exchange killer). Why are you trying to dump it?
How about switching to a fairly decent (only fairly as they are part of Pipex, but seem fairly independent) ISP like Nildram then? They are totally up-front and honest about usage allowances...you get 50gig peak, unlimited off peak, and if you don't use the whole 50gigs peak one month it will roll over once to the next month.
Failing that, go with an Enta reseller like the UK Free Software Network who give a portion of their profits to open source projects.
Back on the subject though, I'm with T-Mobile on their "Web 'n' Walk" plus tarrif and they make it clear that it's a 3GB tarrif that disallows VOIP. For an extra £8 they up you to 10GB and allow VOIP.
That's called being totally transparent, and I'm very grateful they "get it" and show the actual usage terms in plain English for all to see.
JPG is only for "natural" images such as photographs!
Almost, but not quite. JPEG is also good for unnatural images that have lots of very small changes in color. Gradient backgrounds are one that spring to mind.
...it's roughly 5.67137278 × 10^28 IP's per person
Or, as a recent Ars article put it (much better than I ever could):
To put this into perspective: there are currently 130 million people born each year. If this number of births remains the same until the sun goes dark in 5 billion years, and all of these people live to be 72 years old, they can all have 53 times the address space of the IPv4 Internet for every second of their lives. Let nobody accuse the IETF of being frugal this time around.
And fantastic support. The initial release for Vista kept crashing my computer on login, then on boot. Not even safe mode worked.
ESET took around a week and a half, but tracked down the problem, and released a new version that fixed it. And I'm not a corp customer with hundreds of licenses, that's damn good service in my book.
It may not be the best software, but to call PDF a bad format is just plain ignorant.
It allows document publishers to ensure that their files will look the same on every platform, transcending font issues etc - you can't say that with Word docments, web pages, rtf files etc.
True, for this kind of document it makes little sense to use a PDF vs. images, but that's not the fault of the format, it's the fault of the people who digitized the printouts.
If you're fed up with Adobe PDF reader, try something else like the free Foxit Reader - small, quick to load and fast to browse files, I haven't had the reader installed for a couple of years now.
It is possible to make a fast reader, see the one that ships with Mac OS X, or Evince - they both fly even with large complex documents.
...We've just transitioned to using Scalix for our email and calendaring. It's got public folders, calendaring, email, push capability, nifty webmail client, Outlook Integation, Evolution Integration, and pretty soon CalDAV support so Mozilla Sunbird/Lightning and Apple iCal (in Mac OS X 10.5).
It's based on what used to be HP OpenMail, so has roughly a 20 year history. It's mature and well tested and not that expensive (compared to Exchange etc.).
We got our Vista Business Upgrade DVD (part of our Action Pack Subscription) a week and a half ago and I can confirm the following:
No you cannot do a clean install, I tried it. You must start the install from a licensed copy of XP Pro SP2 (Genuine Advantage reasons). However, this copy does not need to be activated (my NIC isn't supported out of the box on XP).
You can select an advanced install which allows you to do a clean install, moving your current windows dir and files to c:\windows.old. This can then be deleted on first boot by yourself and you have a clean windows install.
Most Vista discs are the same (except the non-bootable enterprise ones), the differentiator is the license key you use. If you boot into the DVD and select install with an upgrade license key it will detect this and stop the installer.
If you try and install without a license key (possible, just click continue when prompted then select your version) you are not able to activate the upgrade copy if done as a clean install.
I have not tried installing from a PE environment (e.g. Part's PE) so I cannot comment if that would work or not.
Apart from that I'm enjoying the eye candy in vista (the visual clues do make a subtle difference to knowing which window has focus when lots are open). I had to disable UAC as we use Visual Studio 2005 here and it still doesn't play nicely. The only thing I'm really stuggling with is NOD32 which crashes the computer on boot if installed - but the support people at ESET are guiding me through various options and hopefully it'll be working soon.
It may just be a word, but it's a word that has negative connotations for a lot of informed people. Just recently Acer admitted to there being a glaring security hole in an ActiveX control installed on their computers that could have allowed malicious websites to download and execute rootkits, trojans etc.
Let us not forget that you are also locking out anyone not on Windows and not running Internet Explorer. Gone are the days when we can put "This site works best in Internet Explorer" on a site and expect people to think that's O.K.
Sorry to nitpick, but Irish Coffee is actually neat Whisky mixed with Cane Sugar, after which Black Coffee is poured on. Finally the mixture is topped with Double Cream whipped till slightly thick. This makes a lovely looking glass with half the liquid almost black and the other half almost white. When you drink it the two parts start mixing.
Interestingly it's also a relatively new invention, not much more than 50 years old.
Ruination of good Coffee and good Whisky as my dad always says;o)
I'm sure the porn thing didn't help, but what really killed Betamax in the early days was the shorter length of the tapes. Sony refused to back down on this and add a "long-play" mode until it was too late.
They did tie up the pro crowd however, I had the pleasure of using one of their BetaCAM's in the 90's and it was a lovely piece of kit.
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Exactly, this is the reason that my Windows Mobile Pocket PC Phone runs with a "white" theme I created (plus it increases readability in sunny locations).
However, there are new LCD's coming out with a matrix of LED's acting as the backlight. For those, running black would probably give you a net power saving. However, that would be offset by the cost of the things, they are not cheap.
A lot of hyperbole from the IFPI, as usual. The important thing to remember is that this is Mechanical copyright. That is, the copyright on the actual recording of a song. In many cases, the people lobbying for these extensions (i.e., the "Artists") were also the composers so also own the copyright to the song/music itself. They will still own that as it only expires at death+70 years.
This means that people who wish to cover said works will still be a source of income.
The artists knew when they recorded these works that they had a finite amount of time to exploit them (and if they didn't they should have hired better solicitors), yet they are now turning around and trying to change the rules; That sounds a lot like the behaviour of young children, not grown men and women.
Exactly, otherwise companies wanting easy lawsuits in the future could be very dishonest and pay someone to be sued (and lose).
The reason the road signs haven't changed is more one of practicality than anything else.
Items in shops are in the supply/usage chain for a few months (at most). Cars are in the supply chain for many years.
Some speedos on cars would need a new decal, which wouldn't come cheap (removing the glass panel, applying, calibrating). This is less of a problem on cars with digital speed displays, all that takes is a firmware change to the european version.
More problematic is that every single speed limit sign, distance sign and mile marker would need to be changed at a cost of many many millions of pounds (when I saw the number I couldn't quite believe it). You couldn't even phase it over a few years as you'd just end up confusing people (maybe distance signs, but not speed signs).
Personally I'd rather that money go on improving public transport and the NHS than a pointless exercise to realign our distances with the rest of the world, it's not as if it's a big problem any more - we use metric for all of the important things these days already as you pointed out.
Sure,
when the public decides that they'd like to go back to waiting for a page-refresh to be able to do anything. When I first got a Gmail account I re-activated a long-dormant HoTMaiL account to compare it with and the difference in speed was like day and night.
Web 2.0 may be quite wasteful in the amount of traffic being sent, but in these days of streaming video sites like YouTube we're talking about a drop in the ocean.
IMHO the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks. To all the naysayers that opine about what to do when you don't have any net access, we're also moving into an era where you can, with a few caveats, be always on the net wherever you are. I live in the UK and with HSDPA, 3G and GPRS coverage I have a link to the internet about 98-99% of the time as I move about throughout the day. Accessing Web 2.0 apps via Opera Mobile on my Vario II is more than bearable (esp. with the new "grab and scroll" feature in 8.65). With the new crop of mobile AJAX apps being developed for the iPhone things could start getting very interesting.
A few HTC Smart Phones use Qualcomm Chips IIRC. The new HTC Kaiser (slide out keyboard w/flip up screen, GPS, WM 6) has a Qualcomm Chip core powering it, doing the GPS and also Graphics, so unless this is overturned people in the states are going to miss out on a funky little device.
So Use SVK, which uses the base libraries of Subversion (the atomic, versioning filesystem ones which are heavily tested and work very well) and uses them to build a distributed SCM.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SVK
FX!32 was for running applications, not the operating system. Think of it like rosetta for Mac OS X Intel.
NT was actually built from the ground up to be portable cross-platform (in fact, the dev platform was the Intel i860 an then the MIPS R4000, both RISC chips). Everything runs on top of a Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) that takes care of the differences between various platforms.
NT was a very elegant operating system, which isn't surprising seeing as it was the brain-child of Dave Cutler famous for VMS.
Almost...
IIRC, Microsoft licenses Sql Server per "slot" and not per core, so if you have a fancy Core Quad (or whatever it's called) in your DB server it's still counted as 1 processor.
One thing to bear in mind:
I highly doubt the jmonkeyengine actually does the heavy 3D lifting in java itself. It probably uses Java3D which is a wrapper to native OpenGL calls. So the bits that need the most speed are still native, but the rest of your core game logic etc. is in Java.
The performance overhead of using Java3D is pretty negligible compared to accessing OpenGL from C/C++.
Of course, writing a game in Java has other problems. It's much more trivial to extract the original source from compiled bytecode for one (although this can be overcome to some extent with obfuscation, but that's just security through obscurity).
For Windows there's either the paid route (Adobe Acrobat Suite), or you can use PDFCreator which uses ghostscript. GS used to produce really nasty looking output years ago on Windows (circa the late 90's), but that's not the case anymore.
For linux, print to ps then use something like ps2pdf (once again GhostScript).
The federal parliament probably doesn't "understand" free speech as it's not enshrined in your constitution. As affirmed by Australian Capital Television Pty Ltd v Commonwealth, only Political speech is protected.
Whilst Oz is a signatory to the Convention on Human Rights, they've never created an act of parliament specifically related to Freedom of Speech, so in theory the government can censor anything they please (except protected political expression).
The real problem is Scalix doesn't currently support an open method for syncing calendar data (it's currently stored in a proprietary IMAP object container).
They are saying that we should see full CalDAV support in an upgrade to version 11, which is meant to arrive this quarter. Once that is here you've got IMAP for the mail, and CalDAV for the scheduling/syncing of the calendar.
Add that to the Funambol Scalix connector being released shortly and it's shaping up to be a damn good Exchange challenger (I hate the term exchange killer). Why are you trying to dump it?
How about switching to a fairly decent (only fairly as they are part of Pipex, but seem fairly independent) ISP like Nildram then? They are totally up-front and honest about usage allowances...you get 50gig peak, unlimited off peak, and if you don't use the whole 50gigs peak one month it will roll over once to the next month.
Failing that, go with an Enta reseller like the UK Free Software Network who give a portion of their profits to open source projects.
Back on the subject though, I'm with T-Mobile on their "Web 'n' Walk" plus tarrif and they make it clear that it's a 3GB tarrif that disallows VOIP. For an extra £8 they up you to 10GB and allow VOIP.
That's called being totally transparent, and I'm very grateful they "get it" and show the actual usage terms in plain English for all to see.
You forget that Windows has a Posix layer, so yes, as long as most of the libraries come in versions for Windows it is just a re-compile.
Almost, but not quite. JPEG is also good for unnatural images that have lots of very small changes in color. Gradient backgrounds are one that spring to mind.
True, but it wasn't meant as a scientific metric, just as a rough guide to how awe-inspiringly large the IPv6 address space is.
...it's roughly 5.67137278 × 10^28 IP's per person
Or, as a recent Ars article put it (much better than I ever could):
And fantastic support. The initial release for Vista kept crashing my computer on login, then on boot. Not even safe mode worked.
ESET took around a week and a half, but tracked down the problem, and released a new version that fixed it. And I'm not a corp customer with hundreds of licenses, that's damn good service in my book.
It may not be the best software, but to call PDF a bad format is just plain ignorant.
It allows document publishers to ensure that their files will look the same on every platform, transcending font issues etc - you can't say that with Word docments, web pages, rtf files etc.
True, for this kind of document it makes little sense to use a PDF vs. images, but that's not the fault of the format, it's the fault of the people who digitized the printouts.
If you're fed up with Adobe PDF reader, try something else like the free Foxit Reader - small, quick to load and fast to browse files, I haven't had the reader installed for a couple of years now.
It is possible to make a fast reader, see the one that ships with Mac OS X, or Evince - they both fly even with large complex documents.
...We've just transitioned to using Scalix for our email and calendaring. It's got public folders, calendaring, email, push capability, nifty webmail client, Outlook Integation, Evolution Integration, and pretty soon CalDAV support so Mozilla Sunbird/Lightning and Apple iCal (in Mac OS X 10.5).
It's based on what used to be HP OpenMail, so has roughly a 20 year history. It's mature and well tested and not that expensive (compared to Exchange etc.).
Apart from that I'm enjoying the eye candy in vista (the visual clues do make a subtle difference to knowing which window has focus when lots are open). I had to disable UAC as we use Visual Studio 2005 here and it still doesn't play nicely. The only thing I'm really stuggling with is NOD32 which crashes the computer on boot if installed - but the support people at ESET are guiding me through various options and hopefully it'll be working soon.
It may just be a word, but it's a word that has negative connotations for a lot of informed people. Just recently Acer admitted to there being a glaring security hole in an ActiveX control installed on their computers that could have allowed malicious websites to download and execute rootkits, trojans etc.
Let us not forget that you are also locking out anyone not on Windows and not running Internet Explorer. Gone are the days when we can put "This site works best in Internet Explorer" on a site and expect people to think that's O.K.
Sorry to nitpick, but Irish Coffee is actually neat Whisky mixed with Cane Sugar, after which Black Coffee is poured on. Finally the mixture is topped with Double Cream whipped till slightly thick. This makes a lovely looking glass with half the liquid almost black and the other half almost white. When you drink it the two parts start mixing.
Interestingly it's also a relatively new invention, not much more than 50 years old.
Ruination of good Coffee and good Whisky as my dad always says ;o)
I'm sure the porn thing didn't help, but what really killed Betamax in the early days was the shorter length of the tapes. Sony refused to back down on this and add a "long-play" mode until it was too late.
They did tie up the pro crowd however, I had the pleasure of using one of their BetaCAM's in the 90's and it was a lovely piece of kit.