Your point about wind farms is true. But then who would want to have a petrol station(or pump/mine), or nuclear fission reactor in their view?
I think the guy meant Hydro as in water powered stuff. But I am happy that you have read furthar about the hydrogen safety- I learn something today too!
I am sure with a bit of alternative thinking- we could produce as much solar power without the excess of toxic chemicals. I hold a lot of hope that we may be able to bio-engineer algae or some other plant that could produce power from the sun. This could happen in the next 5-10 years with the right research.
It is worth repeating this important point http://www.e-sources.com/hydrogen/safety.html. Hydrogen is not as volatile and dangerous as it is made out to be - probably less so than gasoline or kerosine.
Out of interest - if a laptop used with a fuel cell based device - how much safer or not would it be than a standard li-ion rechargeable battery(including piercing, fire, overheating and its eventual destruction)? Anyone have any facts on that?
As A followup to this post, it is worth pointing out, that were MS to do so, they would still have a business model. For example , offering a freely downloadable OS, but support, training and other software etc are available at a premium.
There are other software packages MS sport, and these are should be where they could make their bread and butter.
In fact - MS Do have one trump card they could play like this- make the OS free, but big commercial customers would pay for updates/patches from windows update.
Why run those on Windows anyway. From the impression I got - the Mac versions of these are a great deal more worthwhile than the windows equivalents.
Before Mac OS X, I would never have considered buying a Mac, and I probably still wont - but OS X has certainly upped my esteem for Apple a great deal.
Careful - that comment is likely to start a whole flamewar over which you meant...
Eventual part of that convergance would mean more binary compatibility(read wine being much furthar developed and stable). So that would make this a moot point.
Interoperability and standardisation are every bit as important as Ease of Use, Kernel/OS Stability and Cost.
Fair enough- but it a french, or spanish dude wanted to watch the English Language release, and hadn't the patience to wait for a translation(which can take anythign up to 3/4 years with the industry), then why shouldnt he be able to purchase the English language one? After all - if he is willing to pony up money for it- why is the industry not willing to take it?
Or have they just decided the lawsuits and litigation are much more profitable. Who needs to make music and expensive movies, or linux dists when we can just "sue all the world"?. Maybe they are counting on everyone downloading and pirating for this very reason. After all - if they were able to sue every one for the amounts they sue'd that 12 year old girl, they would never need to make a new movie or album again. Hey presto- they have also cut away from those pesky bothersome "artists" and "actors/casts".
This could be the new business model for the 21st century. Go out and buy some crudy old IP, hire a few hotshot lawyers - and sue half the population...
Well done Australia and NZ. Obviously these laws are more suited to respecting fair competition, consumers rights and entertainment values, than simply pandering to pressure (or playing for funding) from heavyweight- anti-competitive consortiums(read MPAA, RIAA).
Having worked a few years in SCEE(not any more), Sony would fight this tooth and claw. Even if the DVD region protection was removed, do not expect any of the console manufacturers to follow suit
Its annoying- because internally- I got to know all of the really cool japanese games, that were just never gonna be released in the uk, or US. The only way to play them would be to chip, and import, or chip and pirate imports.
Sony release schedules are there for a reason- mostly because it does take some time to translate a game to different languages. But that should not stop someone importing the English Language, or japanese language version as a stop gap until there own version is released(*if* it is released).
This means - most of mainstream to which they are pandering would ignore the geekspeak - so they just make up buzzword technobabble. The geeks who would notice this are such a minority that there is no point spending money or time being accurate.
If they did attempt it- theres always a possibility that it would be edited back to nonsense by a non-technical director or producer, who would rather it sounded "impressive" than accurate.
"I would probably need to re-route the primary flux-phased-subspace-inducer..."
I thought that was more to do with geeky-spammer asshole stereotypes than racist ones. I hate racism as much as the next guy(being a small part chinese my self). But I also hate pasty, dole-grabbing spammer types too.
Anyway - it is most likely to be an *american* who has found a badly secured chinese server, and used that to go through the vessel. China really needs to educate its computer users about this stuff(virii, security etc)... as they are now rapidly becoming a very large precentage of internet users.
Yeah - but nobody cares- the Phantom is just a Microsoft (Gold Premier Embedded Member) box. It has a.net based API.
If you want it- you might as well buy a PC or an XBOX. You can guarantee that MS will be looking to broadband game delivery with the X-Box 2 anyway. Forget the phantom. It sucks.
Re:Unfortunately much spam originates from the US.
on
UK Spam Law Goes Live
·
· Score: 1
Although I can entirely see your point, that could have been a stalin quote...
And yes- in the UK, I get as much spam from china as I do from US. Though the ones that annoy me most are the ones from Nigeria.
I also get continually hit with worm infected mail clients - my server filters them - but not without taking some performance hits.
Changing the system means possibly breaking compatibility with other systems
Since when was ANY closed source operating system(or software) designed to be compatible with other vendors products? If the standards for Windows applications and documents were at all transparent - then that would undermine most of MS's business model.
Open source encourages standards- because people like interoperability. People like being able to upgrade freely - not have to upgrade one expensive license only to find out they have to upgrade all their other sofwtare to work with it(2k to Xp for instance).
The definition of what is OS and what is apps is becoming increasingly blurred. Is KDE an App? Part of the OS? Somewhere in between? The same could be said for many MS services. Although the GUI has now been integrated furthar down(instead of Win on top of dos), would you say Explorer (as in your desktop) is part of the OS? Or just a nifty utility shipped with it?
I think having all the source code is a good idea, both for upgradeability, transparency, security/trust and maintainability.
Isaac Asimov took the principle of beaming suns energy back to earth as high energy lasers for granted in at least a few of his stories. In one of his most notable stories,"Reason" , a robot even has other robots worshipping a component of such a station as if it was some kind of Deity.
I assume you mean Bob Shaw - an author mentioned three or four posts above.
The implications of that are interesting. But I think controlling and temporarily holding light beams could lead to some seriously interesting optical devices.
Imagine using the technology to build an optical logic gate system(I dont mean the quantum ones - I mean just gated light). I suspect the concept has been covered - and there are probably good reasons why we dont have not adopted systems based on this as opposed to electronic ones.
Anyone care to enlighten me on this? This kind of thing is very relevant to OrionRobots.
Some time ago, I envisioned a sci-fi device which would use some kind of modified platinum orb and EM suspension field to store light as a power storage system(not source - just storage).
The story was about overcoming certain aspects - like setting up an external potential much greater than the internal one, and the fear of the device being used as some kind of photon bomb by dropping the suspension field suddenly.
And yes- the concept was that it powered its EM field off its own stored power.
I used to write a lot of sci-fi shorts involving alternative power storage mechanisms. One of the simplest being a zero-g wheel- basically a huge elongated flywheel in a space station. It was rotated magnetically- like a motor, and then power was pulled off like a generator afterwards. What is interesting is that as long as the wheel is moving in RELATION to the station then it was useful.
However- I must add that I never did complete a story - being only about 15/16 at the time - it was just a bit of a hobby...
What can I say - this cannot be modded up enough. If IBM could use this to start making laywer firms responsible(as if) or at least put some fear in them before falsifying for profit - then I am right behind them.
I have heard people call microsoft a "sleeping giant in Redmond", but lets face it - Microsoft is an Angry Troll with a Rattle, compare to IBM. IBM are one of the "great old ones". Anyone who has studied geek mythos long enough an see that.
I have to ask - if people are selling out shares - given impeding trouble, and caldera linux and sys v are not exactly popular(are they?), what is SCO's business model beyond litigation?
If they fall through, and IBMs counter action takes them down, then what do they have left? How can a company bashed out of existence by their own campaign continue?
They may have had press monkey control. But with many software companies, linux users and others - their name is mud - at the moment more so than MS.
So unless they really can prove this (to me as much as the judge) then they will probably die. Adapt or die...
Okay having read the artical- its disappointing that the prices were not included in the spec table with the other stats.
The device did nothing much that cannot be done with a proper tablet/laptop pc. As I run Linux for most serious applications(except gaming and music creation) then the lack of compatibility would put me off a great deal too. At work I regularly use X-on-SSH to interact with smaller apps(we have a very high bandwidth there and I have broadband here).
For streaming video - it would be better to just stream/dl the file and play/decode locally. Although slimp have a nice method of decoding, the re-encoding all streams as mp3s. The only issue I found with that was that it was not easy to reset the encoding bandwidth(AFAIK).
Overall - I cannot see why at that price, plus the price of a PC and all of its trappings, you would not want to buy a proper tablet pc or laptop pc instead.
Yes but if your science/technology teacher was also the gym teacher - what do you expect.
I remember the minute I lost all faith in the (uk) school education system when I asked our electronics sceince teacher a question about the subject. His response was - I dont know - I just teach it all from this book.
You should probably have done a plant pot water tester or some of the usual boring crap like that... You would probably have got an A (school teacher likes marking stuff they do not really have to think about).
A good idea in principle - its just sad that when I tried it, it was chock full of paedophiles and kiddie porn. Its sad that there was not much other usble content there, and the speed was awful.
Also - I am not sure about the file system - it could leave dregs of this stuff on your machine... Do geeks wanna go down the samw way Gary Glitter did- for someone elses nasty taste?
Dont misunderstand me - I do beleive in free speech, but its a terrible reflection on users that such content was distributed there. Although - it is good for whistleblowers to have an anonymous place to let rip on misbehaving employers and such. And it is also a good place to make more content free... What about a P2p open wiki? Then anybody can anonymously add content. And anybody can anonymously update, modify it etc.
To some degree parallelisation might be a fundamental strategy here. With a multi-layer device, you could have massively parallel processing as opposed to current models. For instance for supercomputer modelling tasks(not joe-sixpack, word and windows) could you not make an effective machine by manufacturing many simple (8088 equiv with modern techniques) processors on one die? In massively parellel land - you no longer need very fast clocks (and all the heat and power wastage to go with it). After all one of the best known massively parallel devices runs a little over 100Hz (not MHz or KHz - just Hz) - the human brain.
But coders would quite likely also need to adopt entirely different programming strategies. The industry and world at large is not quite ready for such a fundamental change - though be it the 3d systems, quantum systems or otherwise- it is coming. Most software cannot even handle multiple processors properly - let along massively parallel ones.
Maybe we really will need to wait for the singularity before these things could be really exploited.
I agree with this. My most pleasant Linux experience so far has been gentoo. Although - the fact that it is CLI will scare off Joe Sixpack - or even mildly techy users. I know there are projects underway to make a GUI - mostly for things like etc-update (which can be a bit nasty). Adding a small(OPTIONAL!) gui front end to emerge,etcat and those essential tools could pull many more users.
Once agains hats off - I have not had to play wack-a-mole rpm style for a long time now. Gentoo forums really are the friendliest linux forums. They are on par with Lugnet.
Slashdot Mirror
Your point about wind farms is true. But then who would want to have a petrol station(or pump/mine), or nuclear fission reactor in their view?
I think the guy meant Hydro as in water powered stuff. But I am happy that you have read furthar about the hydrogen safety- I learn something today too!
I am sure with a bit of alternative thinking- we could produce as much solar power without the excess of toxic chemicals. I hold a lot of hope that we may be able to bio-engineer algae or some other plant that could produce power from the sun. This could happen in the next 5-10 years with the right research.
It is worth repeating this important point http://www.e-sources.com/hydrogen/safety.html. Hydrogen is not as volatile and dangerous as it is made out to be - probably less so than gasoline or kerosine.
Out of interest - if a laptop used with a fuel cell based device - how much safer or not would it be than a standard li-ion rechargeable battery(including piercing, fire, overheating and its eventual destruction)? Anyone have any facts on that?
As A followup to this post, it is worth pointing out, that were MS to do so, they would still have a business model. For example , offering a freely downloadable OS, but support, training and other software etc are available at a premium.
There are other software packages MS sport, and these are should be where they could make their bread and butter.
In fact - MS Do have one trump card they could play like this- make the OS free, but big commercial customers would pay for updates/patches from windows update.
Why run those on Windows anyway. From the impression I got - the Mac versions of these are a great deal more worthwhile than the windows equivalents.
Before Mac OS X, I would never have considered buying a Mac, and I probably still wont - but OS X has certainly upped my esteem for Apple a great deal.
Careful - that comment is likely to start a whole flamewar over which you meant...
Eventual part of that convergance would mean more binary compatibility(read wine being much furthar developed and stable). So that would make this a moot point.
Interoperability and standardisation are every bit as important as Ease of Use, Kernel/OS Stability and Cost.
There are a million-and-one good free PHP RAD front ends. Why on earth would you choose one you had to pay for? Which was record/or license limited.
It is a good idea- but there are so many free and open-source ones.
Simple answer- refund the DVD, exchange for another(or sell it ebay). Then download and share the version you expected to get.
Fair enough- but it a french, or spanish dude wanted to watch the English Language release, and hadn't the patience to wait for a translation(which can take anythign up to 3/4 years with the industry), then why shouldnt he be able to purchase the English language one? After all - if he is willing to pony up money for it- why is the industry not willing to take it?
Or have they just decided the lawsuits and litigation are much more profitable. Who needs to make music and expensive movies, or linux dists when we can just "sue all the world"?. Maybe they are counting on everyone downloading and pirating for this very reason. After all - if they were able to sue every one for the amounts they sue'd that 12 year old girl, they would never need to make a new movie or album again. Hey presto- they have also cut away from those pesky bothersome "artists" and "actors/casts".
This could be the new business model for the 21st century. Go out and buy some crudy old IP, hire a few hotshot lawyers - and sue half the population...
Well done Australia and NZ. Obviously these laws are more suited to respecting fair competition, consumers rights and entertainment values, than simply pandering to pressure (or playing for funding) from heavyweight- anti-competitive consortiums(read MPAA, RIAA).
Having worked a few years in SCEE(not any more), Sony would fight this tooth and claw. Even if the DVD region protection was removed, do not expect any of the console manufacturers to follow suit
Its annoying- because internally- I got to know all of the really cool japanese games, that were just never gonna be released in the uk, or US. The only way to play them would be to chip, and import, or chip and pirate imports.
Sony release schedules are there for a reason- mostly because it does take some time to translate a game to different languages. But that should not stop someone importing the English Language, or japanese language version as a stop gap until there own version is released(*if* it is released).
This means - most of mainstream to which they are pandering would ignore the geekspeak - so they just make up buzzword technobabble. The geeks who would notice this are such a minority that there is no point spending money or time being accurate.
If they did attempt it- theres always a possibility that it would be edited back to nonsense by a non-technical director or producer, who would rather it sounded "impressive" than accurate.
"I would probably need to re-route the primary flux-phased-subspace-inducer..."
I thought that was more to do with geeky-spammer asshole stereotypes than racist ones. I hate racism as much as the next guy(being a small part chinese my self). But I also hate pasty, dole-grabbing spammer types too.
Anyway - it is most likely to be an *american* who has found a badly secured chinese server, and used that to go through the vessel. China really needs to educate its computer users about this stuff(virii, security etc)... as they are now rapidly becoming a very large precentage of internet users.
Yeah - but nobody cares- the Phantom is just a Microsoft (Gold Premier Embedded Member) box. It has a .net based API.
If you want it- you might as well buy a PC or an XBOX. You can guarantee that MS will be looking to broadband game delivery with the X-Box 2 anyway. Forget the phantom. It sucks.
Although I can entirely see your point, that could have been a stalin quote...
And yes- in the UK, I get as much spam from china as I do from US. Though the ones that annoy me most are the ones from Nigeria.
I also get continually hit with worm infected mail clients - my server filters them - but not without taking some performance hits.
Open source encourages standards- because people like interoperability. People like being able to upgrade freely - not have to upgrade one expensive license only to find out they have to upgrade all their other sofwtare to work with it(2k to Xp for instance).
Software is always in a state of flux. That is what things like Portage/Gentoo, Debian/Apt and Redhat RPM are all about.
The definition of what is OS and what is apps is becoming increasingly blurred. Is KDE an App? Part of the OS? Somewhere in between? The same could be said for many MS services. Although the GUI has now been integrated furthar down(instead of Win on top of dos), would you say Explorer (as in your desktop) is part of the OS? Or just a nifty utility shipped with it?
I think having all the source code is a good idea, both for upgradeability, transparency, security/trust and maintainability.
Which leads to thoughts of using a similar idea as a power storage system. Exactly how much energy as light passes through a window in one day?
Any physics buffs out there care to comment on that?
Isaac Asimov took the principle of beaming suns energy back to earth as high energy lasers for granted in at least a few of his stories. In one of his most notable stories,"Reason" , a robot even has other robots worshipping a component of such a station as if it was some kind of Deity.
I assume you mean Bob Shaw - an author mentioned three or four posts above.
The implications of that are interesting. But I think controlling and temporarily holding light beams could lead to some seriously interesting optical devices.
Imagine using the technology to build an optical logic gate system(I dont mean the quantum ones - I mean just gated light). I suspect the concept has been covered - and there are probably good reasons why we dont have not adopted systems based on this as opposed to electronic ones.
Anyone care to enlighten me on this? This kind of thing is very relevant to OrionRobots.
Some time ago, I envisioned a sci-fi device which would use some kind of modified platinum orb and EM suspension field to store light as a power storage system(not source - just storage).
The story was about overcoming certain aspects - like setting up an external potential much greater than the internal one, and the fear of the device being used as some kind of photon bomb by dropping the suspension field suddenly.
And yes- the concept was that it powered its EM field off its own stored power.
I used to write a lot of sci-fi shorts involving alternative power storage mechanisms. One of the simplest being a zero-g wheel- basically a huge elongated flywheel in a space station. It was rotated magnetically- like a motor, and then power was pulled off like a generator afterwards. What is interesting is that as long as the wheel is moving in RELATION to the station then it was useful.
However- I must add that I never did complete a story - being only about 15/16 at the time - it was just a bit of a hobby...
What can I say - this cannot be modded up enough. If IBM could use this to start making laywer firms responsible(as if) or at least put some fear in them before falsifying for profit - then I am right behind them. I have heard people call microsoft a "sleeping giant in Redmond", but lets face it - Microsoft is an Angry Troll with a Rattle, compare to IBM. IBM are one of the "great old ones". Anyone who has studied geek mythos long enough an see that.
I have to ask - if people are selling out shares - given impeding trouble, and caldera linux and sys v are not exactly popular(are they?), what is SCO's business model beyond litigation?
If they fall through, and IBMs counter action takes them down, then what do they have left? How can a company bashed out of existence by their own campaign continue?
They may have had press monkey control. But with many software companies, linux users and others - their name is mud - at the moment more so than MS.
So unless they really can prove this (to me as much as the judge) then they will probably die. Adapt or die...
Okay having read the artical- its disappointing that the prices were not included in the spec table with the other stats.
The device did nothing much that cannot be done with a proper tablet/laptop pc. As I run Linux for most serious applications(except gaming and music creation) then the lack of compatibility would put me off a great deal too. At work I regularly use X-on-SSH to interact with smaller apps(we have a very high bandwidth there and I have broadband here).
For streaming video - it would be better to just stream/dl the file and play/decode locally. Although slimp have a nice method of decoding, the re-encoding all streams as mp3s. The only issue I found with that was that it was not easy to reset the encoding bandwidth(AFAIK).
Overall - I cannot see why at that price, plus the price of a PC and all of its trappings, you would not want to buy a proper tablet pc or laptop pc instead.
Yes but if your science/technology teacher was also the gym teacher - what do you expect. I remember the minute I lost all faith in the (uk) school education system when I asked our electronics sceince teacher a question about the subject. His response was - I dont know - I just teach it all from this book. You should probably have done a plant pot water tester or some of the usual boring crap like that... You would probably have got an A (school teacher likes marking stuff they do not really have to think about).
A good idea in principle - its just sad that when I tried it, it was chock full of paedophiles and kiddie porn. Its sad that there was not much other usble content there, and the speed was awful.
Also - I am not sure about the file system - it could leave dregs of this stuff on your machine... Do geeks wanna go down the samw way Gary Glitter did- for someone elses nasty taste?
Dont misunderstand me - I do beleive in free speech, but its a terrible reflection on users that such content was distributed there.
Although - it is good for whistleblowers to have an anonymous place to let rip on misbehaving employers and such. And it is also a good place to make more content free...
What about a P2p open wiki? Then anybody can anonymously add content. And anybody can anonymously update, modify it etc.
To some degree parallelisation might be a fundamental strategy here. With a multi-layer device, you could have massively parallel processing as opposed to current models.
For instance for supercomputer modelling tasks(not joe-sixpack, word and windows) could you not make an effective machine by manufacturing many simple (8088 equiv with modern techniques) processors on one die?
In massively parellel land - you no longer need very fast clocks (and all the heat and power wastage to go with it). After all one of the best known massively parallel devices runs a little over 100Hz (not MHz or KHz - just Hz) - the human brain.
But coders would quite likely also need to adopt entirely different programming strategies. The industry and world at large is not quite ready for such a fundamental change - though be it the 3d systems, quantum systems or otherwise- it is coming.
Most software cannot even handle multiple processors properly - let along massively parallel ones.
Maybe we really will need to wait for the singularity before these things could be really exploited.
I agree with this. My most pleasant Linux experience so far has been gentoo. Although - the fact that it is CLI will scare off Joe Sixpack - or even mildly techy users. I know there are projects underway to make a GUI - mostly for things like etc-update (which can be a bit nasty). Adding a small(OPTIONAL!) gui front end to emerge,etcat and those essential tools could pull many more users.
Once agains hats off - I have not had to play wack-a-mole rpm style for a long time now.
Gentoo forums really are the friendliest linux forums. They are on par with Lugnet.