Clearly 'bing' is a mistake - it was intended to be 'billg'. The original plan was for a little cartoon Bill Gates (think xbill) to pop up and explain answers to you - 640 kilobytes should be enough, and so on. That would have been cool (and certainly more useful than Wolfram Alpha) but the marketing guys made a mistake somewhere.
I also have invented a process for creating a rock inside of a computer, one that all of the people in the world could artificially engrave in a tombstone-style text whatever they wish. If built, this rock would enable all people on Earth to store one paragraph or more worth of information that would be permanently stored on the computer. The information stored would outlive the person whom engraved the rock because the rock would be of a 0.8 micron process with 500,000 transistors in the space of a 486 Central Processing Unit. A 486 Central Processing Unit actually has over 800,000 transistors. My design would be more reliable than a 486. Some people may think that a 0.8 micron process is too slow - this is incorrect if it is a 1024 bit or higher processor, then it could do more in increased volume than a smaller processor. The processor would last many hundreds of years and this is why the space shuttle uses similar technology - where failure is not an option. The information engraved in the rock which is purple and blue and marble-like and is black in some areas where the operating system blocks out information that a person may chose to remove from the rock. The information people place on the rock is permanent. Data is stored in the style of something similar to a Nintendo video game cartridge which is Read Only Memory (ROM) and will almost certainly last many lifetimes before failure. The rock is rectangular and information within it could be searched through or zoomed in and out of viewing range. The rock would cost based on the price of data storage media. For instance: an 80 GigaByte hard disk can hold 80 billion characters of information - this would give every single person on Earth approximately 13 characters of information on the rock for about $50 worth of failure prone storage like a personal computer hard disk. The design intentions are to make the rock outlast 10's of lifetimes before repair, to be redundant in all ways and last for eternity. The rock is for love letters, poems, eulogies and anything at all. This rock is free and will remain free and will never cost monetary values to use the contents of it or place information on it. Light from the fiber optic inter-connects would be magnified and sent to to solar panels and then that energy would be used to power the system. It would be electrically efficient. This idea was invented by Shampoo.
Yeah, if they just said 'the computer is broken' or 'my PC is acting funny' there would be no problem with that. What's weird is the way users latch on to one particular technical term ('hard drive' or 'CPU') and somehow develop their own incorrect meaning for it. I suspect it comes from being told to 'save something to the hard disk', which to the user meant save it inside the computer, as opposed to on a floppy disk. Hence the computer box became the 'hard disk' or 'hard drive'.
all government and schools in extramadura in spain This started in 2006/2007 so of course the study in 2005 didn't notice it. schools in gran canaria I couldn't find details of this on the web, but are you sure it was up and running in 2005? french police (still migrating) This was announced in 2008. munich I believe the migration started in 2006.
I know we all hate the Gartner Group and all that, but seriously, was it such a gross error to say there were no widespread public (that is, govermnent or municipal) Linux deployments in Europe in 2005 or earlier?
The study was in 2005, so to show it was wrong you need to find examples of widespread Linux deployments in Europe that existed then. Not deployments that started in 2006, or governments that 'have been looking into it'.
Shouldn't these common actions (Save, Print, New) be presented in a standard way across all applications? I don't think it would help ease-of-use if OpenOffice implemented its own cutesy button bar that's different to all other apps. But if most programs on the system could change at the same time, it might be worth a try.
In fact a true command-line program does not need Expect at all. Expect simulates an interactive terminal, but classical Unix mail(1), for example, can be run just with command lines and piping text to a non-interactive stdin. (A lot of older scripts do so, and can be buggy because of it, if there are embedded commands in the text.) The same is true of ed(1), I believe; it doesn't expect a terminal but just plain text input and output. (You can write ed scripts to perform particular operations such as patching). What do you dislike in GNU ed - I hadn't realized it was incompatible with classic Unix ed?
DEBUG on the way out? Next they'll be trying to remove EDLIN? Where will it stop?
(Bizarrely, the only time I have ever used EDLIN was to administer some dual-boot Linux / Windows NT boxes. I wrote a perl/Expect script that telnetted to each machine running Windows, used EDLIN to change boot.ini, and then ran 'shutdown -r'.)
Why on earth would you want to build a data centre? Moore's Law means that most functions that previously required arrays of expensive hardware can be done with a single server. If your needs are greater than that, surely it makes sense to buy capacity from a cloud computing vendor such as Amazon EC2. Only the really big players like Amazon and Google (and perhaps places that need lots of computing power, like research departments, movie studios and universities) need to bother with huge, air-conditioned rooms and all that.
I know I'm playing devil's advocate here and the number of computers needed to run a business never seems to fall in practice. But although data centres are certainly needed now, do they really have a 'future'?
The 286 and 386SX used 16-bit memory while the full 386 (later branded 386DX) is a 32-bit chip inside and out. (The price advantage of using 16-bit memory was so significant that there were even 486-class chips with a 16-bit external memory bus, such as the 486SLC chips made by Cyrix and IBM.)
Earlier, the 8088 had used 8-bit memory as a cheaper version of the 8086, which is 16-bit.
I'll tell you that internet cafes here mostly do not have the bandwidth for such.
In that case, surely, they do not have the bandwidth to view the videos anyway, Bittorrent or not. It's true that some upstream bandwidth is necessary whereas viewing a downloaded video just needs downstream bandwidth. But the upstream only needs to be within that country or local area - it would often be between two different PCs in the same internet cafe, which would be a net saving of bandwidth since a video watched by two users only needs to be fetched once from the wider Internet.
Few torrents of any significant size are going to complete in that short of a space of time.
What do you mean? Obviously, these files are small enough to download in a reasonable amount of time otherwise the users would not be able to watch them, no matter how they are downloaded. It is true that for web video, you don't want to wait for the whole file to download before it starts playing, whereas the current Bittorrent protocol downloads blocks in a fairly random order. (I think the randomization might be because people tend to close their Bittorrent client after downloading, which means the last block of the file would become the scarcest if it worked sequentially.) So that would need changing.
The obvious answer is to distribute videos and other bandwidth-heavy content through a peer-to-peer mechanism such as Bittorrent. Then the users themselves take care of providing your extra server capacity. I guess it just needs a Bittorrent client written in Flash (ugh), or else built into the browser, with the site's main server acting as the first seed for each file.
Yes, but if it's just life, then there is the very real incentive to simply kill the author.
Somebody suggested that in the future, Disney, movie studios and other big copyright holders will put authors into spacecraft that fly close to the speed of light, thus allowing hundreds of years on earth to pass while the author ages only a few minutes. Copyrights would then never expire. (I can't find the original website set up to draw attention to this looming problem.)
Read the answer by Mike Godwin (Gerneral Counsel of the Wikimedia Foundation)
It's quite lengthy and technical, so allow me to summarize:
Using our trademarked term 'Art' in a non-Wikipedia web page such as yours [citation needed] inevitably tends to dilute and water down our historic trademark protections and liberties. Those who would sacrifice article quality for a little temporary respite from deletion are doomed to repeat it, poorly. Wikipedia is like a car, and taking the wheels off it to replace them with DRM'd ones that only work on a particular kind of road is like boiling a frog. Just consider what would happen if Hitler himself designed cars...
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Clearly 'bing' is a mistake - it was intended to be 'billg'. The original plan was for a little cartoon Bill Gates (think xbill) to pop up and explain answers to you - 640 kilobytes should be enough, and so on. That would have been cool (and certainly more useful than Wolfram Alpha) but the marketing guys made a mistake somewhere.
I think there is prior art on this one:
You might also be interested in SMLserver which embeds Standard ML into Apache, and apparently is pretty fast.
Good idea! And the server farm can come ready-equipped with a camera and web server to show the status of the coffee maker.
Yeah, if they just said 'the computer is broken' or 'my PC is acting funny' there would be no problem with that. What's weird is the way users latch on to one particular technical term ('hard drive' or 'CPU') and somehow develop their own incorrect meaning for it. I suspect it comes from being told to 'save something to the hard disk', which to the user meant save it inside the computer, as opposed to on a floppy disk. Hence the computer box became the 'hard disk' or 'hard drive'.
Twitter
all government and schools in extramadura in spain
This started in 2006/2007 so of course the study in 2005 didn't notice it.
schools in gran canaria
I couldn't find details of this on the web, but are you sure it was up and running in 2005?
french police (still migrating)
This was announced in 2008.
munich
I believe the migration started in 2006.
I know we all hate the Gartner Group and all that, but seriously, was it such a gross error to say there were no widespread public (that is, govermnent or municipal) Linux deployments in Europe in 2005 or earlier?
The study was in 2005, so to show it was wrong you need to find examples of widespread Linux deployments in Europe that existed then. Not deployments that started in 2006, or governments that 'have been looking into it'.
Haha... mercifully I haven't been exposed to Office 2007 so I didn't spot the joke.
Shouldn't these common actions (Save, Print, New) be presented in a standard way across all applications? I don't think it would help ease-of-use if OpenOffice implemented its own cutesy button bar that's different to all other apps. But if most programs on the system could change at the same time, it might be worth a try.
In fact a true command-line program does not need Expect at all. Expect simulates an interactive terminal, but classical Unix mail(1), for example, can be run just with command lines and piping text to a non-interactive stdin. (A lot of older scripts do so, and can be buggy because of it, if there are embedded commands in the text.) The same is true of ed(1), I believe; it doesn't expect a terminal but just plain text input and output. (You can write ed scripts to perform particular operations such as patching). What do you dislike in GNU ed - I hadn't realized it was incompatible with classic Unix ed?
"This idea was invented by Shampoo."
DEBUG on the way out? Next they'll be trying to remove EDLIN? Where will it stop?
(Bizarrely, the only time I have ever used EDLIN was to administer some dual-boot Linux / Windows NT boxes. I wrote a perl/Expect script that telnetted to each machine running Windows, used EDLIN to change boot.ini, and then ran 'shutdown -r'.)
Why on earth would you want to build a data centre? Moore's Law means that most functions that previously required arrays of expensive hardware can be done with a single server. If your needs are greater than that, surely it makes sense to buy capacity from a cloud computing vendor such as Amazon EC2. Only the really big players like Amazon and Google (and perhaps places that need lots of computing power, like research departments, movie studios and universities) need to bother with huge, air-conditioned rooms and all that.
I know I'm playing devil's advocate here and the number of computers needed to run a business never seems to fall in practice. But although data centres are certainly needed now, do they really have a 'future'?
The 286 and 386SX used 16-bit memory while the full 386 (later branded 386DX) is a 32-bit chip inside and out. (The price advantage of using 16-bit memory was so significant that there were even 486-class chips with a 16-bit external memory bus, such as the 486SLC chips made by Cyrix and IBM.)
Earlier, the 8088 had used 8-bit memory as a cheaper version of the 8086, which is 16-bit.
...and it gives some mediaeval shillings-and-ounces result instead of the obvious and correct 10_000 kilobyes.
<ducks>
So this news story is fluff spun out of two lines of IRC chat?
Hey, I only said it was the obvious answer, not necessarily the right answer...
In that case, surely, they do not have the bandwidth to view the videos anyway, Bittorrent or not. It's true that some upstream bandwidth is necessary whereas viewing a downloaded video just needs downstream bandwidth. But the upstream only needs to be within that country or local area - it would often be between two different PCs in the same internet cafe, which would be a net saving of bandwidth since a video watched by two users only needs to be fetched once from the wider Internet.
What do you mean? Obviously, these files are small enough to download in a reasonable amount of time otherwise the users would not be able to watch them, no matter how they are downloaded. It is true that for web video, you don't want to wait for the whole file to download before it starts playing, whereas the current Bittorrent protocol downloads blocks in a fairly random order. (I think the randomization might be because people tend to close their Bittorrent client after downloading, which means the last block of the file would become the scarcest if it worked sequentially.) So that would need changing.
The obvious answer is to distribute videos and other bandwidth-heavy content through a peer-to-peer mechanism such as Bittorrent. Then the users themselves take care of providing your extra server capacity. I guess it just needs a Bittorrent client written in Flash (ugh), or else built into the browser, with the site's main server acting as the first seed for each file.
Somebody suggested that in the future, Disney, movie studios and other big copyright holders will put authors into spacecraft that fly close to the speed of light, thus allowing hundreds of years on earth to pass while the author ages only a few minutes. Copyrights would then never expire. (I can't find the original website set up to draw attention to this looming problem.)
(turns out, it is indeed the same Mike Godwin of 'Law' fame.)
It's quite lengthy and technical, so allow me to summarize:
Using our trademarked term 'Art' in a non-Wikipedia web page such as yours [citation needed] inevitably tends to dilute and water down our historic trademark protections and liberties. Those who would sacrifice article quality for a little temporary respite from deletion are doomed to repeat it, poorly. Wikipedia is like a car, and taking the wheels off it to replace them with DRM'd ones that only work on a particular kind of road is like boiling a frog. Just consider what would happen if Hitler himself designed cars...
Possibly the biggest contradiction in terms yet seen on Slashdot.