Where's the software you can use to browse the web on old hardware? Netscape 1.1 or whatever would be full of security holes and in any case not compatible with most interesting sites of today. So for security if for nothing else, you have to have the latest version. That does impose some minimum hardware requirements.
As a British licence fee payer I'm glad the BBC is getting a bit of extra cash by selling programmes abroad, but I'd much prefer an arrangement where (say) German viewers can watch BBC television free of charge and we get the German state-owned channels in return. Indeed, since the proportion of BBC funding from overseas television sales is under five percent (see BBC annual report and accounts 2005/06, page 105 - link via Wikipedia) I would prefer to pay a few pounds extra on the licence fee and just let television shows be available free of charge worldwide for whoever wants to show them.
Five or six people on exercise bicycles could generate a megawatt and if they're fit could keep going for an hour.
One beneficial effect might be, as you say, to raise awareness of energy. It's confusing and annoying that there are many different units for the same thing: power measured in watts or in horsepower, energy measured in joules, calories (and remember the confusion between calories and kilocalories), kilowatt hours, British thermal units and other nonsense.
What happens on up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right?
Will we see a Pokemon-genre game where you breed pigeons?
A shame we will never know what this feels like for the pigeon. Is it really being forced to turn left against its will, or does the pigeon experience it as a sudden desire to turn left?
In the TNG canon, did the Borg originate with pigeons?
Quite. The vast majority of mutations are non-beneficial. That's why reproduction and natural selection are needed to favour the good mutations and cause the bad ones to die out. If there weren't this selection pressure, then as you say biological systems would degrade over time.
When you press Ctrl-Alt-Del in Windows XP it doesn't always block other applications from accessing the screen that appears. I'm sure I've seen third-party software display random crap dialogue boxes (often crash dialogues) on the login screen, and another example is that StickyKeys thing you can sometimes activate by pressing Shift five times. The principle of having a secure attention sequence is good though.
I'm sure most of the pre-installed craplets would also work under Wine or ReactOS... Dell could still be paid for including them without paying for Windows.
But didn't Microsoft make noises about forbidding craplets for OEMs that want to sell Vista?
But if a company says it has 'Linux drivers' these days they might mean some binary-only monstrosity that only runs with kernel 2.2.14 and tends to cause random crashes. I'd much rather say their hardware has drivers for Fedora Linux, or Debian, or some other distribution that has a reasonable free software policy. Then you know you're getting decent quality hardware with free drivers, even if you intend to run some other distro.
When I said there's only one access level what I meant was that if an application runs as user bob, then it has access to all of bob's files. Not just the ones belonging to that app, or the ones that bob explicitly asks to load. Windows Vista's protection levels let you run an app with increased privilege (so you can run it as administrator if it needs it) but don't provide a way to run with reduced privilege - at least not according to the web page you cite.
It's a similar story on Linux. You can run a program as root, or as your user account. If it runs as your user account then it can't modify/etc/fstab or whatever, but that's not really the important thing for security to protect - what matters much more is that the app has the full set of permissions that you have, so it can read your private files in your home directory even if you never asked it to load those files.
I want to run an app with the least privilege necessary, and that doesn't mean just running it as my own user account instead of as administrator.
It should be possible to download and run third party software without putting your system at risk. That game you downloaded doesn't need administrative privileges to run - why should it need them to install? Just laziness on the part of the developers, cushioned by the general expectation that users on a Windows machine will have access to the administrator account.
More fundamentally, if you install a game into C:\somegame why should it have write access to any file outside that directory? If you install a spreadsheet program why should it be able to read any files at all except the standard Windows libraries, its own installation files, and files you explicitly load into it? At the moment there's only one level of privilege - essentially 'everything' - and all applications run with that.
'maybe 99%' was pulled right out of the air, but I remember seeing how you can use heuristics and some kind of hill climbing to get a reasonably good solution to an instance of TSP.
Yes, we could build a 1000-qubit computer but that's still not enough to solve Sudoku or other problems in polynomial time. Once the problem gets larger than will fit in 1000 qubits, you're back to exponential time, I think?
My point is this. A Sinclair ZX81 has 8192 bits of memory. So it can't by itself solve problems bigger than that. But you can connect it up (somehow) to a storage device and provided it has some means to read and write locations of storage in constant time, it'll be able to handle problems of any size, limited only by how much storage you can plug in.
By contrast take a quantum computer with 8192 qubits. It can't solve an instance of Sudoku bigger than fits in memory. Even if you plug in a 100 gigabyte hard disk, it still can't do it in polynomial time. We would need quantum storage devices to go with our quantum computers. Is this correct?
Nobody is going to use Travelling Salesman in the real world to plan journeys. You can already quickly run an algorithm which will get you a journey plan that's maybe 99% as good as the optimum. Besides, real things (even salesmen) don't just have to travel in straight lines between points in space. There are other factors like lunch breaks and the location of good restaurants, which the problem doesn't account for.
Travelling Salesman is NP-hard, which means (I think) that if you find a polynomial time algorithm for it, any problem in NP can be done in polynomial time (hence P=NP). But I believe that even this quantum computer can't calculate TSP in polynomial time, except for instances small enough to fit inside the 16-qubit memory. Can anyone comment on this? By contrast, a conventional computer can always calculate TSP in the same time complexity (exponential time) no matter how large the input - you just have to hook up enough memory.
It sounds pretty straightforward to fix that: each part of the database is stored identically on three different commodity boxes. That triples your hardware costs but it still works out cheaper than a single monster machine.
I don't think copyright is contract law. Copyright violation is a tort, not a breach of contract, and the scope of copyright is limited (for example it expires after a certain number of years, and some fair dealing rights are inalienable). Of course the publishers would prefer it to be a contract, but wishes aren't the same thing as law.
Yes - and what's more, in 1955 the Amiga had multitasking, a 3d accelerated desktop, and full-motion videoconferencing, but ignorant LEO users dismissed these features as making the Amiga a mere 'toy' and not suitable for real business use.
The NeXT Cube had a slick, very usable graphical interface (the direct ancestor of Mac OS X) and a productive development environment using Objective-C. Its processor was a 25MHz 68030. There isn't any magic spell that has been cast to make programmers more stupid or make compilers worse over the last twenty years. It sounds like the iPhone has at least five times the processing power of the NeXT Cube. There really shouldn't be a problem running a 'real' operating system on it, nor should it require slaving away tweaking assembler opcodes by hand to get it to run at a reasonable speed.
The above post reads like one of those spams that has autogenerated paragraphs of text pasted together from news reports, Great Expectations and the U.S. Constitution.
Apple sells music with DRM because the labels won't let Apple sell music without DRM.
Yes, Apple are under a lot of pressure from the record labels. The best way to deal with that is to apply some counter-pressure, for example from monopoly and antitrust laws. Although they would never admit so publicly, Apple may be rather pleased at these legal proceedings, since it puts them in a stronger position when negotiating with the record labels. 'We'd really love to accommodate your draconian DRM demands, but you see, there are these awkward laws they have in Europe...'
If the DRM standard were open, rather than proprietary to Apple, then it would be possible for software writers in European countries to make player software that allows private copies (since as the poster says, there is already an explicit levy on blank media to compensate record labels for private copying).
So how is it possible to buy a tune from the ITMS and play it? If that information isn't openly available and instead requires you to get permission from Apple, I'd say there is a case that Apple is using a dominant position in online music sales to establish dominance in the hardware market.
I want to get a motherboard with Intel onboard graphics (that has free Linux drivers). I've heard of the G965 chipset; is that the one to go for? I would prefer to buy a 'workstation' rather than 'consumer' motherboard but they tend not to have integrated graphics, no?
Are Intel's own-brand motherboards worth it? In the past I've bought Asus but that was for AMD-based systems.
Can anyone explain why snowflakes are symmetrical? Salt crystals growing in water don't arrange themselves into these long-armed patterns nor are they entirely symmetrical. Why should one arm of a snowflake grow to exactly the same shape as the other arms?
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Where's the software you can use to browse the web on old hardware? Netscape 1.1 or whatever would be full of security holes and in any case not compatible with most interesting sites of today. So for security if for nothing else, you have to have the latest version. That does impose some minimum hardware requirements.
As a British licence fee payer I'm glad the BBC is getting a bit of extra cash by selling programmes abroad, but I'd much prefer an arrangement where (say) German viewers can watch BBC television free of charge and we get the German state-owned channels in return. Indeed, since the proportion of BBC funding from overseas television sales is under five percent (see BBC annual report and accounts 2005/06, page 105 - link via Wikipedia) I would prefer to pay a few pounds extra on the licence fee and just let television shows be available free of charge worldwide for whoever wants to show them.
Yes, I realized my mistake after posting, when I was at the gym putting 200 watts or so through the exercise bike - not 200 kilowatts...
On the other hand, a 'calorie' reported by exercise equipment is really a kilocalorie, and I think that might have helped me get confused.
Five or six people on exercise bicycles could generate a megawatt and if they're fit could keep going for an hour.
One beneficial effect might be, as you say, to raise awareness of energy. It's confusing and annoying that there are many different units for the same thing: power measured in watts or in horsepower, energy measured in joules, calories (and remember the confusion between calories and kilocalories), kilowatt hours, British thermal units and other nonsense.
Since Star Trek was originally called 'Wagon Train to the Stars', this would have some precedent.
What happens on up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right?
Will we see a Pokemon-genre game where you breed pigeons?
A shame we will never know what this feels like for the pigeon. Is it really being forced to turn left against its will, or does the pigeon experience it as a sudden desire to turn left?
In the TNG canon, did the Borg originate with pigeons?
Quite. The vast majority of mutations are non-beneficial. That's why reproduction and natural selection are needed to favour the good mutations and cause the bad ones to die out. If there weren't this selection pressure, then as you say biological systems would degrade over time.
When you press Ctrl-Alt-Del in Windows XP it doesn't always block other applications from accessing the screen that appears. I'm sure I've seen third-party software display random crap dialogue boxes (often crash dialogues) on the login screen, and another example is that StickyKeys thing you can sometimes activate by pressing Shift five times. The principle of having a secure attention sequence is good though.
I'm sure most of the pre-installed craplets would also work under Wine or ReactOS... Dell could still be paid for including them without paying for Windows.
But didn't Microsoft make noises about forbidding craplets for OEMs that want to sell Vista?
But if a company says it has 'Linux drivers' these days they might mean some binary-only monstrosity that only runs with kernel 2.2.14 and tends to cause random crashes. I'd much rather say their hardware has drivers for Fedora Linux, or Debian, or some other distribution that has a reasonable free software policy. Then you know you're getting decent quality hardware with free drivers, even if you intend to run some other distro.
When I said there's only one access level what I meant was that if an application runs as user bob, then it has access to all of bob's files. Not just the ones belonging to that app, or the ones that bob explicitly asks to load. Windows Vista's protection levels let you run an app with increased privilege (so you can run it as administrator if it needs it) but don't provide a way to run with reduced privilege - at least not according to the web page you cite.
/etc/fstab or whatever, but that's not really the important thing for security to protect - what matters much more is that the app has the full set of permissions that you have, so it can read your private files in your home directory even if you never asked it to load those files.
It's a similar story on Linux. You can run a program as root, or as your user account. If it runs as your user account then it can't modify
I want to run an app with the least privilege necessary, and that doesn't mean just running it as my own user account instead of as administrator.
It should be possible to download and run third party software without putting your system at risk. That game you downloaded doesn't need administrative privileges to run - why should it need them to install? Just laziness on the part of the developers, cushioned by the general expectation that users on a Windows machine will have access to the administrator account.
More fundamentally, if you install a game into C:\somegame why should it have write access to any file outside that directory? If you install a spreadsheet program why should it be able to read any files at all except the standard Windows libraries, its own installation files, and files you explicitly load into it? At the moment there's only one level of privilege - essentially 'everything' - and all applications run with that.
See Plash for an implementation of what I mean.
It always used to be 'The GIMP' which sounds even better.
'maybe 99%' was pulled right out of the air, but I remember seeing how you can use heuristics and some kind of hill climbing to get a reasonably good solution to an instance of TSP.
Yes, we could build a 1000-qubit computer but that's still not enough to solve Sudoku or other problems in polynomial time. Once the problem gets larger than will fit in 1000 qubits, you're back to exponential time, I think?
My point is this. A Sinclair ZX81 has 8192 bits of memory. So it can't by itself solve problems bigger than that. But you can connect it up (somehow) to a storage device and provided it has some means to read and write locations of storage in constant time, it'll be able to handle problems of any size, limited only by how much storage you can plug in.
By contrast take a quantum computer with 8192 qubits. It can't solve an instance of Sudoku bigger than fits in memory. Even if you plug in a 100 gigabyte hard disk, it still can't do it in polynomial time. We would need quantum storage devices to go with our quantum computers. Is this correct?
Nobody is going to use Travelling Salesman in the real world to plan journeys. You can already quickly run an algorithm which will get you a journey plan that's maybe 99% as good as the optimum. Besides, real things (even salesmen) don't just have to travel in straight lines between points in space. There are other factors like lunch breaks and the location of good restaurants, which the problem doesn't account for.
Travelling Salesman is NP-hard, which means (I think) that if you find a polynomial time algorithm for it, any problem in NP can be done in polynomial time (hence P=NP). But I believe that even this quantum computer can't calculate TSP in polynomial time, except for instances small enough to fit inside the 16-qubit memory. Can anyone comment on this? By contrast, a conventional computer can always calculate TSP in the same time complexity (exponential time) no matter how large the input - you just have to hook up enough memory.
It sounds pretty straightforward to fix that: each part of the database is stored identically on three different commodity boxes. That triples your hardware costs but it still works out cheaper than a single monster machine.
I don't think copyright is contract law. Copyright violation is a tort, not a breach of contract, and the scope of copyright is limited (for example it expires after a certain number of years, and some fair dealing rights are inalienable). Of course the publishers would prefer it to be a contract, but wishes aren't the same thing as law.
Yes - and what's more, in 1955 the Amiga had multitasking, a 3d accelerated desktop, and full-motion videoconferencing, but ignorant LEO users dismissed these features as making the Amiga a mere 'toy' and not suitable for real business use.
The NeXT Cube had a slick, very usable graphical interface (the direct ancestor of Mac OS X) and a productive development environment using Objective-C. Its processor was a 25MHz 68030. There isn't any magic spell that has been cast to make programmers more stupid or make compilers worse over the last twenty years. It sounds like the iPhone has at least five times the processing power of the NeXT Cube. There really shouldn't be a problem running a 'real' operating system on it, nor should it require slaving away tweaking assembler opcodes by hand to get it to run at a reasonable speed.
The above post reads like one of those spams that has autogenerated paragraphs of text pasted together from news reports, Great Expectations and the U.S. Constitution.
If the DRM standard were open, rather than proprietary to Apple, then it would be possible for software writers in European countries to make player software that allows private copies (since as the poster says, there is already an explicit levy on blank media to compensate record labels for private copying).
So how is it possible to buy a tune from the ITMS and play it? If that information isn't openly available and instead requires you to get permission from Apple, I'd say there is a case that Apple is using a dominant position in online music sales to establish dominance in the hardware market.
I want to get a motherboard with Intel onboard graphics (that has free Linux drivers). I've heard of the G965 chipset; is that the one to go for? I would prefer to buy a 'workstation' rather than 'consumer' motherboard but they tend not to have integrated graphics, no?
Are Intel's own-brand motherboards worth it? In the past I've bought Asus but that was for AMD-based systems.
Can anyone explain why snowflakes are symmetrical? Salt crystals growing in water don't arrange themselves into these long-armed patterns nor are they entirely symmetrical. Why should one arm of a snowflake grow to exactly the same shape as the other arms?