I have a copperhead, and don't find it a problem. That said, since I'm a leftie, I usually turn off the two lefthand side buttons (awkward to reach, since I use the conventional mappings for the main buttons), and use the two righthand side ones with my thumb.
I disagree that you need less buttons for an FPS mouse, especially online-FPS as I generally use the following: 1) fire 2) alt-fire/scope 3) adjust sensitivity (you need a side button for this on a razer, as you hold the button and scroll to change it on a 20 point scale) 4) change fire-mode (full-auto to semi etc) 5) comms/grenade
Yes, all of these could be mapped to the keyboard, but I often need them while my right hand is occupied with moving around; changing firemode or throwing a grenade instantly while dodging around up close is very useful. Changing sensitivity is vital too; you spin it up when in a vehicle to get high turret speed, then spin it down when you jump out so you don't overturn when using infantry weapons. You spin it down even more when using a sniper rifle to get accuracy, then spin it back up when switching to pistol.
I'd quite like to use the extra couple for specific weapon selection, but I get by with scrollwheeling.
No doubt, which is presumably why they're concentrating on DRM rather than the courts when it comes to ripping in the UK. That said, never underestimate the inability of the record labels and media companies to grasp what is blatantly obvious to everyone else, or their ability to point guns footwards.
Sorry, I made an error; Time shifting is now legal and part of the UK law, http://www.opsi.gov.uk/si/si2003/20032498.htm#19 as is making transient copies for the purpose of listening to it on say, the computer. Making entire copies of CDs for personal use, or ripping to MP3 is still technically illegal though.
It's worth pointing out that the BPI is in fact, the British version of the RIAA. Mr Jamieson is speaking on behalf of the same big record labels when he speaks as a representative of the BPI (British Phonographic Institute) which is the British recording industry association/lobby group/vague legal threats mouthpiece.
Maybe the record companies have realised they need a slightly more sane approach in the UK and France, as they can't buy off the legislature so easily as in the US? That said, we have just as much DRM if not more on our CDs. They've obviously decided to use technical measures rather than legal ones to stop people ripping CDs, because they probably fear a court case ruling against them and actually opening the door to media shifting; if they allow it themselves for personal use, it still remains technically illegal, and they can use DRM much more easily.
UK copyright law has several "fair dealing" defences to charges of copyright infringement, written into the law. They're somewhat vague, but allow the non-commercial use of extracts for personal study, reviews, criticism or news reporting. Time shifting, i.e. recording off the radio or television, for the purpose of watching at a later date then erasing have been judged by the courts to be another fair dealing defence.
To date, there has been no such ruling or written exemption for making duplicates for the purpose of backups or personal use such as media shifting. It's long been assumed that if such a case came to court, media shifting would be added to the list; but it certainly wasn't guaranteed.
Don't forget, the large media conglomerates DID try to make video recorders illegal in the UK. It certainly wasn't beyond the realm of possibility that music companies would try to get mp3 players banned, or prosecute individuals for media shifting, which remains technically illegal under UK law. Their argument would go somewhat like this:
"Digital download services are now easily available. iPods and WMA players can be easily filled up with legally downloaded music. Just because someone has an old tape of an album doesn't mean they get to download the CD version for free, they have to buy their favourite music from us in their preferred new format. The defendant does not have the legal right to copy our CDs by 'ripping', and we would like to make clear that people still have to buy music in the new format - whether they want it on their WMA player, their ringtones, or their computer, each of these devices have music specifically designed for their optimum playback, and they are not interchangable. Give us lots of money for every single device you want to play our music on."
Media companies like Sony BMG, EMI and Koch have been explicitly putting anti-computer corruption into their CDs for some time, to try to prevent ripping. The fact that it's hard to do this on CDs, and so far all they've achieved is a fairly famous root kit, a few damaged macs, and a lot of people forced to learn about ripping just to play their CDs in their car-players doesn't matter to them. It's certainly not beyond the realms of possibility that they would take more direct legal action to sue rippers, and sellers of devices that 'encourage' ripping CDs.
One word: Oblivion. Three more words: Unreal Tournament 2007.
I have an athlon 64 3800+ with SLI 7800GT's, XFi etc etc and oblivion still grinds to a halt if I push the settings up much beyond their medium levels. Even FEAR only just runs at a decent rate at full whack on my rig. I don't even want to think about the horsepower UT2007 will need.
You want a game that looks like crap and runs like crap, fine. Buy an X1300 or 6600GT. Those of us who want a better looking, faster responding high-end game can use all the graphic card horsepower we can buy.
I think it's the 11km tall tower that's the problem part! The difference is between a ladder planted on the ground, and a rope hanging from a high point. If you can reach the high point by another route and suspend the rope from it, you can have a much higher climbing method.
Simply put, we have materials which survive tension+torsion much better than the materials which survive compression+torsion. We might be able to build an 11km high structure with current materials, but the structure would be VAST at the base to withstand torsion - i.e. wind. The cost to build it would be staggering, and I think you're looking at more in the trillions range than the billions.
Re:we are not supposed to live longer than 40 year
on
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This is misinformed. The reason we 'live longer' in modern societies is primarily due to an improvements in child health and childbirth. Children dying young, and young women dying in childbirth dragged the mean lifespan down - people lived about as long as they do now, just less of them got a decent run at it. Basically, they didn't just drop dead at 40, they lived to 70 or 80 if they didn't die before the age of 5.
A better 'average' lifespan is around 70. It's difficult to say, as many of the side effects of a modern industrialised society - poor diet, lack of exercise and chemical/toxic pollution drag us down just as modern medicine helps individuals live longer.
Your post also assumes a 'designer'. We've evolved like all animals, and part of the evolution that allows us to stand upright also involved bending the spine into a rather unusual shape, leaving us prone to lower back problems. We also have wear and tear on the joint surfaces (which usually starts kicking in seriously about 70). We have a number of evolutionary weaknesses, which have often been caused because they gave us an advantage in another way, or simply weren't detrimental enough to the population to be weeded out. There's no 'natural' age to live to though, it really just does depend upon luck and maintenance.
Contract law probably wouldn't have worked (in my lay opinion) as there was no consideration, i.e. the public didn't have to give something up in order to enter. If it had been a paid subscription, even a nominal fee, and part of the submission was that you stated you weren't affiliated with direcTV, that would have had a much better chance. Whether it would have worked though, I don't know.
SuSE linux professional was the desktop line. Ubuntu only has 5 years support for the server version, it's less for the desktop, just like SuSE. If you run desktop versions of OS's, you get shorter support times. If you built a server from a £70 workstation disc, then such is life.
You have four choices. Keep doing what you're doing; upgrade to the free SUSE Linux 10.1 OSS, with shorter support lifetime; upgrade to the paid version of SUSE linux 10.1, with an active support time of 2 years, or upgrade to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, lifetimes available here. A new version of SLES is due soon, you may want to wait a month or two, if you decide to go this route, as SLES 9 is a couple of years into its 5 year general support cycle.
Of course, you could switch the server to a different distro altogether. Just go for the server-intended ones, you'll be much happier in a few years time.
Odd. I never had one fail, and the one I had stashed in my spares bin still works - just tested it! Maybe working at 3M, we got the properly made ones...
I worked for 3M around the time Imation was spun off into it's own business unit, and we used to get loads of superdisk drives and disks cheaply. They were supposed to be the real replacement to floppy disk drives when CDR-drives were insanely expensive (and cd-rom drives were still pretty rare).
120MB disks that were the same size as a floppy disk, and a drive that was the same physical size as a floppy drive, AND could read conventional floppies? Should have been the death knell of the 100MB Zip drive and the conventional floppy, given it was available as either a parallel or internal-ide drive. Both the disks and drives were cheaper than the Zip drives.
For some reason it never hit critical mass, and Zip drives ruled the roost until CD-ROM drives became commonplace and CD-R became a realistically priced option for physical storage. And conventional floppy drives still just won't DIE! (Stock windows installs still need floppies for SATA drive installs - in 2006 FFS)
Do what we did. Have one wiki for general use documentation, and a 2nd wiki linked from the first with the sensitive data in, with read access to it locked down to those who need to know via AuthUser.htaccess or the like (I still don't keep passwords in it though, they stay in my master-password-encrypted store on my pda)
Well here in the UK, we were affected. Our users (including me) were having trouble resolving a number of sites yesterday, including.org and.uk ones, that the dns cache didn't have. I've had to send out a organisation wide email to explain the problem, why the 'intenet was broken'.
I'm going to use a hardware analogy. How many computer makers are there? How many different models do they make?
If you don't know what to go for, you do one of three things:
1) ask someone who knows about them. They will know some of the choices, and hopefully direct you to an option that fits your wallet, your experience and your needs. Reading magazines dedicated to this topic will also help.
2) go to a shop, and look for the biggest shiny option on the shelf, or one you saw advertised that 'sounded' good.
3) If you know what you're doing, you read up the different parts, weigh up your needs, and buy up to your budget from the best parts and put it together yourself, or at least customise it.
Linux is no different. If you have no clue, magazines or a helpful person should direct you to a noob distro like ubuntu or linspire, where your choices are limited and clearly marked.
If you're after shinyness, and don't mind actually paying some money, you get a polished boxed distro such as SUSE - complete with thick paper manuals.
If you want to make your hardcore choices, you go for a distro designed for your precise purpose, whether that be Redhat Enterprise, Debian or Gentoo. Expect some knowledge to be required in running it.
As with many things, if you get a free distro patent-licensing will make them remove things like codecs for multimedia. If you want paper manuals, phone support and pre-installed codecs, you need to pay for it.
We expect people to make informed choices in the consumer market every day, whether it's cars, TVs or computers. Companies make products in a price range for a particular type of customer, and there's lots of choices in any given segment from amongst those companies.
People don't go out and buy a car, then turn round and complain their renault clio can't carry their 7 kids to school, or their ferrari is twitchy and drinks petrol. If people can't find one of the many, many resources to guide them from google to magazines to knowledgable friends to help them pick the right OS, whose fault is it really?
SuSE was originally a packaged german-translation of slackware, but evolved into it's own commercial distro based in germany over time with a number of unique features such as YaST, the configuration and installation tool. I believe they also helped KDE development substantially, another german project. SuSE of course was bought out by Novell a couple of years ago (a US company), and is the basis for Novell's linux line these days. Since Novell also had ximian etc, SuSE stopped being a primarily KDE distro, and is now as much gnome as KDE. SUSE Linux is still a german based operation though I believe, with much of the same structure as when it was an independent company.
Novell are doing something similar to fedora with openSUSE, i.e. an opensource-only version that's community driven, with commercial/boxed retail versions being spun off that includes licenced and closed-source components such as codecs and java.
SuSE was my preferred distro for some time, but it was always a pain to update to newer app versions when they updated to a new version bump - the only way I found was to cough up for an upgrade DVD, or wait months for the free ftp version. Now they've got a truly open-source version (including a GPL YAST) with free updates as well as security patches, I've been looking at them again for boxes that don't need the configurability of gentoo.
It doesn't matter if it's an unencrypted signal, as it doesn't do you much good if your tuner downsamples it to SD because you're connected to your HD set via component rather than HDMI. The encryption path is tuner to set, not broadcast aerial to tuner. If the content companies think they can get away with the broadcast flag (aka non-record bit) and downsample bit on HD-disks, there's absolutely no reason they can't also get legislation to get the downsample bit added as a mandatory 'feature' on HD broadcast tuners.
The reason that free distros don't have mp3 and some video codecs such as mpeg2 (for dvd) is because of the patent system. Since codecs such as mp3 are patented in the US, it is illegal to distribute them in the US without paying the patent holder a licence fee.
Since the distro is free, how are they supposed to pay for the licence? Their only choice is to put the rpms, tarballs etc on non-US mirrors, and ask you to get them yourself and pay your own fees if you live in the US.
If it's a paid distro, they generally include mp3, dvd payback and many other codecs on the DVD, paid for out of the purchase price.
By the way, I hope your 'other' operating system isn't windows. That only comes with a crippled mp3 codec and the wma/wmv codecs - linux comes with ogg vorbis, along with other free codecs. If you want divx/xvid, dvd playback, a good quality mp3 codec, realplayer codecs, quicktime (sorenson et al), aac, ac3 etc etc, you need to download them yourself on either operating system.
I've no idea what codecs macs come with out of the box, but I'm betting it's primarily aac and quicktime.
I think mainly because most motherboard manufacturers have a nasty habit of putting their pci-e x1 slots close to the pci-e x16 slots, thus making them also inaccessible if you have sli/crossfire, as well as the first pci slot.
pci-e x1 is still somewhat of a niche feature (I don't know many x1 cards at all) but no doubt the card makers like BFG will produce a pci-e version in the near future if demand is there - which will probably come when cellfactor or unreal 3 engined games come out.
I'm thinking optional is a bad thing. Look at HDCP; graphics card manufacturers aren't including it on their DVI-I cards, so even if you had a HDCP compliant DVI monitor or HDTV you won't be able to play hi-res movies on a PC or pc-based DVR once the down-sample-if-not-HDCP bit gets turned on with HD-DVD and blueray disks - even though they have more than enough capability to do so. Worse, broadcast TV is likely to switch to HDCP as a requirement for HD broadcasts once the switchover is complete, or even before.
The content companies seem hellbent on driving away their audience by excessive restrictions, I see little point in just adding a big mess of incompatibilities into yet another standard from the start - it won't stop them keeping people at SD resolution if they don't have HDCP all the way through, for example. It just means we get to figure out why our friends and family aren't getting the HD resolution they're expecting, and can't get because they bought a device with the wrong plug. Then when they realise they've been screwed, they might get annoyed enough with the content companies to let their feelings show. The only way we're really going to beat the broadcast flag and DRM in general is to expose lots of normal people to the heavy restrictions of DRM, while they still remember what it was like with the old system - and when the volume of protests is large enough, we might actually get something done about it.
Even my non-technical friends had already heard of the sony root-kit CD disaster, and thought poorly of Sony because of it - imagine what the shitstorm is going to be like when people realise they're messing with TV!
Copyright law hasn't existed for much of human history. If I write a novel, why should anyone with a printing press be able to turn out copies unless I allow them? - why shouldn't they? After all, they own the printing press. Copyrighted works are supposed to eventually end up in the public domain, which is where the inspiration for much new work comes from. Human culture - stories, histories, myths and art, in all their many forms - is a shared process. The artist needs the audience as much as the audience needs him. We tell ghost stories round the fire, we discuss our opinions around the watercooler, we listen, watch and read other people's stories. They enrich us. The same with scientific ideas, they are largely small increments built on the progress of those before.
Before copyright, art and written works were created, but it was expensive to make and copy, so the wealthy paid for artists to go round doing their thing, recognising the value of culture. This attitude still survives today, with corporate and foundation grants and government subsidies. Copyright was a way to increase the amount of works produced, by giving the creator a cut of the reproduction money long after the printing press was invented. It was supposed to be a trade, you get to be sole source of your work for a time, so we have more products in the public domain as a result. This was never meant to be a new form of property right, so that wealthy companies could lock up culture in digital prisons, and never release it to the public domain from which its inspiration came.
Yes, artists should be paid something - but to produce new material. The idea that culture can be parceled up into someone or some companies exclusive property, that it can restricted for hundreds of years, that artists get to make one big hit and they and their families get to live on royalty paychecks for ever-more - that's wrong. I don't get paid repeatedly for the work I've already done, why should an artist have a special right? My work is an expression of my skill and knowledge, but I only get paid the once for doing it. Why shouldn't artists? Why should my free speech in sharing what I know, what I've heard, be restricted for someone elses profit? Why shouldn't I have my fair use ability to make my own copies for my own use? At the very least, content creators should have a choice between DRM and copyright, if you use DRM, you also lose copyright protection. DRM'd works will never enter the public domain.
Now, I recognise that copyright is one way to increase the amount of culture and art, when it works (which is another question, now we have DRM). There are others, such as recurring opt-in flat fees to join broadcast streams and collections (online or in the RF spectrum) - e.g. TV licence fees or an addition to your ISPs bill. We can ask that music artists get most of their money from concerts, touring and generally performance work, rather than a tiny percent getting big bucks from exclusive CD contracts. Hell, nobody says that people can't still be a copy-provider of their own works, iTunes and bottled water shows people will pay for convenience and perceived quality.
About the only thing from copyright law I agree with is the moral rights, specifically the ability to be exclusively known as the creator of a work. Passing someone elses ideas off as your own, should still be prevented. Other than that? I see a legal fiction, a government created artificial monopoly that those who've got theirs are trying to codify into a permanent exclusive ownership on our culture that was never intended.
The 2D performance of graphics cards has barely moved for years, all the work (and extra transistors) go to much beefier 3D capability. Unless you're thinking of moving to a shiny new 3D desktop - of which there are several in development for linux - you'll see next to no advantage on your existing X11/KDE desktop. About the only advantage of upgrading for 2D desktops is higher resolutions, but the limit is generally the monitor now, not the graphics card. If you're going to dual-boot vista of course, a good 3D card will be an advantage, but a 5200fx should actually do reasonably well, it's not that old a card - I used to use that card for a 2nd gaming rig a couple of years ago!
As you surmise, the current gen high/mid-end cards are basically for games and openGL apps. About the only other advantage is improved MPEG2 and MPEG4 decoding, which lowers the CPU load when playing videos - useful if you're building a PVR. The nvidia 6 series and upwards do have the purevideo software for windows as well, which does improve video quality somewhat.
To be honest, I now prefer a slower passively cooled graphic card (currently got an nvidia 4200) in my workstation/servers, and I've gone for the hot and noisy SLI 7800GTs in my games rig, which is only on while I play games.
This is a rediculous statement. The purpose of science should be to find the truth--whether that includes "supernatural phenomena" or not cannot be a foregone conlcusion for any _truely_ scientific search for truth.
Actually, that's wrong. By definition, supernatural is: 1. not of natural world: relating to or attributed to phenomena that cannot be explained by natural laws
Science is the study of natural facts. It is looking at the known facts, coming up with a possible explanation, predicting new facts, and performing experiments to see if what was predicted actually happens. If a lot of predictions come true, and the theory stands up for a long time, we tend to call it a law, such as the law of gravity. Evolution should rightly be called a law by now, the weight of evidence is overwhelming. Some bleeding edge areas of science are very hard to test YET, generally the very big and very small, but the key point is observable evidence and that tests could be designed. When the periodic table was created, there were a lot of gaps, but had predictions of what the properties the elements in the gaps would have. Tests we can now perform proved the predictions to be accurate.
Supernatural phenomenon *by definition* do not rely upon natural laws to govern their behaviour. Just because something appears supernatural does not mean it is so, admittedly (but if we can test it and get the same results back each time, then it's not supernatural after all), but something that by definition does not follow the same laws as the observable universe, such as God, is not studyable by science, and should not be. If people want to discuss God and His laws in theology class, in church, between their friends, more power to them. But He, and theories discussing His actions do not belong in a science class or discussion because by definition, no tests can be created to confirm or deny His existance or even His actions.
In a language where each object is created from a class, an object is called an instance of that class. If each object has a type, two objects with the same class would have the same datatype. Creating an instance of a class is sometimes referred to as instantiating the class.
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I have a copperhead, and don't find it a problem. That said, since I'm a leftie, I usually turn off the two lefthand side buttons (awkward to reach, since I use the conventional mappings for the main buttons), and use the two righthand side ones with my thumb.
I disagree that you need less buttons for an FPS mouse, especially online-FPS as I generally use the following:
1) fire
2) alt-fire/scope
3) adjust sensitivity (you need a side button for this on a razer, as you hold the button and scroll to change it on a 20 point scale)
4) change fire-mode (full-auto to semi etc)
5) comms/grenade
Yes, all of these could be mapped to the keyboard, but I often need them while my right hand is occupied with moving around; changing firemode or throwing a grenade instantly while dodging around up close is very useful. Changing sensitivity is vital too; you spin it up when in a vehicle to get high turret speed, then spin it down when you jump out so you don't overturn when using infantry weapons. You spin it down even more when using a sniper rifle to get accuracy, then spin it back up when switching to pistol.
I'd quite like to use the extra couple for specific weapon selection, but I get by with scrollwheeling.
No doubt, which is presumably why they're concentrating on DRM rather than the courts when it comes to ripping in the UK. That said, never underestimate the inability of the record labels and media companies to grasp what is blatantly obvious to everyone else, or their ability to point guns footwards.
Sorry, I made an error; Time shifting is now legal and part of the UK law, http://www.opsi.gov.uk/si/si2003/20032498.htm#19 as is making transient copies for the purpose of listening to it on say, the computer. Making entire copies of CDs for personal use, or ripping to MP3 is still technically illegal though.
It's worth pointing out that the BPI is in fact, the British version of the RIAA. Mr Jamieson is speaking on behalf of the same big record labels when he speaks as a representative of the BPI (British Phonographic Institute) which is the British recording industry association/lobby group/vague legal threats mouthpiece.
Maybe the record companies have realised they need a slightly more sane approach in the UK and France, as they can't buy off the legislature so easily as in the US? That said, we have just as much DRM if not more on our CDs. They've obviously decided to use technical measures rather than legal ones to stop people ripping CDs, because they probably fear a court case ruling against them and actually opening the door to media shifting; if they allow it themselves for personal use, it still remains technically illegal, and they can use DRM much more easily.
UK copyright law has several "fair dealing" defences to charges of copyright infringement, written into the law. They're somewhat vague, but allow the non-commercial use of extracts for personal study, reviews, criticism or news reporting. Time shifting, i.e. recording off the radio or television, for the purpose of watching at a later date then erasing have been judged by the courts to be another fair dealing defence.
To date, there has been no such ruling or written exemption for making duplicates for the purpose of backups or personal use such as media shifting. It's long been assumed that if such a case came to court, media shifting would be added to the list; but it certainly wasn't guaranteed.
Don't forget, the large media conglomerates DID try to make video recorders illegal in the UK. It certainly wasn't beyond the realm of possibility that music companies would try to get mp3 players banned, or prosecute individuals for media shifting, which remains technically illegal under UK law. Their argument would go somewhat like this:
"Digital download services are now easily available. iPods and WMA players can be easily filled up with legally downloaded music. Just because someone has an old tape of an album doesn't mean they get to download the CD version for free, they have to buy their favourite music from us in their preferred new format. The defendant does not have the legal right to copy our CDs by 'ripping', and we would like to make clear that people still have to buy music in the new format - whether they want it on their WMA player, their ringtones, or their computer, each of these devices have music specifically designed for their optimum playback, and they are not interchangable. Give us lots of money for every single device you want to play our music on."
Media companies like Sony BMG, EMI and Koch have been explicitly putting anti-computer corruption into their CDs for some time, to try to prevent ripping. The fact that it's hard to do this on CDs, and so far all they've achieved is a fairly famous root kit, a few damaged macs, and a lot of people forced to learn about ripping just to play their CDs in their car-players doesn't matter to them. It's certainly not beyond the realms of possibility that they would take more direct legal action to sue rippers, and sellers of devices that 'encourage' ripping CDs.
One word:
Oblivion.
Three more words:
Unreal Tournament 2007.
I have an athlon 64 3800+ with SLI 7800GT's, XFi etc etc and oblivion still grinds to a halt if I push the settings up much beyond their medium levels. Even FEAR only just runs at a decent rate at full whack on my rig. I don't even want to think about the horsepower UT2007 will need.
You want a game that looks like crap and runs like crap, fine. Buy an X1300 or 6600GT. Those of us who want a better looking, faster responding high-end game can use all the graphic card horsepower we can buy.
I think it's the 11km tall tower that's the problem part! The difference is between a ladder planted on the ground, and a rope hanging from a high point. If you can reach the high point by another route and suspend the rope from it, you can have a much higher climbing method.
Simply put, we have materials which survive tension+torsion much better than the materials which survive compression+torsion. We might be able to build an 11km high structure with current materials, but the structure would be VAST at the base to withstand torsion - i.e. wind. The cost to build it would be staggering, and I think you're looking at more in the trillions range than the billions.
This is misinformed. The reason we 'live longer' in modern societies is primarily due to an improvements in child health and childbirth. Children dying young, and young women dying in childbirth dragged the mean lifespan down - people lived about as long as they do now, just less of them got a decent run at it. Basically, they didn't just drop dead at 40, they lived to 70 or 80 if they didn't die before the age of 5.
A better 'average' lifespan is around 70. It's difficult to say, as many of the side effects of a modern industrialised society - poor diet, lack of exercise and chemical/toxic pollution drag us down just as modern medicine helps individuals live longer.
Your post also assumes a 'designer'. We've evolved like all animals, and part of the evolution that allows us to stand upright also involved bending the spine into a rather unusual shape, leaving us prone to lower back problems. We also have wear and tear on the joint surfaces (which usually starts kicking in seriously about 70). We have a number of evolutionary weaknesses, which have often been caused because they gave us an advantage in another way, or simply weren't detrimental enough to the population to be weeded out. There's no 'natural' age to live to though, it really just does depend upon luck and maintenance.
Contract law probably wouldn't have worked (in my lay opinion) as there was no consideration, i.e. the public didn't have to give something up in order to enter. If it had been a paid subscription, even a nominal fee, and part of the submission was that you stated you weren't affiliated with direcTV, that would have had a much better chance. Whether it would have worked though, I don't know.
SuSE linux professional was the desktop line. Ubuntu only has 5 years support for the server version, it's less for the desktop, just like SuSE. If you run desktop versions of OS's, you get shorter support times. If you built a server from a £70 workstation disc, then such is life.
You have four choices. Keep doing what you're doing; upgrade to the free SUSE Linux 10.1 OSS, with shorter support lifetime; upgrade to the paid version of SUSE linux 10.1, with an active support time of 2 years, or upgrade to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, lifetimes available here. A new version of SLES is due soon, you may want to wait a month or two, if you decide to go this route, as SLES 9 is a couple of years into its 5 year general support cycle.
Of course, you could switch the server to a different distro altogether. Just go for the server-intended ones, you'll be much happier in a few years time.
Odd. I never had one fail, and the one I had stashed in my spares bin still works - just tested it! Maybe working at 3M, we got the properly made ones...
I worked for 3M around the time Imation was spun off into it's own business unit, and we used to get loads of superdisk drives and disks cheaply. They were supposed to be the real replacement to floppy disk drives when CDR-drives were insanely expensive (and cd-rom drives were still pretty rare).
120MB disks that were the same size as a floppy disk, and a drive that was the same physical size as a floppy drive, AND could read conventional floppies? Should have been the death knell of the 100MB Zip drive and the conventional floppy, given it was available as either a parallel or internal-ide drive. Both the disks and drives were cheaper than the Zip drives.
For some reason it never hit critical mass, and Zip drives ruled the roost until CD-ROM drives became commonplace and CD-R became a realistically priced option for physical storage. And conventional floppy drives still just won't DIE! (Stock windows installs still need floppies for SATA drive installs - in 2006 FFS)
Do what we did. Have one wiki for general use documentation, and a 2nd wiki linked from the first with the sensitive data in, with read access to it locked down to those who need to know via AuthUser .htaccess or the like (I still don't keep passwords in it though, they stay in my master-password-encrypted store on my pda)
Well here in the UK, we were affected. Our users (including me) were having trouble resolving a number of sites yesterday, including .org and .uk ones, that the dns cache didn't have. I've had to send out a organisation wide email to explain the problem, why the 'intenet was broken'.
I'm going to use a hardware analogy. How many computer makers are there? How many different models do they make?
If you don't know what to go for, you do one of three things:
1) ask someone who knows about them. They will know some of the choices, and hopefully direct you to an option that fits your wallet, your experience and your needs. Reading magazines dedicated to this topic will also help.
2) go to a shop, and look for the biggest shiny option on the shelf, or one you saw advertised that 'sounded' good.
3) If you know what you're doing, you read up the different parts, weigh up your needs, and buy up to your budget from the best parts and put it together yourself, or at least customise it.
Linux is no different. If you have no clue, magazines or a helpful person should direct you to a noob distro like ubuntu or linspire, where your choices are limited and clearly marked.
If you're after shinyness, and don't mind actually paying some money, you get a polished boxed distro such as SUSE - complete with thick paper manuals.
If you want to make your hardcore choices, you go for a distro designed for your precise purpose, whether that be Redhat Enterprise, Debian or Gentoo. Expect some knowledge to be required in running it.
As with many things, if you get a free distro patent-licensing will make them remove things like codecs for multimedia. If you want paper manuals, phone support and pre-installed codecs, you need to pay for it.
We expect people to make informed choices in the consumer market every day, whether it's cars, TVs or computers. Companies make products in a price range for a particular type of customer, and there's lots of choices in any given segment from amongst those companies.
People don't go out and buy a car, then turn round and complain their renault clio can't carry their 7 kids to school, or their ferrari is twitchy and drinks petrol. If people can't find one of the many, many resources to guide them from google to magazines to knowledgable friends to help them pick the right OS, whose fault is it really?
SuSE was originally a packaged german-translation of slackware, but evolved into it's own commercial distro based in germany over time with a number of unique features such as YaST, the configuration and installation tool. I believe they also helped KDE development substantially, another german project. SuSE of course was bought out by Novell a couple of years ago (a US company), and is the basis for Novell's linux line these days. Since Novell also had ximian etc, SuSE stopped being a primarily KDE distro, and is now as much gnome as KDE. SUSE Linux is still a german based operation though I believe, with much of the same structure as when it was an independent company.
Novell are doing something similar to fedora with openSUSE, i.e. an opensource-only version that's community driven, with commercial/boxed retail versions being spun off that includes licenced and closed-source components such as codecs and java.
SuSE was my preferred distro for some time, but it was always a pain to update to newer app versions when they updated to a new version bump - the only way I found was to cough up for an upgrade DVD, or wait months for the free ftp version. Now they've got a truly open-source version (including a GPL YAST) with free updates as well as security patches, I've been looking at them again for boxes that don't need the configurability of gentoo.
It doesn't matter if it's an unencrypted signal, as it doesn't do you much good if your tuner downsamples it to SD because you're connected to your HD set via component rather than HDMI. The encryption path is tuner to set, not broadcast aerial to tuner. If the content companies think they can get away with the broadcast flag (aka non-record bit) and downsample bit on HD-disks, there's absolutely no reason they can't also get legislation to get the downsample bit added as a mandatory 'feature' on HD broadcast tuners.
The reason that free distros don't have mp3 and some video codecs such as mpeg2 (for dvd) is because of the patent system. Since codecs such as mp3 are patented in the US, it is illegal to distribute them in the US without paying the patent holder a licence fee.
Since the distro is free, how are they supposed to pay for the licence? Their only choice is to put the rpms, tarballs etc on non-US mirrors, and ask you to get them yourself and pay your own fees if you live in the US.
If it's a paid distro, they generally include mp3, dvd payback and many other codecs on the DVD, paid for out of the purchase price.
By the way, I hope your 'other' operating system isn't windows. That only comes with a crippled mp3 codec and the wma/wmv codecs - linux comes with ogg vorbis, along with other free codecs. If you want divx/xvid, dvd playback, a good quality mp3 codec, realplayer codecs, quicktime (sorenson et al), aac, ac3 etc etc, you need to download them yourself on either operating system.
I've no idea what codecs macs come with out of the box, but I'm betting it's primarily aac and quicktime.
I think mainly because most motherboard manufacturers have a nasty habit of putting their pci-e x1 slots close to the pci-e x16 slots, thus making them also inaccessible if you have sli/crossfire, as well as the first pci slot.
pci-e x1 is still somewhat of a niche feature (I don't know many x1 cards at all) but no doubt the card makers like BFG will produce a pci-e version in the near future if demand is there - which will probably come when cellfactor or unreal 3 engined games come out.
I'm thinking optional is a bad thing. Look at HDCP; graphics card manufacturers aren't including it on their DVI-I cards, so even if you had a HDCP compliant DVI monitor or HDTV you won't be able to play hi-res movies on a PC or pc-based DVR once the down-sample-if-not-HDCP bit gets turned on with HD-DVD and blueray disks - even though they have more than enough capability to do so. Worse, broadcast TV is likely to switch to HDCP as a requirement for HD broadcasts once the switchover is complete, or even before.
The content companies seem hellbent on driving away their audience by excessive restrictions, I see little point in just adding a big mess of incompatibilities into yet another standard from the start - it won't stop them keeping people at SD resolution if they don't have HDCP all the way through, for example. It just means we get to figure out why our friends and family aren't getting the HD resolution they're expecting, and can't get because they bought a device with the wrong plug. Then when they realise they've been screwed, they might get annoyed enough with the content companies to let their feelings show. The only way we're really going to beat the broadcast flag and DRM in general is to expose lots of normal people to the heavy restrictions of DRM, while they still remember what it was like with the old system - and when the volume of protests is large enough, we might actually get something done about it.
Even my non-technical friends had already heard of the sony root-kit CD disaster, and thought poorly of Sony because of it - imagine what the shitstorm is going to be like when people realise they're messing with TV!
Copyright law hasn't existed for much of human history. If I write a novel, why should anyone with a printing press be able to turn out copies unless I allow them? - why shouldn't they? After all, they own the printing press. Copyrighted works are supposed to eventually end up in the public domain, which is where the inspiration for much new work comes from. Human culture - stories, histories, myths and art, in all their many forms - is a shared process. The artist needs the audience as much as the audience needs him. We tell ghost stories round the fire, we discuss our opinions around the watercooler, we listen, watch and read other people's stories. They enrich us. The same with scientific ideas, they are largely small increments built on the progress of those before.
Before copyright, art and written works were created, but it was expensive to make and copy, so the wealthy paid for artists to go round doing their thing, recognising the value of culture. This attitude still survives today, with corporate and foundation grants and government subsidies. Copyright was a way to increase the amount of works produced, by giving the creator a cut of the reproduction money long after the printing press was invented. It was supposed to be a trade, you get to be sole source of your work for a time, so we have more products in the public domain as a result. This was never meant to be a new form of property right, so that wealthy companies could lock up culture in digital prisons, and never release it to the public domain from which its inspiration came.
Yes, artists should be paid something - but to produce new material. The idea that culture can be parceled up into someone or some companies exclusive property, that it can restricted for hundreds of years, that artists get to make one big hit and they and their families get to live on royalty paychecks for ever-more - that's wrong. I don't get paid repeatedly for the work I've already done, why should an artist have a special right? My work is an expression of my skill and knowledge, but I only get paid the once for doing it. Why shouldn't artists? Why should my free speech in sharing what I know, what I've heard, be restricted for someone elses profit? Why shouldn't I have my fair use ability to make my own copies for my own use? At the very least, content creators should have a choice between DRM and copyright, if you use DRM, you also lose copyright protection. DRM'd works will never enter the public domain.
Now, I recognise that copyright is one way to increase the amount of culture and art, when it works (which is another question, now we have DRM). There are others, such as recurring opt-in flat fees to join broadcast streams and collections (online or in the RF spectrum) - e.g. TV licence fees or an addition to your ISPs bill. We can ask that music artists get most of their money from concerts, touring and generally performance work, rather than a tiny percent getting big bucks from exclusive CD contracts. Hell, nobody says that people can't still be a copy-provider of their own works, iTunes and bottled water shows people will pay for convenience and perceived quality.
About the only thing from copyright law I agree with is the moral rights, specifically the ability to be exclusively known as the creator of a work. Passing someone elses ideas off as your own, should still be prevented. Other than that? I see a legal fiction, a government created artificial monopoly that those who've got theirs are trying to codify into a permanent exclusive ownership on our culture that was never intended.
The 2D performance of graphics cards has barely moved for years, all the work (and extra transistors) go to much beefier 3D capability. Unless you're thinking of moving to a shiny new 3D desktop - of which there are several in development for linux - you'll see next to no advantage on your existing X11/KDE desktop. About the only advantage of upgrading for 2D desktops is higher resolutions, but the limit is generally the monitor now, not the graphics card. If you're going to dual-boot vista of course, a good 3D card will be an advantage, but a 5200fx should actually do reasonably well, it's not that old a card - I used to use that card for a 2nd gaming rig a couple of years ago!
As you surmise, the current gen high/mid-end cards are basically for games and openGL apps. About the only other advantage is improved MPEG2 and MPEG4 decoding, which lowers the CPU load when playing videos - useful if you're building a PVR. The nvidia 6 series and upwards do have the purevideo software for windows as well, which does improve video quality somewhat.
To be honest, I now prefer a slower passively cooled graphic card (currently got an nvidia 4200) in my workstation/servers, and I've gone for the hot and noisy SLI 7800GTs in my games rig, which is only on while I play games.
You have a 2.8Ghz Opteron in your desktop PC at home? Don't you have someone to press the refresh button for you?
This is a rediculous statement. The purpose of science should be to find the truth--whether that includes "supernatural phenomena" or not cannot be a foregone conlcusion for any _truely_ scientific search for truth.
Actually, that's wrong. By definition, supernatural is:
1. not of natural world: relating to or attributed to phenomena that cannot be explained by natural laws
Science is the study of natural facts. It is looking at the known facts, coming up with a possible explanation, predicting new facts, and performing experiments to see if what was predicted actually happens. If a lot of predictions come true, and the theory stands up for a long time, we tend to call it a law, such as the law of gravity. Evolution should rightly be called a law by now, the weight of evidence is overwhelming. Some bleeding edge areas of science are very hard to test YET, generally the very big and very small, but the key point is observable evidence and that tests could be designed. When the periodic table was created, there were a lot of gaps, but had predictions of what the properties the elements in the gaps would have. Tests we can now perform proved the predictions to be accurate.
Supernatural phenomenon *by definition* do not rely upon natural laws to govern their behaviour. Just because something appears supernatural does not mean it is so, admittedly (but if we can test it and get the same results back each time, then it's not supernatural after all), but something that by definition does not follow the same laws as the observable universe, such as God, is not studyable by science, and should not be. If people want to discuss God and His laws in theology class, in church, between their friends, more power to them. But He, and theories discussing His actions do not belong in a science class or discussion because by definition, no tests can be created to confirm or deny His existance or even His actions.
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instance_(programming )
In a language where each object is created from a class, an object is called an instance of that class. If each object has a type, two objects with the same class would have the same datatype. Creating an instance of a class is sometimes referred to as instantiating the class.