I think that you will find that he said that it could be ice free, not would. If there is one thing that you can safely say about scientists, it is that they avoid making outright statements when there is any significant margin of error.
Hmm, let me think... Was it Miley Cyrus? It was possibly part of the lyrics of her latest song, although to be honest I watched her video with the sound muted.
And why shouldn't the bombs go off if the plane goes down?
You can't be serious! Surely this example of crashing in North Carolina is the exact reason why bombs shouldn't explode during crashes. Would you really want an accident during take off or landing to destroy your own airport or carrier? Do you want to take out your own troops on the ground because your plane got shot down before it reached its target?
A plane spends a large percentage of its life flying over its own country or allied territories. Generally you prefer to not bomb those places if you can help it.
I think the format's failure was more to do with the fact that the mainstream Video 2000 sets didn't have AV inputs and outputs, that the early units suffered from audio synchronisation incompatibilities between different manufacturers, and (most importantly) the format arrived years later in an already established market. They didn't just have to compete with the other formats, they had to supplant them; which is a much harder job.
Also, I have never seen any evidence that any video format required the approval of the manufacturer before you could sell tapes using that format. In fact I think the idea that adult content was banned was an extension of the earlier urban myth that it was the porn industry's selection of VHS that drove the success of that format, which ignores all the mainstream reasons for the success of VHS: tape length and cheaper recorders.
All this ignores the fact that porn was actually available on Betamax format even in the early days. Look around now. Virtually any format that can show even the lowest resolution of pictures gets used by the porn industry. They would not (and did not) exclusively choose one format of tape and ignore another potential market.
Guess you Americans still can't get the grasp of irony.
Yeah, some men are so superior they can't even spell superior.
There is nothing ironic about this. The word superior does not imply perfection. In this example, man only needs to be better at spelling the word superior than nature is
In a contest between man and nature, man will always win any spelling bee, even if nature was represented by an actual bee.
People didn't want an Abbott government, that was made quite clear by the ~4% swing against Labor translating to only a 1.5% swing to the Libs (in first preference votes).
I wonder how much of that was due to the negative advertisements that the Labor party ran. The "If you vote for him (Abbott), then you lose" campaign might stop people from voting from the Coalition, but it doesn't mean that they will vote Labor instead. Considering that they were a minority government, they had more to lose by a small swing against them than the Coalition would gain by the same swing towards them. For that reason, the negative ads were the worst idea they had. It made Labor look desperate, had the potential to put off voters who dislike negative campaigns and would not stop the flow of votes away from their party to the smaller parties.
I found the truly scary part is that the Australian Labor Party still got a reasonable amount of the vote. I wonder just how incompetent a party must become in order to be abandoned.
I suspect it is because the Labor government was not as incompetent as some people say. Sure debt is higher than is it was when Labor took power, but they came in just as the GFC was kicking in so they had to start with a big spending initiative to keep the economy going (which worked very well). They also have a policy of building infrastructure (like the NBN) rather than selling it all off (eg privatisation of Telstra).
Where they were incompetent was in allowing an internal power struggle to play out in public. So much attention was paid to the Rudd-Gillard tug of war that even if they ran a perfect government nobody would remember it.
You are right. He would really need to use some sort of computer to be able to measure whether his Internet speed had changed by that amount. How unlikely is that?
Seriously, we can't know what he meant by noticing the speed change. It may just be that as a gamer, he keeps an eye on his ping times regularly and noticed the numbers change. Frankly, that is not the important part of the article so it isn't worth worrying about that quote.
The idea of a female Doctor comes up every single regeneration since Tom Baker hinted at the possibility (presumably in jest). It's no longer an amusing idea, and it is obviously not going to happen (since they have managed to resist the idea ever since then).
There's a reason tablet computers didn't really catch on until iOS - and not for the lack of tablets with "most supported platform on the planet".
The main reason was because of the form factor and weight. Early tablet PCs were not comfortable to use, especially for extended periods. Plus the lack instant on/off meant that you couldn't quickly look something up then resume a low power state - which is the way people want to use a portable device.
The technology just wasn't ready in the early Pen For Windows days.
Anybody running an MS infrastructure who is getting MS product news from/. have a serious issue with priorities.
Here's a quick tip to make Slashdot more efficient for you. If you don't want to read about updates to Microsoft products, just skip over the story and read the next one. That way you can filter out the articles that don't interest you while those people who don't want to spend every day with their eyes glued to Microsoft's website can still get the information that they need. Remember that it is supposed to be "News for nerds" and not "News for FaxeTheCat".
The mistake that you made here today was wasting your time writing five posts to say that this topic doesn't interest you.
It seems to be an implausible claim that you were in the top 1% of high school English if you make the basic mistake of misunderstanding what I wrote. Nowhere did I state that the pronunciation of the word spruik was obvious. I merely said that it was not tricky; meaning that it is not difficult or complicated.
You just have the company write a driver, install 3D software that works with it, and hit print. The operating system is irrelevant.
I can't believe how many people around here don't understand the role of the printer driver system in modern operating systems. In the old days each program had their own printer drivers. For example, printer manufactures all had to make drivers for the main applications like WordPerfect. For the rest of the lesser known apps, they would have to have their printers emulate more popular printers so that the other and hope the other programs were well written. Often it would turn out to be a mess.
Then along came the operating systems that had their own printer driver system and suddenly all programs worked with all printers. It opened up competition between printer manufacturers as well as application developers because it became more viable for lesser known brands to still work out of the box. Of course, it meant that instead of lock-in for applications, it moved up to the operating system level.
By supporting 3D printers at the operating system level, consumers can pair up different software with different printers and be confident that it will work.
Counterfeinting: Selling you some other piece of software that has been themed to fool you or your peers into thinking it is Windows.
The counterfeiting being discussed refers to the media and accompanying documentation. The actual software is real, albeit illegally acquired from Technet.
The unauthorised copying and distribution of copyright works is exactly what the term means, and has done so since at least the 17th century. I am sure you old-timers who predate this usage probably still complain about this. Frankly, you would serve the planet better if, instead of your pendantry over this one use of this word, that you shared the secret of your longevity.
Why do the different Linux distributions need to get MS to accept those shims again ?
To make it easier to install the OS without having to require that people install keys. Since there would be a variety of interfaces in the different motherboards, it would make it difficult to write generic documentation to tell lay people what to do. That hardly makes for a plug-n-play experience, and brings us back to the good-old-days of overly complicated operating system installations.
Your XP installation is overcomplicated. You only need Service Pack 3, because on XP they were cumulative. Your steps for downloading another browser is the same for any Windows version. As for drivers, you need to research your hardware purchasesefore you buy to ensure driver support (just like Linux).
The reason AMD would drop support for XP is not because it is hard for the user to install, but because they changed the driver model with Vista. If they don't need to support two driver models then it would greatly simplify the development process. They probably have an idea on how many XP users actually update their drivers. Sure the OS still has a large percentage of users, but how many of those feel the need to constantly update their graphics drivers. With more and more games coming out with system requirements that exclude XP, the need to keep such an old system up-to-date is reduced.
I was under the impression that the PlayStation 3's OS was already based on FreeBSD, which means that this is not entirely unexpected news. According to the PS3 System Software page on Wikipedia:
The native operating system of the PlayStation 3 is CellOS, which is believed to be a branch from the FreeBSD project. The 3D computer graphics API software used in the PlayStation 3 is LibGCM and PSGL, based on OpenGL ES and Nvidia's Cg. The PlayStation 3 uses the XrossMediaBar (XMB) as its graphical user interface.
The difference between Sony removing the "Other OS" option on the PS3 and patching the PS4 to add mandatory internet connection or remove the ability to share/sell games is that the former only affected a tiny minority of owners of the PS3 (far less than the number who complain about it).
But if Sony made a patch to make the console match the XBox One, it would affect 100% of their customers. Every. Single. Gamer! That would be a huge PR nightmare.
A more likely scenario would be that Sony will take the long term approach and just wait for the PS5 to implement the same restrictive system. That way Microsoft can take the flak now, and then when Sony does it they can point to the precedent of the XBox to justify their anti-consumer policies as "moving to industry standard practices". This is much in the same way that defenders of Microsoft point to Steam to justify their DRM now.
I don't think ANYONE in his right mind will do ANYTHING even remotely CPU intensive on a laptop that is NOT plugged in.
What nonsense. Gaming capable notebook computers are quite affordable these days. I have one to play games on my long train trips to work. Not only do more efficient computers mean that we can play on batteries for longer, but they also stop our genitals being fried from CPU/GPUs under heavy load.
Similarly, my main gaming PC is pretty low spec solely because I don't want to have a furnace sitting at my feet, especially in summer when I used to have to stop playing games when it got too hot with my previous system. More efficient processors mean that I don't have to have such a weak system just because I want cool & quiet gaming.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that you will find that he said that it could be ice free, not would. If there is one thing that you can safely say about scientists, it is that they avoid making outright statements when there is any significant margin of error.
Hmm, let me think... Was it Miley Cyrus? It was possibly part of the lyrics of her latest song, although to be honest I watched her video with the sound muted.
And why shouldn't the bombs go off if the plane goes down?
You can't be serious! Surely this example of crashing in North Carolina is the exact reason why bombs shouldn't explode during crashes. Would you really want an accident during take off or landing to destroy your own airport or carrier? Do you want to take out your own troops on the ground because your plane got shot down before it reached its target?
A plane spends a large percentage of its life flying over its own country or allied territories. Generally you prefer to not bomb those places if you can help it.
I think the format's failure was more to do with the fact that the mainstream Video 2000 sets didn't have AV inputs and outputs, that the early units suffered from audio synchronisation incompatibilities between different manufacturers, and (most importantly) the format arrived years later in an already established market. They didn't just have to compete with the other formats, they had to supplant them; which is a much harder job.
Also, I have never seen any evidence that any video format required the approval of the manufacturer before you could sell tapes using that format. In fact I think the idea that adult content was banned was an extension of the earlier urban myth that it was the porn industry's selection of VHS that drove the success of that format, which ignores all the mainstream reasons for the success of VHS: tape length and cheaper recorders.
All this ignores the fact that porn was actually available on Betamax format even in the early days. Look around now. Virtually any format that can show even the lowest resolution of pictures gets used by the porn industry. They would not (and did not) exclusively choose one format of tape and ignore another potential market.
Guess you Americans still can't get the grasp of irony.
Yeah, some men are so superior they can't even spell superior.
There is nothing ironic about this. The word superior does not imply perfection. In this example, man only needs to be better at spelling the word superior than nature is
In a contest between man and nature, man will always win any spelling bee, even if nature was represented by an actual bee.
People didn't want an Abbott government, that was made quite clear by the ~4% swing against Labor translating to only a 1.5% swing to the Libs (in first preference votes).
I wonder how much of that was due to the negative advertisements that the Labor party ran. The "If you vote for him (Abbott), then you lose" campaign might stop people from voting from the Coalition, but it doesn't mean that they will vote Labor instead. Considering that they were a minority government, they had more to lose by a small swing against them than the Coalition would gain by the same swing towards them. For that reason, the negative ads were the worst idea they had. It made Labor look desperate, had the potential to put off voters who dislike negative campaigns and would not stop the flow of votes away from their party to the smaller parties.
I found the truly scary part is that the Australian Labor Party still got a reasonable amount of the vote. I wonder just how incompetent a party must become in order to be abandoned.
I suspect it is because the Labor government was not as incompetent as some people say. Sure debt is higher than is it was when Labor took power, but they came in just as the GFC was kicking in so they had to start with a big spending initiative to keep the economy going (which worked very well). They also have a policy of building infrastructure (like the NBN) rather than selling it all off (eg privatisation of Telstra).
Where they were incompetent was in allowing an internal power struggle to play out in public. So much attention was paid to the Rudd-Gillard tug of war that even if they ran a perfect government nobody would remember it.
You might be from the UK. For Americans (and Canadians) a trillion is a thousand million (1,000,000,000 or 10^9), not a million million (10^12).
You are thinking of a billion there. A trillion is 10^12 or 10^18, depending on where you live.
You are right. He would really need to use some sort of computer to be able to measure whether his Internet speed had changed by that amount. How unlikely is that?
Seriously, we can't know what he meant by noticing the speed change. It may just be that as a gamer, he keeps an eye on his ping times regularly and noticed the numbers change. Frankly, that is not the important part of the article so it isn't worth worrying about that quote.
The idea of a female Doctor comes up every single regeneration since Tom Baker hinted at the possibility (presumably in jest). It's no longer an amusing idea, and it is obviously not going to happen (since they have managed to resist the idea ever since then).
There's a reason tablet computers didn't really catch on until iOS - and not for the lack of tablets with "most supported platform on the planet".
The main reason was because of the form factor and weight. Early tablet PCs were not comfortable to use, especially for extended periods. Plus the lack instant on/off meant that you couldn't quickly look something up then resume a low power state - which is the way people want to use a portable device.
The technology just wasn't ready in the early Pen For Windows days.
To be fair, this was found at the gift shop of a restaurant. That is not exactly the place you would go for the best tech bargains.
Anybody running an MS infrastructure who is getting MS product news from /. have a serious issue with priorities.
Here's a quick tip to make Slashdot more efficient for you. If you don't want to read about updates to Microsoft products, just skip over the story and read the next one. That way you can filter out the articles that don't interest you while those people who don't want to spend every day with their eyes glued to Microsoft's website can still get the information that they need. Remember that it is supposed to be "News for nerds" and not "News for FaxeTheCat".
The mistake that you made here today was wasting your time writing five posts to say that this topic doesn't interest you.
It seems to be an implausible claim that you were in the top 1% of high school English if you make the basic mistake of misunderstanding what I wrote. Nowhere did I state that the pronunciation of the word spruik was obvious. I merely said that it was not tricky; meaning that it is not difficult or complicated.
You just have the company write a driver, install 3D software that works with it, and hit print. The operating system is irrelevant.
I can't believe how many people around here don't understand the role of the printer driver system in modern operating systems. In the old days each program had their own printer drivers. For example, printer manufactures all had to make drivers for the main applications like WordPerfect. For the rest of the lesser known apps, they would have to have their printers emulate more popular printers so that the other and hope the other programs were well written. Often it would turn out to be a mess.
Then along came the operating systems that had their own printer driver system and suddenly all programs worked with all printers. It opened up competition between printer manufacturers as well as application developers because it became more viable for lesser known brands to still work out of the box. Of course, it meant that instead of lock-in for applications, it moved up to the operating system level.
By supporting 3D printers at the operating system level, consumers can pair up different software with different printers and be confident that it will work.
spruik
I can't even to take a guess at the pronunciation of this one ... sproo-ick? Sp-royk? Sprik?
It is not tricky. Just think about how you pronounce the word "fruit".
You are right. If only the slacker had invented a way of talking to the dead!
Counterfeinting: Selling you some other piece of software that has been themed to fool you or your peers into thinking it is Windows.
The counterfeiting being discussed refers to the media and accompanying documentation. The actual software is real, albeit illegally acquired from Technet.
counterfeiting != piracy
The unauthorised copying and distribution of copyright works is exactly what the term means, and has done so since at least the 17th century. I am sure you old-timers who predate this usage probably still complain about this. Frankly, you would serve the planet better if, instead of your pendantry over this one use of this word, that you shared the secret of your longevity.
Why do the different Linux distributions need to get MS to accept those shims again ?
To make it easier to install the OS without having to require that people install keys. Since there would be a variety of interfaces in the different motherboards, it would make it difficult to write generic documentation to tell lay people what to do. That hardly makes for a plug-n-play experience, and brings us back to the good-old-days of overly complicated operating system installations.
Your XP installation is overcomplicated. You only need Service Pack 3, because on XP they were cumulative. Your steps for downloading another browser is the same for any Windows version. As for drivers, you need to research your hardware purchasesefore you buy to ensure driver support (just like Linux).
The reason AMD would drop support for XP is not because it is hard for the user to install, but because they changed the driver model with Vista. If they don't need to support two driver models then it would greatly simplify the development process. They probably have an idea on how many XP users actually update their drivers. Sure the OS still has a large percentage of users, but how many of those feel the need to constantly update their graphics drivers. With more and more games coming out with system requirements that exclude XP, the need to keep such an old system up-to-date is reduced.
I was under the impression that the PlayStation 3's OS was already based on FreeBSD, which means that this is not entirely unexpected news. According to the PS3 System Software page on Wikipedia:
The native operating system of the PlayStation 3 is CellOS, which is believed to be a branch from the FreeBSD project. The 3D computer graphics API software used in the PlayStation 3 is LibGCM and PSGL, based on OpenGL ES and Nvidia's Cg. The PlayStation 3 uses the XrossMediaBar (XMB) as its graphical user interface.
The difference between Sony removing the "Other OS" option on the PS3 and patching the PS4 to add mandatory internet connection or remove the ability to share/sell games is that the former only affected a tiny minority of owners of the PS3 (far less than the number who complain about it).
But if Sony made a patch to make the console match the XBox One, it would affect 100% of their customers. Every. Single. Gamer! That would be a huge PR nightmare.
A more likely scenario would be that Sony will take the long term approach and just wait for the PS5 to implement the same restrictive system. That way Microsoft can take the flak now, and then when Sony does it they can point to the precedent of the XBox to justify their anti-consumer policies as "moving to industry standard practices". This is much in the same way that defenders of Microsoft point to Steam to justify their DRM now.
And personally i'm sick and tired of the 'blame America for the worlds woes'
So you see "Northern Hemisphere" and think that just means America? That continent spans both hemispheres!
I don't think ANYONE in his right mind will do ANYTHING even remotely CPU intensive on a laptop that is NOT plugged in.
What nonsense. Gaming capable notebook computers are quite affordable these days. I have one to play games on my long train trips to work. Not only do more efficient computers mean that we can play on batteries for longer, but they also stop our genitals being fried from CPU/GPUs under heavy load.
Similarly, my main gaming PC is pretty low spec solely because I don't want to have a furnace sitting at my feet, especially in summer when I used to have to stop playing games when it got too hot with my previous system. More efficient processors mean that I don't have to have such a weak system just because I want cool & quiet gaming.