I would encourage anyone who would prefer VS return to two separate options to vote on this bug, as your feedback can certainly influence decisions about this issue in the future.
So, would the six Microsoft developers reading/. please go and place your votes?
Personally, I find it interesting that the change is about coalescing the "tab stops" and "indent characters" into a single setting and yet discussion has boiled down to a Tabs vs. Spaces debate. Oh that's right, nobody reads TFA around here.
You're confusing the tab key with the tab character. Do you expect to see arrow characters in your code when you use the arrow keys on your keyboard too?
A visualization of IPv4 addresses that responded to ICMP (ping) packets during a two-month (very slow) scan of the IPv4 address space. Some hosts do not respond to the probes due to firewalls, NAT boxes, and ICMP filtering. Thus, the data and map give us a lower bound on IPv4 address utilization.
That explains why places like the US-DoD are big black holes on the map.
It is unfortunate that dollars obtained from stupid people are just as green and spend just as well as money obtained from those who make intelligent purchasing decisions.
Australia phased out green money (the $2 note) in 1988. Maybe that's why we're having such difficulties with Carbon Credits and the Green Economy.
Moore and his colleagues... named their craft the Puffin because "if you've ever seen a puffin on the ground, it looks very awkward, with wings too small to fly, and that's exactly what our vehicle looks like," he explains. "But it's also apparently called the most environmentally friendly bird, because it hides its poop, and we're environmentally friendly because we have essentially no emissions.
Yeah, environmentally friendly except for that nasty lithium stuff in the lithium phosphate batteries.
I can't help but wonder what the glide slope on this thing is like - with those small wings, how quickly will it hit the ground if it runs out of power.
AV-sync is still an issue for modern containers, like MKV, it's just that most GUI front ends automatically handle the parameters when encoding for you - command line pilots still need a calculator.
The biggest drawbacks of the dinosaur AVI container format include: it doesn't support chapters (ah, the hacks in Encarta to work around that); it doesn't support included subtitle streams; it doesn't support alternative video tracks; it doesn't support alternative audio tracks. Heck, in it's 1.0 version it didn't even support multi-gigabyte files. I'm all for covering it with another shovel-full of dirt.
If killing-off support for the AVI container means a few casualties like DivX/XviD codecs (and it doesn't, except for embedded solutions that don't have firmware upgrade paths) there'll be no tears here - there have been much better quality and higher efficiency codecs to replace them for a number of years.
I don't think 1 or 2 will be as big an issue as you think.
Buying On2 so that Google can get access to the VP7 and VP8 codecs isn't going to be a magic pill that transforms YouTube overnight - they've still got a whole bunch of video content in VP3 and MP4/H.264 format and it's only going to decrease in quality if they try to transcode it to VP7/8. What you'll likely see is new videos getting encoded in VP7/8 as they're uploaded and fallback to VP3/H.264 transcodings as required by end-user's codec installations.
Of course, Google being Google, it's possible that they'll just open source the VP7/8 codecs after some period of time (they'll likely want to cash-in on some of the royalties for 12 or 18 months first) and then VP7/8 codecs will be available for all sorts of embedded applications (smart phones, media centers, etc.) in addition to desktop computers.
This may happen more quickly than 12-18 months if Google wants to use VP7/8 as the default codec on Android, allowing smoother video playback over 3G networks.
None of this will make On2 shareholders any happier - they already feel they're getting shafted with the Google offer equating to about 60c/share.
When you spawn a separate process, you are acquiring a memory space that is separate and distinct. This makes it so that the process will only lock / kill itself.
Ah, you must be new to this whole programming thing. Even separate processes can block on semaphores and shared memory.
A 3-pack of good-quality CFLs costs about $6 at Wal-Mart. Still about 3x the cost of the same number of incandescents, although the CFLs last a lot longer, and use sufficiently less energy to pay for themselves over their lifetime
As good little consumers I know that's what we're supposed to think, but:
1. my experience has shown that CCFL's need replacing much more frequently than incandescents ever did.
2. they only consume less energy if they're left on for long periods (> 30 mins or so) as they have quite high start-up currents until they come up to operating temperature (1-5 minutes).
3. they output much higher levels of UV than incandescents, aggravating some skin conditions and causing retinal damage with some people.
4. they also contain hazardous chemicals such as mercury, complicating their disposal - our local city council has no *legal* means of CFL disposal yet, with most people just throwing them in with the regular refuse.
I think that our (Australian) federal government having "phased out" incandescent bulbs is a premature action. I'd rather see LED lighting get traction but, again, hazardous chemicals.
Funny, I'd have thought that the take-home lesson from your experiences with ReiserFS would not have been "don't use the undelete function"... it should have been "back your crap up so you don't need to use undelete."
We've been using Dymo LabelWriters (both 300 and 400 series) under Windows and Linux for printing oil sample labels for quite some time now. Even in a workshop environment they seem quite reliable.
I'm not a big fan of the printer drivers under Windows (they're prone to causing exceptions in.NET land for random reasons), but the CUPS drivers under Linux seem fine.
That's only a reasonable indicator if the two copies of the same image you are comparing are also the same resolution. It's not hard to have a higher resolution image consume less disk space if the compression level has been bumped up.
Also, different programs usually produce different JFIF streams even when set to the same compression level and using the same *uncompressed* source image, making the DCT size approach even less reliable.
This is a feature. If there is no mouse input to a window, Windows decides that it is a background process and assigns it a low priority so that it does not disrupt the performance of interactive tasks.
Windows doesn't actively change the priority of running tasks. The priority is generally set to "Normal" whenever a new process starts and then can be changed by the running process itself, or by the process when it starts new threads, or as you noted by way of the Windows Task Manager tray applet.
The problem in the Domino case was traced to stupid event-driven code in the Win16-based setup executable. Moving the mouse around generated more events to be fired at the main window's event handler and thus caused the time between file-copy operations to be reduced.
Lotus Domino server installations (circa 2000) would complete at about four to five times their "normal" speed if someone just sat there moving the mouse around whilst the install wizard was copying files. Go figure.
I didn't finish reading the article, but I hope one of their proposed solutions was to fire the incompetent people who can't deliver on-time or within budget.
You probably should have finished reading the article. How I read it was that the contractors responsible for building the new (and SiRF-III upgraded) satellites (ie: Boeing) have been letting go of the people with the necessary knowledge to stay on-schedule with their commitments because they've too busy buying and merging with other companies instead.
Free versions of things help to bring you to your audience. It's more likely to increase sales rather than hinder them - more people will be exposed to your book than would otherwise have been the case. If they don't buy this one at least they know you're there and what you're on about, and that makes them more likely to purchase your next one. It's advertising that you don't have to pay for.
If this wasn't the case then why do software companies, and game companies in particular, routinely release free "demos" of their products before the final "pay for this" release?
Hate to through a conspiracy theory amongst the pigeons, but the bill (http://assembly.state.ny.us/leg/?bn=A02455) proposes taxes on "video and DVD movies" - there's no mention of Blu-Ray. Encouraged upgrades, anyone?
Seriously though, if the real intent of this bill is to reduce childhood obesity then the taxes should be applied to childhood things: snacks for kids; G-rated movies, videos, DVD and Blu-Ray titles; *INDOOR TOYS* and the like.
The cost of anti-virus software is not the problem - there's plenty of free anti-virus alternatives in the market already, some of them much better IMNSHO than the paid-for offerings. If cost was the problem, everyone would be using free anti-virus software. And yet, there are still computers with no anti-virus software on them.
I think that many (corporate, in particular) anti-virus solutions are overly greedy on their CPU and memory usage. People notice this on their machines at work, or hear about it from friends and think, "my home computer's slow enough already, I'm not putting that crap onto it."
Content Control/Filtering solutions are also a desirable piece of software to have on home PC's. And yet when the Australian Government tried to give away NetNanny to anyone who wanted it, not a single person took them up on their offer. Not one. I don't know whether that says anything about NetNanny, or whether it shows that people don't trust "free" things from the government, but it must mean something.
Hate to tell you this, but images are less a part of the HTML format than script - whilst script blocks can be embedded amongst the HTML code, images can only be referenced from HTML.
Images are, in fact, a security risk - there are known JPEG image exploits, for example. All major browsers I've ever used also have the ability to disable loading images. If I turn off images am I protecting myself or creating an unauthorized derivative work through contributory copyright infringement? What if I'm using a text-only browser, like Lynx? What if I'm blind and am using a text-to-speech browser?
People have a choice in how they browse the internet. It's their right to choose. If they want to turn-off script and ads that's their choice, not yours and not the web pages author's. Putting site-specific rules on top of that is no different.
If you want to push he contributory copyright infringement argument I'd suggest that you start talking to the governments of a number of countries that are actively blocking content "on behalf of their citizens," such as China, United Kingdom and Australia.
Slashdot Mirror
There's more info and discussion over here regarding the Android 1.5 firmware and the E911 bug...
Rogers HTC E911 GPS Bug Update
FWIW, "Brittany" did have this to say:
I would encourage anyone who would prefer VS return to two separate options to vote on this bug, as your feedback can certainly influence decisions about this issue in the future.
So, would the six Microsoft developers reading /. please go and place your votes?
Personally, I find it interesting that the change is about coalescing the "tab stops" and "indent characters" into a single setting and yet discussion has boiled down to a Tabs vs. Spaces debate. Oh that's right, nobody reads TFA around here.
You're confusing the tab key with the tab character. Do you expect to see arrow characters in your code when you use the arrow keys on your keyboard too?
You missed the caveats on the page about the image:
A visualization of IPv4 addresses that responded to ICMP (ping) packets during a two-month (very slow) scan of the IPv4 address space. Some hosts do not respond to the probes due to firewalls, NAT boxes, and ICMP filtering. Thus, the data and map give us a lower bound on IPv4 address utilization.
That explains why places like the US-DoD are big black holes on the map.
It is unfortunate that dollars obtained from stupid people are just as green and spend just as well as money obtained from those who make intelligent purchasing decisions.
Australia phased out green money (the $2 note) in 1988. Maybe that's why we're having such difficulties with Carbon Credits and the Green Economy.
I dunno, it could be a great source of material for the Darwin Awards.
Your V-22 video was an unfortunate example. The V-22/XV-15/BA-609 tilt rotor platform is generally stable and easily controlled, ala this video.
Moore and his colleagues ... named their craft the Puffin because "if you've ever seen a puffin on the ground, it looks very awkward, with wings too small to fly, and that's exactly what our vehicle looks like," he explains. "But it's also apparently called the most environmentally friendly bird, because it hides its poop, and we're environmentally friendly because we have essentially no emissions.
Yeah, environmentally friendly except for that nasty lithium stuff in the lithium phosphate batteries.
I can't help but wonder what the glide slope on this thing is like - with those small wings, how quickly will it hit the ground if it runs out of power.
AV-sync is still an issue for modern containers, like MKV, it's just that most GUI front ends automatically handle the parameters when encoding for you - command line pilots still need a calculator.
The biggest drawbacks of the dinosaur AVI container format include: it doesn't support chapters (ah, the hacks in Encarta to work around that); it doesn't support included subtitle streams; it doesn't support alternative video tracks; it doesn't support alternative audio tracks. Heck, in it's 1.0 version it didn't even support multi-gigabyte files. I'm all for covering it with another shovel-full of dirt.
If killing-off support for the AVI container means a few casualties like DivX/XviD codecs (and it doesn't, except for embedded solutions that don't have firmware upgrade paths) there'll be no tears here - there have been much better quality and higher efficiency codecs to replace them for a number of years.
I don't think 1 or 2 will be as big an issue as you think.
Buying On2 so that Google can get access to the VP7 and VP8 codecs isn't going to be a magic pill that transforms YouTube overnight - they've still got a whole bunch of video content in VP3 and MP4/H.264 format and it's only going to decrease in quality if they try to transcode it to VP7/8. What you'll likely see is new videos getting encoded in VP7/8 as they're uploaded and fallback to VP3/H.264 transcodings as required by end-user's codec installations.
Of course, Google being Google, it's possible that they'll just open source the VP7/8 codecs after some period of time (they'll likely want to cash-in on some of the royalties for 12 or 18 months first) and then VP7/8 codecs will be available for all sorts of embedded applications (smart phones, media centers, etc.) in addition to desktop computers.
This may happen more quickly than 12-18 months if Google wants to use VP7/8 as the default codec on Android, allowing smoother video playback over 3G networks.
None of this will make On2 shareholders any happier - they already feel they're getting shafted with the Google offer equating to about 60c/share.
When you spawn a separate process, you are acquiring a memory space that is separate and distinct. This makes it so that the process will only lock / kill itself.
Ah, you must be new to this whole programming thing. Even separate processes can block on semaphores and shared memory.
A 3-pack of good-quality CFLs costs about $6 at Wal-Mart. Still about 3x the cost of the same number of incandescents, although the CFLs last a lot longer, and use sufficiently less energy to pay for themselves over their lifetime
As good little consumers I know that's what we're supposed to think, but:
1. my experience has shown that CCFL's need replacing much more frequently than incandescents ever did.
2. they only consume less energy if they're left on for long periods (> 30 mins or so) as they have quite high start-up currents until they come up to operating temperature (1-5 minutes).
3. they output much higher levels of UV than incandescents, aggravating some skin conditions and causing retinal damage with some people.
4. they also contain hazardous chemicals such as mercury, complicating their disposal - our local city council has no *legal* means of CFL disposal yet, with most people just throwing them in with the regular refuse.
I think that our (Australian) federal government having "phased out" incandescent bulbs is a premature action. I'd rather see LED lighting get traction but, again, hazardous chemicals.
Sounds like they've been sabotaged.
We've seen this story before. Even has some of the same pictures. http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/29/1516231
Funny, I'd have thought that the take-home lesson from your experiences with ReiserFS would not have been "don't use the undelete function"... it should have been "back your crap up so you don't need to use undelete."
We've been using Dymo LabelWriters (both 300 and 400 series) under Windows and Linux for printing oil sample labels for quite some time now. Even in a workshop environment they seem quite reliable. I'm not a big fan of the printer drivers under Windows (they're prone to causing exceptions in .NET land for random reasons), but the CUPS drivers under Linux seem fine.
That's only a reasonable indicator if the two copies of the same image you are comparing are also the same resolution. It's not hard to have a higher resolution image consume less disk space if the compression level has been bumped up. Also, different programs usually produce different JFIF streams even when set to the same compression level and using the same *uncompressed* source image, making the DCT size approach even less reliable.
This is a feature. If there is no mouse input to a window, Windows decides that it is a background process and assigns it a low priority so that it does not disrupt the performance of interactive tasks.
Windows doesn't actively change the priority of running tasks. The priority is generally set to "Normal" whenever a new process starts and then can be changed by the running process itself, or by the process when it starts new threads, or as you noted by way of the Windows Task Manager tray applet.
The problem in the Domino case was traced to stupid event-driven code in the Win16-based setup executable. Moving the mouse around generated more events to be fired at the main window's event handler and thus caused the time between file-copy operations to be reduced.
Too boring, already been done: New Zealand man builds cruise missile in his garage.
Lotus Domino server installations (circa 2000) would complete at about four to five times their "normal" speed if someone just sat there moving the mouse around whilst the install wizard was copying files. Go figure.
I didn't finish reading the article, but I hope one of their proposed solutions was to fire the incompetent people who can't deliver on-time or within budget.
You probably should have finished reading the article. How I read it was that the contractors responsible for building the new (and SiRF-III upgraded) satellites (ie: Boeing) have been letting go of the people with the necessary knowledge to stay on-schedule with their commitments because they've too busy buying and merging with other companies instead.
Free versions of things help to bring you to your audience. It's more likely to increase sales rather than hinder them - more people will be exposed to your book than would otherwise have been the case. If they don't buy this one at least they know you're there and what you're on about, and that makes them more likely to purchase your next one. It's advertising that you don't have to pay for.
If this wasn't the case then why do software companies, and game companies in particular, routinely release free "demos" of their products before the final "pay for this" release?
Hate to through a conspiracy theory amongst the pigeons, but the bill (http://assembly.state.ny.us/leg/?bn=A02455) proposes taxes on "video and DVD movies" - there's no mention of Blu-Ray. Encouraged upgrades, anyone?
Seriously though, if the real intent of this bill is to reduce childhood obesity then the taxes should be applied to childhood things: snacks for kids; G-rated movies, videos, DVD and Blu-Ray titles; *INDOOR TOYS* and the like.
The cost of anti-virus software is not the problem - there's plenty of free anti-virus alternatives in the market already, some of them much better IMNSHO than the paid-for offerings. If cost was the problem, everyone would be using free anti-virus software. And yet, there are still computers with no anti-virus software on them.
I think that many (corporate, in particular) anti-virus solutions are overly greedy on their CPU and memory usage. People notice this on their machines at work, or hear about it from friends and think, "my home computer's slow enough already, I'm not putting that crap onto it."
Content Control/Filtering solutions are also a desirable piece of software to have on home PC's. And yet when the Australian Government tried to give away NetNanny to anyone who wanted it, not a single person took them up on their offer. Not one. I don't know whether that says anything about NetNanny, or whether it shows that people don't trust "free" things from the government, but it must mean something.
Hate to tell you this, but images are less a part of the HTML format than script - whilst script blocks can be embedded amongst the HTML code, images can only be referenced from HTML.
Images are, in fact, a security risk - there are known JPEG image exploits, for example. All major browsers I've ever used also have the ability to disable loading images. If I turn off images am I protecting myself or creating an unauthorized derivative work through contributory copyright infringement? What if I'm using a text-only browser, like Lynx? What if I'm blind and am using a text-to-speech browser?
People have a choice in how they browse the internet. It's their right to choose. If they want to turn-off script and ads that's their choice, not yours and not the web pages author's. Putting site-specific rules on top of that is no different.
If you want to push he contributory copyright infringement argument I'd suggest that you start talking to the governments of a number of countries that are actively blocking content "on behalf of their citizens," such as China, United Kingdom and Australia.