I'm happy enough if not a human but a robot boldly goes where no human|robot has gone before, and I suspect the robot will do a better job, cost one fifth as much, and happen twenty years sooner.
Well, if history is any indication, it'll never happen without a manned space program. Nations that don't have a manned space program (e.g. the EU) also spend less on unmanned missions, and the greatest unmanned US missions were initiated and funded during the Apollo era, when spendings for manned space exploration were also the highest. Manned space exploration inspires the public. Even STS does. Without such a program, the giant funds for unmanned missions that are supposed to be freed because of all the saved money will never materialize.
At 2:00 it looks like there are new wavefronts being generated far below the craft. Reflections from the ground? Can't think of any really good explanation.
* Write new config file to a temporary file
* Rename the temporary file over the top of the old config file
This way if the computer crashes, applications expect the config file to always be valid. i.e. they expect the data to have been written to disk, completely, before the rename happens.
I would say they expect the data to be written to the VFS layer with intact happens-before relations, so the later rename renames the complete new file contents. Whether or not anything is physically written to the disk in the process is of no concern -- if the whole writing and renaming happens in the cache only, that should be just fine.
Forgive me that I'm a layperson who didn't RTFA, but this story makes me wonder how they actually arrive at these astronomically low probabilities that the DNA profiles of two different people are accidentally identical? They wouldn't just include some random base pairs in the profiles and then calculate the probability as p=(1/4)^(number of base pairs), which would not account for the fact that 99.xxx percent of all base pairs are identical in all humans... would they? I was always assuming that, given that scientists who know what they're doing should have invented this test, there was some sophisticated process that would ensure that they would somehow only choose base pairs from the subset that was actually different in different individuals (and, more specifically, where each of A,C,G and T would have a 0.25 probability of occuring). I'm still relatively confident that something like this takes place, but sometimes you can be just astonished at how stupid people can be...
Did you just say that installing software and restarting server processes should not be considered to be "admin-only" things?
Yes, I did just say that.
Security includes being secure from unauthorized changes to the system.
Right. And one way to ensure that is to not install or run server processes system-wide, or with admin privileges. A good piece of software should be installable and runnable without admin privileges.
Developers DO need full admin rights on their dev boxes. You *really* don't want to be bothering the admin teams with "hey I need to restart IIS and/or reboot my machine" every 15 minutes if you're troubleshooting something.
Why would you need admin rights to restart IIS? I did Enterprise Java/J2EE development on SunRay X11 terminals for some years, never had admin rights on the connected server (X11 client) machines, and still regularly restarted and even installed and updated complete multi-tier Application servers, of which the web server was only a small part, in my home directory...
Now I wouldn't say that that was an ideal development environment, but I rarely missed admin rights. In fact, if you think about it, there aren't many things that are intrinsically "admin-only". Installing software or restarting server processes should not be one of those things.
The difference is that the Gnash developers do not promote Flash as a platform for new software to be developed. In fact, they actively discourage any such ideas with passion, because developing new Flash apps would unnecessarily deepen the OSS community's dependence on a proprietary platform. Gnash is clearly a band-aid, a piece of software that exists purely for the purpose of enabling interoperability with existing Flash apps. The Mono people, OTOH, would like to see the whole OSS community switch to a partly proprietary development platform without there being any real reason to do so, thereby increasing the appeal and the legitimacy of the original, proprietary implementation of said platform.
The president in Germany is absolutely NOT comparable to the president in the US. The German president isn't even elected by the people (but by the parliament), and he's neither a part of the government nor a member of the parliament. He is NOT elected in a general election, which is comparable to the US presidential elections, takes place every four years, and elects a new government (not quite, but that's a different issue...). Thus it kind of makes sense that the president has no political power. The german equivalent to the US president would be the chancellor, who heads the government. Allowing the president to veto a law based on his political opinions would be like choosing random guy X from the population and give him the ultimate decision on a law that's already passed parliament.
So collecting data is ok, but it's forbidden to run certain algorithms on the collected data?
No. It's forbidden to send the data to a 3rd party like Google without the website vistor's consent. Which is what a website operator using Google Analytics apparently does.
Yes, both Netbeans and Eclipse are also RCP platforms, but how many real Netbeans platform apps are there?
Well, with Eclipse, the IDE is pretty good, but the RCP platform -- not so much. It's quite obvious that this thing was designed to write Eclipse (IDE) plugins. For writing standalone applications, the whole approach seems overengineered. OSGI doesn't buy you much in that context, and one doesn't want to turn every small standalone app into a kind of mini-Eclipse, with simple things like command shortcuts and editor selection synchronizations being handled by 5 plugins interacting in complex ways. And then the whole SWT/native-UI-toolkit thing is bound to bite you at some point, e.g. if you're trying to have a table control with varying row heights, for God's sake.
Haven't there been designs in which the upper stage is ignited before the separation? Wouldn't that stabilize the flight path of the upper stage? Would it be possible to fire the RCS of the upper stage backwards to achieve a similar effect?
Instead they rely on their publications to speak for their views instead of a label with baggage.
Well, on their web site's header they apparently rely on a lot of dead people to speak for their views. The undeniable advantage of that is that dead people can no longer answer back, so you can quite easily add authority to an anti-net-neutrality article by associating yourself with Ben Franklin, even though nobody will ever know what the man would've had to say about the issue:-P
The plane did not vaporize. Nobody ever claimed it did (except, apparently, you and a few other people who got their basic facts totally wrong). It was certainly destroyed. That, of course, does not mean that the passport of a person sitting in the cockpit (i.e., the front) of the plane couldn't have been hurled out the front of the plane and fallen onto the street without being destroyed. If it had been the other way round -- i.e. if the passport had been incinerated and the plane had been hurled out of the front of the building undamaged, then you would have good reason to believe that there was something fishy with that story.
That is a very different case. I am well aware that Microsoft can not be trusted when they say they will play nice. My point is that they are predictable in there own selfish actions.
So what do you pretend Microsoft would do if Mono became a real competitor, one that everybody would perceive as being essentially equal to Microsoft's.NET implementation, with the added bonus that it ran on many more platforms? What do you think Microsoft's "selfish actions" would be in that case?
Microsoft knows that killing or even just attacking Mono would result in a exodus from.NET. Less coders means less programs means less reasons to use Windows.
Yeah, for now. And in the above scenario, Microsoft would know that not killing Mono would result in an exodus from Microsoft's.NET and, therefore, Windows. Less coders means less (Windows-Only) programs means less reasons to use Windows.
But it might be economically non-viable. In many ways the Linux desktop and free software stack is better than the version you can get from Microsoft or Apple. For 80% of the users it can do everything they need.
...except copy & paste.
Oh, and dependable sound output, maybe even when using more than one sound-producing program at the same time.
Right. It is natural if you want to use it to turn the monitor into a simulated physical window to an outside world, such that e.g. if you get close to the monitor/"window", you see a bigger section (in terms of angular size) of the outside, or if you look at the "window" from the side, the view changes accordingly. If you want to have great panoramic viewing ability as well, just as you would have e.g. below the canopy of a fighter aircraft, you would indeed have to surround yourself with simulated windows, i.e. combine the many-monitors idea with a head tracker. Unless you use a full VR setup to begin with, of course.
I'm sure the Windows kernel also provides a hardware-independent API for accessing webcams, and webcam drivers written by webcam manufacturers are backends to this API. Otherwise there couldn't be software like Skype that can use any installed webcam. The software that allows you to stick a virtual beard on yourself should be separated from the driver software; you will only have to install the latter to get the camera to work.
Also, it's probably a fact of life that hardware manufacturers won't always provide a spec for their hardware. You could say that they should to that, but then you could also say that the Linux manufacturers should provide a spec for their software, i.e. a stable API/ABI. The reasons for not doing that may even be similar in both cases: It takes additional effort to write and maintain such a spec, and it may make it harder to later change and improve the hardware/software that's described by the spec. The hardware manufacturer's point of view may be that the hardware-independent hardware access API provided by the OS should be thought of as the "spec" for the hardware.
I'm sure it'll still run the damn Flash plugin in-process, making "kill" the most frequent way to quit Firefox. But it'll have tabs-on-top. Talk about priorities!
TYPICAL GERMAN politics, come up with a screwy law, and make it even more screwy! So I guess what I can take from this is that child porn is ok to see at a university, but not a corporation or large ISP... Yeah that makes sense, really does...
I guess they introduced these exceptions because implementing the censorship infrastructure on the ISP side takes a great deal of time & money. Obviously only big ISPs can afford that;)
Maybe they did it because their totally secret list of sites to be blocked would no longer be secret enough if nerdy admins of 100-customers ISPs as well as unwashed leftist University datacenter operators would get to see it.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if history is any indication, it'll never happen without a manned space program. Nations that don't have a manned space program (e.g. the EU) also spend less on unmanned missions, and the greatest unmanned US missions were initiated and funded during the Apollo era, when spendings for manned space exploration were also the highest. Manned space exploration inspires the public. Even STS does. Without such a program, the giant funds for unmanned missions that are supposed to be freed because of all the saved money will never materialize.
..or maybe those are waves that are much nearer to the camera.
At 2:00 it looks like there are new wavefronts being generated far below the craft. Reflections from the ground? Can't think of any really good explanation.
I would say they expect the data to be written to the VFS layer with intact happens-before relations, so the later rename renames the complete new file contents. Whether or not anything is physically written to the disk in the process is of no concern -- if the whole writing and renaming happens in the cache only, that should be just fine.
Forgive me that I'm a layperson who didn't RTFA, but this story makes me wonder how they actually arrive at these astronomically low probabilities that the DNA profiles of two different people are accidentally identical? They wouldn't just include some random base pairs in the profiles and then calculate the probability as p=(1/4)^(number of base pairs), which would not account for the fact that 99.xxx percent of all base pairs are identical in all humans... would they? I was always assuming that, given that scientists who know what they're doing should have invented this test, there was some sophisticated process that would ensure that they would somehow only choose base pairs from the subset that was actually different in different individuals (and, more specifically, where each of A,C,G and T would have a 0.25 probability of occuring). I'm still relatively confident that something like this takes place, but sometimes you can be just astonished at how stupid people can be...
Did you just say that installing software and restarting server processes should not be considered to be "admin-only" things?
Yes, I did just say that.
Security includes being secure from unauthorized changes to the system.
Right. And one way to ensure that is to not install or run server processes system-wide, or with admin privileges. A good piece of software should be installable and runnable without admin privileges.
Developers DO need full admin rights on their dev boxes. You *really* don't want to be bothering the admin teams with "hey I need to restart IIS and/or reboot my machine" every 15 minutes if you're troubleshooting something.
Why would you need admin rights to restart IIS? I did Enterprise Java/J2EE development on SunRay X11 terminals for some years, never had admin rights on the connected server (X11 client) machines, and still regularly restarted and even installed and updated complete multi-tier Application servers, of which the web server was only a small part, in my home directory... Now I wouldn't say that that was an ideal development environment, but I rarely missed admin rights. In fact, if you think about it, there aren't many things that are intrinsically "admin-only". Installing software or restarting server processes should not be one of those things.
You should do away with that ENTER key first. Hitting it is equivalent to typing 1010 anyway. Maybe there is a keyboard macro for that.
The difference is that the Gnash developers do not promote Flash as a platform for new software to be developed. In fact, they actively discourage any such ideas with passion, because developing new Flash apps would unnecessarily deepen the OSS community's dependence on a proprietary platform. Gnash is clearly a band-aid, a piece of software that exists purely for the purpose of enabling interoperability with existing Flash apps. The Mono people, OTOH, would like to see the whole OSS community switch to a partly proprietary development platform without there being any real reason to do so, thereby increasing the appeal and the legitimacy of the original, proprietary implementation of said platform.
The president in Germany is absolutely NOT comparable to the president in the US. The German president isn't even elected by the people (but by the parliament), and he's neither a part of the government nor a member of the parliament. He is NOT elected in a general election, which is comparable to the US presidential elections, takes place every four years, and elects a new government (not quite, but that's a different issue...). Thus it kind of makes sense that the president has no political power. The german equivalent to the US president would be the chancellor, who heads the government. Allowing the president to veto a law based on his political opinions would be like choosing random guy X from the population and give him the ultimate decision on a law that's already passed parliament.
So collecting data is ok, but it's forbidden to run certain algorithms on the collected data?
No. It's forbidden to send the data to a 3rd party like Google without the website vistor's consent. Which is what a website operator using Google Analytics apparently does.
Fox News (along with the rest of the mainstream media...CNN, MSNBC, etc.) exists SOLELY to sell ads and opinions, not the news.
Why would they want to sell opinions more than information (i.e. news), especially if the latter is what (most of) their listeners want?
Yes, both Netbeans and Eclipse are also RCP platforms, but how many real Netbeans platform apps are there?
Well, with Eclipse, the IDE is pretty good, but the RCP platform -- not so much. It's quite obvious that this thing was designed to write Eclipse (IDE) plugins. For writing standalone applications, the whole approach seems overengineered. OSGI doesn't buy you much in that context, and one doesn't want to turn every small standalone app into a kind of mini-Eclipse, with simple things like command shortcuts and editor selection synchronizations being handled by 5 plugins interacting in complex ways. And then the whole SWT/native-UI-toolkit thing is bound to bite you at some point, e.g. if you're trying to have a table control with varying row heights, for God's sake.
Haven't there been designs in which the upper stage is ignited before the separation? Wouldn't that stabilize the flight path of the upper stage? Would it be possible to fire the RCS of the upper stage backwards to achieve a similar effect?
Well, on their web site's header they apparently rely on a lot of dead people to speak for their views. The undeniable advantage of that is that dead people can no longer answer back, so you can quite easily add authority to an anti-net-neutrality article by associating yourself with Ben Franklin, even though nobody will ever know what the man would've had to say about the issue :-P
The plane did not vaporize. Nobody ever claimed it did (except, apparently, you and a few other people who got their basic facts totally wrong). It was certainly destroyed. That, of course, does not mean that the passport of a person sitting in the cockpit (i.e., the front) of the plane couldn't have been hurled out the front of the plane and fallen onto the street without being destroyed. If it had been the other way round -- i.e. if the passport had been incinerated and the plane had been hurled out of the front of the building undamaged, then you would have good reason to believe that there was something fishy with that story.
That is a very different case. I am well aware that Microsoft can not be trusted when they say they will play nice. My point is that they are predictable in there own selfish actions.
So what do you pretend Microsoft would do if Mono became a real competitor, one that everybody would perceive as being essentially equal to Microsoft's .NET implementation, with the added bonus that it ran on many more platforms? What do you think Microsoft's "selfish actions" would be in that case?
Microsoft knows that killing or even just attacking Mono would result in a exodus from .NET. Less coders means less programs means less reasons to use Windows.
Yeah, for now. And in the above scenario, Microsoft would know that not killing Mono would result in an exodus from Microsoft's .NET and, therefore, Windows. Less coders means less (Windows-Only) programs means less reasons to use Windows.
Oh, and dependable sound output, maybe even when using more than one sound-producing program at the same time.
Right. It is natural if you want to use it to turn the monitor into a simulated physical window to an outside world, such that e.g. if you get close to the monitor/"window", you see a bigger section (in terms of angular size) of the outside, or if you look at the "window" from the side, the view changes accordingly. If you want to have great panoramic viewing ability as well, just as you would have e.g. below the canopy of a fighter aircraft, you would indeed have to surround yourself with simulated windows, i.e. combine the many-monitors idea with a head tracker. Unless you use a full VR setup to begin with, of course.
Also, it's probably a fact of life that hardware manufacturers won't always provide a spec for their hardware. You could say that they should to that, but then you could also say that the Linux manufacturers should provide a spec for their software, i.e. a stable API/ABI. The reasons for not doing that may even be similar in both cases: It takes additional effort to write and maintain such a spec, and it may make it harder to later change and improve the hardware/software that's described by the spec. The hardware manufacturer's point of view may be that the hardware-independent hardware access API provided by the OS should be thought of as the "spec" for the hardware.
I'm sure it'll still run the damn Flash plugin in-process, making "kill" the most frequent way to quit Firefox. But it'll have tabs-on-top. Talk about priorities!
...looks like the outer "honeycombs" are bigger than the inner ones. Can somebody work out why? :-P
It all starts when you have something in your head and there is no other way to communicate it...
And what would be the evolutionary advantage in communicating it?
TYPICAL GERMAN politics, come up with a screwy law, and make it even more screwy! So I guess what I can take from this is that child porn is ok to see at a university, but not a corporation or large ISP... Yeah that makes sense, really does...
I guess they introduced these exceptions because implementing the censorship infrastructure on the ISP side takes a great deal of time & money. Obviously only big ISPs can afford that ;)
Maybe they did it because their totally secret list of sites to be blocked would no longer be secret enough if nerdy admins of 100-customers ISPs as well as unwashed leftist University datacenter operators would get to see it.