He also failed to take marketing fully into account. There was always the need for doublethink in 1984. Back in the real world, it turns out that it's quite easy to persuade most of the population that having Big Brother watching them is a good thing.
There's a difference between information uploaded somewhere and made publicly available, and information provided to a specific service. If I put something on a public web site that anyone can access, then it no longer counts as private information. If someone gives out my email address (or postal address) to an 'invite your friends' type form, or tags a photograph of me that's been uploaded and shared between friends, then that's still private information.
This will mostly affect Google because things like information about which link I click on in the search results are private information (if they are stored in any form other than aggregate data).
Uh, what? EU directives absolutely do affect UK law. The ECHR is completely irrelevant to this, because it is from the Council of Europe, which has nothing to do with the EU. Your argument makes as much sense as saying that the fact that the USA PATRIOT Act doesn't apply in the UK is evidence that EU laws don't apply in the UK.
FreeBSD's ZFS is years behind what Illumos offers in features, and shows no signs of catching up.
FreeBSD 8-STABLE and 9-RELEASE contain ZFS v28, the same version of ZFS as OpenSolaris. iXSystems is now funding development, and it has seen quite a lot of bug fixes that have yet to be back-ported to any Solaris version.
the FreeBSD implementation is still dogged by performance issues. Any significant workload on ZFS is still marginal compared to, well, pretty much anything else (including, dare I say, NTFS on Windows).
I installed FreeBSD 9 BETA on a machine with three disks in a RAID-Z configuration and the only time the bottleneck for reading and writing to the array was not the GigE connection, was when I was writing to a compressed deduplicated filesystem. Then the CPU was the limit, at about 20-30MB/s. That's with a pretty anaemic CPU (1.6GHz AMD Fusion) and with WITNESS turned on in the kernel, which adds lots of extra error checking around kernel code and slows everything down.
I'm not sure what they did, but shutting down a VirtualBox VM on my new Mac seems to have about a 10% chance of causing a kernel panic. They've released three new versions since I got this machine, and none of them fixes this.
If they require different kernels, then you move one to an LPAR. You can, unless they were removed since I last used Solaris, use branded zones to run different kernel personalities in different zones, so one looks like Solaris 8, one looks like RedHat Linux, and one looks like Solaris 10 to anything in userspace.
Really than why don't they hate linux? After all as a linux admin my life was made hard by linux much more often than windows or Solaris
Some of us do. And if you think Linux makes your life difficult as an admin, spare a thought for developers. Poor standards compliance, convoluted APIs (e.g. no unified kernel event mechanism, unlike *BSD and Solaris), a massive overdose of NIH (e.g. OSS, which works everywhere and is a simple userland API, vs ALSA which only works on Linux and is a mess), and a deprecation-happy team that seems to delight in deprecating APIs as soon as you've started using them.
When things are light Linux may be more responsive, but I've found it gets bogged down when the going gets tough
I'm astonished at how bad Linux is under load. My former university's computer society has had to reboot their Linux server several times over the last couple of months because Apache + PHP managed to completely kill it with what was effectively a fork bomb (a little bit more complicated, lots of short-lived processes were being created). I thought that kind of thing didn't happen with modern operating systems. Even OS X hasn't been susceptible to that kind of thing since 10.5 (10.4 was pretty easy to kill).
So you seriously believe that if the studios released the films simultaneously to cinemas and on DVD, there would be no more piracy, and that it is only the intolerable burden of having to wait a couple of months for a DVD release that forces people to illegally download copies?
The studios invest a huge amount in marketing around the time of the cinema release. This creates a huge demand. A significant fraction of them won't go to the cinema. So they pirate (or, in my case, forget about the film by the time the DVD comes out, typically 8+ months later).
The studios can do what they want with their own product, it is up to them what order they release it in, not you or me
I almost agree, but this stops when they demand a time-limited monopoly (which is increasingly less time limited) on distribution in exchange for distributing their work, then don't distribute it, and when they request even more laws to protect their failing business models.
2^32 is not enough for everyone on the planet to have one IP address. If you're allocating/48s, then it's enough for everyone on the planet to have about fifty thousand/48 subnets. Or, to put it another way, it's enough for every building to have one/48 and still have sparse (and easily routable) routing tables. If every building has one/48, then you've got enough addresses for every component in every man-made artefact in the building to have its own IP address, without denting the address space. You've probably got enough addresses for every atom in the building to be individually addressable.
A typical rifle will fire a 0.0042 kg bullet at a speed of 965 m/s. The clipboard weighs 0.907 kg (more if it has paper on it, obviously). Assuming an elastic collision, conservation of momentum means that the clipboard will be travelling at a little under 4.5m/s immediately after impact (in the real world, it will be less). If it's held in your hands and are not completely limp wristed, then by the time it impacts with your face it will have significantly less kinetic energy than if someone took the clipboard and hit you in the face with it. Clipboards are very easy to obtain, yet are rarely used as offensive weapons, so I presume that this wouldn't hurt very much...
I have an HP TouchPad, which was also free. I use it to remotely control music and DVD playback, and I occasionally use it for light web browsing. The App Catalogue seems to be broken on it, or I'd be tempted to use it for RSS reading (it doesn't come with a built-in RSS reader, which is a bit of a WTF for something called WebOS). It's probably more use when travelling, as a portable media player. I think I'd use it a bit more if I had the TouchStone dock - having it sitting on a shelf displaying photos would mean that I'd bother to copy my photo collection to it, and then I'd use it, instead of a laptop, for showing people photos.
But, by and large, I think you're right. Tablets just don't do anything that laptops don't, and most of the stuff that they do, they do less well than a laptop. I mainly use mine via SSH, as it's the fastest ARM machine I have, and that's a pretty niche use case.
The problem with child porn laws is that they are always badly defined. Child abuse is fairly easy to define. Pictures of child abuse make you an accessory (or an accessory after the fact) to child abuse, so no extra laws are required. Child porn laws have covered:
Drawings of fictitious children in various settings (wanting got look at these may be a bit fucked up, but no children were harmed in the creation of them).
A photograph of a naked child in the bath taken by its parents (use your favourite search engine to find this one).
Pictures of consensual sex between people above the age of consent, create without the intent to distribute them.
Pictures of adults who look like they are under the age of consent
Pictures of children playing that someone thought might be arousing to someone else.
One of the cases the was on Slashdot a few weeks ago was a catholic priest. Some of the pictures he had were just photograph of (clothed) children with their crotches in the centre of the frame. These were counted as child porn (not to defend the individual in question - there was also evidence that he was molesting the children, but focussing on the pictures rather than the molestation seems wrong).
And renting the DVD is even cheaper. I pay less for an all-I-can-watch, 2 disks at home at once (becoming 3 next week for the same price) rental subscription as I'd pay for going to the cinema twice a month. I spent about £100 on my 5.1 speakers ten years ago, and about £150 on my projector four years ago. I can watch films on a comfy sofa with whatever food or drink I want and pause it when I want. If I want to watch a film with someone else, it costs the same amount, while going to the cinema will cost twice as much.
The studios delay the DVD releases because they will cannibalise cinema profits. They don't seem to understand that this means that, given the choice, people would rather watch the DVD than go to the cinema. In any sane business, this would mean that they'd release the DVD first, giving their customers what they want. Instead, they intentionally don't give customers what they want and then blame piracy for their profits being lower than they want.
Yes they are. The President can veto any legislation. There are - intentionally - no limits on what he is allowed to veto because the US government was created to make passing laws hard to avoid too much Federal control (that went well...). That is about his only official power, aside from being able to negotiate (but not ratify) treaties and command the armed forces. Unofficially, he can negotiate with the legislature, saying that he won't veto something he doesn't like if something he does like is passed.
Fsck is a subset of scrub. Scrub checks and repairs the metadata and the data. It doesn't just verify at the block level, it verifies all of the data structures. Fsck checks and repairs the metadata. Well, normally it does, fsck for btrfs just checks it and then says 'sorry, your filesytem is broken. Sucks to be you.'
If it takes more than two button presses, or requires her to stop talking, she won't do it.
It's not much more than that to send a picture via bluetooth on my phone. From the menu when the picture is visible, you select send, then via bluetooth. It pops up a list of all bluetooth devices it can see, and then lets you select the one you want. So, probably seven or eight button presses, but most of those are selecting menu items.
Tablets are currently expensive, but they're getting cheaper. My mother has a first-generation digital photo frame. It only does 640x480, but images on it look reasonable and the display is about the same size as a print photo. It cost about £40, several years ago. Colour eInk is likely to make a big difference in this market, because you'll be able to make battery powered digital photo frames that only use power when changing the photo that's displayed.
The big screen isn't the only place to display them, it's the equivalent of a slide projector, not the equivalent of a tiny printout from a camera. A tablet has a bigger screen than the pictures this thing prints, and even the kind of crappy $100 ARM11 Android tablets that you can buy right at the bottom of the market are fine for displaying photos. For the price of this camera, you can buy a couple of them to display the photos from your phone, and they'll each have enough storage space to store many albums worth of pictures.
How important is the instant photo now though? I take a picture on my mobile phone, and I can show it to people instantly on the screen. I can send a copy of it to any bluetooth enabled phone nearby if they want a copy (can this camera print multiple copies? That's something the original polaroids lacked). For sharing later, I can put them online. The advantage of instant prints went away with cameras with built-in displays.
I have heard that the most important factor is having worked with a Nobel laureate before grad school
With someone who had already won a Nobel, or with someone who would later win one? I'd expect the latter to be a better correlation. If you're working at the forefront of a field before it is recognised as important, then there is a good chance that when you go on to do independent work you will continue to do so.
It's worth noting that Nobels are not just for making significant contributions, they also tend to be for contributions in new branches of the field. Often the Nobel winner doesn't do the most interesting work in a field, he's the one that first recognises that an area is worth researching and directs others towards it.
Most of the work Einstein is famous for was not getting the right answers, it was asking the right questions. A high-school student can reproduce all of the work he did on special relativity and the photoelectric effect and a university student should be able to recreate the work on general relativity. The clever bit was spotting the gaps in our understanding and posing questions that led to the answers.
This is the problem that companies like Google have. Their hiring process gets them a lot of problem solvers, but problem solving is not a particularly rare skill. The more useful skill is identifying the problems that are worth solving.
Slashdot Mirror
He also failed to take marketing fully into account. There was always the need for doublethink in 1984. Back in the real world, it turns out that it's quite easy to persuade most of the population that having Big Brother watching them is a good thing.
There's a difference between information uploaded somewhere and made publicly available, and information provided to a specific service. If I put something on a public web site that anyone can access, then it no longer counts as private information. If someone gives out my email address (or postal address) to an 'invite your friends' type form, or tags a photograph of me that's been uploaded and shared between friends, then that's still private information.
This will mostly affect Google because things like information about which link I click on in the search results are private information (if they are stored in any form other than aggregate data).
Uh, what? EU directives absolutely do affect UK law. The ECHR is completely irrelevant to this, because it is from the Council of Europe, which has nothing to do with the EU. Your argument makes as much sense as saying that the fact that the USA PATRIOT Act doesn't apply in the UK is evidence that EU laws don't apply in the UK.
FreeBSD's ZFS is years behind what Illumos offers in features, and shows no signs of catching up.
FreeBSD 8-STABLE and 9-RELEASE contain ZFS v28, the same version of ZFS as OpenSolaris. iXSystems is now funding development, and it has seen quite a lot of bug fixes that have yet to be back-ported to any Solaris version.
the FreeBSD implementation is still dogged by performance issues. Any significant workload on ZFS is still marginal compared to, well, pretty much anything else (including, dare I say, NTFS on Windows).
I installed FreeBSD 9 BETA on a machine with three disks in a RAID-Z configuration and the only time the bottleneck for reading and writing to the array was not the GigE connection, was when I was writing to a compressed deduplicated filesystem. Then the CPU was the limit, at about 20-30MB/s. That's with a pretty anaemic CPU (1.6GHz AMD Fusion) and with WITNESS turned on in the kernel, which adds lots of extra error checking around kernel code and slows everything down.
I'm not sure what they did, but shutting down a VirtualBox VM on my new Mac seems to have about a 10% chance of causing a kernel panic. They've released three new versions since I got this machine, and none of them fixes this.
If they require different kernels, then you move one to an LPAR. You can, unless they were removed since I last used Solaris, use branded zones to run different kernel personalities in different zones, so one looks like Solaris 8, one looks like RedHat Linux, and one looks like Solaris 10 to anything in userspace.
Really than why don't they hate linux? After all as a linux admin my life was made hard by linux much more often than windows or Solaris
Some of us do. And if you think Linux makes your life difficult as an admin, spare a thought for developers. Poor standards compliance, convoluted APIs (e.g. no unified kernel event mechanism, unlike *BSD and Solaris), a massive overdose of NIH (e.g. OSS, which works everywhere and is a simple userland API, vs ALSA which only works on Linux and is a mess), and a deprecation-happy team that seems to delight in deprecating APIs as soon as you've started using them.
When things are light Linux may be more responsive, but I've found it gets bogged down when the going gets tough
I'm astonished at how bad Linux is under load. My former university's computer society has had to reboot their Linux server several times over the last couple of months because Apache + PHP managed to completely kill it with what was effectively a fork bomb (a little bit more complicated, lots of short-lived processes were being created). I thought that kind of thing didn't happen with modern operating systems. Even OS X hasn't been susceptible to that kind of thing since 10.5 (10.4 was pretty easy to kill).
So you seriously believe that if the studios released the films simultaneously to cinemas and on DVD, there would be no more piracy, and that it is only the intolerable burden of having to wait a couple of months for a DVD release that forces people to illegally download copies?
The studios invest a huge amount in marketing around the time of the cinema release. This creates a huge demand. A significant fraction of them won't go to the cinema. So they pirate (or, in my case, forget about the film by the time the DVD comes out, typically 8+ months later).
The studios can do what they want with their own product, it is up to them what order they release it in, not you or me
I almost agree, but this stops when they demand a time-limited monopoly (which is increasingly less time limited) on distribution in exchange for distributing their work, then don't distribute it, and when they request even more laws to protect their failing business models.
2^32 is not enough for everyone on the planet to have one IP address. If you're allocating /48s, then it's enough for everyone on the planet to have about fifty thousand /48 subnets. Or, to put it another way, it's enough for every building to have one /48 and still have sparse (and easily routable) routing tables. If every building has one /48, then you've got enough addresses for every component in every man-made artefact in the building to have its own IP address, without denting the address space. You've probably got enough addresses for every atom in the building to be individually addressable.
A typical rifle will fire a 0.0042 kg bullet at a speed of 965 m/s. The clipboard weighs 0.907 kg (more if it has paper on it, obviously). Assuming an elastic collision, conservation of momentum means that the clipboard will be travelling at a little under 4.5m/s immediately after impact (in the real world, it will be less). If it's held in your hands and are not completely limp wristed, then by the time it impacts with your face it will have significantly less kinetic energy than if someone took the clipboard and hit you in the face with it. Clipboards are very easy to obtain, yet are rarely used as offensive weapons, so I presume that this wouldn't hurt very much...
I'm sure mobile networks will be happy to charge an extra $1/MB for data to any site resolved via a .xxx domain name lookup...
I have an HP TouchPad, which was also free. I use it to remotely control music and DVD playback, and I occasionally use it for light web browsing. The App Catalogue seems to be broken on it, or I'd be tempted to use it for RSS reading (it doesn't come with a built-in RSS reader, which is a bit of a WTF for something called WebOS). It's probably more use when travelling, as a portable media player. I think I'd use it a bit more if I had the TouchStone dock - having it sitting on a shelf displaying photos would mean that I'd bother to copy my photo collection to it, and then I'd use it, instead of a laptop, for showing people photos.
But, by and large, I think you're right. Tablets just don't do anything that laptops don't, and most of the stuff that they do, they do less well than a laptop. I mainly use mine via SSH, as it's the fastest ARM machine I have, and that's a pretty niche use case.
One of the cases the was on Slashdot a few weeks ago was a catholic priest. Some of the pictures he had were just photograph of (clothed) children with their crotches in the centre of the frame. These were counted as child porn (not to defend the individual in question - there was also evidence that he was molesting the children, but focussing on the pictures rather than the molestation seems wrong).
And renting the DVD is even cheaper. I pay less for an all-I-can-watch, 2 disks at home at once (becoming 3 next week for the same price) rental subscription as I'd pay for going to the cinema twice a month. I spent about £100 on my 5.1 speakers ten years ago, and about £150 on my projector four years ago. I can watch films on a comfy sofa with whatever food or drink I want and pause it when I want. If I want to watch a film with someone else, it costs the same amount, while going to the cinema will cost twice as much.
The studios delay the DVD releases because they will cannibalise cinema profits. They don't seem to understand that this means that, given the choice, people would rather watch the DVD than go to the cinema. In any sane business, this would mean that they'd release the DVD first, giving their customers what they want. Instead, they intentionally don't give customers what they want and then blame piracy for their profits being lower than they want.
Interesting. When the BBC carried this story it said 'every week'. I wonder which one is accurate...
Yes they are. The President can veto any legislation. There are - intentionally - no limits on what he is allowed to veto because the US government was created to make passing laws hard to avoid too much Federal control (that went well...). That is about his only official power, aside from being able to negotiate (but not ratify) treaties and command the armed forces. Unofficially, he can negotiate with the legislature, saying that he won't veto something he doesn't like if something he does like is passed.
Though Sarkozy, we do actually really hate him, just not France in general.
No, we mildly dislike him. You need to talk to French people to find someone who really hates him...
Fsck is a subset of scrub. Scrub checks and repairs the metadata and the data. It doesn't just verify at the block level, it verifies all of the data structures. Fsck checks and repairs the metadata. Well, normally it does, fsck for btrfs just checks it and then says 'sorry, your filesytem is broken. Sucks to be you.'
If it takes more than two button presses, or requires her to stop talking, she won't do it.
It's not much more than that to send a picture via bluetooth on my phone. From the menu when the picture is visible, you select send, then via bluetooth. It pops up a list of all bluetooth devices it can see, and then lets you select the one you want. So, probably seven or eight button presses, but most of those are selecting menu items.
Tablets are currently expensive, but they're getting cheaper. My mother has a first-generation digital photo frame. It only does 640x480, but images on it look reasonable and the display is about the same size as a print photo. It cost about £40, several years ago. Colour eInk is likely to make a big difference in this market, because you'll be able to make battery powered digital photo frames that only use power when changing the photo that's displayed.
The big screen isn't the only place to display them, it's the equivalent of a slide projector, not the equivalent of a tiny printout from a camera. A tablet has a bigger screen than the pictures this thing prints, and even the kind of crappy $100 ARM11 Android tablets that you can buy right at the bottom of the market are fine for displaying photos. For the price of this camera, you can buy a couple of them to display the photos from your phone, and they'll each have enough storage space to store many albums worth of pictures.
How important is the instant photo now though? I take a picture on my mobile phone, and I can show it to people instantly on the screen. I can send a copy of it to any bluetooth enabled phone nearby if they want a copy (can this camera print multiple copies? That's something the original polaroids lacked). For sharing later, I can put them online. The advantage of instant prints went away with cameras with built-in displays.
You realise that the president has veto powers already, right?
I have heard that the most important factor is having worked with a Nobel laureate before grad school
With someone who had already won a Nobel, or with someone who would later win one? I'd expect the latter to be a better correlation. If you're working at the forefront of a field before it is recognised as important, then there is a good chance that when you go on to do independent work you will continue to do so.
It's worth noting that Nobels are not just for making significant contributions, they also tend to be for contributions in new branches of the field. Often the Nobel winner doesn't do the most interesting work in a field, he's the one that first recognises that an area is worth researching and directs others towards it.
Most of the work Einstein is famous for was not getting the right answers, it was asking the right questions. A high-school student can reproduce all of the work he did on special relativity and the photoelectric effect and a university student should be able to recreate the work on general relativity. The clever bit was spotting the gaps in our understanding and posing questions that led to the answers.
This is the problem that companies like Google have. Their hiring process gets them a lot of problem solvers, but problem solving is not a particularly rare skill. The more useful skill is identifying the problems that are worth solving.
Only if the farmer hires a large private militia, otherwise the libertarian approach is for the local warlord to take it all.