And once again AOL offers us another paid service any person can spend 15 minutes learning to get absolutely free and legal!
How is this different to almost any other consumer-level paid-for thing in computing? Lets see:
1. SkypeOut is a single closed service with vendor lockin. There are hundreds of SIP->PSTN gateways out there where you are *not* locked in and can get a better deal. However, many people still use Skype because of marketting and lazyness. I was talking to someone (who is Pro-open-standards) the other day who was telling his parents to use SkypeOut rather than a SIP service - the reasonsing was that because Skype is locked into a single vendor it's easier than deciding which vendor to use and endtering those login details into your SIP client. Yes, vendor lockin really does make the lazy people happy because someone else has already made their decisions for them.
2. Most people spend money on MS Office. Why? They can get OOo for free and it probably doesn't lack any features they want anyway.
3. People buy stuff like Windows Mediacentre - why? MythTV is free.
The list goes on, I'm afraid many people don't know or care enough to go for the cheaper alternative. Whoever has the best marketting will always take a big chunk of the market, no matter how bad the product compared to the competition.
Speaking as someone who receives all his television via DVB-T in the UK, I can say that I have zero interest in digital cable.
I think a more significant problem is DVB-S support. Speaking as someone who uses Myth with Sky by having an S-video connection between the sky decoder and the Myth box, I would far prefer to just stick a DVB-S card in my Myth system. There are currently 3 problems here:
1. Sky encrypt their channels using VideoGuard and won't produce a CAM to decrypt it. This ties you into using an official Sky branded decoder (which are also completely useless for picking up stuff not covered by Sky). There are 3rd party CAMs available which claim to decrypt VideoGuard but they are relatively expensive (~100ukp) and I suspect the EUCD renders them illegal. I've yet to find a SoftCAM that will work under Linux.
2. DVB-S cards with a common interface are still reasonably pricey compared with DVB-T cards and DVB-S cards which don't have a common interface. This is probably down to lack of demand caused by (1).
3. To record multiple programs at the same time would involve having multiple CAMs and multiple Sky subscriptions. Ideally what would be better is to either do the decoding on playback (like Sky+ does), or (better) do the decoding in a post-processing job much like the commflag and transcoding jobs.
which means that analogue PVR's like this won't work, period.
Well I'm not sure what the GP is smoking here, as you pointed out the PVR being discussed in the article is DVB-T (i.e. digital), however I use my MythTV box with a plain BT878 card in it to record the analogue S-video signal off my Sky box and it works just fine.
Until I can sit back and fire up a PC that displays the same interactive guide data I am currently getting in a proprietary cable box, I don't think these things will find any success.
Infact, I get _better_ guide data through my Myth box than I do through my Sky box. The Sky box gives me a week's worth with often very short descriptions, whereas the Myth box gives me 2 week's worth of listings (pulled from radio times). Additionally, having looked at the Sky+ feature set I'd say my Myth box is a hell of a lot more capable (especially when I hear my sky+ owning friends complain that they missed the first episode of the new series of $foo because sky+ doesn't automatically record it, whilest my Myth box noticed the new series had started and automatically scheduled in the recordings).
Find an empty road and try it, I dare you. Close your eyes and see how long it is before you hit the rumble strips. (And please, use a road with rumble strips!)
Awareness isn't just a boolean "aware / not aware" property - there are different levels of awareness. You can be aware enough to keep the car on the road but not aware enough to deal with a sudden change in the circumstances (you only have to look at accidents caused by very tired drivers to see this, you can drive for a long distance while tired but you won't be aware enough to deal with something unexpected).
Those can tell you if the driver is awake, but not if they are paying attention.
I'm not familiar with the devices in question, but I imagine it's fairly easy to tell if the driver is aware - when you're driving your eyes are constantly moving to scan the road for hazards. If you stop concentrating it's reasonable to think that you'll probably stop moving your eyes (so much) or at least the pattern of eye movement would change.
Fortunatly, someone driving a car has to pay attention fairly routinely just to stay in the lane and on the road, so 'awake == aware' (generally) in that situation.
I'm afraid I think you're probably wrong here - you don't have to really be paying a lot of attention to stay in a lane since most roads are pretty predictable - the road isn't going to change between the time you first saw it on the horizon and the time you get to that point. The real problem is that you can be driving along for a very long time whilest not really paying attention and then something you weren't expecting happens like the guy infront of you stamps on his brakes.
I think the fact that people can stay on the road whilest quite drunk is proof that staying in lane isn't a lot of effort - but drunk drivers can't deal with the unexpected.
I fail to see how making Microsoft sell their OS piece by piece somehow decreases their ability to keep a monopoly.
Having a monopoly isn't a problem if you're a monopoly because your product is the best (and thus everyone wants it). The problem is that this isn't the case - MS use their position to take advantage of people's lazyness.
When you get your computer it has Internet Explorer there as standard - what would motivate anyone to bother to install an alternative? I mean, it's effort. So you've already locked out any competing browser that isn't *significantly* better. How else do you explain the fact that 90% of people use Internet Explorer despite the fact that it's a pile of crap compared to the competition?
For the end user, the lack of competition isn't an immediate problem - the end user sees the bundling as a Good Thing since it gives them something "for free" (included in the cost) and means they don't have to expend any effort. However, in the long run the lack of competition makes the vendor complacent - why bother investing in improving a piece of software that has no competition? And so in the end the bundled piece of software stagnates.
Now I could be wrong, but last time I checked every OS comes with a Media Player.
Yeah, but unlike Windows, every other OS is not a monopoly! The rules about bundling are different for monopolies and non-monopolies, which is why it's illegal for Microsoft but legal for everyone else.
It's also worth remembering that the various Linux distros usually come with more than one media player, _and_ (this is the important bit) those media players aren't owned by the people who decided to distribute them, nor are the people who own the code required to pay vast amounts of money to have their software bundled with a distro.
I.e. the bundled software is chosen on merit rather than because: 1. It's owned by the distributor and they want to force it into more of the market 2. The owner is paying a shed load of money to have it distributed 3. It'll put someone else out of business
If MS made it as easy to run everyone else's media players as it is to run their own then this would be a non-issue.
I think Internet Explorer is a great example of why bundling in a monopoly situation is a very Bad Thing - by bundling it they effectively killed the competition and then they stopped developing it because there's no financial benefit in improving something that already has no competition. It's only now that IE has got so crap compared with other browsers that people are starting to migrate away, and MS has suddenly woken up and started doing development on IE since it now has competition again.
This technology is patented so noone else will be able to force you to watch ads (without paying some astronomical licence fee)
Currently Myth has to do lots of heuristics to work out where the adverts are - i.e. looking at scene change frequency and logo placement - this is computationally expensive and not entirely accurate. It sounds like they're going to embed a nice friendly flag in the TV stream that can tell Myth when to start skipping the adverts.:)
In any case, this is simply a flag in the stream that will trigger your system to disable certain features, similar to the unskippable chapters on a DVD - as such it's not (technologically) enforcable on an open system since anyone who cares can just rip out that chunk of code and recompile.
This is a significant advantage (to the consumer) of open systems - it's very difficult for anyone to put in false limitations. Of course it's also a disadvantage since an open source program that includes DRM decoder is fundamentally illegal under the EUCD or DMCA.
Part of the problem is both ATI and nVidia were founded by hardware guys, who see software support as a cost center instead of an integral part of making the stuff work - it's like throwing bare silicon at users and telling them to spot-weld the chips right onto the circuit board because packages cost money.
The crazy thing is that this mentality would work in the FOSS world - if they chucked bare hardware at the community with complete documentation of the interface but no software then most FOSS people would be happy since we could have fully open drivers in the stock kernel developed by third parties. (And yes, I believe there are enough interested third parties to make completely open from-scratch drivers a serious idea iff documentation is made available).
this is an obvious, uninteresting statement and this is precisely the point I'm trying to make. People who use this language are trying to sell you something that's obvious; to sell the emperor his own clothes.
You know that, I know that, but does the (probably less technical) customer know that? All too often people who use management speak _do_ manage to sell stuff and at that point they have won, no matter how right or wrong that is. If you are competing with people who "win" a lot more frequently than you, it doesn't really matter that what you're offering is better - the customer goes on what they hear and maybe your plain-english doesn't sound as interesting and clued up to them as the management speak BS.
Ask them to explain what each term means. Example: What is Web 2.0 anyway? I haven't seen a new W3C standard called Web 2.0.
Do this infront of a customer and you run the risk of appearing stupid and uninformed: salesman A is using all these new terms and seems to know his stuff, but salesman B is clearly uninformed since he doesn't even understand the stuff salesman A is selling! Again, it doesn't matter that the other person is talking BS, if the customer doesn't _know_ it's BS then you look uninformed if you appear ignorant of the BS.
Most likely, the phones would be polled every few minutes to see what they're attached to. In much the same way that the cell towers check to see if your phone is still within range when you're not using it. This is the reason your phone sets off your speakers or makes your monitor twitch randomly
Actually, GSM phones don't get polled very frequently at all (usually every few hours ISTR). But the phone listens to the base station and if it goes out of range of one and into range of the other it will transmit to inform the network that it's moved. If the phone outright goes out of range then the first the network usually knows about it is when it tries to contact the phone (e.g. to place a call or send an SMS) and doesn't get a response. Which is why there is sometimes a few seconds of silence after dialling an out-of-coverage cellphone before it drops you through to voicemail - it's trying to contact the phone in it's last known cell and when that times out you get forwarded to voicemail.
Polling the phone regularly has the disadvantage that the phone has to transmit acks regularly too and transmitting eats the batteries. Far better for the phone to just listen and only transmit to tell the network that it's moved.
I imagine that the way this system will work is to record both a "last known" cell and a "last known" IP address. The last known IP will be tried first and if it fails then the last known cell will be tried.
I'm not sure how they will bill for the seamless handoff stuff though - maybe the whole thing will be charged at cellular rates, in which case there doesn't seem to be a lot of advantage to the end user.
It is due to hard facts and carefull analysis. Which pretty much means, it is the truth, beyond reasonable doubt.
It's a hard fact that the Earth is flat... no wait, we just discovered it's round. It's a hard fact that the Sun orbits around the Earth... damn, someone just produced some evidence that shows that's wrong - we'll burn him because we don't agree with the evidence. It's a hard fact that time is a constant... oh, wait...
I'm not arguing the right or wrong of global warming theories, I'm just saying that "hard facts" in science have a habit of changing radically as new evidence is presented. We need to remember that nothing in science is a "fact" - it's all theory. Some of the theories have a huge amount of evidence behind them, but they're still just theories and we might uncover something that modifies that theory tomorrow. This isn't a bad thing - science is our best method of describing and modelling the universe, but we always need to remember that science is dynamic.
IMHO we probably don't have enough data to know definitively what is causing global warming. But does it matter? Whether or not it's our fault, it's happening and we need to decide what to do about it. The answer may well be to let it happen - we have no idea what the long term effects of stopping it might be.
"The real reason the population in the west is still increasing is immegration."
Well, I'd say a lot of it is due to the ILLEGAL immigrant problem we now have. There is nothing wrong with the legal entry immigrants...that's what this country was built upon.
Ah yes, I see... legal immigrants somehow don't increase the population... it all makes perfect sense now...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
No, it isn't. Nobody (except you) is making the assertion that people are causing the Earth to spiral toward the sun.
Actually, we probably _are_ causing the planets to spiral toward the sun - most of the interplanitary space craft we launch do slingshot manouvers which use the gravity of the planets to increase the craft's speed. This in turn causes the planet to slow in it's orbit.
Of course, a couple of tons of space craft is going to make an immeasurable difference to a 6x10^21 ton planet like the Earth.:)
Population control please, no more than two children per family.
The western fertility rate is way down. For example, in the UK it's just 1.66 children per woman. In the US it's 2.08 - that's only just above the point at which the population is stable (2.00). The real reason the population in the west is still increasing is immegration.
Want to reduce the western population? Stop immegration. Either forcably or by making the rest of the world a nicer place to live so that people don't _want_ to immegrate (although increasingly I'm wondering if the plan is to make the west a crapper place to live so everyone leaves).
Generally, the more developed a country is, the lower the birth rate. So I wonder if in a few hundred years, when the whole world is more developed we may require laws requiring _over_ 2 children per family in order to sustain the population.
I should take this opportunity to point out that there are severe economic problems with having a "top heavy" society (i.e. few young people, many old people) - a lower proportion of the population is working and paying taxes and a larger proportion of the population is collecting a pension and needing care (which costs money).
and sometimes ads would go from the first party ad server through 4 or 5 networks until it was shown.
I don't understand what's in it for any of the parties involved. I'm not familiar with the way Yahoo ads work, so I'll talk about Google AdSense here (which I use and so I'm familiar with it). Normally the way it works is:
1. A website is a member of AdSense 2. when you visit it you get shown a Google advert that is appropriate to the content of the page. 3. When someone clicks on the ad then google gets paid by the advertiser and gives the website a cut of that cash.
The way I understand this "scam" to work is:
1. A website (we'll call it "site A") is a member of AdSense 2. A second website (we'll call it "site B") isn't an AdSense member 3. When you visit site B, it ends up showing an advert that's targetting to the content on site A 4. When someone clicks the ad, google gets paid by the advertiser, gives site A a cut and site A gives site B a cut of that.
So why doesn't site B just become an AdSense member itself since then it wouldn't be giving site A a cut. And since the ads are nolonger targetted, won't the number of clicks go down (== less cash)?
Very true. I'm barely aware that the Web still has ads. I hear that Slashdot has ads, but I've never seen one.
This might be a silly question, but what do you expect to happen when the sites you use can't make any money out of advertising anymore?
Whilest I'm in favor of blocking "bad" adverts (popups, those designed to be extremely annoying, flash ads that suck all your CPU time and play music at you, etc) I think those who block _all_ ads must be either very short sighted or just plain stupid - don't we want to turn the web into a place where you can get free content supported by unobtrusive targetted (dare I say: useful) ads rather than having to enter your credit card details on all sites when it's nolonger economical to be ad-supported?
as soon as business *complies* with these things, it'll be perfectly legal for them to spam you.
But: 1. is it feasable to send spam from a legitimate address? Having been on the receiving end of a joe-job I know first hand how big the hate-mail and bounce flood is. (Does the US (you-)can-spam law require this address to be monitored?) 2. you should be able to filter complient spam on the headers - spamming is no good if everyone is dropping it in the bin at the MTA.
I'd like to know if it's legal to invoice the spammers for the sysadmin and software development time required to filter the spam (and then set the debt collectors on them when they don't pay up). If so, that may well be a deterrent to complient spammers.
Perhaps software should get a 5 year copyright with an option of another 5 if the product is still commerically viable (as most people know, 10 years is an eternity in the world of software development).
If you're giving software a maximum of a 10 year copyright, the original Linux kernel would now be out of copyright. Now the problem is, what do you do with an ongoing project like the Linux kernel - some of the code may well be over 10 years old, whilest other bits of the code were implemented yesterday. How do you track and apply that copyright?
If you're going to apply the copyright to the project as a whole based on when the original code was written then long-term ongoing projects like Linux, GNU, etc are screwed.
OTOH, if you're applying the copyright to the whole project based on when the latest code was written then you've just allowed any company to extend their copyright indefinately by making a minor update every few years.
With version control systems you might be able to track copyright on individual lines of code but now you are getting into the worrying world of the law dictating the technical development procedures for a project.
I agree that something should be done to prevent large corporations abusing patent and copyright laws, I'm unconvinced that your idea is the solution.
I'd also like to see laws requiring interface specifications to be made public for everything. I.e. you shouldn't be tied to using a particular word processor because the company who write it are keeping the file format specs secret and so you don't even know how to access your own data. Similarly, specs for interfacing with hardware should be made public - when you buy a piece of hardware isn't it reasonable for the manufacturer to tell you how to use _your hardware_ rather than being forced to use the accompanying software? I'm not advocating requiring people like nVidia to open their internal code optimisations - just making them publish specs for interfacing with the hardware would be a good start rather than having to reverse engineer it.
I can remember the good old days where you bought a piece of hardware and it came with a bloody great big technical manual. I've still got the manuals that came with my old printers which provide detailed specs of the control codes you could use to control the printer, and I've got the Creative Sound Blaster developer's manual somewhere (which is pretty big and was a free download from the Creative BBS).
Using the compiler to pre-extract parallelism simplifies the hardware, but a single binary won't be optimized for all CPUs within the same family.
It's been a while since I looked at the IA64 architecture, but ISTR it addressed this issue by tagging instructions. I.e. an instruction word contains 3 instructions which are executed in parallel and a tag. Other instruction words containing the same tag are allowed to be executed in parallel too. So your basic processor can execute 3 instructions in parallel (1 instruction word), the faster processors could execute 6 in parallel (2 words), etc. The compiler has already told the processor which of the instruction words can be parallelised through the tagging so as processors get "wider" they can just process more instruction words in parallel so long as they have the same tag, thus no recompilation is necessary.
The IA64 architecture really is quite a nice design, just a shame that compiler technology never seems to have caught up enough.
For example, I have two 5 year old systems, one with a Gigabyte AMD Athlon board, and one with a true Intel P3 board.
I used to like Gigabyte boards ever since I got my old TX board for my P200. But I don't think I'll be buying any more Gigabyte boards for now:
My server had a Gigabyte GA7VAX (I think) which went up in a cloud of smoke (capacitors blew - lots of smoke).
My MythTV box has one of the smaller Gigabyte Athlon/VIA boards. WoL doesn't work even though there's an option in the BIOS, ACPI S3 mode doesn't work (it just powers off the whole damned box instead of suspending to RAM), lm_sensors can't get any sensible temperature readings off anything and you can't get temperature readings off ACPI.
The replacement motherboard for my server is another Gigabyte board. Again, can't get much in the way of temperature or voltage readings with lm_sensors and ACPI won't provide a CPU temperature reading.
Also, all the Gigabyte boards have only the clip-on heatsink mounts rather than also having the bolt-through holes in the board, so some heat sinks and water cooling kits either won't fit at all or require some modification.
Both have insane cooling so the board temps never go over 100 degrees.
100 degrees sounds really far too hot to me. My air-cooled Athlon XP 1900+ runs at ~60 degrees (CPU temperature). My water cooled Athlon XP 2100+ server runs at 30 - 40 degrees. If the CPU temperature exceeds 70-odd degrees the whole thing goes really unstable.
It sure is news of the patient isn't sent into a fit of spasms from a seizure every 45 minutes while the camera is activated. You know, like what happened 10 years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Now color me ignorant, but show me another service that would permit free incomming calls without a monthly fee.
www.voipuser.org
Infact, pretty much all of the SIPPSTN gateways do freebee DDIs.
And once again AOL offers us another paid service any person can spend 15 minutes learning to get absolutely free and legal!
How is this different to almost any other consumer-level paid-for thing in computing? Lets see:
1. SkypeOut is a single closed service with vendor lockin. There are hundreds of SIP->PSTN gateways out there where you are *not* locked in and can get a better deal. However, many people still use Skype because of marketting and lazyness. I was talking to someone (who is Pro-open-standards) the other day who was telling his parents to use SkypeOut rather than a SIP service - the reasonsing was that because Skype is locked into a single vendor it's easier than deciding which vendor to use and endtering those login details into your SIP client. Yes, vendor lockin really does make the lazy people happy because someone else has already made their decisions for them.
2. Most people spend money on MS Office. Why? They can get OOo for free and it probably doesn't lack any features they want anyway.
3. People buy stuff like Windows Mediacentre - why? MythTV is free.
The list goes on, I'm afraid many people don't know or care enough to go for the cheaper alternative. Whoever has the best marketting will always take a big chunk of the market, no matter how bad the product compared to the competition.
Speaking as someone who receives all his television via DVB-T in the UK, I can say that I have zero interest in digital cable.
I think a more significant problem is DVB-S support. Speaking as someone who uses Myth with Sky by having an S-video connection between the sky decoder and the Myth box, I would far prefer to just stick a DVB-S card in my Myth system. There are currently 3 problems here:
1. Sky encrypt their channels using VideoGuard and won't produce a CAM to decrypt it. This ties you into using an official Sky branded decoder (which are also completely useless for picking up stuff not covered by Sky). There are 3rd party CAMs available which claim to decrypt VideoGuard but they are relatively expensive (~100ukp) and I suspect the EUCD renders them illegal. I've yet to find a SoftCAM that will work under Linux.
2. DVB-S cards with a common interface are still reasonably pricey compared with DVB-T cards and DVB-S cards which don't have a common interface. This is probably down to lack of demand caused by (1).
3. To record multiple programs at the same time would involve having multiple CAMs and multiple Sky subscriptions. Ideally what would be better is to either do the decoding on playback (like Sky+ does), or (better) do the decoding in a post-processing job much like the commflag and transcoding jobs.
which means that analogue PVR's like this won't work, period.
Well I'm not sure what the GP is smoking here, as you pointed out the PVR being discussed in the article is DVB-T (i.e. digital), however I use my MythTV box with a plain BT878 card in it to record the analogue S-video signal off my Sky box and it works just fine.
Until I can sit back and fire up a PC that displays the same interactive guide data I am currently getting in a proprietary cable box, I don't think these things will find any success.
Infact, I get _better_ guide data through my Myth box than I do through my Sky box. The Sky box gives me a week's worth with often very short descriptions, whereas the Myth box gives me 2 week's worth of listings (pulled from radio times). Additionally, having looked at the Sky+ feature set I'd say my Myth box is a hell of a lot more capable (especially when I hear my sky+ owning friends complain that they missed the first episode of the new series of $foo because sky+ doesn't automatically record it, whilest my Myth box noticed the new series had started and automatically scheduled in the recordings).
Find an empty road and try it, I dare you. Close your eyes and see how long it is before you hit the rumble strips. (And please, use a road with rumble strips!)
Awareness isn't just a boolean "aware / not aware" property - there are different levels of awareness. You can be aware enough to keep the car on the road but not aware enough to deal with a sudden change in the circumstances (you only have to look at accidents caused by very tired drivers to see this, you can drive for a long distance while tired but you won't be aware enough to deal with something unexpected).
Those can tell you if the driver is awake, but not if they are paying attention.
I'm not familiar with the devices in question, but I imagine it's fairly easy to tell if the driver is aware - when you're driving your eyes are constantly moving to scan the road for hazards. If you stop concentrating it's reasonable to think that you'll probably stop moving your eyes (so much) or at least the pattern of eye movement would change.
Fortunatly, someone driving a car has to pay attention fairly routinely just to stay in the lane and on the road, so 'awake == aware' (generally) in that situation.
I'm afraid I think you're probably wrong here - you don't have to really be paying a lot of attention to stay in a lane since most roads are pretty predictable - the road isn't going to change between the time you first saw it on the horizon and the time you get to that point. The real problem is that you can be driving along for a very long time whilest not really paying attention and then something you weren't expecting happens like the guy infront of you stamps on his brakes.
I think the fact that people can stay on the road whilest quite drunk is proof that staying in lane isn't a lot of effort - but drunk drivers can't deal with the unexpected.
Because it's free?
Where can I download my free copy of Microsoft Media Player For Linux?
I fail to see how making Microsoft sell their OS piece by piece somehow decreases their ability to keep a monopoly.
Having a monopoly isn't a problem if you're a monopoly because your product is the best (and thus everyone wants it). The problem is that this isn't the case - MS use their position to take advantage of people's lazyness.
When you get your computer it has Internet Explorer there as standard - what would motivate anyone to bother to install an alternative? I mean, it's effort. So you've already locked out any competing browser that isn't *significantly* better. How else do you explain the fact that 90% of people use Internet Explorer despite the fact that it's a pile of crap compared to the competition?
For the end user, the lack of competition isn't an immediate problem - the end user sees the bundling as a Good Thing since it gives them something "for free" (included in the cost) and means they don't have to expend any effort. However, in the long run the lack of competition makes the vendor complacent - why bother investing in improving a piece of software that has no competition? And so in the end the bundled piece of software stagnates.
Now I could be wrong, but last time I checked every OS comes with a Media Player.
Yeah, but unlike Windows, every other OS is not a monopoly! The rules about bundling are different for monopolies and non-monopolies, which is why it's illegal for Microsoft but legal for everyone else.
It's also worth remembering that the various Linux distros usually come with more than one media player, _and_ (this is the important bit) those media players aren't owned by the people who decided to distribute them, nor are the people who own the code required to pay vast amounts of money to have their software bundled with a distro.
I.e. the bundled software is chosen on merit rather than because:
1. It's owned by the distributor and they want to force it into more of the market
2. The owner is paying a shed load of money to have it distributed
3. It'll put someone else out of business
If MS made it as easy to run everyone else's media players as it is to run their own then this would be a non-issue.
I think Internet Explorer is a great example of why bundling in a monopoly situation is a very Bad Thing - by bundling it they effectively killed the competition and then they stopped developing it because there's no financial benefit in improving something that already has no competition. It's only now that IE has got so crap compared with other browsers that people are starting to migrate away, and MS has suddenly woken up and started doing development on IE since it now has competition again.
Well it all sounds rather good to me:
In any case, this is simply a flag in the stream that will trigger your system to disable certain features, similar to the unskippable chapters on a DVD - as such it's not (technologically) enforcable on an open system since anyone who cares can just rip out that chunk of code and recompile.
This is a significant advantage (to the consumer) of open systems - it's very difficult for anyone to put in false limitations. Of course it's also a disadvantage since an open source program that includes DRM decoder is fundamentally illegal under the EUCD or DMCA.
Part of the problem is both ATI and nVidia were founded by hardware guys, who see software support as a cost center instead of an integral part of making the stuff work - it's like throwing bare silicon at users and telling them to spot-weld the chips right onto the circuit board because packages cost money.
The crazy thing is that this mentality would work in the FOSS world - if they chucked bare hardware at the community with complete documentation of the interface but no software then most FOSS people would be happy since we could have fully open drivers in the stock kernel developed by third parties. (And yes, I believe there are enough interested third parties to make completely open from-scratch drivers a serious idea iff documentation is made available).
this is an obvious, uninteresting statement and this is precisely the point I'm trying to make. People who use this language are trying to sell you something that's obvious; to sell the emperor his own clothes.
You know that, I know that, but does the (probably less technical) customer know that? All too often people who use management speak _do_ manage to sell stuff and at that point they have won, no matter how right or wrong that is. If you are competing with people who "win" a lot more frequently than you, it doesn't really matter that what you're offering is better - the customer goes on what they hear and maybe your plain-english doesn't sound as interesting and clued up to them as the management speak BS.
Ask them to explain what each term means. Example: What is Web 2.0 anyway? I haven't seen a new W3C standard called Web 2.0.
Do this infront of a customer and you run the risk of appearing stupid and uninformed: salesman A is using all these new terms and seems to know his stuff, but salesman B is clearly uninformed since he doesn't even understand the stuff salesman A is selling! Again, it doesn't matter that the other person is talking BS, if the customer doesn't _know_ it's BS then you look uninformed if you appear ignorant of the BS.
Most likely, the phones would be polled every few minutes to see what they're attached to.
In much the same way that the cell towers check to see if your phone is still within range when you're not using it. This is the reason your phone sets off your speakers or makes your monitor twitch randomly
Actually, GSM phones don't get polled very frequently at all (usually every few hours ISTR). But the phone listens to the base station and if it goes out of range of one and into range of the other it will transmit to inform the network that it's moved. If the phone outright goes out of range then the first the network usually knows about it is when it tries to contact the phone (e.g. to place a call or send an SMS) and doesn't get a response. Which is why there is sometimes a few seconds of silence after dialling an out-of-coverage cellphone before it drops you through to voicemail - it's trying to contact the phone in it's last known cell and when that times out you get forwarded to voicemail.
Polling the phone regularly has the disadvantage that the phone has to transmit acks regularly too and transmitting eats the batteries. Far better for the phone to just listen and only transmit to tell the network that it's moved.
I imagine that the way this system will work is to record both a "last known" cell and a "last known" IP address. The last known IP will be tried first and if it fails then the last known cell will be tried.
I'm not sure how they will bill for the seamless handoff stuff though - maybe the whole thing will be charged at cellular rates, in which case there doesn't seem to be a lot of advantage to the end user.
Is fertility down? Or are women making the choice to have fewer kids?
Isn't it the same thing? The fertility rate is just a measurement of the average number of kids per woman, regardless of the cause.
It is due to hard facts and carefull analysis. Which pretty much means, it is the truth, beyond reasonable doubt.
It's a hard fact that the Earth is flat... no wait, we just discovered it's round.
It's a hard fact that the Sun orbits around the Earth... damn, someone just produced some evidence that shows that's wrong - we'll burn him because we don't agree with the evidence.
It's a hard fact that time is a constant... oh, wait...
I'm not arguing the right or wrong of global warming theories, I'm just saying that "hard facts" in science have a habit of changing radically as new evidence is presented. We need to remember that nothing in science is a "fact" - it's all theory. Some of the theories have a huge amount of evidence behind them, but they're still just theories and we might uncover something that modifies that theory tomorrow. This isn't a bad thing - science is our best method of describing and modelling the universe, but we always need to remember that science is dynamic.
IMHO we probably don't have enough data to know definitively what is causing global warming. But does it matter? Whether or not it's our fault, it's happening and we need to decide what to do about it. The answer may well be to let it happen - we have no idea what the long term effects of stopping it might be.
the Romans grew wine in England, and thus it was considerably warmer then than now
:)
Umm... we still grow wine in England (or rather, the grapes that are made into wine)...
And since the European population will have halved in a generation, we Americans can move over there
Oh dear lord please no
"The real reason the population in the west is still increasing is immegration."
:)
Well, I'd say a lot of it is due to the ILLEGAL immigrant problem we now have. There is nothing wrong with the legal entry immigrants...that's what this country was built upon.
Ah yes, I see... legal immigrants somehow don't increase the population... it all makes perfect sense now...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I couldn't have put it better myself
No, it isn't. Nobody (except you) is making the assertion that people are causing the Earth to spiral toward the sun.
:)
Actually, we probably _are_ causing the planets to spiral toward the sun - most of the interplanitary space craft we launch do slingshot manouvers which use the gravity of the planets to increase the craft's speed. This in turn causes the planet to slow in it's orbit.
Of course, a couple of tons of space craft is going to make an immeasurable difference to a 6x10^21 ton planet like the Earth.
Population control please, no more than two children per family.
The western fertility rate is way down. For example, in the UK it's just 1.66 children per woman. In the US it's 2.08 - that's only just above the point at which the population is stable (2.00). The real reason the population in the west is still increasing is immegration.
Want to reduce the western population? Stop immegration. Either forcably or by making the rest of the world a nicer place to live so that people don't _want_ to immegrate (although increasingly I'm wondering if the plan is to make the west a crapper place to live so everyone leaves).
Generally, the more developed a country is, the lower the birth rate. So I wonder if in a few hundred years, when the whole world is more developed we may require laws requiring _over_ 2 children per family in order to sustain the population.
I should take this opportunity to point out that there are severe economic problems with having a "top heavy" society (i.e. few young people, many old people) - a lower proportion of the population is working and paying taxes and a larger proportion of the population is collecting a pension and needing care (which costs money).
and sometimes ads would go from the first party ad server through 4 or 5 networks until it was shown.
I don't understand what's in it for any of the parties involved. I'm not familiar with the way Yahoo ads work, so I'll talk about Google AdSense here (which I use and so I'm familiar with it). Normally the way it works is:
1. A website is a member of AdSense
2. when you visit it you get shown a Google advert that is appropriate to the content of the page.
3. When someone clicks on the ad then google gets paid by the advertiser and gives the website a cut of that cash.
The way I understand this "scam" to work is:
1. A website (we'll call it "site A") is a member of AdSense
2. A second website (we'll call it "site B") isn't an AdSense member
3. When you visit site B, it ends up showing an advert that's targetting to the content on site A
4. When someone clicks the ad, google gets paid by the advertiser, gives site A a cut and site A gives site B a cut of that.
So why doesn't site B just become an AdSense member itself since then it wouldn't be giving site A a cut.
And since the ads are nolonger targetted, won't the number of clicks go down (== less cash)?
Very true. I'm barely aware that the Web still has ads. I hear that Slashdot has ads, but I've never seen one.
This might be a silly question, but what do you expect to happen when the sites you use can't make any money out of advertising anymore?
Whilest I'm in favor of blocking "bad" adverts (popups, those designed to be extremely annoying, flash ads that suck all your CPU time and play music at you, etc) I think those who block _all_ ads must be either very short sighted or just plain stupid - don't we want to turn the web into a place where you can get free content supported by unobtrusive targetted (dare I say: useful) ads rather than having to enter your credit card details on all sites when it's nolonger economical to be ad-supported?
as soon as business *complies* with these things, it'll be perfectly legal for them to spam you.
But:
1. is it feasable to send spam from a legitimate address? Having been on the receiving end of a joe-job I know first hand how big the hate-mail and bounce flood is. (Does the US (you-)can-spam law require this address to be monitored?)
2. you should be able to filter complient spam on the headers - spamming is no good if everyone is dropping it in the bin at the MTA.
I'd like to know if it's legal to invoice the spammers for the sysadmin and software development time required to filter the spam (and then set the debt collectors on them when they don't pay up). If so, that may well be a deterrent to complient spammers.
Perhaps software should get a 5 year copyright with an option of another 5 if the product is still commerically viable (as most people know, 10 years is an eternity in the world of software development).
If you're giving software a maximum of a 10 year copyright, the original Linux kernel would now be out of copyright. Now the problem is, what do you do with an ongoing project like the Linux kernel - some of the code may well be over 10 years old, whilest other bits of the code were implemented yesterday. How do you track and apply that copyright?
If you're going to apply the copyright to the project as a whole based on when the original code was written then long-term ongoing projects like Linux, GNU, etc are screwed.
OTOH, if you're applying the copyright to the whole project based on when the latest code was written then you've just allowed any company to extend their copyright indefinately by making a minor update every few years.
With version control systems you might be able to track copyright on individual lines of code but now you are getting into the worrying world of the law dictating the technical development procedures for a project.
I agree that something should be done to prevent large corporations abusing patent and copyright laws, I'm unconvinced that your idea is the solution.
I'd also like to see laws requiring interface specifications to be made public for everything. I.e. you shouldn't be tied to using a particular word processor because the company who write it are keeping the file format specs secret and so you don't even know how to access your own data. Similarly, specs for interfacing with hardware should be made public - when you buy a piece of hardware isn't it reasonable for the manufacturer to tell you how to use _your hardware_ rather than being forced to use the accompanying software? I'm not advocating requiring people like nVidia to open their internal code optimisations - just making them publish specs for interfacing with the hardware would be a good start rather than having to reverse engineer it.
I can remember the good old days where you bought a piece of hardware and it came with a bloody great big technical manual. I've still got the manuals that came with my old printers which provide detailed specs of the control codes you could use to control the printer, and I've got the Creative Sound Blaster developer's manual somewhere (which is pretty big and was a free download from the Creative BBS).
Using the compiler to pre-extract parallelism simplifies the hardware, but a single binary won't be optimized for all CPUs within the same family.
It's been a while since I looked at the IA64 architecture, but ISTR it addressed this issue by tagging instructions. I.e. an instruction word contains 3 instructions which are executed in parallel and a tag. Other instruction words containing the same tag are allowed to be executed in parallel too. So your basic processor can execute 3 instructions in parallel (1 instruction word), the faster processors could execute 6 in parallel (2 words), etc. The compiler has already told the processor which of the instruction words can be parallelised through the tagging so as processors get "wider" they can just process more instruction words in parallel so long as they have the same tag, thus no recompilation is necessary.
The IA64 architecture really is quite a nice design, just a shame that compiler technology never seems to have caught up enough.
I used to like Gigabyte boards ever since I got my old TX board for my P200. But I don't think I'll be buying any more Gigabyte boards for now:
Also, all the Gigabyte boards have only the clip-on heatsink mounts rather than also having the bolt-through holes in the board, so some heat sinks and water cooling kits either won't fit at all or require some modification.
Both have insane cooling so the board temps never go over 100 degrees.
100 degrees sounds really far too hot to me. My air-cooled Athlon XP 1900+ runs at ~60 degrees (CPU temperature). My water cooled Athlon XP 2100+ server runs at 30 - 40 degrees. If the CPU temperature exceeds 70-odd degrees the whole thing goes really unstable.
It sure is news of the patient isn't sent into a fit of spasms from a seizure every 45 minutes while the camera is activated.
You know, like what happened 10 years ago.
Can you provide a link about this?