Ah, right..... now I understand perfectly..... So you get an optical finder {hence no digital artefacts, and better in poor light; my own Fuji has no optical finder, not even a rough one -- indoor pictures were a bit of a guessing game till I learned its ways} but looking through the same lens {hence no misregistration errors -- if the person's face is smack bang in the centre of the viewfinder, you can be sure it will be smack bang in the centre of the picture; you won't get their forehead cut off or anything like that}. Sounds cool.
No, that's mirrors that have to be parabolic, if I remember my school physics classes from 18 years ago. Unfortunately, some parts of the ray optics course were dropped from the syllabus for my year; specifically, the relationship between radius of curvature, focal length and refractive index, which somebody is surely about to state in response to this post. It was mentioned on the special paper, phrased in terms that you probably would understand, even if you hadn't studied it formally, as long as you were good enough to do the special papers; but I answered a different question anyway.
My Fuji 2800 has the usual tiny 4*3cm. colour LCD screen, plus an eye-level viewfinder which also contains an even tinier LCD. There is no optical finder. That's the only weak point with this camera IMHO..... in bad light, you can't see a blind thing in the viewfinder. The flash is plenty bright enough:) but you can't fire the flash just to use the viewfinder. Fortunately, you learn to judge it pretty well. It's a skill you acquire after a lifetime of using cameras with untrustworthy viewfinders!
If you attempt the impossible -- and make no mistake, copy-prevention is physically impossible, not just difficult -- then you will fail. You might be able to fool people into thinking you have succeeded, for a short while; but, sooner or later, your lies will catch up with you. All copy-prevention technology is pure snake oil, and can never work. It will always be defeated. Once a single CPT-free version has been created, then every penny anyone ever invested in that particular copy-prevention technology is wasted.
The most important part of any camera is the lens. There are two main problems with lenses. Chromatic aberration causes colour fringing due to the focal length of the lens being different at different wavelengths. It can be corrected by using compound lenses {one positively-dispersing lens and one negatively-dispersing lens} or low-dispersivity materials. Spherical aberration causes distortion of the image due to the lens surface not being perfectly spherical, and thus the focal length varying over the surface. It can only be corrected by grinding lenses well.
A bad lens will produce a bad image regardless of the image sensor. Sometimes an image sensor will not have enough resolution to detect the distortion due to chromatic and spherical aberrations. But when the same manufacturer slaps a new sensor on last year's lens, the new sensor can pick up better on the aberration and the pictures end up looking lousy.
Another feature to bear in mind is hardware {optical} zoom. Don't buy a camera without it and don't reject a camera for not having software {digital} zoom -- your favourite graphics editor can do this for you.
Cheap image sensors are invariably noisy. Big pixels can hold more initial charge, therefore can accept more light in the course of an exposure. The sensor will only be saturated in really bright light, and the amount of charge remaining on the pixel {which is a measure of how much light didn't hit it} can be measured more accurately: one "unit" on the ubiquitous 0-255 scale represents many electrons. But more silicon costs more money. Small pixels don't have the same capacitance, so can't accept as much light before becoming saturated -- you have to run a shorter exposure. And the number of electrons per ADC count is smaller. The net result of having a higher density in the image sensor is that even in bright light, the resulting pictures will look a little bit as though they were taken in poor light. Of course, you can remove the noise by downsampling, but then you lose the benefit of the higher-res sensor.
And what's with the confusing term "digital SLR" ? As far as I can see, all digital cameras with LCD viewfinders are by definition SLRs, since the same lens is used for viewing and taking the picture.
Australian and British WCs are mostly of the "washdown" design. The entire basin is really just the belled-out mouth of a U-bend. The waste pipe (110mm is standard in the UK) goes over a weir of about 10cm., then usually exits backwards through an outside wall. As a result there is not much water in the bottom of the basin, just enough to seal the trap; this acts like a brewer's airlock to prevent sewer gases from entering the house. The flushwater pushes the contents of the basin backwards, up and over the trap. Usage and flushing are noisy, but the full-bore outlet is almost immune to blockage.
The syphonic closet is more popular in the USA. This has a specially-constructed trap within the pedestal which slows the egress of water. The waste pipe goes from the bottom of the basin, up and over and down within the pedestal - and suddenly widens out to full bore just below the level of the bottom of the basin. When flushed, the water level in the basin rises at first; then, as soon as the first drop begins to descend into the wider section, a syphonic action is set up which draws out the basin contents. The action is quieter, since the waste and the flushwater have less height to fall, but the more complex trap design -- particularly the necessity for a constriction in order to start the syphonic action -- make this design more prone to blockage.
There is also a twin-trap WC, which also uses a syphonic action in flushing. In the twin-trap closet, the flushwater passes over a venturi device into a plenum chamber which slows its progress towards the flushing rim. The venturi draught draws out the air from the space between the upper and lower traps. The lower trap has the deeper seal, so water is drawn over the weir of the upper trap. This starts a syphonic action, which continues until the basin is empty (the lower trap behaves like a traditional washdown WC trap). The plenum chamber holds enough water to recharge the basin and upper trap.
Despite their almost silent action, twin-trap WCs are not all that common, as they are expensive {due to all that complexity} and still somewhat susceptible to blockage.
I'm glad I'm British, where teachers still read pupils' answers. In my day, we almost always used to have to answer in complete sentences rather than giving an answer from among multiple choices. That taught us to form proper sentences.
I'll second that. Horowitz and Hill is the book for anybody wanting to learn about electronics. If you can find a copy at the right price, buy it - you'll never regret it.
Enzymes can only withstand temperatures up to about 45 degrees. Any hotter and they start decomposing. But some types of dirt don't get properly loosened from fibres at temperatures below about 55 degrees. As a result, low temperature washing will require more detergent to get the same amount of cleaning. I wonder if this is why it is the detergent manufacturers {not the washing machine or clothing manufacturers} who are sponsoring those adverts saying to wash at 40 degrees rather than 60?
I set the thermostat on my washer to 60 degrees. When filling up for the mainwash, it draws both hot and cold water; the hot water (about 60 degrees) has a much lower pressure, as it comes from a cistern-fed supply whereas the cold (can be anything from 0 to 20 degrees) comes from the main, so the machine fills up with water no hotter than around 40 deg. This is ideal for the enzymes to do their work; but the thermostat is still closed, so the water gets heated by the machine's own heater. This takes awhile; up till the temperature hits 45, the enzymes are doing their work. Beyond this temperature, the enzymes are broken down into simpler chemicals; leaving the conventional detergents and heat to finish the cleaning. The net result is no enzymes, less detergent use {half a cup per wash, as opposed to 1.5 cups}, but more electricity use. It's my understanding that detergent residues {including enzymes} are worse for the environment than generating electricity {which can be done in very benign ways, though admittedly it isn't always done like that}.
There is simply no way that something like this is EVER going to work.
In the technological domain, it is impossible -- not merely difficult, actually impossible -- to prevent something that can be perceived from being copied. I shouldn't have to explain why that is the case -- I've done so often enough, on Slashdot and other places, that I'm already several shades of blue in the face. And just because I can't complete the reductio ad absurdum by proving it would require you to travel faster than the speed of light, or to create or destroy energy, or to have the pressure in a fluid act differently in different directions, or add a vector to a scalar, doesn't mean it isn't just as impossible as any of those things -- it might even be a fundamental law in its own right.
In the social domain, people have been sharing music since the first instruments were invented. They aren't going to stop just like that.
Traditionally, manufacturing audio permanent-storage media used to require specialised equipment not commonly available to everyone, and so the record companies had an advantage over the likes of you and me. This is no longer the case. {In fact, it hasn't really been the case since the late 1960s, when Philips invented the compact cassette.} The record companies could make records cheaper than anybody else; and if some Fred-in-the-shed set up in competition, he was liable to get himself bought out. With the advent of CD in the late 1970s / early 1980s, and the first really cheap players in the early-to-mid 1990s, almost everyone began replacing their old vinyl LPs with CDs.
By the year 2000, the mass replacement of LP with CD was almost complete, so people stopped buying quite so many back-catalogue CDs. The fashion for "Reality TV" shows led to a phenomenon of short-lived, disposable wannabe acts releasing albums that were not actually very good, and people soon stopped buying quite so many new CDs.
I don't know which is sadder: the fact that there seem to be people who think that it is possible to prevent copying, or the fact that they are attempting to do so with flagrant disregard for the fact that we might have obtained the necessary permission for said copying. {Until quite recently, it was the law in Britain -- dunno about other countries, sorry -- that you were to be considered as innocent until proven guilty. Upon which basis it would be up to the authorities to prove that you did not have the right to copy that material, and not up to you to prove that you did have such a right. However, in cases of racism, paedophilia and terrorism, the suspect is often considered guilty until, or even sometimes despite being, proven innocent.}
When you buy a CD, the money you pay gets split various ways. There are lots of things you are paying for: pressing the CD, printing the sleeve, packaging it all up, delivering it to a record store conveniently located in your neighbourhood..... and of course, actually performing the songs in the first place. That is the only job that can't really be done by anyone else {since one typically is not so interested simply in the song "Baby One More Time" but in Britney Spears' particular rendition of "Baby One More Time"}.
The best anyone can hope for is that people will make use of a system which allows them to compensate artists directly for downloading music. If I wanted to listen to Britney Spears singing "Baby One More Time", I wouldn't really object to paying a few pence to Britney Spears. I'd certainly hope that she'd slip me a few coppers if she wanted me to sing for her. What is bad, though, is that I'm expected to pay a small fortune for some record company to perform logistical services {stamping a CD, printing a booklet and delivering the whole thing} that could be obtained {albeit to a lesser standard, but hey --
What I'm envisaging is a gadget with a HDD and a USB connector. You plug it into a PC and it pretends to be a USB audio adaptor, something like a SoundBlaster Extigy perhaps. The PC sends PCM audio to it over the USB connection, fully expecting it to be converted to analogue, amplified and listened to. Instead, the gadget is simply writing the raw PCM data to its own hard disk. Maybe it could add WAV headers, maybe it could recompress on-the-fly into MP3 or Ogg Vorbis and write to a flash card instead of a HDD, but those are just details: the main thing is that it's snarfing data that is being broadcast down a bus.
The fun part is that it also pretends to be -- well, it is -- a USB mass storage device. So now you just mount it and read back the raw PCM files.
Alternatively, if you already have the necessary software for playing audio from a stream anyway, why can't you just hack the source code a little so that it outputs data to a regular file as well as or instead of the DSP device?
You can run MySQL and Postgres on the same machine, as they use different ports by default; so the situation is not quite as dire as you're making out. I would also hazard a guess that somebody somewhere has a My-to-PG syntax translator or even a set of patches to the Postgres source that make it accept MySQL's slightly-unusual quoting syntax.
The points you raise are all valid, but only in a minority of cases. In probably 8 cases out of 10, MySQL provides everything the user is going to want. And if someone's application is beginning seriously to outgrow the capabilities of the database backend, isn't there a chance it might actually benefit from a complete, from-the-ground-up rewrite?
I feel the situation is best illustrated as follows.
PHP Programmer: Look at my new improved speedy potato peeler!
Java Programmer: Does it peel apples as well?
PHP Programmer: No, it only peels potatoes. Nobody in my family likes apples, so I didn't bother peeling apples.
Java programmer: Well, then; if it's hard-coded to work with only one kind of vegetable, it's obviously crap.
............... later...............
PHP Programmer: I have redesigned my potato peeler to peel apples, although it now takes half as long again to peel a potato compared to the original version.
Java Programmer: Well, that's a start, I suppose. So does it cut up the potato into chips after peeling it?
If it makes you any happier, I'd ditch MySQL in a heartbeat if I thought something else would be better in a particular application. And that probably would be Postgres, since we have a "no source, no sale" software procurement policy around here.
This is about the darker side of freedom. Freedom of speech means that the fascists, the religious nutters, the pro-lifers and so on are allowed to hold their rallies -- and that some idiot is allowed to post "Don't forget to pay your $699 licence fee, you cock smoking teabaggers" at the top of almost every Slashdot discussion. And Free software means that the bad guys also get to use it to control their homemade cruise missiles, their slaughterhouses, their injecting-radioactive-tobacco-into-genetically-mod ified-monkeys research labs..... and now, just when we thought we had reached the very nadir of anti-social applications to which Linux could be applied, someone goes and runs their parking meters with it!
it has no separation between syntax and libraries - making it a complete nightmare to compile and install if you want to enable as many features as possible.
They should have designed it so that the language interpreter could be compiled, and then you could add extensions without recompiling PHP itself.
PEAR is a step in the right direction, but too many things still rely on built in extensions.
Read your history. Up till version 4, PHP was still growing. It was designed so that new bits could be kludged in on an as-and-when basis. That may not be "perfect" from the point of view of a snotty programmer who thinks there is only one right way to do anything, but not everyone thinks that way {imagine an electronic engineer and a mechanical engineer showing one another their latest inventions: the elec. eng. is going to bemoan the proliferation of moving parts in the mech. eng.'s design and the mech. eng. is going to deride the elec. eng. for using too few moving parts}.
Now the feature set is stable, it can always be re-implemented in a more "beautiful" style.
and WAY too many programs use the mysql_* functions directly.
Those things are an abomination to good design.
Why the hell should you have to completely rewrite your code to support a different database in these days?
Well, since the mysql_*, pg_*, sybase_* and so on functions use very similar syntax, try using sed.
But I think the question we should be asking is, why would you want your code to support a different database anyway? MySQL is free software, so it'll always be available and supported. Ditching some of the bells and whistles and relying on the scripting language (perl, PHP or python) to do some of the donkey work made it bloody fast {e.g. the primitive % and _ wildcards work so much quicker than full-blown regular expression matching, that it's quicker to pull out more records than you need, have the wrapper script do the regular expression matching and just throw away the ones it doesn't need; more of the queries you are going to do are going to be right than wrong, so let the script provide any 'rollback' functionality you may need}, and -- barring a power failure -- it doesn't corrupt its own tables either.
You obviously think that constraining a programme so it only performs one function is a bad thing -- I guess your ultimate piece of software is one that doesn't care what kind of hardware it is running on or what function it is being asked to perform. But such high ideals are too far removed from reality for most ordinary people to take seriously.
Most programmes don't need to have so much changeability, because they are designed to do a specific task. You can add your fancy object oriented classes and methods, abstraction layers and sundry filibustering tricks all you like; but nothing will change the fact that, at the end of the day, sooner or later, you can't avoid the inevitable fact of having to get your hands dirty and actually manipulate some data. It does mean that a programme meant for handling order forms with a Postgres backend is going to need a lot changed to make it do cooking recipes with a MySQL backend, but if your audience prefers to see a pony doing one trick well rather than a full repertoire of tricks badly, who's disappointed?
And all that would happen is that, in a story parallelling that of PGP, someone would rewrite their own version in a country without software patents {thereby not infringing upon said patents}. Provided they put up some kind of notice on the distribution website {"AVAILABLE TO UK USERS ONLY"} their own arse would be covered. It probably would be illegal to distribute it, and it might be illegal even to use it, in countries where software was patentable {mere usage might be protected as part of your "fair dealing" rights in some countries}, but that isn't the fault of the author. What they were doing was perfectly legal where they did it. If a Briton goes to the Netherlands to smoke a quick joint, or a pregnant Irishwoman comes to the UK to get an abortion, or a French family send an ageing relative to Belgium {where euthanasia is legal TTBOMK} there is nothing anybody can do about it legally when they get home; that's the whole idea of national sovereignty.
I actually quite like the idea of NO SOFTWARE PATENTS, PERIOD. If you were going to allow software patents you would have to have a system of checks and balances to prevent abuse, and it's just not worth it for the small amount of legitimate, protect-the-small-guy application there could ever be for software patents.
All that will happen is that P2P and similar applications will start using SSL, TLS or some other form of encryption. Good luck to the RIAA proving that they were the intended recipient of an encrypted communication {which alone would give them the right to decrypt it} -- the fact that it was not encrypted against their public key might be worth mentioning in court too.
You are forgetting section seven of the GPL. If a programme is patented, it must be licenced royalty-free to everyone as a condition of applying the GPL. It isn't enough to say it is licenced royalty-free for bona fide GPL users -- it has to be everyone or no-one. Similarly, you can't release a programme under the GPL but not allow it to be used in, say, m**t farming / weapons manufacture / biotechnology research applications. It's for everybody or nobody.
If you wanted to patent something but allow royalty-free use in Open Source software, you'd have to use a BSD-like licence -- but that is fraught with danger; it's too easy with the unmodified form of the BSD licence for someone to take BSD-licenced code, make a tiny tweak and re-release it closed-source. {Maybe you could add something like "Any redistribution of the software or derived work in binary form must be accompanied by an offer of the source code, to be valid until the lapse of copyright on the work in question", as I did when I released a project: that was mainly because the source code for the first alpha version was smaller than the GPL and it didn't seem right that the licence should overshadow the programme.}
Coming from a country where software can't be patented at all, it's not so much of an issue..... at least it wouldn't be an issue if they weren't trying to change the rules at the behest of Microsoft's paid shills.
A five-high hand would have to be 5-4-3-2-A, which is counted as a straight in most circles and even beats A-K-Q-J-T in some circles, or else contain a pair. 6-4-3-2-A is the lowest ranking poker hand.
Of course, even A-A-A-A-W doesn't necessarily beat a Magnum.....
If you had actually bothered to read anything off the Debian site you would realise that though the stable version of their software may claim old version numbers, it is actually bang smack up to date with security patches. Most users will want the testing version, or maybe unstable {which is made by grabbing the newest version of almost everything as it comes out}.
You only have to edit a file, for crying out loud. If you can't deal with that then you are not a hacker -- but it's easier to be a whining little baby, isn't it? Go back to your pirate copies of Windows and Office XP and delude yourself you're sticking it to the man by copying software illegally, when in reality you're just sucking his cock and loving it.
its awesome, you will enough benefits and unless we get down to studying it, we will never really know. But all it takes is one slight mistake to cause a whole lot of bullshit and set us back really bad.
I'm sure that was the sort of thing they were saying the first time a caveman snatched a burning stick from a lightning-blasted tree.
Burning plants and doing something with the heat is not as bad as burning fossil fuels, because with plants it's a closed cycle..... you are only putting back what you already took out.
There is nitrogen and sulphur in plants, but it comes from the air or from the ground. Nobody cared when it was there before the plants you grew pulled it out, elements don't change into other elements {except in a nuclear reaction which we are not considering here} so why should anyone give a monkey's toss when you put it back? And if you do something with the heat, like produce steam to spin a turbine to generate electricity, then you have saved the need to burn some amount of fossil fuel.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, right ..... now I understand perfectly ..... So you get an optical finder {hence no digital artefacts, and better in poor light; my own Fuji has no optical finder, not even a rough one -- indoor pictures were a bit of a guessing game till I learned its ways} but looking through the same lens {hence no misregistration errors -- if the person's face is smack bang in the centre of the viewfinder, you can be sure it will be smack bang in the centre of the picture; you won't get their forehead cut off or anything like that}. Sounds cool.
No, that's mirrors that have to be parabolic, if I remember my school physics classes from 18 years ago. Unfortunately, some parts of the ray optics course were dropped from the syllabus for my year; specifically, the relationship between radius of curvature, focal length and refractive index, which somebody is surely about to state in response to this post. It was mentioned on the special paper, phrased in terms that you probably would understand, even if you hadn't studied it formally, as long as you were good enough to do the special papers; but I answered a different question anyway.
My Fuji 2800 has the usual tiny 4*3cm. colour LCD screen, plus an eye-level viewfinder which also contains an even tinier LCD. There is no optical finder. That's the only weak point with this camera IMHO ..... in bad light, you can't see a blind thing in the viewfinder. The flash is plenty bright enough :) but you can't fire the flash just to use the viewfinder. Fortunately, you learn to judge it pretty well. It's a skill you acquire after a lifetime of using cameras with untrustworthy viewfinders!
If you attempt the impossible -- and make no mistake, copy-prevention is physically impossible, not just difficult -- then you will fail. You might be able to fool people into thinking you have succeeded, for a short while; but, sooner or later, your lies will catch up with you. All copy-prevention technology is pure snake oil, and can never work. It will always be defeated. Once a single CPT-free version has been created, then every penny anyone ever invested in that particular copy-prevention technology is wasted.
The most important part of any camera is the lens. There are two main problems with lenses. Chromatic aberration causes colour fringing due to the focal length of the lens being different at different wavelengths. It can be corrected by using compound lenses {one positively-dispersing lens and one negatively-dispersing lens} or low-dispersivity materials. Spherical aberration causes distortion of the image due to the lens surface not being perfectly spherical, and thus the focal length varying over the surface. It can only be corrected by grinding lenses well.
A bad lens will produce a bad image regardless of the image sensor. Sometimes an image sensor will not have enough resolution to detect the distortion due to chromatic and spherical aberrations. But when the same manufacturer slaps a new sensor on last year's lens, the new sensor can pick up better on the aberration and the pictures end up looking lousy.
Another feature to bear in mind is hardware {optical} zoom. Don't buy a camera without it and don't reject a camera for not having software {digital} zoom -- your favourite graphics editor can do this for you.
Cheap image sensors are invariably noisy. Big pixels can hold more initial charge, therefore can accept more light in the course of an exposure. The sensor will only be saturated in really bright light, and the amount of charge remaining on the pixel {which is a measure of how much light didn't hit it} can be measured more accurately: one "unit" on the ubiquitous 0-255 scale represents many electrons. But more silicon costs more money. Small pixels don't have the same capacitance, so can't accept as much light before becoming saturated -- you have to run a shorter exposure. And the number of electrons per ADC count is smaller. The net result of having a higher density in the image sensor is that even in bright light, the resulting pictures will look a little bit as though they were taken in poor light. Of course, you can remove the noise by downsampling, but then you lose the benefit of the higher-res sensor.
And what's with the confusing term "digital SLR" ? As far as I can see, all digital cameras with LCD viewfinders are by definition SLRs, since the same lens is used for viewing and taking the picture.
Australian and British WCs are mostly of the "washdown" design. The entire basin is really just the belled-out mouth of a U-bend. The waste pipe (110mm is standard in the UK) goes over a weir of about 10cm., then usually exits backwards through an outside wall. As a result there is not much water in the bottom of the basin, just enough to seal the trap; this acts like a brewer's airlock to prevent sewer gases from entering the house. The flushwater pushes the contents of the basin backwards, up and over the trap. Usage and flushing are noisy, but the full-bore outlet is almost immune to blockage.
The syphonic closet is more popular in the USA. This has a specially-constructed trap within the pedestal which slows the egress of water. The waste pipe goes from the bottom of the basin, up and over and down within the pedestal - and suddenly widens out to full bore just below the level of the bottom of the basin. When flushed, the water level in the basin rises at first; then, as soon as the first drop begins to descend into the wider section, a syphonic action is set up which draws out the basin contents. The action is quieter, since the waste and the flushwater have less height to fall, but the more complex trap design -- particularly the necessity for a constriction in order to start the syphonic action -- make this design more prone to blockage.
There is also a twin-trap WC, which also uses a syphonic action in flushing. In the twin-trap closet, the flushwater passes over a venturi device into a plenum chamber which slows its progress towards the flushing rim. The venturi draught draws out the air from the space between the upper and lower traps. The lower trap has the deeper seal, so water is drawn over the weir of the upper trap. This starts a syphonic action, which continues until the basin is empty (the lower trap behaves like a traditional washdown WC trap). The plenum chamber holds enough water to recharge the basin and upper trap.
Despite their almost silent action, twin-trap WCs are not all that common, as they are expensive {due to all that complexity} and still somewhat susceptible to blockage.
Marking machines?!
I'm glad I'm British, where teachers still read pupils' answers. In my day, we almost always used to have to answer in complete sentences rather than giving an answer from among multiple choices. That taught us to form proper sentences.
Ssssh! Don't say that or we'll be bombarded under a tidal wave of Perl one-liners!
I'll second that. Horowitz and Hill is the book for anybody wanting to learn about electronics. If you can find a copy at the right price, buy it - you'll never regret it.
Enzymes can only withstand temperatures up to about 45 degrees. Any hotter and they start decomposing. But some types of dirt don't get properly loosened from fibres at temperatures below about 55 degrees. As a result, low temperature washing will require more detergent to get the same amount of cleaning. I wonder if this is why it is the detergent manufacturers {not the washing machine or clothing manufacturers} who are sponsoring those adverts saying to wash at 40 degrees rather than 60?
I set the thermostat on my washer to 60 degrees. When filling up for the mainwash, it draws both hot and cold water; the hot water (about 60 degrees) has a much lower pressure, as it comes from a cistern-fed supply whereas the cold (can be anything from 0 to 20 degrees) comes from the main, so the machine fills up with water no hotter than around 40 deg. This is ideal for the enzymes to do their work; but the thermostat is still closed, so the water gets heated by the machine's own heater. This takes awhile; up till the temperature hits 45, the enzymes are doing their work. Beyond this temperature, the enzymes are broken down into simpler chemicals; leaving the conventional detergents and heat to finish the cleaning. The net result is no enzymes, less detergent use {half a cup per wash, as opposed to 1.5 cups}, but more electricity use. It's my understanding that detergent residues {including enzymes} are worse for the environment than generating electricity {which can be done in very benign ways, though admittedly it isn't always done like that}.
There is simply no way that something like this is EVER going to work.
..... and of course, actually performing the songs in the first place. That is the only job that can't really be done by anyone else {since one typically is not so interested simply in the song "Baby One More Time" but in Britney Spears' particular rendition of "Baby One More Time"}.
In the technological domain, it is impossible -- not merely difficult, actually impossible -- to prevent something that can be perceived from being copied. I shouldn't have to explain why that is the case -- I've done so often enough, on Slashdot and other places, that I'm already several shades of blue in the face. And just because I can't complete the reductio ad absurdum by proving it would require you to travel faster than the speed of light, or to create or destroy energy, or to have the pressure in a fluid act differently in different directions, or add a vector to a scalar, doesn't mean it isn't just as impossible as any of those things -- it might even be a fundamental law in its own right.
In the social domain, people have been sharing music since the first instruments were invented. They aren't going to stop just like that.
Traditionally, manufacturing audio permanent-storage media used to require specialised equipment not commonly available to everyone, and so the record companies had an advantage over the likes of you and me. This is no longer the case. {In fact, it hasn't really been the case since the late 1960s, when Philips invented the compact cassette.} The record companies could make records cheaper than anybody else; and if some Fred-in-the-shed set up in competition, he was liable to get himself bought out. With the advent of CD in the late 1970s / early 1980s, and the first really cheap players in the early-to-mid 1990s, almost everyone began replacing their old vinyl LPs with CDs.
By the year 2000, the mass replacement of LP with CD was almost complete, so people stopped buying quite so many back-catalogue CDs. The fashion for "Reality TV" shows led to a phenomenon of short-lived, disposable wannabe acts releasing albums that were not actually very good, and people soon stopped buying quite so many new CDs.
I don't know which is sadder: the fact that there seem to be people who think that it is possible to prevent copying, or the fact that they are attempting to do so with flagrant disregard for the fact that we might have obtained the necessary permission for said copying. {Until quite recently, it was the law in Britain -- dunno about other countries, sorry -- that you were to be considered as innocent until proven guilty. Upon which basis it would be up to the authorities to prove that you did not have the right to copy that material, and not up to you to prove that you did have such a right. However, in cases of racism, paedophilia and terrorism, the suspect is often considered guilty until, or even sometimes despite being, proven innocent.}
When you buy a CD, the money you pay gets split various ways. There are lots of things you are paying for: pressing the CD, printing the sleeve, packaging it all up, delivering it to a record store conveniently located in your neighbourhood
The best anyone can hope for is that people will make use of a system which allows them to compensate artists directly for downloading music. If I wanted to listen to Britney Spears singing "Baby One More Time", I wouldn't really object to paying a few pence to Britney Spears. I'd certainly hope that she'd slip me a few coppers if she wanted me to sing for her. What is bad, though, is that I'm expected to pay a small fortune for some record company to perform logistical services {stamping a CD, printing a booklet and delivering the whole thing} that could be obtained {albeit to a lesser standard, but hey --
They certainly didn't mind the loss of quality when walkman cassettes were all there was.
yes it does
What I'm envisaging is a gadget with a HDD and a USB connector. You plug it into a PC and it pretends to be a USB audio adaptor, something like a SoundBlaster Extigy perhaps. The PC sends PCM audio to it over the USB connection, fully expecting it to be converted to analogue, amplified and listened to. Instead, the gadget is simply writing the raw PCM data to its own hard disk. Maybe it could add WAV headers, maybe it could recompress on-the-fly into MP3 or Ogg Vorbis and write to a flash card instead of a HDD, but those are just details: the main thing is that it's snarfing data that is being broadcast down a bus.
The fun part is that it also pretends to be -- well, it is -- a USB mass storage device. So now you just mount it and read back the raw PCM files.
Alternatively, if you already have the necessary software for playing audio from a stream anyway, why can't you just hack the source code a little so that it outputs data to a regular file as well as or instead of the DSP device?
You can run MySQL and Postgres on the same machine, as they use different ports by default; so the situation is not quite as dire as you're making out. I would also hazard a guess that somebody somewhere has a My-to-PG syntax translator or even a set of patches to the Postgres source that make it accept MySQL's slightly-unusual quoting syntax.
...............
The points you raise are all valid, but only in a minority of cases. In probably 8 cases out of 10, MySQL provides everything the user is going to want. And if someone's application is beginning seriously to outgrow the capabilities of the database backend, isn't there a chance it might actually benefit from a complete, from-the-ground-up rewrite?
I feel the situation is best illustrated as follows.
PHP Programmer: Look at my new improved speedy potato peeler!
Java Programmer: Does it peel apples as well?
PHP Programmer: No, it only peels potatoes. Nobody in my family likes apples, so I didn't bother peeling apples.
Java programmer: Well, then; if it's hard-coded to work with only one kind of vegetable, it's obviously crap.
............... later
PHP Programmer: I have redesigned my potato peeler to peel apples, although it now takes half as long again to peel a potato compared to the original version.
Java Programmer: Well, that's a start, I suppose. So does it cut up the potato into chips after peeling it?
If it makes you any happier, I'd ditch MySQL in a heartbeat if I thought something else would be better in a particular application. And that probably would be Postgres, since we have a "no source, no sale" software procurement policy around here.
This is about the darker side of freedom. Freedom of speech means that the fascists, the religious nutters, the pro-lifers and so on are allowed to hold their rallies -- and that some idiot is allowed to post "Don't forget to pay your $699 licence fee, you cock smoking teabaggers" at the top of almost every Slashdot discussion. And Free software means that the bad guys also get to use it to control their homemade cruise missiles, their slaughterhouses, their injecting-radioactive-tobacco-into-genetically-mod ified-monkeys research labs ..... and now, just when we thought we had reached the very nadir of anti-social applications to which Linux could be applied, someone goes and runs their parking meters with it!
Now the feature set is stable, it can always be re-implemented in a more "beautiful" style. Well, since the mysql_*, pg_*, sybase_* and so on functions use very similar syntax, try using sed.
But I think the question we should be asking is, why would you want your code to support a different database anyway? MySQL is free software, so it'll always be available and supported. Ditching some of the bells and whistles and relying on the scripting language (perl, PHP or python) to do some of the donkey work made it bloody fast {e.g. the primitive % and _ wildcards work so much quicker than full-blown regular expression matching, that it's quicker to pull out more records than you need, have the wrapper script do the regular expression matching and just throw away the ones it doesn't need; more of the queries you are going to do are going to be right than wrong, so let the script provide any 'rollback' functionality you may need}, and -- barring a power failure -- it doesn't corrupt its own tables either.
You obviously think that constraining a programme so it only performs one function is a bad thing -- I guess your ultimate piece of software is one that doesn't care what kind of hardware it is running on or what function it is being asked to perform. But such high ideals are too far removed from reality for most ordinary people to take seriously.
Most programmes don't need to have so much changeability, because they are designed to do a specific task. You can add your fancy object oriented classes and methods, abstraction layers and sundry filibustering tricks all you like; but nothing will change the fact that, at the end of the day, sooner or later, you can't avoid the inevitable fact of having to get your hands dirty and actually manipulate some data. It does mean that a programme meant for handling order forms with a Postgres backend is going to need a lot changed to make it do cooking recipes with a MySQL backend, but if your audience prefers to see a pony doing one trick well rather than a full repertoire of tricks badly, who's disappointed?
Doh! So it is. 7-5-4-3-2, it would have to be then. Think I'd best stay away from any card tables for awhile pending a little practice :)
And all that would happen is that, in a story parallelling that of PGP, someone would rewrite their own version in a country without software patents {thereby not infringing upon said patents}. Provided they put up some kind of notice on the distribution website {"AVAILABLE TO UK USERS ONLY"} their own arse would be covered. It probably would be illegal to distribute it, and it might be illegal even to use it, in countries where software was patentable {mere usage might be protected as part of your "fair dealing" rights in some countries}, but that isn't the fault of the author. What they were doing was perfectly legal where they did it. If a Briton goes to the Netherlands to smoke a quick joint, or a pregnant Irishwoman comes to the UK to get an abortion, or a French family send an ageing relative to Belgium {where euthanasia is legal TTBOMK} there is nothing anybody can do about it legally when they get home; that's the whole idea of national sovereignty.
I actually quite like the idea of NO SOFTWARE PATENTS, PERIOD. If you were going to allow software patents you would have to have a system of checks and balances to prevent abuse, and it's just not worth it for the small amount of legitimate, protect-the-small-guy application there could ever be for software patents.
All that will happen is that P2P and similar applications will start using SSL, TLS or some other form of encryption. Good luck to the RIAA proving that they were the intended recipient of an encrypted communication {which alone would give them the right to decrypt it} -- the fact that it was not encrypted against their public key might be worth mentioning in court too.
Shameless plug: The file sharing software I currently use already includes SSL.
You are forgetting section seven of the GPL. If a programme is patented, it must be licenced royalty-free to everyone as a condition of applying the GPL. It isn't enough to say it is licenced royalty-free for bona fide GPL users -- it has to be everyone or no-one. Similarly, you can't release a programme under the GPL but not allow it to be used in, say, m**t farming / weapons manufacture / biotechnology research applications. It's for everybody or nobody.
..... at least it wouldn't be an issue if they weren't trying to change the rules at the behest of Microsoft's paid shills.
If you wanted to patent something but allow royalty-free use in Open Source software, you'd have to use a BSD-like licence -- but that is fraught with danger; it's too easy with the unmodified form of the BSD licence for someone to take BSD-licenced code, make a tiny tweak and re-release it closed-source. {Maybe you could add something like "Any redistribution of the software or derived work in binary form must be accompanied by an offer of the source code, to be valid until the lapse of copyright on the work in question", as I did when I released a project: that was mainly because the source code for the first alpha version was smaller than the GPL and it didn't seem right that the licence should overshadow the programme.}
Coming from a country where software can't be patented at all, it's not so much of an issue
A five-high hand would have to be 5-4-3-2-A, which is counted as a straight in most circles and even beats A-K-Q-J-T in some circles, or else contain a pair. 6-4-3-2-A is the lowest ranking poker hand.
.....
Of course, even A-A-A-A-W doesn't necessarily beat a Magnum
If you had actually bothered to read anything off the Debian site you would realise that though the stable version of their software may claim old version numbers, it is actually bang smack up to date with security patches. Most users will want the testing version, or maybe unstable {which is made by grabbing the newest version of almost everything as it comes out}.
You only have to edit a file, for crying out loud. If you can't deal with that then you are not a hacker -- but it's easier to be a whining little baby, isn't it? Go back to your pirate copies of Windows and Office XP and delude yourself you're sticking it to the man by copying software illegally, when in reality you're just sucking his cock and loving it.
Burning plants and doing something with the heat is not as bad as burning fossil fuels, because with plants it's a closed cycle ..... you are only putting back what you already took out.
There is nitrogen and sulphur in plants, but it comes from the air or from the ground. Nobody cared when it was there before the plants you grew pulled it out, elements don't change into other elements {except in a nuclear reaction which we are not considering here} so why should anyone give a monkey's toss when you put it back? And if you do something with the heat, like produce steam to spin a turbine to generate electricity, then you have saved the need to burn some amount of fossil fuel.