That is flat out wrong. A black body is an object which does not REFLECT anything. The sun is a pretty decent black body, though it is not black. (well, it would be if you shone a bright enough light on it!)
In this sense of the word, black holes are quite black. In the lay sense of the word, black holes are not black, but instead x-ray coloured, which the eye doesn't see very well.
From 1992 (rev 2.2, baybee!) until about 3 months ago (when I moved to windows 2000) I used nothing but the GUS and the GUS interwave (aka GUS PNP). I loved the card, under DOS it was a dream, but Gravis/AMD never really had their act together in terms of driver support. Their Windows drivers were always flakey. Their approach to other OS's (like OS/2) was to say Real Soon Now for years until some of their users get fed up and write their own drivers..
Don't get me wrong, I like the hardware. I appreciated the register-level documentation (it was pretty damned easy to code for that card), but their drivers just never were fantastic.
The obvious goal every programmer really has deep down inside, is total personal world domination. The ability to crush the lives of millions of people on a whim, the ability to make nations tremble, the power to get anyone to do whatever you want them to!
The GOOD programmers seek to do this in 1 line of perl.
However, here is a pet theory: If Borland really is trying to limit the distribution of source, then it is probably because they feel that if you have the source and the binary of a program that was compiled with their compiler, then you can figure out some of the optimization algorithms that they might use. So they might want to try to prevent that by disallowing the distribution of the original source with binaries that their compiler has produced
No good.
If you're serious about reverse engineering the optimisation, you will just have your own copy of the compiler and
not bother looking at other people's code. Specfically designed simple code would be MUCH more revealing anyways than a normal programme.
Furthermore, Borland's optimizer is not so hot anyways. My code runs significantly faster when it's compiled with Microsoft's compiler than with Borland's. It's POSSIBLE that that's what they don't want you to know, but still this doesn't forbid benchmark's, just complete distribution of the benchmarks.
I actually believe Microsoft's defence that faulty drivers are the cause of most of the instabilities in their NT line. And certainly a buggy driver will bring a linux box down just as well (though I also think it's more likely to be fixed in a timely manner under linux as many of the drivers are open source).
Anyways, Since installing W2K a few months ago, (after resolving some hardware issues (my undercooled (not overclocked - it's a long story) processor was charcoal)) the only unscheduled reboot I've made was when I kicked out the power cord on accident. I feel that this is "stable enough" to be adequate for use as a workstation.
My linux box, on the other hand, goes down about as often (eg, never, unless it loses power (once every three months or so)).
My point is that being UnkyBunkyJoe is not any more significant than being an Anonymous Coward. If it's a user you KNOW then yeah, logging in will help add weight to their statement. but the truth is there are hundreds of thousands of slashdot accounts, and the vast majority of the you know no more about than you do about the poster you oringally replied to.
I am not the original poster, but while I hate several aspects of microsoft's body of policy, I bear little grudge towards EVERYONE who happens to work there.
Just because someone is logged in does not mean they don't work for Microsoft. How much looking does it take to figure out whether I work for Microsoft or not?
It's so easy to make an account, the mere fact that one's not an AC should hold very little weight.
The PS2 is architecturally MUCH more difficult than the original PSX (which really could be modeled as a simple von neumann architecture, with a seperate single graphics accelerator module).
The PS2 has much more explicit and obvious paralelism, which is never as easy to code for.
I've had it with that rediculous statement. DOS is just barely an operating system at all, and Windows 98 really only uses it as a convenient boot loader, and for backwards compatibility with rather old apps. I would say that Windows98 is less similar to DOS than it is to unix OR MacOS, in that all three provide fundamental OS features, like process scheduling, memory management, and hardware abstractions.
DOS is Windows98, in about the same way that sh, lilo, and libc together ARE linux.
Well, on one hand that's true. But on the more practical side of things, I want to avoid retailers who are lacking either the scruples or the savy to get me the chip correctly marked. To a certain point, I don't care who did it, I just want to get what I pay for.
According to Neil Gaiman's Don't Panic, when you started the HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy it was actually going to be a series of six radio shows entitled "The Ends Of The Earth" in which the Earth gets destroyed in each one. You wrote one episode, and ran with that.
Throughout the HHG series, you've put forth several reasons to blow up the earth:
Hyperspace bypass
To keep shrinks in business
A restaraunt?
Something involving the Kricket?
To make it "perfectly safe" (Young Zaphod Plays It Safe)
Something about Mostly Harmless's new guide?
Is this just the result of me reading it a few too many times, or am I onto something here? What WERE your original ideas to blow up the earth over?
Anyways, you think all that is weird, check this out:
From the jargon file, we learn that 105 octal is 69 base 10, and that 105 base 10 is 69 hex. Well, does this pattern continue? Yeah. 105 hex is 69 in base... 42!
The ending to Mostly Harmless seems to be an effort to tie up the ends and say unambigiously "all done, stop bugging me to write more books about this."
So, when are we going to find out what ever became of Fenchurch?
You've worked in a lot of different segments of the information 'industry'. You've written code, & maintained web databases, you've created the story for computer games, you've written novels, radio shows, tv programs (programmes?). Most of those activities have been done in at least a semi-commercial setting. Around here in particular, I hear people trying generalize principles of information ownership across these domains. Do you feel that these various kinds of information are alike enough that they all should or can be treated similarly, in terms of ownership? How different have you seen the concerns of the publishers of these various media you've worked in to be?
I realize you're not a lawyer, but that's part of the reason I'm asking you this (there's also always the off chance you might say something funny in reply).
Creative Labs did a piss-poor job of quality control on the SB cards pretty much up until the Live! series (which are finally pretty good). I'd suggest you find some other card which you can squeeze linux/windows support out of, if you're going with a PC based mp3 player.
Actually that figure was never meant to apply to the copper wiring within the house, but for the long lengths of line and bandwidth-limiting* switches that the signal must travel through to get to another modem. While it is true that depending on your line quality you can get between 2 and 6 times this 'upper limit' of 9600 baud, the higher speed POTS connections (ISDN, ADSL) have very different switching from voice service (to the point where you can use DSL and voice simultaneously on the same copper line).
* bandwidth in the original and literal sense of how wide the band is (in hz) rather than the slight extention of that term meaning "how many bits can we cram through the pipe".
Remember, companies are not evil, as many people think they are. They just do what is the most profitable, if this turns out to make them more money, they will continue to do so.
I consider being motivated by blind greed to be fairly evil. Perhaps not actually malevolant (actively persuing the goal of harming others) but definately evil. Even movie villians often are motivated only by desires for power and wealth. What is it that makes them villians? A lack of compassion or mercy.
The only argument that corporations are non-evil I would consider is that they are more analogous to automata than to sentient moral entities (which is why 'amoral' might suit them). But this is sometimes a stretch - certainly corporate entities often do act with a seeming great ammount of deliberation.
I think the idea is that the FSF is against the ownership of IP, and for information being free, and all that. However, there are copyrights, and the GPL does what it can to undermine the copyright system from within. Not only does it guarantee that the original GPL'd code is 'free' (as would placing it in the public domain), it also exerts a pressure towards freeness on other code, such as derivitives of the original, and separate programmes that wish to 'borrow' from the original.
Slashdot Mirror
That is flat out wrong. A black body is an object which does not REFLECT anything. The sun is a pretty decent black body, though it is not black. (well, it would be if you shone a bright enough light on it!)
In this sense of the word, black holes are quite black. In the lay sense of the word, black holes are not black, but instead x-ray coloured, which the eye doesn't see very well.
From 1992 (rev 2.2, baybee!) until about 3 months ago (when I moved to windows 2000) I used nothing but the GUS and the GUS interwave (aka GUS PNP). I loved the card, under DOS it was a dream, but Gravis/AMD never really had their act together in terms of driver support. Their Windows drivers were always flakey. Their approach to other OS's (like OS/2) was to say Real Soon Now for years until some of their users get fed up and write their own drivers..
Don't get me wrong, I like the hardware. I appreciated the register-level documentation (it was pretty damned easy to code for that card), but their drivers just never were fantastic.
Well, all their upper level managment quit, they have filed for bankrupcy. They may not actually be dead yet, but they are doing VERY poorly.
when the GUI stuff isn't mixed into the kernel ...Linux users can have their cake and eat it too.
At the cost of some performance.
The obvious goal every programmer really has deep down inside, is total personal world domination. The ability to crush the lives of millions of people on a whim, the ability to make nations tremble, the power to get anyone to do whatever you want them to!
The GOOD programmers seek to do this in 1 line of perl.
patents, which are protected for 17 years from date of filing
.. first?
I thought patents were protected for 17 years from date of grant, or 19 years from date of filing, whichever expires
The huge win that they should be looking for will not be in a proven market.
Only if the software has no easily exploitable bugs is the uneducated user the primary flaw in security.
It's not people leaving their passwords on Post-it (TM) notes that allows people to hack hundreds or thousands of boxes to do a DDOS attack with.
No good.
w2k crashes enough on its own
I actually believe Microsoft's defence that faulty drivers are the cause of most of the instabilities in their NT line. And certainly a buggy driver will bring a linux box down just as well (though I also think it's more likely to be fixed in a timely manner under linux as many of the drivers are open source).
Anyways, Since installing W2K a few months ago, (after resolving some hardware issues (my undercooled (not overclocked - it's a long story) processor was charcoal)) the only unscheduled reboot I've made was when I kicked out the power cord on accident. I feel that this is "stable enough" to be adequate for use as a workstation.
My linux box, on the other hand, goes down about as often (eg, never, unless it loses power (once every three months or so)).
Your crash windows link in your sig doesn't do very much to w2k. Does it work better on the 9x series?
My point is that being UnkyBunkyJoe is not any more significant than being an Anonymous Coward. If it's a user you KNOW then yeah, logging in will help add weight to their statement. but the truth is there are hundreds of thousands of slashdot accounts, and the vast majority of the you know no more about than you do about the poster you oringally replied to.
The PS2 is architecturally MUCH more difficult than the original PSX (which really could be modeled as a simple von neumann architecture, with a seperate single graphics accelerator module).
The PS2 has much more explicit and obvious paralelism, which is never as easy to code for.
Win98 == DOS
I've had it with that rediculous statement. DOS is just barely an operating system at all, and Windows 98 really only uses it as a convenient boot loader, and for backwards compatibility with rather old apps. I would say that Windows98 is less similar to DOS than it is to unix OR MacOS, in that all three provide fundamental OS features, like process scheduling, memory management, and hardware abstractions.
DOS is Windows98, in about the same way that sh, lilo, and libc together ARE linux.
Well, on one hand that's true. But on the more practical side of things, I want to avoid retailers who are lacking either the scruples or the savy to get me the chip correctly marked. To a certain point, I don't care who did it, I just want to get what I pay for.
Throughout the HHG series, you've put forth several reasons to blow up the earth:
- Hyperspace bypass
- To keep shrinks in business
- A restaraunt?
- Something involving the Kricket?
- To make it "perfectly safe" (Young Zaphod Plays It Safe)
- Something about Mostly Harmless's new guide?
Is this just the result of me reading it a few too many times, or am I onto something here? What WERE your original ideas to blow up the earth over?So maybe he's dyslexic.
Anyways, you think all that is weird, check this out:
From the jargon file, we learn that 105 octal is 69 base 10, and that 105 base 10 is 69 hex. Well, does this pattern continue? Yeah. 105 hex is 69 in base... 42!
The ending to Mostly Harmless seems to be an effort to tie up the ends and say unambigiously "all done, stop bugging me to write more books about this."
So, when are we going to find out what ever became of Fenchurch?
You've worked in a lot of different segments of the information 'industry'. You've written code, & maintained web databases, you've created the story for computer games, you've written novels, radio shows, tv programs (programmes?). Most of those activities have been done in at least a semi-commercial setting. Around here in particular, I hear people trying generalize principles of information ownership across these domains. Do you feel that these various kinds of information are alike enough that they all should or can be treated similarly, in terms of ownership? How different have you seen the concerns of the publishers of these various media you've worked in to be?
I realize you're not a lawyer, but that's part of the reason I'm asking you this (there's also always the off chance you might say something funny in reply).
The live! fares poorly as a professional quality sound card, but it's at least fairly quiet as consumer-gamer-hobbyist cards go.
Creative Labs did a piss-poor job of quality control on the SB cards pretty much up until the Live! series (which are finally pretty good). I'd suggest you find some other card which you can squeeze linux/windows support out of, if you're going with a PC based mp3 player.
Actually that figure was never meant to apply to the copper wiring within the house, but for the long lengths of line and bandwidth-limiting* switches that the signal must travel through to get to another modem. While it is true that depending on your line quality you can get between 2 and 6 times this 'upper limit' of 9600 baud, the higher speed POTS connections (ISDN, ADSL) have very different switching from voice service (to the point where you can use DSL and voice simultaneously on the same copper line).
* bandwidth in the original and literal sense of how wide the band is (in hz) rather than the slight extention of that term meaning "how many bits can we cram through the pipe".
Remember, companies are not evil, as many people think they are. They just do what is the most profitable, if this turns out to make them more money, they will continue to do so.
I consider being motivated by blind greed to be fairly evil. Perhaps not actually malevolant (actively persuing the goal of harming others) but definately evil. Even movie villians often are motivated only by desires for power and wealth. What is it that makes them villians? A lack of compassion or mercy.
The only argument that corporations are non-evil I would consider is that they are more analogous to automata than to sentient moral entities (which is why 'amoral' might suit them). But this is sometimes a stretch - certainly corporate entities often do act with a seeming great ammount of deliberation.
I think the idea is that the FSF is against the ownership of IP, and for information being free, and all that. However, there are copyrights, and the GPL does what it can to undermine the copyright system from within. Not only does it guarantee that the original GPL'd code is 'free' (as would placing it in the public domain), it also exerts a pressure towards freeness on other code, such as derivitives of the original, and separate programmes that wish to 'borrow' from the original.