1. Inability to change the battery. Many people who are willing to pay this much for a phone USE the phone quite a bit and want the ability to change their batteries. Treo made this mistake and Palm corrected it. So will Apple. Guranteed in iPhone 2.0.
2. Inability to swap the GSM card. People who can afford this phone travel overseas and have cell phone numbers overseas. If I can't plug my Hong Kong GSM card into it and get phone functionality (I could give a damn about voicemail) I will not buy one.
3. Mediocre 2.0 Megapixel Camera. If I buy this phone I still have to carry around a digital camera. I am better off buying a Nokia 5 Megapixel camera and getting rid of an extra device in my pocket.
4. Lack of 3G. People will demand faster downloads. Another reason to wait for iPhone 2.0.
5. Lack of External Applications. Many iPhone users will be programmers who will want to design applications for the iPhone. I am all but positive that hackers will resolve this feature limitation very quickly which will remove Apple's ability to control the applications on the iPhone and completely eliminate Apple's ability to assure that applications running on the iPhone are stable, making the iPhone platform less stable. This was more arrogance on Apple's part than anything else.
6. Lack of iTunes on the iPhone. You have Internet. You should be able to buy songs / video on the iPhone.
7. Phone disabled when plugged into base. No, Apple, you may NOT turn off my phone. I like to hear the GSM signal when I am listening to my iTunes. This should have been a user option. Fortunately third-party accessories will solve this problem, but Apple's sales will suffer as a result.
8. Lack of built in GPS. Perhaps because it will not work indoors? But I usually know where I am when I am indoors! If Apple added GPS This device would replace seven other devices I have right now and would be wonderful. Look for this in iPhone 2.0.
9. Lack of Mini SD Card. Why limit expandability? So you can gouge me for $100 for an extra 4G of Flash when I pay $24 for a 4G SD Card?
10. Contract with AT&T. I sincerely hope and pray there is an escape clause from this contract for Apple. I do not want to be forced to change my service provider. This will hurt iPhone sales more than anything else. Its just simple math: Apple sales would be higher with four cell phone service providers pushing their product than with just one. And Verizon is not just going to lay down and die. Maybe they didn't see the incredible opportunity they were missing when they passed on the opportunity to partner with Apple the first time around, but forcing them to wait for five years for a second shot will do nothing but guarantee that other mobile phone manufacturers develop products equivalent or better than the iPhone to meet this demand. While this is good for consumers, it is a mistake by Apple.
The term that you are looking for is a Certified High Net-Worth Individual. The obligation is on the company NOT to take any investment from somebody who can not be certified as a high net-worth individual. LiftPort should have returned their checks. BTY, in general the standard is not to put more than 15% of your total net worth into high risk investments, although LiftPort is something I would pass on altogether.
The point I was trying to make is that a LOT of people in the private equity and venture capital industry read Slashdot and follow it for hot new ideas. Even more Angel Investors read Slashdot. And Slashdot is a wonderful resource for feedback and ideas based on your ideas, regardless of income level. So the opportunity to pitch to the Slashdot community is... absolutely incredible.
More importantly, EVERY SINGLE VC that would seriously consider investing in LiftPort will read every single one of these posts on both this and the first Slashdot story. This is just basic due diligence. They will look at Mr. Laine's past companies, his successes, failures, and the resume's of the key people on his team. The rebuttal is whiny, unfocussed, and lacks the razor sharp crystal vision that investors want to see. By posting this rebuttal they have all but guaranteed that no VC will ever invest in LiftPort.
Imagine a guarantee pitch your business plan on Slashdot? LiftPort took "a few weeks" to prepare their response and this is the best they could come up with? Where is the PowerPoint presentation? Where is the Corporate Summary? Where is the business plan? Where is the investor's prospectus? Wouldn't they think to provide links to these critical documents at the BEGINNING of their response? I downloaded Roadmap and it is nothing more than a very boring excercise in project management spanning a couple of decades. The parents to this post are spot-on. It is a crying shame that LiftPort wasted such a wonderful opportunity. I would give anything to be able to pitch a business plan to the Slashdot community.
Venture Capitalists invest in a team, first and foremost. The inability of this 'team' to take advantage of this incredible wonderful opportunity to 'Pitch' to the entire Slashdot community guarantees their inability to raise investment capital, at least not from professional investors. Lack of a Chief Scientist with a PhD in nano-technology on their 'team' is also a guarantee for failure. Perhaps this explains why they attempted to raise money through a Reg. 504d stock offering. They don't even have bios for their 'team' on their website! A company raising money through professional investors must include their team on their web site.
Michael Laine et al have NO IDEA what is required to run a business of this magnitude. LiftPort will fail, not because their idea is impossible, but because the problem they are trying to solve is monumental and their team lacks the experience and the charisma to turn a dream into reality. As a result they will be unable to attract professional investors, and you are not going to build a space elevator by selling T-Shirts online. Mr. Laine may be a visionary, but his time and money would be better spent writing visionary books.
One person out of a population of 300 Million decided to go beserk and kill a bunch of people. There is NO WAY you can prevent this kind of thing. Senseless killing has been a fact of life since Adam and Eve. 'Trying' to prevent this sort of thing will only infringe on the freedoms of everybody else in the United States. The Patriot Act has already taken away many freedoms which Congress should never have been so quick to give away. The net result of 9/11 and Virginia Tech will be the elimination of basic freedoms for all Americans under the guise of 'Security' and 'Safety'.
Max have you ever even been to China? Sure, public peace officers in China might try to discourage somebody from filming them, but this is true for everybody everywhere. Unless you are Paris Hilton the idea of somebody filming you and putting you on television is kind of daunting for most. But the chances of somebody actually being arrested and actually being CHARGED with a crime in China are pretty slim.
Actually, it is NOT the same in China. Something like this could almost NEVER happen in China. In China the VAST majority of police do not carry guns. Daily policing is divided into two sectors: "Public Peace" officers and "Traffic Police" - those are literal translations. Traffic police are ONLY authorized to regulate traffic, so they have no authority or control over a bystander filming them. Traffic police in China are not armed, so they do not have the power of the gun behind them to intimidate the photographer.
Public Peace officers in China are a refreshing experience compared to police in the USA. Suppose you get in an altercation in China. Most of the time the public peace officers will show up, try to find out what happened, reason with the two sides, decide one side was wrong, and encourage the party that was wrong to make a private settlement. Nobody gets arrested or fingerprinted or put into the legal 'system'. In this respect the average "Public Peace" officers in China are very much like Andy Griffith was in Mayberry, NC.
The common misconception that China is a police state is in reality a myth. China has a population of over 1,500 Million people. For readers in the USA, think of multiplying the number of people in your workplace or in Starbucks by FIVE. That is how crowded it is over here. Spying on that many people is not manageable. China does not have the infrastructure to have that many people in the system. In China, as long as you dont participate in organized government protests the police by and for the most part leave the average person alone.
The United States has 5 percent of the world's population and 25 percent of the world's incarcerated population. We rank first in the world in locking up our fellow citizens. A U.S. Justice Department report released on November 30, 2006 showed that a record 7 million people - or one in every 32 American adults - were behind bars, on probation or on parole at the end of 2005. Of the total, 2.2 million were in prison or jail in the USA. More people are behind bars in the United States than in any other country. China ranks second with 1.5 million prisoners, followed by Russia with 870,000. But China has a population five times the size of the United States, so from a percentage standpoint Chinas incarceration rate is less than 1/7 of the USA and the fraction of people in the 'system' is even smaller.
That is not to say that police in China never act contrary to the law. There are bad eggs in every batch. But in the situation described in this case the chance of the photographer getting locked up for filming a traffic stop would be extremely remote in China. Traffic Police in China would probably just smile and wave to the camera.
This is a great thread. There are so many 3D alternatives out it will be great to see what this thread comes up with. I am only disappointed this topic didn't get rated as a major story on Slashdot.
Not to downplay the benefits of programming in C++, I think it is better to focus game development using scripting language rather than for C++. When I started writing games on the Apple II+ I wrote everything in 6502 assembly but with lores B&W graphics. Today the successful game developer no longer has that luxury.;-)
Game development now requires imagination, creativity, artistic talent and often times story telling ability in addition to programming talent. IMHO it is better to balance your time developing all the different parts of a game than to waste cycles on the ins and outs of C++ (or assembly). I believe this is why the LUA (open source) scripting language has seen so much success in the development of video games. Games such as Grim Fandango and Escape from Monkey Island published by Lucasarts and Neverwinter Nights and MDK2 developed by Bioware were written in LUA. More information about LUA can be found here: http://www.lua.org/ and here: http://www.gamedev.net/reference/programming/featu res/lua.
I am just getting started learning LUA (for a 2D game - another advantage of learning LUA - the ability to grow) so I make no claims to know which 3D engine is the best. There may be other 3D engines integrated to LUA out there and I would love to hear from other people who have experience developing games using LUA and from people developing 3D games using LUA.
The website is riddled with annoying ads and no way to print the article. And Windows only: there is zero information on which programs use compression algorythms supported in Linux.
The data is in a pretty useless format. The data should definitely be charted in compression vs. speed format with identical scales to measure the significance of the compression. Compression of 7% for video is really not that interesting to me. I don't want to be bothered with the time it takes to decompress. For different users different levels of compression is significant. For me if I can't compress by 20% then I don't bother.
It seems almost like this article was written to get Slashdoted. The article is a complete waste of time.
Back in 2004 a close friend of mine told me that when he visited Foxconn (the largest manufacturer of motherboards in the world) in Guangdong China he personally saw an invoice from Microsoft for OEM volumes of Windows XP Home which were bundled together with systems being assembled for Dell. At the time my company was trying to sell Taiwan and China OEM manufacturers on the concept of bundling Linux with their OEM systems. We faced a lot of resistance because they were already getting Windows XP Home for so little, they had no motivation to bundle Linux and try to 'sell' Linux to their OEM customers. In their eyes the value add of Linux was zero.
Microsoft's Windows XP strategy was to provide an inexpensive starter product and hit customers with an expensive upgrade to Windows XP Pro. Now there are even more upgrade options with Windows Vista. Perhaps Windows XP Pro is subsidizing the 'Patent Tax', but Windows XP Home is underwater.
Back in 2004 a close friend of mine told me that when he visited Foxconn in Guangdong China he saw an invoice from Microsoft for OEM volumes of Windows XP Home which were bundled together with systems for a large computer manufacturer whose name starts with a D and rhymes with bell. At the time my company was trying to convince Taiwan and China OEM manufacturers to bundle Linux with their OEM systems. We were faced with a lot of resistance because they were already getting Windows XP Home for so little, they had no motivation to bundle Linux and try to 'sell' Linux to their OEM customers.
Microsoft's game plan was always to come in with a very cheap starter product and hit customers with an expensive upgrade. Perhaps Windows XP Pro is subsidizing the 'Patent Tax', but Windows XP Home is underwater.
Gosh your math is wrong. The 1000 watts of light per square meter is based on the amount of light from a 1000 watt incandescent light bulb. The light from a CCFL fluorescent light bulb would use MUCH less energy. Of course it is possible! See the comments above.
This will not work. The back light in an LCD is actually not a backlight at all. It is a 'side light'. The light is a long CCFL lamp which looks like a very bright miniature fluorescent lamp. They shine through the entire LCD through a prism effect. Puting a light bulb behind the LCD or holding the LCD up to the sunlight will not work, at least not for my LCD.
One thing you COULD try is replacing the CCFL in your LCD with a more powerful bulb. You would also have to change the Inverter used to power the CCFL. I am not sure if this would help a lot, but it would probably help some. And it would be cheap. About $50 for the parts.
You can buy CCFL lamps here: http://www.ccfldirect.com/
The premise of Internet interuption is probably much more likely to occur as a result of natural disasters. A serious earthquake near Taiwan on Dec. 27th 2006 DID shut down most of the Internet for China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea and Japan. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6211451.st m I was IN China at the time and it was... horrible. The major telcos in Beijing, China Netcom, was not so great at recovering from it. China Telecom in Shanghai did a much better job. Japan, Korea and Taiwan recovered much quicker because their ISPs were willing to spend money on alternate Internet paths via satellite. China Netcom was just too cheap and screwed over their customers.
The Internet never actually went completely down, but you were not able to surf the Internet. Email was problematic, but IM and VoIP still worked. Most of the problem was that port 80 requests far exceeded the available bandwidth, so everything just ground to a hault. MSN and Skype still worked like a charm. I had friends IM me web page content so that I could 'surf' pages I desperately needed to read. I also used proxies in Australia to gain access to the USA Internet and this worked quite well.
I think the idea of a terrorist organization trying to bring down Internet infrastructure is completely ludicrous. Terrorists want to take lives, and bringing down the Internet is not going to take (that many) lives. This is just another sad example of the sorry state of paranoya we live in under the Bush administration post 911. Just as there will NEVER be another successful hijacking of an airplane in the USA again, not because of the stupid security we have to go through at airports, but because normal every day airplane passengers will kill the terrorists rather than let terrorists take over an airplane again, ever.
We do NOT need to worry about things that will never happen, and terrorists trying to shut down the Internet by blowing up infrastructure? It is just NOT going to happen. A bomb would be better used where there is a high concentration of people. Maybe the Internet will be compromised through a virus or malware or bots - these are things we should worry about, but NEVER by physical force.
We really need to STOP giving attention to these fear mongers who promote these stupid ideas.
Great! After having just returned from Communist China (where they deliberately block WikiPedia) the USA now has school districts blocking WikiPedia. Woa to all you dimwits who say "This is for the good of the children." What are you thinking??? Part of the 'learning' process is to be able to acquire data and distinguish that which is accurate from that which is misleading. That is what makes us 'human'.
If we do not teach our children how to distinguish the truth from made up lies and how to check a theory using multiple alternate sources then we end up cripling our future generations. It is precisely the free and open access to information that we in the USA enjoy (and that China lacks) that makes this country and our students some of the most creative and imaginative in the world. NEVER destroy that freedom!
I agree that people who use Spyware to steal credit card and bank information should be punished. But we already have laws on the books which cover this kind of action: trespass, wire fraud, mail fraud, theft, conspiracy, etc. Do we really need to spend our money (because it is our tax dollars which pay congress) to write new legislation which will be hard to define in the first place to expand the scope of coverage of existing law?
Are we really ready to begin prosecution of people who spy because they wonder if their spouse is being faithful? Are we ready to dish out jail time for invading somebody's privacy? How do we quantify the harm done by invading somebody's privacy? What about the paparazzi who invade the privacy of movie stars all day long? Oh but they do so in public. What about keyloggers which measure RF frequencies transmitted by keyboards? So keyloggers will be legal as long as you have the time and the resources to set up RF monitoring equipment?
Then there will be exceptions to the rule. What about parents who install Spyware to monitor where there children visit and who their children send messages to? Are we going to make it illegal for parents to monitor their children? The courts have already determined that the FBI has the right to capture the keystrokes we type into our keyboard (http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/01/04/1 735230) so there is some question as to whether we can really consider what we type on a keyboard 'private'.
Nothing is simple to legislate. Personally I would prefer if the government stayed OUT of my computer.
Therein lies the rub.
Should the husband / boyfriend who spies on his partner be faced with jail time? What if they are using his computer?
Or should the developer who designs the keystroke logger go to jail?
But do we trust the government to define precisely what is Spyware? I have a utility on my computer that remembers old clipboard entries. Is that Spyware? What about 'History' in your browser? What about a cookie that tracks what web site you visit before and after you visit their website? Will legislation mean the end to all Affiliate Programs like Utah's legislation outlawing keyword advertising?
It sounds like a pretty slippery slope and personally I'd prefer if the government focussed on other things like balancing the budget.
Slashdot Mirror
10 Fatal iPhone Flaws:
1. Inability to change the battery. Many people who are willing to pay this much for a phone USE the phone quite a bit and want the ability to change their batteries. Treo made this mistake and Palm corrected it. So will Apple. Guranteed in iPhone 2.0.
2. Inability to swap the GSM card. People who can afford this phone travel overseas and have cell phone numbers overseas. If I can't plug my Hong Kong GSM card into it and get phone functionality (I could give a damn about voicemail) I will not buy one.
3. Mediocre 2.0 Megapixel Camera. If I buy this phone I still have to carry around a digital camera. I am better off buying a Nokia 5 Megapixel camera and getting rid of an extra device in my pocket.
4. Lack of 3G. People will demand faster downloads. Another reason to wait for iPhone 2.0.
5. Lack of External Applications. Many iPhone users will be programmers who will want to design applications for the iPhone. I am all but positive that hackers will resolve this feature limitation very quickly which will remove Apple's ability to control the applications on the iPhone and completely eliminate Apple's ability to assure that applications running on the iPhone are stable, making the iPhone platform less stable. This was more arrogance on Apple's part than anything else.
6. Lack of iTunes on the iPhone. You have Internet. You should be able to buy songs / video on the iPhone.
7. Phone disabled when plugged into base. No, Apple, you may NOT turn off my phone. I like to hear the GSM signal when I am listening to my iTunes. This should have been a user option. Fortunately third-party accessories will solve this problem, but Apple's sales will suffer as a result.
8. Lack of built in GPS. Perhaps because it will not work indoors? But I usually know where I am when I am indoors! If Apple added GPS This device would replace seven other devices I have right now and would be wonderful. Look for this in iPhone 2.0.
9. Lack of Mini SD Card. Why limit expandability? So you can gouge me for $100 for an extra 4G of Flash when I pay $24 for a 4G SD Card?
10. Contract with AT&T. I sincerely hope and pray there is an escape clause from this contract for Apple. I do not want to be forced to change my service provider. This will hurt iPhone sales more than anything else. Its just simple math: Apple sales would be higher with four cell phone service providers pushing their product than with just one. And Verizon is not just going to lay down and die. Maybe they didn't see the incredible opportunity they were missing when they passed on the opportunity to partner with Apple the first time around, but forcing them to wait for five years for a second shot will do nothing but guarantee that other mobile phone manufacturers develop products equivalent or better than the iPhone to meet this demand. While this is good for consumers, it is a mistake by Apple.
The term that you are looking for is a Certified High Net-Worth Individual. The obligation is on the company NOT to take any investment from somebody who can not be certified as a high net-worth individual. LiftPort should have returned their checks. BTY, in general the standard is not to put more than 15% of your total net worth into high risk investments, although LiftPort is something I would pass on altogether.
... absolutely incredible.
The point I was trying to make is that a LOT of people in the private equity and venture capital industry read Slashdot and follow it for hot new ideas. Even more Angel Investors read Slashdot. And Slashdot is a wonderful resource for feedback and ideas based on your ideas, regardless of income level. So the opportunity to pitch to the Slashdot community is
More importantly, EVERY SINGLE VC that would seriously consider investing in LiftPort will read every single one of these posts on both this and the first Slashdot story. This is just basic due diligence. They will look at Mr. Laine's past companies, his successes, failures, and the resume's of the key people on his team. The rebuttal is whiny, unfocussed, and lacks the razor sharp crystal vision that investors want to see. By posting this rebuttal they have all but guaranteed that no VC will ever invest in LiftPort.
Imagine a guarantee pitch your business plan on Slashdot? LiftPort took "a few weeks" to prepare their response and this is the best they could come up with? Where is the PowerPoint presentation? Where is the Corporate Summary? Where is the business plan? Where is the investor's prospectus? Wouldn't they think to provide links to these critical documents at the BEGINNING of their response? I downloaded Roadmap and it is nothing more than a very boring excercise in project management spanning a couple of decades. The parents to this post are spot-on. It is a crying shame that LiftPort wasted such a wonderful opportunity. I would give anything to be able to pitch a business plan to the Slashdot community.
Venture Capitalists invest in a team, first and foremost. The inability of this 'team' to take advantage of this incredible wonderful opportunity to 'Pitch' to the entire Slashdot community guarantees their inability to raise investment capital, at least not from professional investors. Lack of a Chief Scientist with a PhD in nano-technology on their 'team' is also a guarantee for failure. Perhaps this explains why they attempted to raise money through a Reg. 504d stock offering. They don't even have bios for their 'team' on their website! A company raising money through professional investors must include their team on their web site.
Michael Laine et al have NO IDEA what is required to run a business of this magnitude. LiftPort will fail, not because their idea is impossible, but because the problem they are trying to solve is monumental and their team lacks the experience and the charisma to turn a dream into reality. As a result they will be unable to attract professional investors, and you are not going to build a space elevator by selling T-Shirts online. Mr. Laine may be a visionary, but his time and money would be better spent writing visionary books.
One person out of a population of 300 Million decided to go beserk and kill a bunch of people. There is NO WAY you can prevent this kind of thing. Senseless killing has been a fact of life since Adam and Eve. 'Trying' to prevent this sort of thing will only infringe on the freedoms of everybody else in the United States. The Patriot Act has already taken away many freedoms which Congress should never have been so quick to give away. The net result of 9/11 and Virginia Tech will be the elimination of basic freedoms for all Americans under the guise of 'Security' and 'Safety'.
Max have you ever even been to China? Sure, public peace officers in China might try to discourage somebody from filming them, but this is true for everybody everywhere. Unless you are Paris Hilton the idea of somebody filming you and putting you on television is kind of daunting for most. But the chances of somebody actually being arrested and actually being CHARGED with a crime in China are pretty slim.
Actually, it is NOT the same in China. Something like this could almost NEVER happen in China. In China the VAST majority of police do not carry guns. Daily policing is divided into two sectors: "Public Peace" officers and "Traffic Police" - those are literal translations. Traffic police are ONLY authorized to regulate traffic, so they have no authority or control over a bystander filming them. Traffic police in China are not armed, so they do not have the power of the gun behind them to intimidate the photographer.
Public Peace officers in China are a refreshing experience compared to police in the USA. Suppose you get in an altercation in China. Most of the time the public peace officers will show up, try to find out what happened, reason with the two sides, decide one side was wrong, and encourage the party that was wrong to make a private settlement. Nobody gets arrested or fingerprinted or put into the legal 'system'. In this respect the average "Public Peace" officers in China are very much like Andy Griffith was in Mayberry, NC.
The common misconception that China is a police state is in reality a myth. China has a population of over 1,500 Million people. For readers in the USA, think of multiplying the number of people in your workplace or in Starbucks by FIVE. That is how crowded it is over here. Spying on that many people is not manageable. China does not have the infrastructure to have that many people in the system. In China, as long as you dont participate in organized government protests the police by and for the most part leave the average person alone.
The United States has 5 percent of the world's population and 25 percent of the world's incarcerated population. We rank first in the world in locking up our fellow citizens. A U.S. Justice Department report released on November 30, 2006 showed that a record 7 million people - or one in every 32 American adults - were behind bars, on probation or on parole at the end of 2005. Of the total, 2.2 million were in prison or jail in the USA. More people are behind bars in the United States than in any other country. China ranks second with 1.5 million prisoners, followed by Russia with 870,000. But China has a population five times the size of the United States, so from a percentage standpoint Chinas incarceration rate is less than 1/7 of the USA and the fraction of people in the 'system' is even smaller.
That is not to say that police in China never act contrary to the law. There are bad eggs in every batch. But in the situation described in this case the chance of the photographer getting locked up for filming a traffic stop would be extremely remote in China. Traffic Police in China would probably just smile and wave to the camera.
This is a great thread. There are so many 3D alternatives out it will be great to see what this thread comes up with. I am only disappointed this topic didn't get rated as a major story on Slashdot.
;-)
u res/lua.
Not to downplay the benefits of programming in C++, I think it is better to focus game development using scripting language rather than for C++. When I started writing games on the Apple II+ I wrote everything in 6502 assembly but with lores B&W graphics. Today the successful game developer no longer has that luxury.
Game development now requires imagination, creativity, artistic talent and often times story telling ability in addition to programming talent. IMHO it is better to balance your time developing all the different parts of a game than to waste cycles on the ins and outs of C++ (or assembly). I believe this is why the LUA (open source) scripting language has seen so much success in the development of video games. Games such as Grim Fandango and Escape from Monkey Island published by Lucasarts and Neverwinter Nights and MDK2 developed by Bioware were written in LUA. More information about LUA can be found here: http://www.lua.org/ and here: http://www.gamedev.net/reference/programming/feat
There are no less than five (and probably more) major 3D engines tied to LUA: Ogre3D (using Emma3D http://emma3d.sourceforge.net/, Irrlicht http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/ (using https://sourceforge.net/projects/irrlua/, Apocalyx http://apocalyx.sourceforge.net/, Luxina http://www.luxinia.de/, and Electro http://www.evl.uic.edu/rlk/electro/index.html
I am just getting started learning LUA (for a 2D game - another advantage of learning LUA - the ability to grow) so I make no claims to know which 3D engine is the best. There may be other 3D engines integrated to LUA out there and I would love to hear from other people who have experience developing games using LUA and from people developing 3D games using LUA.
The website is riddled with annoying ads and no way to print the article. And Windows only: there is zero information on which programs use compression algorythms supported in Linux.
The data is in a pretty useless format. The data should definitely be charted in compression vs. speed format with identical scales to measure the significance of the compression. Compression of 7% for video is really not that interesting to me. I don't want to be bothered with the time it takes to decompress. For different users different levels of compression is significant. For me if I can't compress by 20% then I don't bother.
It seems almost like this article was written to get Slashdoted. The article is a complete waste of time.
Back in 2004 a close friend of mine told me that when he visited Foxconn (the largest manufacturer of motherboards in the world) in Guangdong China he personally saw an invoice from Microsoft for OEM volumes of Windows XP Home which were bundled together with systems being assembled for Dell. At the time my company was trying to sell Taiwan and China OEM manufacturers on the concept of bundling Linux with their OEM systems. We faced a lot of resistance because they were already getting Windows XP Home for so little, they had no motivation to bundle Linux and try to 'sell' Linux to their OEM customers. In their eyes the value add of Linux was zero.
Microsoft's Windows XP strategy was to provide an inexpensive starter product and hit customers with an expensive upgrade to Windows XP Pro. Now there are even more upgrade options with Windows Vista. Perhaps Windows XP Pro is subsidizing the 'Patent Tax', but Windows XP Home is underwater.
Microsoft's game plan was always to come in with a very cheap starter product and hit customers with an expensive upgrade. Perhaps Windows XP Pro is subsidizing the 'Patent Tax', but Windows XP Home is underwater.
Every keyboard except DVORAK keyboards that is.
Gosh your math is wrong. The 1000 watts of light per square meter is based on the amount of light from a 1000 watt incandescent light bulb. The light from a CCFL fluorescent light bulb would use MUCH less energy. Of course it is possible! See the comments above.
This will not work. The back light in an LCD is actually not a backlight at all. It is a 'side light'. The light is a long CCFL lamp which looks like a very bright miniature fluorescent lamp. They shine through the entire LCD through a prism effect. Puting a light bulb behind the LCD or holding the LCD up to the sunlight will not work, at least not for my LCD. One thing you COULD try is replacing the CCFL in your LCD with a more powerful bulb. You would also have to change the Inverter used to power the CCFL. I am not sure if this would help a lot, but it would probably help some. And it would be cheap. About $50 for the parts. You can buy CCFL lamps here: http://www.ccfldirect.com/
The premise of Internet interuption is probably much more likely to occur as a result of natural disasters. A serious earthquake near Taiwan on Dec. 27th 2006 DID shut down most of the Internet for China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea and Japan. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6211451.st m I was IN China at the time and it was ... horrible. The major telcos in Beijing, China Netcom, was not so great at recovering from it. China Telecom in Shanghai did a much better job. Japan, Korea and Taiwan recovered much quicker because their ISPs were willing to spend money on alternate Internet paths via satellite. China Netcom was just too cheap and screwed over their customers.
The Internet never actually went completely down, but you were not able to surf the Internet. Email was problematic, but IM and VoIP still worked. Most of the problem was that port 80 requests far exceeded the available bandwidth, so everything just ground to a hault. MSN and Skype still worked like a charm. I had friends IM me web page content so that I could 'surf' pages I desperately needed to read. I also used proxies in Australia to gain access to the USA Internet and this worked quite well.
I think the idea of a terrorist organization trying to bring down Internet infrastructure is completely ludicrous. Terrorists want to take lives, and bringing down the Internet is not going to take (that many) lives. This is just another sad example of the sorry state of paranoya we live in under the Bush administration post 911. Just as there will NEVER be another successful hijacking of an airplane in the USA again, not because of the stupid security we have to go through at airports, but because normal every day airplane passengers will kill the terrorists rather than let terrorists take over an airplane again, ever.
We do NOT need to worry about things that will never happen, and terrorists trying to shut down the Internet by blowing up infrastructure? It is just NOT going to happen. A bomb would be better used where there is a high concentration of people. Maybe the Internet will be compromised through a virus or malware or bots - these are things we should worry about, but NEVER by physical force.
We really need to STOP giving attention to these fear mongers who promote these stupid ideas.
Great! After having just returned from Communist China (where they deliberately block WikiPedia) the USA now has school districts blocking WikiPedia. Woa to all you dimwits who say "This is for the good of the children." What are you thinking??? Part of the 'learning' process is to be able to acquire data and distinguish that which is accurate from that which is misleading. That is what makes us 'human'. If we do not teach our children how to distinguish the truth from made up lies and how to check a theory using multiple alternate sources then we end up cripling our future generations. It is precisely the free and open access to information that we in the USA enjoy (and that China lacks) that makes this country and our students some of the most creative and imaginative in the world. NEVER destroy that freedom!
Are we really ready to begin prosecution of people who spy because they wonder if their spouse is being faithful? Are we ready to dish out jail time for invading somebody's privacy? How do we quantify the harm done by invading somebody's privacy? What about the paparazzi who invade the privacy of movie stars all day long? Oh but they do so in public. What about keyloggers which measure RF frequencies transmitted by keyboards? So keyloggers will be legal as long as you have the time and the resources to set up RF monitoring equipment?
Then there will be exceptions to the rule. What about parents who install Spyware to monitor where there children visit and who their children send messages to? Are we going to make it illegal for parents to monitor their children? The courts have already determined that the FBI has the right to capture the keystrokes we type into our keyboard (http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/01/04/1 735230) so there is some question as to whether we can really consider what we type on a keyboard 'private'.
Nothing is simple to legislate. Personally I would prefer if the government stayed OUT of my computer.
Therein lies the rub. Should the husband / boyfriend who spies on his partner be faced with jail time? What if they are using his computer? Or should the developer who designs the keystroke logger go to jail? But do we trust the government to define precisely what is Spyware? I have a utility on my computer that remembers old clipboard entries. Is that Spyware? What about 'History' in your browser? What about a cookie that tracks what web site you visit before and after you visit their website? Will legislation mean the end to all Affiliate Programs like Utah's legislation outlawing keyword advertising? It sounds like a pretty slippery slope and personally I'd prefer if the government focussed on other things like balancing the budget.