Basically Nokia seems to be saying that they'd rather pay predictable patent licensing fees for H.264/AAC than face unknown risk. That's a business decision, and I don't know of any good argument against it
I have an argument against it. How do they know there aren't submarine patents covering H.264/AAC in addition to the patents they're paying license fees for?
I took a picture of the comet just yesterday. Posted here.
In fact, I have several photos of the comet taken over the past few weeks. They're not all cropped the same, but it's still quite apparent how much the comet is expanding. One of these days I plan to put together a composite photo, fixing the stars in place, and showing not only the expansion of the comet but also its motion relative to the stars.
On an all-night *yawn* trip from Salt Lake City to San Diego, I took this photo at the rest area in the desert between Baker and Barstow, California, looking in the direction of Las Vegas. Once I found refuge from the glare bombs surrounding the parking lot, I looked up and saw more stars than I've ever seen before... but Vegas and L.A. were huge glowing domes on the horizon. I don't think there's anywhere in the continental U.S. that is totally free from light pollution.
Tone down the lighting at gas stations and car lots. Seriously, there are many of these that are so excessively bright that it's literally painful to drive by them at night. While we're at it, get rid of all the billboards shooting kilowatts of light straight into the sky all night. Save power and bring back some of the stars too...
I was disappointed by the epilogue as well. Before I read a page of it, I already knew Harry and Ginny would get married, and I predicted the kids named James and Lily too.
It might have been nice to see some vignettes--just a paragraph or two touching the courtship, wedding, newlywed argument, landing a job, etc.
As for the OotP movie adaptation, the only change that bothered me was that Harry handed over the prophecy to Lucius instead of stalling for time ("Yeah right, as if you're not going to kill us anyway"). I think the other changes streamlined the story for the movie screen without compromising its spirit.
Although HFS was upgraded to HFS+, NTFS and later incarnations up till today don't have journaling, something you should expect in just about any OS now.
Maybe I'm parsing that wrong, but NTFS is journaled. Has been since its introduction in Windows NT 3.1 in 1993. HFS+ didn't acquire journaling until Mac OS 10.2 in 2002.
... it just positions itself to the right of the screen. You can right-click the taskbar icon, select "Move", and then hold the left arrow to bring it back.
What bothers me more about it is that the keyboard shortcuts for minimize and maximize don't work (Alt+Space, N / Alt+Space, X).
My guess is both these bugs came about because Apple wanted to draw their own window title (and apparently haven't heard of WM_NCPAINT).
A few years ago, I went to Best Buy intending to buy a digital camera, only to find it cost 20% more than the price advertised on the web site. So I bought it elsewhere. I'm fine with web-only specials, but this was not identified as one.
I don't think anybody buys stuff online from big brick and mortar chains anyway. If I go to Best Buy or CompUSA's website, it's because I want something fast and I want to make sure they have what I want at a reasonable price before driving across town. Once I learned Best Buy's website does not reflect Best Buy's in-store prices, any reason I had for going there evaporated.
I am not proposing to eliminate the patent system, nor am I proposing to prohibit patents on software. Instead, I believe the patent system needs to be fixed in a way that requires every patent issued to show that there is genuine innovation that would not have come about, at least in a timely manner, without the opportunity of exclusivity driving the investment in the invention, or the coincidental intellectual creation beyond the routine.
That's awfully hard to prove. I think it'd be easier to just abolish patents entirely. The cure is worse than the disease IMHO.
The youngest moon walker (Harrison Shmitt; Apollo 17) will be 84 in 2019. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin will be 89. There's a good chance at least one Apollo moon walker will survive to see mankind return to the moon.
In Unix, you type a command, get "permission denied", and then run the command again, prefixed with "sudo".
In Windows, you type in a command, get "permission denied", and... crap. There is no "sudo". Instead, you have to find a shortcut to a command prompt, right-click and select "Run as administrator", confirm the UAC prompt, change back to whatever directory you were in, and then run the command. It's a huge pain for people who work from the command line.
The latter window popped up a "calculating remaining time" window, but I could see in the folder view that it was copying files the entire time. So it's not that it spent more time calculating than copying per se--it was calculating while it was copying, and didn't get a time estimate until it was almost done.
It's a bug that never should have made it into a shipping product, let alone gone unfixed for two major releases of the compiler (VS2002 and 2003). The fact that it took more than three years to fix a bug that completely b0rked unmanaged/managed interoperability shows how high a priority this must be to Microsoft (i.e., not very high at all).
The article made a big deal about how Win32 and GDI are obsolete in Vista, and all the cool apps use WPF on the.NET Framework 3, and this makes them vector-based, so they're DPI-independent and magnify cleanly.
I use Vista every day at work, and I have never seen such an app. All the built-in Windows apps look just the same as they did in XP (with the notable exceptions of Minesweeper and Solitaire, which still appear blocky under the Magnifier).
Does Vista even come with any WPF applications?
And is the.NET Framework really the native API for this? Not a great way to encourage existing applications to be ported to WPF, as "managed code" does not play well with compiled languages like C++ (they can't even marshal bool properly, for heaven's sake).
Mandate full-cutoff streetlights that focus light where it's needed instead of spraying it every which way (this will eliminate glare and reduce light pollution as well as save energy). Also set a brightness limit for gas stations, car lots, etc. - there's no need to light these up brighter than an operating room table.
Slashdot Mirror
I have an argument against it. How do they know there aren't submarine patents covering H.264/AAC in addition to the patents they're paying license fees for?
"cryogenic" in this context typically refers to liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen; in other words, this ischemical propulsion.
Also, parachutes have been used on Mars, by the Pathfinder and Mars Exploration Rover missions (albeit in conjunction with retrorockets and airbags).
It is certainly visible to the naked eye, and looks distinctly not-star-like. It's spectacular in binoculars.
Right now it's in Perseus, quite close to the brightest star. It's in the northeast as dusk falls, below Cassiopeia.
I took a picture of the comet just yesterday. Posted here.
In fact, I have several photos of the comet taken over the past few weeks. They're not all cropped the same, but it's still quite apparent how much the comet is expanding. One of these days I plan to put together a composite photo, fixing the stars in place, and showing not only the expansion of the comet but also its motion relative to the stars.
No. You need a temperature gradient to convert heat into energy.
here. There was no visible tail, just a fuzzy circle.
Huh? Win2K's EFS works for multiple users. Although it wasn't until XP SP1 that EFS was no longer trivially crackable...
Oh, and in your list of enhancements in XP, you forgot ClearType.
On an all-night *yawn* trip from Salt Lake City to San Diego, I took this photo at the rest area in the desert between Baker and Barstow, California, looking in the direction of Las Vegas. Once I found refuge from the glare bombs surrounding the parking lot, I looked up and saw more stars than I've ever seen before... but Vegas and L.A. were huge glowing domes on the horizon. I don't think there's anywhere in the continental U.S. that is totally free from light pollution.
Tone down the lighting at gas stations and car lots. Seriously, there are many of these that are so excessively bright that it's literally painful to drive by them at night. While we're at it, get rid of all the billboards shooting kilowatts of light straight into the sky all night. Save power and bring back some of the stars too...
I was disappointed by the epilogue as well. Before I read a page of it, I already knew Harry and Ginny would get married, and I predicted the kids named James and Lily too.
It might have been nice to see some vignettes--just a paragraph or two touching the courtship, wedding, newlywed argument, landing a job, etc.
As for the OotP movie adaptation, the only change that bothered me was that Harry handed over the prophecy to Lucius instead of stalling for time ("Yeah right, as if you're not going to kill us anyway"). I think the other changes streamlined the story for the movie screen without compromising its spirit.
Although HFS was upgraded to HFS+, NTFS and later incarnations up till today don't have journaling, something you should expect in just about any OS now.
Maybe I'm parsing that wrong, but NTFS is journaled. Has been since its introduction in Windows NT 3.1 in 1993. HFS+ didn't acquire journaling until Mac OS 10.2 in 2002.
... it just positions itself to the right of the screen. You can right-click the taskbar icon, select "Move", and then hold the left arrow to bring it back.
What bothers me more about it is that the keyboard shortcuts for minimize and maximize don't work (Alt+Space, N / Alt+Space, X).
My guess is both these bugs came about because Apple wanted to draw their own window title (and apparently haven't heard of WM_NCPAINT).
... try and maximize Safari-on-Windows on your secondary monitor and see what happens.
And why are the Minimize and Maximize options in the window menu disabled? The Alt+Space, X / Alt+Space, R keyboard shortcuts don't work.
"Scientists in Norway discover that the sun rises each and every Tuesday."
;)
Not in the northernmost parts of Norway it doesn't...
A few years ago, I went to Best Buy intending to buy a digital camera, only to find it cost 20% more than the price advertised on the web site. So I bought it elsewhere. I'm fine with web-only specials, but this was not identified as one.
I don't think anybody buys stuff online from big brick and mortar chains anyway. If I go to Best Buy or CompUSA's website, it's because I want something fast and I want to make sure they have what I want at a reasonable price before driving across town. Once I learned Best Buy's website does not reflect Best Buy's in-store prices, any reason I had for going there evaporated.
That's awfully hard to prove. I think it'd be easier to just abolish patents entirely. The cure is worse than the disease IMHO.
The youngest moon walker (Harrison Shmitt; Apollo 17) will be 84 in 2019. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin will be 89. There's a good chance at least one Apollo moon walker will survive to see mankind return to the moon.
You can't execute shell commands such as copy or del that way. You can only launch processes.
I suppose you could launch a new cmd.exe that way, but then you'd still lose whatever context you had (mostly the current directory).
In Unix, you type a command, get "permission denied", and then run the command again, prefixed with "sudo".
In Windows, you type in a command, get "permission denied", and... crap. There is no "sudo". Instead, you have to find a shortcut to a command prompt, right-click and select "Run as administrator", confirm the UAC prompt, change back to whatever directory you were in, and then run the command. It's a huge pain for people who work from the command line.
Do you see that with few larger files, or lots of smaller files?
I just did a few tests on Vista Ultimate x64 on an Athlon X2 3800+ machine with 2GB of RAM:
10 files totaling 10MB = instant
675 files totaling 5MB = about 15 seconds
The latter window popped up a "calculating remaining time" window, but I could see in the folder view that it was copying files the entire time. So it's not that it spent more time calculating than copying per se--it was calculating while it was copying, and didn't get a time estimate until it was almost done.
Yet another whiny fan to sieze up and die in six months.
How long before they put active heatsinks on mice?
It's a bug that never should have made it into a shipping product, let alone gone unfixed for two major releases of the compiler (VS2002 and 2003). The fact that it took more than three years to fix a bug that completely b0rked unmanaged/managed interoperability shows how high a priority this must be to Microsoft (i.e., not very high at all).
The article made a big deal about how Win32 and GDI are obsolete in Vista, and all the cool apps use WPF on the .NET Framework 3, and this makes them vector-based, so they're DPI-independent and magnify cleanly.
.NET Framework really the native API for this? Not a great way to encourage existing applications to be ported to WPF, as "managed code" does not play well with compiled languages like C++ (they can't even marshal bool properly, for heaven's sake).
I use Vista every day at work, and I have never seen such an app. All the built-in Windows apps look just the same as they did in XP (with the notable exceptions of Minesweeper and Solitaire, which still appear blocky under the Magnifier).
Does Vista even come with any WPF applications?
And is the
Use the Boost Threads library. It's portable to many platforms (including Windows) and supports condition variables.
Mandate full-cutoff streetlights that focus light where it's needed instead of spraying it every which way (this will eliminate glare and reduce light pollution as well as save energy). Also set a brightness limit for gas stations, car lots, etc. - there's no need to light these up brighter than an operating room table.