Reread my post above. Note that I didn't say TV shows are crap. There are some (very few in my opinion) excellent ones. I am specifically referring to the activity of sitting at home watching a purpose-built device. I would rather do something else with my time at home. My time commuting is perfect for watching TV---and there are few enough TV shows I enjoy that this works fine for me.
As far as investment of money, I would rather have one device---my laptop---that allows me to do work, browse the web, play games, and watch shows at my preferred location and time, without spending a lot of money on things like a TIVO and a huge pixel display where I have to fight the advertisements all the time.
Just think of bittorrent as your TIVO par excellence.
Already has replaced it for the past five years
on
Will the Web Replace TV?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
TV? I don't watch a television device anymore, haven't for five years. The whole idea of attaching myself to a video broadcast at home seems so incredibly impossible to me. For the past five years, my chief source of entertainment has been reading and interacting with my favorite websites, posting comments, with the occasional game on the side. This to me is far more entertaining than the idea of gluing my eyes to a video broadcast. If there is a well-done TV show, I'll just download it off the bittorrent and watch it on the bus on the way to and from work.
Ten years ago, a lot of us were using Suns and shelling $10K a piece for them. Then we tried linux boxes, which were like ten times cheaper, but ran the same software as the Suns ran. The problem with linux boxes, though, was the amount of head-banging required to get things like wireless and 3D graphics working. Especially on laptops, which only recently have caught up (thanks to the people reverse-engineering proprietary hardware).
Macs were the perfect solution. They ran our geeky unix software. They ran powerpoint which most prefer for presentations. Wireless just worked.
After a brief stint with macs, I'm back to linux. I love free software. I love the fact I can customize the GUI easily. But most of my colleagues couldn't care less. They just want their hardware to work. They will not listen to argument about free software and proprietary lock-in.
Here's an aside about OS X that's relevant for people who work with PDFs, which includes scientists but I'm sure a lot of other people too. One area that OS X beats linux in handily is Preview, their PDF viewer. Preview does the following things that are much harder or impossible to do with linux software:
Convert postscript files to PDF that ghostscript cannot.
Extremely quickly search a PDF for a phrase, and display a sidebar showing all the search results, allowing you to quickly move between pages that contain the search term.
Easily cut-and-paste figures out of a PDF and save them as PDF, tiff, and other formats.
Beautifully antialias graphics before printing, even with complex color background.
In summary, I love Linux, but I do believe that the article/summary have a point and that Apple's significant resources in (1) spending money on proprietary drivers and (2) developing software that is in some cases superior is cutting into Linux.
Amen to that. Up until feisty, Ubuntu was a constant improvement for me. Then gutsy broke two very important features:
Suspend/resume doesn't work as reliably (hard restart required every ~5 resumes)
NetworkManager barfs when switching from wireless to wired
Now, I won't say that there weren't improvements. Rhythmbox now plays iTunes shares over SSH, and hibernate (which I never use) finally works. But these improvements definitely were not worth the above two regressions. Badly done, Ubuntu.
The only reason I'm not regressing to feisty is that I'm afraid I'll break my evolution settings when reloading my inbox to the older version. That, and the fact that I don't have the time.
Ah, this is the often ignored genius of systems like the APT installation software in Debian flavored Linux distros. When you download software from a trusted repository, you are downloading binaries that have been compiled and digitally signed using the private key of people that you (implicitly) trust. This is a good thing, because the sources you are downloading have been checked by an expert third party that you believe capable of doing the job. This mitigates the need for trusting the software provider and/or checking the source code yourself.
Not that this helps with WoW, but it addresses a common cynical criticism of free/open source software, where people claim it's useless since the average joe can't read source. Yes, the average joe can't read source, but he can decide to have a trusted third party for do so.
That's not true. Read the link I posted above. rsync can create hard links, through the magical --link-dest option. This means that you never need to do full backups, or worry about keeping track of several versions.
You can set up rsync to do hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly backups, all taking up minimal (and I mean minimal) disk space, using hard links.
All you have to do is rm -rf your oldest directory of each kind (hourly daily, weekly, monthly) every time you run.
Heck, I'll even give you the BASH script I use to do this. Call it via cron: e.g. snapshot daily
#!/bin/bash # This script makes a snapshot of several directories using rsync.
# Version 0.5, Rob Bos, September 8, 2002 # Modified by Pausanias August 2004 # This script is released under the terms of the # GNU General Public License, version 2.0.
# run "hourly" from a crontab; run daily, weekly, and monthly from/etc/cron.{daily,weekly,monthly}/.
# Assume that the baseline snapshot type is daily unless otherwise # specified. if [ "f$2" == "f" ]; then
basetype="daily" else
basetype="$2" fi
# if you run every two hours, make it 12, every hour, 24, etc. try to span the entire day. # The below setting runs 8 times a day (every three hours), keeps 7 days, 4 weeks, and 12 months # of backup.
hourlymax=8 dailymax=10 weeklymax=5 monthlymax=8
# This simplifies things down below so I can use $max to delete # the overrotated snapshot, as well as $hourlymax/$dailymax to do # rotation checks. [ $type == "hourly" ] && max=hourlymax [ $type == "daily" ] && max=dailymax [ $type == "weekly" ] && max=weeklymax [ $type == "monthly" ] && max=monthlymax
# Rotate the current list of backups, if we can. if [ -d $backuproot/$type.1 ]; then
oldest=`ls -dt $backuproot/$type.* | tail -n 1 | sed 's/^.*\.//'`
echo Oldest is $type.$oldest >> $logfile 2>&1
for i in `/usr/local/bin/seq $oldest 1 -1`; do
mv $backuproot/$type.$i $backuproot/$type.$(( i + 1 ))
done
linkopt="--link-dest=$backuproot/$type.2" else
linkopt="" fi
I've up a system exactly like the one described above, and had it running, on Panther and now Tiger. The same setup can be used in Linux, or actually any posix file system that allows hard links.
I've been enjoying beautiful backups, with each subdirectory being a perfect image of my home directory at any given date, for about three years now. What does time machine do exactly that's different from this, other than fancy graphics?
There is nothing new in Leopard that would interest most geeks.
Time Machine? I have had something very similar to it set up since the Panther days (via rsync).
3D interface? According to the ars review, it's not so hot.
I was so hopeful that ZFS would make it to Leopard. It has, but only with read access AFAIK, and certainly not in time machine---ummm, not very useful.
So, lots of eye candy for the casual user. Anyone care to chime in why a geek might want to upgrade?
where we already went 40 years ago with computers that would be 0wned by a calculator today.
Way to go firing up the imaginations of the next generation of space scientists, NASA.
To answer the "bits is bits" crowd I have to say that they are right. They are right, that is, until you have to convert back to analog and you factor in real-world power supplies and analog circuitry. I did some experiments with cd's to determine what the heck was happening. Turns out that no magic is involved. What is happening is that the disc takes on a static charge,either through spinning in dry air or just from handling. A spinning, statically charged disc is the definition of an electrostatic generator. This hash-like voltage is impressed on the laser-pickup circuitry. Of course the digital circuit ignores this noise (Well,not entirely. It does effect the jitter rather badly because of power supply noise.), but the noise is now impressed on the power supply and you can see the hash presented to the power-supply rails feeding the analog amplifier, and the cheap chips in most cd-players cannot reject this hash/noise. The better the power-supply and analog cicuitry the less effect this hash/noise and the clarifier has. No power supply built by man can completely eliminate this hash-voltage. It is best to stop it at its source. Hence the Clarifier. This tweak is actually an ANALOG tweak; the clarifier removes the static charge from the disc reducing the noise impressed on the power supply. Most all cd tweaks affect the player in the analog domain. Remember, the CD itself is indeed a digital storage medium, but the player is essentially an analog device right after conversion. (Hell, even before conversion. Its accuracy of conversion is dependent on a clean voltage from the power supply.) For an experiment, take your favorite cd and play it. Notice where in the image the high frequency stuff is (bells etc). Now take your disc and place it against a color tv picture tube when on (about 30,000 volts static charge while running). Now play it again. You will notice an enourmous degradation of sound. Now use the Clarifier (or a bulk tape eraser;start the erasor from about 1 foot,bring close to disc,hold near disc for about 20 secs,then move out to 2 foot before turning off,it works the same just not as convienient as the Clarifier). Now listen again. There should be a readily noticable difference in percieved noise floor and clarity on the highs. Tweaks like vibration damping, green ink, etc all work because the PLAYER is mostly an analog device; it just gets its initial data from a digital source.
Is there a media player software that allows you to listen to these single-file FLACs (together with their.cues) as if they were ripped tracks? I.e. can you have the best of both worlds? It's a tremendous waste of storage and also a huge inconvenience to keep a single FLAC for your when you're in a "whole album" mode and when you're in a "just single track" mode.
is amazing! Prokofiev symphony #2 revealed 156 hits! Now that is some obscure music (his least popular symphony), and the fact that they would have multiple recordings of it right there for 90c... wow.
Price was no object. The main reason I went for a linux laptop was simple---pixel density. I work with very large images, and the more pixels I can see at a time, in better. Even back in 2001, you could buy a cheap 14" Dell with 1440x1050 resolution (128 pixels/linear inch). By contrast, in 2007 you cannot buy a 15.4" inch MacBook pro with similar pixel density. The best Apple can do is 1440x900, which comes to a crappy 110 pixels/linear inch. Simply put, the pixels on a MacBook/MacBook Pro are just way too big.
My current laptop is a Dell Precision M70 (top of the line in 2004) with a screaming graphics card (NVidia Quadro FX 1400 Go). It runs Ubuntu. Since it's a Pentium M, I can undervolt it in linux and it runs fairly cool. Wireless, everything works out of the box (though WPA didn't work until the most recent version of Ubuntu, 7.04). I love it.
For things like iPhoto/iMovie/iDVD, you can't beat a mac---I still go back for those. But I'm starting to get sick of this iTunes nonsense, and if there were suitable linux alternatives to iLife (which there aren't, no matter how much we'd like to think so), I would completely ditch OS X.
Apple is hostile to Linux, because it is beginning to compete with OS X in a much more serious way than Windows.
It all started last year when with the release of iTunes 7, Apple purposely broke DAAP, ending the compatibility of their iTunes software with various media players. Now rhythmbox/amaroK/banshee users can't listen to iTunes shares, and no one has yet been able to break the hash that would allow it.
So it comes as no surprise that the iPod is being further locked down. The closer our desktops get in usability to OS X (and they are not close yet, but making progress), the more of this we'll see.
Disclaimer: I use an OS X desktop and a Linux laptop.
Check out Figure 4 at the end of the linked paper. It shows that the periods of highest diversity coincide with the periods where the cosmic ray flux is lowest. Really amazing correlation if you ask me.
Thanks for the info. I'm attaching the readme that came with the package installer. I was really hoping that this would include a new and better quartz-wm, but it looks like we're stuck with the old one. Can you clue me in as to why this update is better than the default Apple X11 install (aside from niceties of interest to developers only)?
This package is a partial distribution of the X.org X11R7.2 release,
built as a Universal package. It should run on any system running
Mac OS X Tiger (10.4) or later.
Please note that this is an experimental package, and has some features
missing and also probably some bugs, but it's usable on a day-to-day
basis. As such, it is mainly intended for developers who want to be
able to work on parts of X without having to rebuild the whole thing.
If it breaks, you get to keep both pieces. Please send any patches
to x11app@bbyer.mm.st.
The directory/usr/X11 will be created, and all files will be installed
in that directory. This package contains all of the header files,
libraries, fonts, the Xquartz server, and a new version of X11.app,
located at/usr/X11/X11.app.
Note that this does not (yet) contain any user applications (xterm,
etc.), nor does it contain quartz-wm, so most users should also install
Apple's X11User.pkg before proceeding.
The latest version of this package, as well as the sources used to build it, may be found at http://people.freedesktop.org/~bbyer/.
The site claims that they are in gstreamer format. This means that if you are running GNOME, then they are certain to work. The MP3 decoder is free (as in beer).
This is so not true. Have you ever heard of OpenMP? It lets you trivially parallelize any for loops in your program (i.e. let each CPU handle a point in the loops. It is embarrassingly easy to implement. How would it benefit the user? Umm, how about searching your terabytes of images with face recognition software that will soon become available? How about all your photoshop processing, or for finance nuts, or updating your gigabytes of spreadsheet data? Those all run on for loops, you can bet.
Sorry? You don't use C or C++? Everything you've written is in Java/.NET and takes 2 seconds just to bring up a window on a modern CPU? Then maybe it's time to stop dissing lower level languages.
This is also a huge reason for GNOME to stay written in C like it sensibly is and stop talking to the devil/courting Mono.
With the mass of Eris and Pluto, it was a relatively high precision measurement (for astronomers anyway). For the internal density profiles of planets, it's not a direct measurement---it's modeling of the data to argue for consistency with various models. So, to put it more accurately, they just measured the masses of Eris/Pluto correctly; but for the extrasolar planets, they considered various models consistent with the data and showed which one is most likely.
Generally the public doesn't know/care about that particular distinction. And that's good for funding.
This is fascinating. It seems to me through the number of references in Linus's post to ZFS that he (or at least members of the kernel team) are drooling over it. This is all actually working quite the way RMS intended. Linux may be a GPLv2 stronghold, but as soon as some piece of GPLv3 software comes along which is a *must have* i.e. ZFS, enough pressure will fall on the major copyright holders that they will consider going through the PITA of upgrading the kernel to GPLv3.
That may be the major reason for Linus's striking change of heart on GPLv3.
You have to wonder whether RMS talked to Sun at all about this. We do know that he has praised the company for the decision to GPL Java. If RMS wanted to strongarm Linux into a license change, what better way to do it than through ZFS?
Everybody seems to be missing one point here, which is that they are providing the actual warranty service. If your hardware fails due to a manufacturing defect, they will replace it. This is a "normal" warranty and the fact that they are providing it means that they are capable of testing their hardware even with Linux installed. Heck, just install Windows, run your test suite, then wipe and install Linux.
CompleteCare means something different. It means that even if your hardware is working 100% perfectly, say your toddler decides that it is thirsty and pours a gallon of water over it, frying the motherboard. Under a normal warranty, this is not a manufacturing defect and therefore is not covered. The whole point of CompleteCare is that it will cover accidents like this.
It still doesn't covert theft/loss for obvious reasons, but otherwise it is as close as you're going to get to full insurance on your laptop. For a pretty reasonable rate, I might add.
I've actually used Inkscape for making scientific posters (lots of graphics and formulae), and it's decent and easy to use. My only complaints were the following: equation support took some doing to get working---basically you would type in a LaTeX equation, it would convert it to postscript, and then it would use pstoedit to convert it to SVG format.
Second, no native PDF output. The postscript output would not be parsed by ps2pdf. Luckily I was able to get Apple's Preview to do the conversion (that is an excellent piece of software, by the way).
Maybe in the newest version inkscape's ironed out the PDF output issue; that's a pretty huge one.
So then put a limit on the maximum amount of money a candidate or his supporting organizations can accept. With no limits to individual/corporate donations, "freedom" is preserved.
Couple this with a law saying that 50% of the costs of any ads mentioning a candidate for an office must be paid by that candidate or an opponent. This kind of provision (1) forces a limit on ad spending by the candidate, and (2) any "smear" ads must also be paid for by a candidate.
Yes, there may be "fake" candidates whose sole purpose is to accept donations just to smear a "real" candidate's opponent, but this will be limited, because those candidates will be obvious.
And yes, there will still be generic "issue" ads, but it is neither desirable nor justified to limit those.
Say you make the max contribution for a company 10,000 or something, they'll just create a whole bunch of sub-corps and have each donate 10,000 to get back to their original contribution.
Slashdot Mirror
Reread my post above. Note that I didn't say TV shows are crap. There are some (very few in my opinion) excellent ones. I am specifically referring to the activity of sitting at home watching a purpose-built device. I would rather do something else with my time at home. My time commuting is perfect for watching TV---and there are few enough TV shows I enjoy that this works fine for me.
As far as investment of money, I would rather have one device---my laptop---that allows me to do work, browse the web, play games, and watch shows at my preferred location and time, without spending a lot of money on things like a TIVO and a huge pixel display where I have to fight the advertisements all the time.
Just think of bittorrent as your TIVO par excellence.
TV? I don't watch a television device anymore, haven't for five years. The whole idea of attaching myself to a video broadcast at home seems so incredibly impossible to me. For the past five years, my chief source of entertainment has been reading and interacting with my favorite websites, posting comments, with the occasional game on the side. This to me is far more entertaining than the idea of gluing my eyes to a video broadcast. If there is a well-done TV show, I'll just download it off the bittorrent and watch it on the bus on the way to and from work.
Macs were the perfect solution. They ran our geeky unix software. They ran powerpoint which most prefer for presentations. Wireless just worked.
After a brief stint with macs, I'm back to linux. I love free software. I love the fact I can customize the GUI easily. But most of my colleagues couldn't care less. They just want their hardware to work. They will not listen to argument about free software and proprietary lock-in.
Here's an aside about OS X that's relevant for people who work with PDFs, which includes scientists but I'm sure a lot of other people too. One area that OS X beats linux in handily is Preview, their PDF viewer. Preview does the following things that are much harder or impossible to do with linux software:
In summary, I love Linux, but I do believe that the article/summary have a point and that Apple's significant resources in (1) spending money on proprietary drivers and (2) developing software that is in some cases superior is cutting into Linux.
- Suspend/resume doesn't work as reliably (hard restart required every ~5 resumes)
- NetworkManager barfs when switching from wireless to wired
Now, I won't say that there weren't improvements. Rhythmbox now plays iTunes shares over SSH, and hibernate (which I never use) finally works. But these improvements definitely were not worth the above two regressions. Badly done, Ubuntu.The only reason I'm not regressing to feisty is that I'm afraid I'll break my evolution settings when reloading my inbox to the older version. That, and the fact that I don't have the time.
Ah, this is the often ignored genius of systems like the APT installation software in Debian flavored Linux distros. When you download software from a trusted repository, you are downloading binaries that have been compiled and digitally signed using the private key of people that you (implicitly) trust. This is a good thing, because the sources you are downloading have been checked by an expert third party that you believe capable of doing the job. This mitigates the need for trusting the software provider and/or checking the source code yourself.
Not that this helps with WoW, but it addresses a common cynical criticism of free/open source software, where people claim it's useless since the average joe can't read source. Yes, the average joe can't read source, but he can decide to have a trusted third party for do so.
That's not true. Read the link I posted above. rsync can create hard links, through the magical --link-dest option. This means that you never need to do full backups, or worry about keeping track of several versions.
/etc/cron.{daily,weekly,monthly}/.
/etc/snapshot/include.txt`
/usr/bin/awk 'substr($0,length($0),
You can set up rsync to do hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly backups, all taking up minimal (and I mean minimal) disk space, using hard links.
All you have to do is rm -rf your oldest directory of each kind (hourly daily, weekly, monthly) every time you run.
Heck, I'll even give you the BASH script I use to do this. Call it via cron: e.g. snapshot daily
#!/bin/bash
# This script makes a snapshot of several directories using rsync.
# Version 0.5, Rob Bos, September 8, 2002
# Modified by Pausanias August 2004
# This script is released under the terms of the
# GNU General Public License, version 2.0.
# run "hourly" from a crontab; run daily, weekly, and monthly from
[ -z "$1" ] && echo syntax: $0 snapshottype baselinesnapshottype && exit 1
type=$1 # hourly, daily, monthly snapshot?
logfile=/var/log/snapshot.log
backuproot=/Volumes/Sutton/ibackup
backup=`cat
excludefile=/etc/snapshot/exclude.txt
echo `date` >> $logfile
[ ! -e "$backuproot" ] && echo "$backuproot not mounted." >> $logfile && exit 1
# Assume that the baseline snapshot type is daily unless otherwise
# specified.
if [ "f$2" == "f" ]; then
basetype="daily"
else
basetype="$2"
fi
# if you run every two hours, make it 12, every hour, 24, etc. try to span the entire day.
# The below setting runs 8 times a day (every three hours), keeps 7 days, 4 weeks, and 12 months
# of backup.
hourlymax=8
dailymax=10
weeklymax=5
monthlymax=8
# This simplifies things down below so I can use $max to delete
# the overrotated snapshot, as well as $hourlymax/$dailymax to do
# rotation checks.
[ $type == "hourly" ] && max=hourlymax
[ $type == "daily" ] && max=dailymax
[ $type == "weekly" ] && max=weeklymax
[ $type == "monthly" ] && max=monthlymax
# Rotate the current list of backups, if we can.
if [ -d $backuproot/$type.1 ]; then
oldest=`ls -dt $backuproot/$type.* | tail -n 1 | sed 's/^.*\.//'`
echo Oldest is $type.$oldest >> $logfile 2>&1
for i in `/usr/local/bin/seq $oldest 1 -1`; do
mv $backuproot/$type.$i $backuproot/$type.$(( i + 1 ))
done
linkopt="--link-dest=$backuproot/$type.2"
else
linkopt=""
fi
if [ "$type" == "$basetype" ]; then
rsync -xva $linkopt --safe-links --delete --delete-excluded --exclude-from=$excludefile $backup $backuproot/$type.1/ >> $logfile 2>&1
elif [ "$type" == "daily" ]; then
[ -d $backuproot/hourly.$hourlymax ] && mv $backuproot/hourly.$hourlymax $backuproot/daily.1
elif [ "$type" == "weekly" ]; then
[ -d $backuproot/daily.$dailymax ] && mv $backuproot/daily.$dailymax $backuproot/weekly.1
elif [ "$type" == "monthly" ]; then
[ -d $backuproot/weekly.$weeklymax ] && mv $backuproot/weekly.$weeklymax $backuproot/monthly.1
fi
At least since 2004. Just bear with me and take a look at the following HOWTO.
http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/
I've up a system exactly like the one described above, and had it running, on Panther and now Tiger. The same setup can be used in Linux, or actually any posix file system that allows hard links.
I've been enjoying beautiful backups, with each subdirectory being a perfect image of my home directory at any given date, for about three years now. What does time machine do exactly that's different from this, other than fancy graphics?
There is nothing new in Leopard that would interest most geeks.
Time Machine? I have had something very similar to it set up since the Panther days (via rsync).
3D interface? According to the ars review, it's not so hot.
I was so hopeful that ZFS would make it to Leopard. It has, but only with read access AFAIK, and certainly not in time machine---ummm, not very useful.
So, lots of eye candy for the casual user. Anyone care to chime in why a geek might want to upgrade?
where we already went 40 years ago with computers that would be 0wned by a calculator today. Way to go firing up the imaginations of the next generation of space scientists, NASA.
Is there a media player software that allows you to listen to these single-file FLACs (together with their .cues) as if they were ripped tracks? I.e. can you have the best of both worlds? It's a tremendous waste of storage and also a huge inconvenience to keep a single FLAC for your when you're in a "whole album" mode and when you're in a "just single track" mode.
is amazing! Prokofiev symphony #2 revealed 156 hits! Now that is some obscure music (his least popular symphony), and the fact that they would have multiple recordings of it right there for 90c... wow.
I hope this means they will also soon crack the DAAP hash so that non-iTunes clients can see the shared music libraries on their local networks.
Price was no object. The main reason I went for a linux laptop was simple---pixel density. I work with very large images, and the more pixels I can see at a time, in better. Even back in 2001, you could buy a cheap 14" Dell with 1440x1050 resolution (128 pixels/linear inch). By contrast, in 2007 you cannot buy a 15.4" inch MacBook pro with similar pixel density. The best Apple can do is 1440x900, which comes to a crappy 110 pixels/linear inch. Simply put, the pixels on a MacBook/MacBook Pro are just way too big.
My current laptop is a Dell Precision M70 (top of the line in 2004) with a screaming graphics card (NVidia Quadro FX 1400 Go). It runs Ubuntu. Since it's a Pentium M, I can undervolt it in linux and it runs fairly cool. Wireless, everything works out of the box (though WPA didn't work until the most recent version of Ubuntu, 7.04). I love it.
For things like iPhoto/iMovie/iDVD, you can't beat a mac---I still go back for those. But I'm starting to get sick of this iTunes nonsense, and if there were suitable linux alternatives to iLife (which there aren't, no matter how much we'd like to think so), I would completely ditch OS X.
Apple is hostile to Linux, because it is beginning to compete with OS X in a much more serious way than Windows.
It all started last year when with the release of iTunes 7, Apple purposely broke DAAP, ending the compatibility of their iTunes software with various media players. Now rhythmbox/amaroK/banshee users can't listen to iTunes shares, and no one has yet been able to break the hash that would allow it.
So it comes as no surprise that the iPod is being further locked down. The closer our desktops get in usability to OS X (and they are not close yet, but making progress), the more of this we'll see.
Disclaimer: I use an OS X desktop and a Linux laptop.
Check out Figure 4 at the end of the linked paper. It shows that the periods of highest diversity coincide with the periods where the cosmic ray flux is lowest. Really amazing correlation if you ask me.
The site claims that they are in gstreamer format. This means that if you are running GNOME, then they are certain to work. The MP3 decoder is free (as in beer).
This is so not true. Have you ever heard of OpenMP? It lets you trivially parallelize any for loops in your program (i.e. let each CPU handle a point in the loops. It is embarrassingly easy to implement. How would it benefit the user? Umm, how about searching your terabytes of images with face recognition software that will soon become available? How about all your photoshop processing, or for finance nuts, or updating your gigabytes of spreadsheet data? Those all run on for loops, you can bet.
Sorry? You don't use C or C++? Everything you've written is in Java/.NET and takes 2 seconds just to bring up a window on a modern CPU? Then maybe it's time to stop dissing lower level languages.
This is also a huge reason for GNOME to stay written in C like it sensibly is and stop talking to the devil/courting Mono.
LOL, too true.
With the mass of Eris and Pluto, it was a relatively high precision measurement (for astronomers anyway). For the internal density profiles of planets, it's not a direct measurement---it's modeling of the data to argue for consistency with various models. So, to put it more accurately, they just measured the masses of Eris/Pluto correctly; but for the extrasolar planets, they considered various models consistent with the data and showed which one is most likely.
Generally the public doesn't know/care about that particular distinction. And that's good for funding.
This is fascinating. It seems to me through the number of references in Linus's post to ZFS that he (or at least members of the kernel team) are drooling over it. This is all actually working quite the way RMS intended. Linux may be a GPLv2 stronghold, but as soon as some piece of GPLv3 software comes along which is a *must have* i.e. ZFS, enough pressure will fall on the major copyright holders that they will consider going through the PITA of upgrading the kernel to GPLv3.
That may be the major reason for Linus's striking change of heart on GPLv3.
You have to wonder whether RMS talked to Sun at all about this. We do know that he has praised the company for the decision to GPL Java. If RMS wanted to strongarm Linux into a license change, what better way to do it than through ZFS?
Everybody seems to be missing one point here, which is that they are providing the actual warranty service. If your hardware fails due to a manufacturing defect, they will replace it. This is a "normal" warranty and the fact that they are providing it means that they are capable of testing their hardware even with Linux installed. Heck, just install Windows, run your test suite, then wipe and install Linux.
CompleteCare means something different. It means that even if your hardware is working 100% perfectly, say your toddler decides that it is thirsty and pours a gallon of water over it, frying the motherboard. Under a normal warranty, this is not a manufacturing defect and therefore is not covered. The whole point of CompleteCare is that it will cover accidents like this.
It still doesn't covert theft/loss for obvious reasons, but otherwise it is as close as you're going to get to full insurance on your laptop. For a pretty reasonable rate, I might add.
I've actually used Inkscape for making scientific posters (lots of graphics and formulae), and it's decent and easy to use. My only complaints were the following: equation support took some doing to get working---basically you would type in a LaTeX equation, it would convert it to postscript, and then it would use pstoedit to convert it to SVG format.
Second, no native PDF output. The postscript output would not be parsed by ps2pdf. Luckily I was able to get Apple's Preview to do the conversion (that is an excellent piece of software, by the way).
Maybe in the newest version inkscape's ironed out the PDF output issue; that's a pretty huge one.
accept. With no limits to individual/corporate donations, "freedom" is preserved.
Couple this with a law saying that 50% of the costs of any ads mentioning a candidate for an office must be paid by that candidate or an opponent. This kind of provision (1) forces a limit on ad spending by the candidate, and (2) any "smear" ads must also be paid for by a candidate.
Yes, there may be "fake" candidates whose sole purpose is to accept donations just to smear a "real" candidate's opponent, but this will be limited, because those candidates will be obvious.
And yes, there will still be generic "issue" ads, but it is neither desirable nor justified to limit those.