The EU has mandated a phaseout by 2012, it's up to member states how they implement that. In the UK, for example, the government and retailers are working together on a voluntary programme.
You can make a comparison with the regulation of fridge and freezer power consumption a few years ago. The EU put limits on how much power they could draw (banning the lest efficient types) and required that fridges and freezers should display their power consumption band (A for very efficient, F for terrible) prominently in the showroom.
People love having numbers to compare when chosing between products, so they now very much favour efficient models. Manufacturers are competing to get better efficiency ratings, something that wasn't given that high a priority in the past. Notice that the US benefits too, since these new efficient models are sold there as well. Thanks to EU regulation, you now have much more efficient fridges.
As a result, the consumer wins. For almost no effort (just a little light regulation) we now have much more efficient appliances, a noticeable reduction in our energy bills, and a drop in national CO2 output.
What's happening here is the same thing, but with TVs. You can expect this type of regulation to spread to other electrical appliances in time. And it's been such a success I can see the US picking up this type of regulation as well.
I've come across a couple of examples of inappropriate use of Excel
A friend worked at the UK Treasury as a statistician. One of his jobs was testing and improving the Treasury's model of the UK enconomy. I was impressed and asked what tools they used for this. Erm, none, it's just a huge Excel spreadsheet.
One of my jobs is modelling for a project using FDG-PET to investiagate COPD and asthma. I was horrified to discover that these large 4D images were being analysed in... Excel.
Sorry, you are totally wrong, that's not how X11 works at all.
The client queues up a set of drawing commands (not bitmaps), at some point the queue gets flushed, and for a local display there's a context switch and the server updates the screen. This is exactly how Windows and OS X work as well. The only difference is that the X11 protocol was carefully designed to be asynchronous, so that when you run over a network connection rather than locally, you don't get killed by latency on round trips.
Browser apps are nice in many ways, but that's a separate issue from the display architecture.
Bad things about X11: primitive drawing model, too much hardware management (this is an X.org problem rather than an X11 one, really), a lot of legacy. Most of the things that are actually bad are being or have been fixed.
The PC electronics only burns 1-2 watts in standby, but the large and idle power supply will burn another 8 or so.
Or at least that's the way my imac is. I got a watt meter and it's 70w at full power, 40w in low-power mode, 10w in standby and 10w when off. It only goes to zero when you unplug it.
My laptop is the same: the charger burns 7w even when you don't plug it in to the laptop.
You're right that these projects are not doing much technically that's not been done previously by government programmes. Their innovation is that they are dramatically cheaper and that someone other than NASA is taking the risk and making the investment.
how do you get that music onto the iPod? Oh yeah, you need to install iTunes
iTunes is nice on OS X at least. There are plenty of alternative ways of getting the music on there if you don't like iTunes. Windows friends seem to like Mediamonkey or WinAmp.
Awesome, so all malware needs to do is stay resident as the user's process until it detects that the user has elevated privileges. Then BLAMMO, sudo rootme.
No, that one process gets a temporary elevation, not the user. It's not a security hole.
Windows dev friends tell me that Windows actually has almost the same thing (you can have a timeout on admin privs), but sadly Explorer is too retarded to use it properly:-( Perhaps this is something win7 can address.
Re:Any chance we can draw circles and boxes now
on
GIMP 2.6 Released
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· Score: 1
I think those circles must have been made with rather an old gimp. 2.4 at least has a proper stroke path that doesn't use a brush and makes lovely circles. Stroking with a brush is still there, but it's not the default.
Is it really any cheaper? Their website quotes a price of $7.9m to get 420kg to LEO, or about $20,000 per kilo. This is just about exactly what we pay now. There's no cost advantage as far as I can see.
The speedup is more due to new hardware than anything magic about Windows. In fact, a.net system is likely to need larger servers than the old C/COBOL thing they had before.
3ms is still quite a bit slower than the NYSE, who (I think) claim 1ms for their linux-based system. But I imagine there are other factors here, like physical distance, the precise definition of 'transaction' and whether that's the guaranteed or typical speed.
Re:Good analysis. MOD PARENT UP.
on
Chrome Vs. IE 8
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· Score: 1
There is going to be an extension mechanism (the bloke who made Greasemonkey is part of the team), they just haven't done it yet.
When they have an extension mechanism, people will write extensions. Google can't control which extensions you install, so someone will make an ad blocker.
Are you sure it's not one thread per tab? That's what the person who did ie7 tabs seems to say:
One design decision worth calling out is that our current implementation is fully multithreaded. Each tab is on a separate thread, and the frame is also on its own thread. This has some impact on the overall footprint of IE, but we believe this will allow IE7 to feel faster and provide an overall better user experience.
cost around £100,000 to buy and install, then some amount each year for maintenance. I guess they spent so much on the install they had no money left to look after the things.
The page numbers and headers swap over, so it doesn't look crazy if you print it double-sided. The first page of each chapter, lists of figures and tables, and some floating figures are forced to right-hand pages. Erm, probably some other stuff I've forgotten.
No one's (I think) mentioned longevity yet. This is a really important benefit to something like LaTeX, especially for academics.
I wrote my PhD thesis in LaTeX 20 years ago. I still have the source in my home area somewhere, and it still works perfectly. I needed a copy for my homepage and I was able to reformat it to make a double-sided, single-line-spaced, 10pt PDF in just a few minutes.
With LaTeX, papers aren't fire-and-forget. You can be pretty confident that if you come back to a subject again, maybe many years later, what you wrote last time will still be useful.
Slashdot Mirror
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=yarv&lang2=php
I did, the article is wrong and idiotic. Here's the EU press release:
Member States approve the phasing-out of incan-descent bulbs by 2012
100w blubs are not banned, they are to be phased out by 2012, with the details of the phase-out to be determined by member states as they choose.
No they didn't. Check your sources.
The EU has mandated a phaseout by 2012, it's up to member states how they implement that. In the UK, for example, the government and retailers are working together on a voluntary programme.
You can make a comparison with the regulation of fridge and freezer power consumption a few years ago. The EU put limits on how much power they could draw (banning the lest efficient types) and required that fridges and freezers should display their power consumption band (A for very efficient, F for terrible) prominently in the showroom.
People love having numbers to compare when chosing between products, so they now very much favour efficient models. Manufacturers are competing to get better efficiency ratings, something that wasn't given that high a priority in the past. Notice that the US benefits too, since these new efficient models are sold there as well. Thanks to EU regulation, you now have much more efficient fridges.
As a result, the consumer wins. For almost no effort (just a little light regulation) we now have much more efficient appliances, a noticeable reduction in our energy bills, and a drop in national CO2 output.
What's happening here is the same thing, but with TVs. You can expect this type of regulation to spread to other electrical appliances in time. And it's been such a success I can see the US picking up this type of regulation as well.
We live in a democratic society. Politician's actions are our commonly-expressed will. Don't like it? Vote 'em out!
Yes, a set of volumetric images. Argh :-( I redid it in an image processing package and the run time went from a day to 20 seconds.
Sorry, you are totally wrong, that's not how X11 works at all.
The client queues up a set of drawing commands (not bitmaps), at some point the queue gets flushed, and for a local display there's a context switch and the server updates the screen. This is exactly how Windows and OS X work as well. The only difference is that the X11 protocol was carefully designed to be asynchronous, so that when you run over a network connection rather than locally, you don't get killed by latency on round trips.
Browser apps are nice in many ways, but that's a separate issue from the display architecture.
Bad things about X11: primitive drawing model, too much hardware management (this is an X.org problem rather than an X11 one, really), a lot of legacy. Most of the things that are actually bad are being or have been fixed.
The PC electronics only burns 1-2 watts in standby, but the large and idle power supply will burn another 8 or so.
Or at least that's the way my imac is. I got a watt meter and it's 70w at full power, 40w in low-power mode, 10w in standby and 10w when off. It only goes to zero when you unplug it.
My laptop is the same: the charger burns 7w even when you don't plug it in to the laptop.
You're right that these projects are not doing much technically that's not been done previously by government programmes. Their innovation is that they are dramatically cheaper and that someone other than NASA is taking the risk and making the investment.
People say that it's a bogus standard because no one but Microsoft can really ever claim to have 100% compatibility.
iTunes is nice on OS X at least. There are plenty of alternative ways of getting the music on there if you don't like iTunes. Windows friends seem to like Mediamonkey or WinAmp.
No, that one process gets a temporary elevation, not the user. It's not a security hole.
Windows dev friends tell me that Windows actually has almost the same thing (you can have a timeout on admin privs), but sadly Explorer is too retarded to use it properly :-( Perhaps this is something win7 can address.
I think those circles must have been made with rather an old gimp. 2.4 at least has a proper stroke path that doesn't use a brush and makes lovely circles. Stroking with a brush is still there, but it's not the default.
Ah, OK, I'm dumb, thanks.
Is it really any cheaper? Their website quotes a price of $7.9m to get 420kg to LEO, or about $20,000 per kilo. This is just about exactly what we pay now. There's no cost advantage as far as I can see.
The author Nicholson Baker wrote an interesting piece on the Deleteopedia earlier this year:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/10/wikipedia.internet
Worth a read if you've not seen it.
The speedup is more due to new hardware than anything magic about Windows. In fact, a .net system is likely to need larger servers than the old C/COBOL thing they had before.
3ms is still quite a bit slower than the NYSE, who (I think) claim 1ms for their linux-based system. But I imagine there are other factors here, like physical distance, the precise definition of 'transaction' and whether that's the guaranteed or typical speed.
Firefox currently has the slowest DOM manipulation of any of the major browsers.
iBench 5.0 has ff 3.0 only slightly slower at DOM than opera 9.5 and safari 3.1, and many times faster than ie7 and ie8.
Various sites have posted results, but to pick one http://www.zdnet.com.au/story_media/339289417/browsers_graph_2_423.jpg (hope the direct link works, otherwise try dragndrop).
There is going to be an extension mechanism (the bloke who made Greasemonkey is part of the team), they just haven't done it yet.
When they have an extension mechanism, people will write extensions. Google can't control which extensions you install, so someone will make an ad blocker.
Are you sure it's not one thread per tab? That's what the person who did ie7 tabs seems to say:
From: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/05/26/422103.aspx
ff3 generally uses quite a bit less memory than opera9.5.
Google finds many benchmarks, but to pick one: http://avencius.nl/content/firefox-3-vs-opera-95-memory-usage-take-2
The EU isn't totally different on this issue:
Britain -- 48% evolution, 17% ID, 22% creationism
USA -- 13% evolution, 27% ID, 55% creationism
From http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4648598.stm, though of course the questions aren't exactly the same.
Automated Public Conveniences have been around for years. For example:
http://www.jcdecaux.co.uk/development/apc/
cost around £100,000 to buy and install, then some amount each year for maintenance. I guess they spent so much on the install they had no money left to look after the things.
The page numbers and headers swap over, so it doesn't look crazy if you print it double-sided. The first page of each chapter, lists of figures and tables, and some floating figures are forced to right-hand pages. Erm, probably some other stuff I've forgotten.
No one's (I think) mentioned longevity yet. This is a really important benefit to something like LaTeX, especially for academics.
I wrote my PhD thesis in LaTeX 20 years ago. I still have the source in my home area somewhere, and it still works perfectly. I needed a copy for my homepage and I was able to reformat it to make a double-sided, single-line-spaced, 10pt PDF in just a few minutes.
With LaTeX, papers aren't fire-and-forget. You can be pretty confident that if you come back to a subject again, maybe many years later, what you wrote last time will still be useful.