At worst they could just give it to ESA. I'm sure they'd love the chance to wring some more life out of it, and they're just as competent as NASA at burning the thing up safely when it really does die (at least I hope so!) Junking it when other competent people could still make good use of it just seems like throwing the toys out of the pram, and completely contrary to the spirit of international co-operation most of these space agencies claim to believe in.
Why would it be impossible to service it at L2? Surely if they can get it there they can get something there to service it - I assume what is meant is "prohibitively expensive to service it at L2"?
Very true. For some reason my brain must have been stuck in a timewarp back to before the films had been made, when it was rumoured that they would be prequels.
Anyone (outside patent encumbered countries) working on a Free implementation? It should be okay in the EU, for "allowing interoperability with existing products".
I thought NG and Voyager rocked, Enterprise sucked and DS9 was watchable but nothing to write home about (I always found myself rooting for Quark:-))
By the way, is it just me or was the whole Bajoran plot element a weird, confused attempt to say something about Zionism and the current state of the Middle East? I've never read anything to support my theory (and I'm not sure what the message was meant to be) but there were certain aspects that seemed to point in that direction.
I've never known a prequel that didn't suck. Without exception. Period.
The Matrix? Prequels made, prequels sucked. Star Trek? Prequel made, prequel sucked. Star Wars? Don't get me started... OK, what about Lord of the Rings? The Hobbit wasn't really a prequel as it was written first, but the Silmarillion was, and guess what? It sucked. Sure, there were some nice stories within it, and it's all very clever and consistent, but as something to sit down and read it sucks.
Certainly in the modern era they seem almost without exception to be written purely to wring more money from a franchise when it's impossible to write sequels due to some conclusive plot endpoint. Writing a prequel should be a cause for immediate LARTing with extreme prejudice.
is still the weak point for me. Specifically its privacy features (or lack thereof). Until konqueror gets an ad blocking feature as sophisticated as the Mozilla "Adblock" extension, you can have my Firebird when you pry it from my cold, dead HDD.
I've been on the fence for a long time over the gnome/KDE thing. (However, I use KDE almost exclusively.) The problem is, I like the way gnome 'makes do' with existing libraries as far as possible: that seems properly UNIXy. But I hate its (gnome 2's, anyway) lack of configurability. I've worked with my desktop setup for ages now and if a DE can't be set up to imitate that it's of no use to me. The problem with all gnome's HIG work is that it all applies to the average user, which is to say, hardly anybody. Okay, it's a good starting point but goddammit I want to be able to tweak my DE to suit me. Oh well, rock and a hard place, I guess.
Their "technology to get round adblockers" will have to involve getting a new domain every day if they want to get past the "Adblock" extension. Using http://*doubleclick.net/* as a filter easily blocks any content originating from that domain, even if it's in an iframe. There's the option of "hide ad" (annoying blank spaces) or "remove ad" (ideal, as far as I'm concerned). It's handy for other stuff too, one of the elements I have blocked is "http://192.168.0.1/Images/Maze.swf" which is an annoying animation my router admin page sees fit to throw at me and crashed one version of flash-plugin.
What about radios? I'm sure I read that on average there is more than one radio per person: thus it must have at least doubled since 50% of the population had one.
I assume this is more than a worthless md5 sum: certainly in terms of the images that this guy is talking about it should be possible to steganographically hide a watermark in the image. If the p2p bots checked for this there might be a chance his scheme could work: some watermark techniques are apparently quite robust to re-encoding of the image, etc. Where all this falls down is that it'll be 5 seconds before some w4r3Z d00d releases a p2p client that just lies about having checked for the watermark and allows distribution regardless. That's the thing about the p2p model: there is no central server where the running code can be verified - to implement any kind of workable security model you have to assume that everyone on the network is going to be trying to defeat it and design it so that it's core to the whole application - unless the security validates, and other machines can prove to themselves that it validates on your machine, no transfer should work. I suspect something along those lines is possible albeit very difficult, but the fact that that kind of application isn't what p2p users want would still render the entire thing useless. Nobody would use such an app.
I don't care whether it overtakes the market leader. For one thing, a long period of sustained Linux dominance could well be nearly as damaging as the long period of Windows dominance has been. Without a serious rival I suspect development would stagnate somewhat. What I do think is desirable is that Linux (or at any rate something!: due to its x86 availability I think Linux is more likely than MacOS at least in the medium term) achieves at least a Pepsi-stature second-fiddle to Microsoft's Coke. That way lies rivalry and stimulation: it would be good for Windows users as well as Linux users.
Re the digital camera thing: does KDE3.2 come with an enhanced hotplug script then? With my Canon Powershot A70 I find that once it's plugged in, to use the camera as a normal user (with gtkam, currently, but I'm open to other options) I have to su to root, manually chmod the relevant directory under/proc/bus/usb/ and then run gtkam.
As far as I understand it posting with the sole aim of accruing high karma is karma-whoring (like when people post the entire text of articles so as to be modded +5, Informative); my understanding of trolling is a post that, while not in itself offensive, is designed to attract replies that are rude or controversial or, best of all, long pointless arguments. So if a top-level post replying to an interview with Linus about the Linux desktop just said: "But does he use vi or emacs?" that would be a blatant troll, just designed to spark off the old holy war again. I see flamebait posts as those adopting a cruder approach designed to attract only criticism and invective: for example, a post in a gnome development thread inaccurately describing various alleged weaknesses of gnome which turns out to be obviously based on three-year-old versions would be well described as flamebait. I suppose goatse postings have to be as well, but only becasue there isn't a moderation type "-5, Moron".
Having described all that, I find the moderation gets applied quite inconsistently. I'm rather undecided about whether troll postings should carry negative modifiers as they can often be quite witty. Perhaps an ideal would be to have the post itself modified neutrally but to negatively weight all replies[0] (the arguments that troll comments draw out are usually predictable enough even if the troll itself was funny). But I suppose that would be open to abuse as it would make mod points far more powerful when used to mod trolls than when used for other purposes. Okay, I'm just rambling now. I'll stop.
[0] I don't mean that all replies should accrue negative karma for their authors, just that they should be less likely to show up.
I've never quite thought of MacOS as a contender for "ubiquitous OS". Sure, it's aesthetically wonderful, it's stable, has pro-quality graphics support and runs on excellent hardware - but it doesn't run on x86. You can only get MacOS if you buy a certain brand of computer - while I'm certain that its afficionados will stand loyally by I don't believe Joe Public will go for it. Microsoft has pulled two very clever tricks with Windows: firstly they have left the public with the impression (which I used to share, way back in the days before I discovered Linux) that Windows is the only Operating System for x86 (how would something else start? Wouldn't Windows have to boot the computer and then run it? They don't get the concept of bootloaders[0]). Secondly, they've made people believe that x86 are the only "real" computers. Everything else is either a toy or a supercomputer. While people may just be persuaded to abandon Windows for Linux on x86 it will take a lot more for them to abandon Windows for MacOS on non-x86, especially if they don't just happen to require a hardware upgrade at the same time they get fed up with Windows. So I can see Linux stealing huge amounts of market share but not MacOS. Having said that I don't see MacOS going anywhere either: people will stick by it. It'll continue along just fine, doing a superb job and producing excellent results but still with low market share.
From the Canon camp, I'm not surprised. The 1 range is pro stuff, so it gets the highest quality parts: in this case, that 4Mp sensor will be the best they can find (and the software might be better, though that's just my speculation). The two-digit cameras are semi-pro stuff and although they tend to perform like workhorses they don't have the robustness, build quality or attention to detail of the 1 range. I've never owned any of the digital bodies (yet!) but I've had a 10 and a 1N. The 10 was very good for its time and the class of camera (very fast motor drive, 5fps without a booster) but the 1N is in a different league. The only time it's let me down is when the battery died. I suspect similar differences will apply on their digital models - I'd be more interested to know how the 4Mp 1D compares with the 12Mp 1Ds (I think the 1Ds uses two of the 10D's 6Mp CCDs stuck side by side).
A 1D body is very much on my winning-the-lottery list, though...
While you're right that it definitely takes greatness to produce great images, there's no getting away from the fact that an idiot with a $10 disposable camera with a plastic lens will not get as good holiday snaps as if he's used an EOS-1V on "P" metering, a pro lens and a good off-camera flash. The exposure is more likely to be right, the flash will be less prone to red-eye and may well expose better due to more sophisticated flash metering, the lens will produce far better images etc.
The genius photographers are the ones who know when to say "I see what the camera is telling me to do, but I'm going to do it this way instead" and come up with a stunning image that most of us would allow the camera to tell us not to take.
Seems like a lot of generally loathsome small companies are forming an orderly queue to be the targets for IBM, Register.com etc. to play whack-a-rat. And I can't say I'm sorry for them..
Slashdot Mirror
All Metallica's albums since and including the Black Album?
Not true. Mars Express existed as a concept before Beagle 2 ever did. It just turned out to be convenient to piggyback the one on the other.
I suspect the Americans weren't exactly over-eager to cover Soviet successes at the height of the cold war either.
At worst they could just give it to ESA. I'm sure they'd love the chance to wring some more life out of it, and they're just as competent as NASA at burning the thing up safely when it really does die (at least I hope so!)
Junking it when other competent people could still make good use of it just seems like throwing the toys out of the pram, and completely contrary to the spirit of international co-operation most of these space agencies claim to believe in.
Why would it be impossible to service it at L2? Surely if they can get it there they can get something there to service it - I assume what is meant is "prohibitively expensive to service it at L2"?
Very true. For some reason my brain must have been stuck in a timewarp back to before the films had been made, when it was rumoured that they would be prequels.
They still sucked, though!
Anyone (outside patent encumbered countries) working on a Free implementation? It should be okay in the EU, for "allowing interoperability with existing products".
What about ST5: The Final Frontier? That, without any shadow of a doubt, sucked royally, but I don't think we can quite blame him for that.
I thought NG and Voyager rocked, Enterprise sucked and DS9 was watchable but nothing to write home about (I always found myself rooting for Quark :-))
By the way, is it just me or was the whole Bajoran plot element a weird, confused attempt to say something about Zionism and the current state of the Middle East? I've never read anything to support my theory (and I'm not sure what the message was meant to be) but there were certain aspects that seemed to point in that direction.
I've never known a prequel that didn't suck. Without exception. Period.
The Matrix? Prequels made, prequels sucked.
Star Trek? Prequel made, prequel sucked.
Star Wars? Don't get me started...
OK, what about Lord of the Rings? The Hobbit wasn't really a prequel as it was written first, but the Silmarillion was, and guess what? It sucked. Sure, there were some nice stories within it, and it's all very clever and consistent, but as something to sit down and read it sucks.
Certainly in the modern era they seem almost without exception to be written purely to wring more money from a franchise when it's impossible to write sequels due to some conclusive plot endpoint. Writing a prequel should be a cause for immediate LARTing with extreme prejudice.
is still the weak point for me. Specifically its privacy features (or lack thereof). Until konqueror gets an ad blocking feature as sophisticated as the Mozilla "Adblock" extension, you can have my Firebird when you pry it from my cold, dead HDD.
this will get every geek around to visit msn.com tomorrow just to check that $BROWSER_OF_CHOICE is blocking the ads...
I've been on the fence for a long time over the gnome/KDE thing. (However, I use KDE almost exclusively.) The problem is, I like the way gnome 'makes do' with existing libraries as far as possible: that seems properly UNIXy. But I hate its (gnome 2's, anyway) lack of configurability. I've worked with my desktop setup for ages now and if a DE can't be set up to imitate that it's of no use to me. The problem with all gnome's HIG work is that it all applies to the average user, which is to say, hardly anybody. Okay, it's a good starting point but goddammit I want to be able to tweak my DE to suit me.
Oh well, rock and a hard place, I guess.
Their "technology to get round adblockers" will have to involve getting a new domain every day if they want to get past the "Adblock" extension. Using http://*doubleclick.net/* as a filter easily blocks any content originating from that domain, even if it's in an iframe. There's the option of "hide ad" (annoying blank spaces) or "remove ad" (ideal, as far as I'm concerned). It's handy for other stuff too, one of the elements I have blocked is "http://192.168.0.1/Images/Maze.swf" which is an annoying animation my router admin page sees fit to throw at me and crashed one version of flash-plugin.
Yuck! Come back tubgirl, all is forgiven...
What about radios? I'm sure I read that on average there is more than one radio per person: thus it must have at least doubled since 50% of the population had one.
I assume this is more than a worthless md5 sum: certainly in terms of the images that this guy is talking about it should be possible to steganographically hide a watermark in the image. If the p2p bots checked for this there might be a chance his scheme could work: some watermark techniques are apparently quite robust to re-encoding of the image, etc. Where all this falls down is that it'll be 5 seconds before some w4r3Z d00d releases a p2p client that just lies about having checked for the watermark and allows distribution regardless. That's the thing about the p2p model: there is no central server where the running code can be verified - to implement any kind of workable security model you have to assume that everyone on the network is going to be trying to defeat it and design it so that it's core to the whole application - unless the security validates, and other machines can prove to themselves that it validates on your machine, no transfer should work. I suspect something along those lines is possible albeit very difficult, but the fact that that kind of application isn't what p2p users want would still render the entire thing useless. Nobody would use such an app.
I don't care whether it overtakes the market leader. For one thing, a long period of sustained Linux dominance could well be nearly as damaging as the long period of Windows dominance has been. Without a serious rival I suspect development would stagnate somewhat.
What I do think is desirable is that Linux (or at any rate something!: due to its x86 availability I think Linux is more likely than MacOS at least in the medium term) achieves at least a Pepsi-stature second-fiddle to Microsoft's Coke. That way lies rivalry and stimulation: it would be good for Windows users as well as Linux users.
Re the digital camera thing: does KDE3.2 come with an enhanced hotplug script then? With my Canon Powershot A70 I find that once it's plugged in, to use the camera as a normal user (with gtkam, currently, but I'm open to other options) I have to su to root, manually chmod the relevant directory under /proc/bus/usb/ and then run gtkam.
As far as I understand it posting with the sole aim of accruing high karma is karma-whoring (like when people post the entire text of articles so as to be modded +5, Informative); my understanding of trolling is a post that, while not in itself offensive, is designed to attract replies that are rude or controversial or, best of all, long pointless arguments. So if a top-level post replying to an interview with Linus about the Linux desktop just said: "But does he use vi or emacs?" that would be a blatant troll, just designed to spark off the old holy war again.
I see flamebait posts as those adopting a cruder approach designed to attract only criticism and invective: for example, a post in a gnome development thread inaccurately describing various alleged weaknesses of gnome which turns out to be obviously based on three-year-old versions would be well described as flamebait. I suppose goatse postings have to be as well, but only becasue there isn't a moderation type "-5, Moron".
Having described all that, I find the moderation gets applied quite inconsistently. I'm rather undecided about whether troll postings should carry negative modifiers as they can often be quite witty. Perhaps an ideal would be to have the post itself modified neutrally but to negatively weight all replies[0] (the arguments that troll comments draw out are usually predictable enough even if the troll itself was funny). But I suppose that would be open to abuse as it would make mod points far more powerful when used to mod trolls than when used for other purposes. Okay, I'm just rambling now. I'll stop.
[0] I don't mean that all replies should accrue negative karma for their authors, just that they should be less likely to show up.
I've never quite thought of MacOS as a contender for "ubiquitous OS". Sure, it's aesthetically wonderful, it's stable, has pro-quality graphics support and runs on excellent hardware - but it doesn't run on x86. You can only get MacOS if you buy a certain brand of computer - while I'm certain that its afficionados will stand loyally by I don't believe Joe Public will go for it.
:-)
Microsoft has pulled two very clever tricks with Windows: firstly they have left the public with the impression (which I used to share, way back in the days before I discovered Linux) that Windows is the only Operating System for x86 (how would something else start? Wouldn't Windows have to boot the computer and then run it? They don't get the concept of bootloaders[0]). Secondly, they've made people believe that x86 are the only "real" computers. Everything else is either a toy or a supercomputer.
While people may just be persuaded to abandon Windows for Linux on x86 it will take a lot more for them to abandon Windows for MacOS on non-x86, especially if they don't just happen to require a hardware upgrade at the same time they get fed up with Windows. So I can see Linux stealing huge amounts of market share but not MacOS. Having said that I don't see MacOS going anywhere either: people will stick by it. It'll continue along just fine, doing a superb job and producing excellent results but still with low market share.
[0] I know better now
From the Canon camp, I'm not surprised. The 1 range is pro stuff, so it gets the highest quality parts: in this case, that 4Mp sensor will be the best they can find (and the software might be better, though that's just my speculation). The two-digit cameras are semi-pro stuff and although they tend to perform like workhorses they don't have the robustness, build quality or attention to detail of the 1 range.
I've never owned any of the digital bodies (yet!) but I've had a 10 and a 1N. The 10 was very good for its time and the class of camera (very fast motor drive, 5fps without a booster) but the 1N is in a different league. The only time it's let me down is when the battery died.
I suspect similar differences will apply on their digital models - I'd be more interested to know how the 4Mp 1D compares with the 12Mp 1Ds (I think the 1Ds uses two of the 10D's 6Mp CCDs stuck side by side).
A 1D body is very much on my winning-the-lottery list, though...
While you're right that it definitely takes greatness to produce great images, there's no getting away from the fact that an idiot with a $10 disposable camera with a plastic lens will not get as good holiday snaps as if he's used an EOS-1V on "P" metering, a pro lens and a good off-camera flash. The exposure is more likely to be right, the flash will be less prone to red-eye and may well expose better due to more sophisticated flash metering, the lens will produce far better images etc.
The genius photographers are the ones who know when to say "I see what the camera is telling me to do, but I'm going to do it this way instead" and come up with a stunning image that most of us would allow the camera to tell us not to take.
Seems like a lot of generally loathsome small companies are forming an orderly queue to be the targets for IBM, Register.com etc. to play whack-a-rat. And I can't say I'm sorry for them..
Yep. I just saw Patrick sidling out of a store today with what was clearly a Mandrake boxed set under his arm :-)