The problem is that if IBM buys SCO, then every two-bit scammer will try the same thing (sue IBM hoping IBM will settle/buy them out). IBM knows this and is in the process of driving SCO into the ground to make an example of them.
In the long run, it is (far) cheaper for IBM to fight this case to the bitter end rather then trying to deal with hundreds of similar cases that could arise if IBM buys SCO.
Besides the point, it is not even clear that SCO owns anything at all. SCO claims to have the rights to sub-licence UNIX System V for Novel (its not clear if this agreement is still in effect, for various reasons). From this, SCO claims to have the rights to enforce licencing deals for Novell (via copyrights that may or may not have been transfered) And so on and so forth. With so many ambiguities, it would be sheer madness for IBM to buy SCO just to make the lawsuit go away.
Has anyone attempted a female James Bond, yet?
Yes The Operative in No one lives forever fits the bill. An great game with a compelling story that for some reason is overlooked a lot. Its sort of a tribute/spoof of the old 60 spy movies/TV shows with a female protaganist. The in-jokes are worth the price of the game alone. (especially the used PS2 games)
Almost everyone I know who has read Tolkien has an opinion on how to read it. I have a friend who suggests that you get into a boring part, skip forward to a point where someone starts talking and resume reading. Personally, I suggest to people to skip the songs (if they don't like that bit, although I know people who love the songs) as I personally like the little back stories that get inserted here and there.
Also, a lot of people liked the movies because they were very faithful to the books. Tolkien was a very visual writer, describing the appearance of almost everything. Peter Jackson filmed many of the scenes very similarly to how people imagined them. Compare this to many recent film adaptations of classic books (and comics) that get absolutely slaughtered (I Robot, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, etc) when they are filmed and its easy to rave about the LotR movies.
OK, the way I understand that this scheme would work is the same way as other vaccinations, training the immune system to react against the substance introduced in the vaccine. The problem is that drugs work by triggering recepters in the brain, recepters for substances the body produces naturally.
Worse case scenario, the immune system eaither mis-learns or mutates its defences, and starts attacking the bodys own chemicals. The body produces small ammounts of morphine to regulate pain. Heroin addicts take so much that the body attems to regulate by producing less morphine. When a heroin adic goes through withdrawl, his body essentiall has no natural morhine in it, hence constant pain. If the immune system was trained to destroy morphine, then the recipient could be in a perminent withdrawl. Nicotine mimics a natural nuro-transmitter in the brain. I would hate to see what would happen if a autoimmune reaction against that nuro-transmitter happened.
Complex systems react unpredicably when disrupted. We don't know enough abou the human body to interfear with it in this way.
The Xbox is one of the most innovative consoles to ever hit the market.
Ummm, NO.
The X-box is a simplified PC, nothing more. It is not inovative in any meaninful way what-so-ever. All the tools for the Xbox are variants of the PC development tools. The XBox live stuff is simple rehashes of stuff that was done on the PC 5 to 10 years before.
Around 2000, it became clear that the consoles were gaining the advantage over PC simply due to support issues. The game manufatures were getting tired of supporting the increadible range of varient components that could go into a PC, whereas a console had standardised architecture. I heard a story about a major games manufacturer (Activision I think); that a single call to tech support for any problem with a game, wiped out the profit for that unit. There was a major worry about this time that PC's would cease to be a platform that games were developed for. Microsoft was starting to dominate game development the same way they had dominated the desktop with their DirectX APIs when this happened, so what did they do, they created a console that was just a standardised PC, that could only be programmed using their tools. Most of the XBoxes early games were just ports of PC games (some of which had not even been released on PC at the time) Because the XBox is just a PC, it would have been very hard for MS not to put a HD in it.
I've met people who think that joins are best done in the middle tier, on tables with hundreds of thousands of rows!
Have you run test to confirm that this is false? As part of a project to improve the performance of an app that I developed at work, a colleague and I rewrote several key select statements in different manners, and found the select statements using joins were the fastest by far (in a very large table). We think that the DBA team has the database tuned in such a way to cause this, but I have also heard that there is a query optimizer built into the engine (sybase) that works much beter with joins then nested selects.
The only advice I can give is to run tests comparing the performance of different SQL statements that do the same thing to determine which is the fastest. The results may surprise you.
On the CBC's science show Quirks and Quarks this past weekend, they interviewed the leads of both Canadian teams, and both stated that they were planning to make an attempt in August. Thats 6 to 10 weeks from now, so there may still be a race on if the Rutans can't fix the problem right away.
The floater flash ads are really annoying in firefox with 'flash click to play' because the click to play replaces the flash with a opaque box that floats over the content, and it cannot be closed without starting the flash to find the close button to close it. Iv'e tried the 'nukeit' extension, but the flash seems to override the right click. Has anyone solved this problem
A better solution would be for the author of the 'flash click to play' extension to add a option to right click on the flash to remove it completely, and or make the default background for floating flash object be semi-transparent so you can see whats underneath them.
The 'cell' is not an individual chip, but a technology to create specialized chips quickly and cheaply using off the shelf designs. Essentially its a form of grid computing where different components are placed on the same chip die. In this case, they will put a chip in the TV that has sub-cores specialized in signal handling and possibly decryption on a chip that has a general purpose core that will act as a traffic-cop routing data to the correct subcommponents. In the PS3, the cell chips will have sub-cores dealing with vector calculations and graphics programming. The the signals traveling between these different sub-cores is similar to network traffic between chips, network communication was included in the design so that multiple cell chips can work together easilly. Although Sony has hyped this as potentially being avaliable in the PS3, it is doubtfull that it will be used to borrow cycles from your TV and microwave when you are the middle of a boss fight. The network latency would be too slow, however, it would be incredably usefull in a cell based supercomputer where there is a much higher density of components.
What a horrable decision. The end result of this will be lots of lawsuit filed over pollen. Consider this scenario. Farmer A plans genetically modified seeds. Mosanto comes allong and tests all the neibours fields and finds (what they claim are) genetically modified material in farmer B's crop. Monsanto then threatens to sue farmer B for using their intelectual property. End result, Farmer B has to destroy his crop. Farmer B then sues Farmer A for contaminating his crops using previous rulings dealing with responsibility for damages caused by livestock. Farmer A then sues Monsanto for making it immposible for him to controll the pollination of the plant. Cases drag on for years and both farmers go bankrupt.
btw, if some of you think the next logical step is that Monsanto buys both farmers land and start their own company farm, think again, because in a lot of places in Canada (Saskatchewan in particular where the origional case happened), it is illegal for corperations to own farms.
It would not surprise me that the issues raised by this case become so severe, that the Supreme court eventuially overrules its own decision just to restore sanity to the legal system. Here is just a partial list of issues that are raised by this decision.
Do laws and legal precidents dealing with damage caused by livestock extend to patened plants?
Is the "I didn't know" defence become legitimate if it takes a highly trained expert and millions of dollars of equipment to determine if the plant has been pateneded or not?
What happenes if a natural plant is found with the same gene sequence?
what if someone cross breeds a plant with the same gene sequence?
Who is responsible when cross polination occurs in the wild? The owner of the nearest source of the patened plants, or the company who created the seed for not ensuring that is can reproduce normally?
What I can see hapening is that we will get more and more of these restricive IP laws and court cases untill people start complaning too loudly for the clueless politicians to ignore. The poly will then say, "but its out of our hands because its international law and trade restrictions will be placed on us unless we comply." A few years after that, some country will decide that the IP regeme is worse then any ammount of sanctions and change their IP laws to something sane. Shortly after that most other countries will fallow suit.
Yep, I looked at the photo, and thought I saw Warwick Davis standing there in the front row, so I looked it up in the imdb, and yes, the people in the front row do look (vaguly) like the cast. IMDB entry for hg2g
Also, did anyones flash pause loading at 42%? Mine temperarly paused at 38% and I was quite disapointed.
What a wierd way of starting an article. I would have thought that 1984 would have been invoked in an article like this, but no, the author means 1974, and talks about Watergate et all. He even goes on to make a pun about Braingate, a brain computer communication tech.
Actually, I think the whole article is just wierd. At least three topics have been rammed together into this article. Does anyone have any proof that this is actually happening, or is this just some marketing hype that a reporter fell for?
There have been lots of stories about how Apple corp gots its name. The most common relate to how there was an apple nearby when Woz and Jobs were thinking up the name for their company. I have never heard of the Turing connection before.
On the topic of Turings death, there was a magazine article that looked into it (American Scientist I think) and raised serious doubts about the suicide theory. They concluded the death was accidental.
Odd, I heard the same thing about 65 eps, which is 13 weeks at 5 eps per week. 13 weeks is quarter of a year, so would seem to fit beter in to yearly schedules then 20 weeks.
Sad, I liked Andromina. It was one of my guilty pleasues watching it.
The difference is MS could afford to launch the console at some special price (say $200, or $300 but that includes one game) for only 6 months.
I remember reading somewhere thast MS's original plan for the XBox was to sell it at a premium for the early adapters who would buy it at any price, and then drop the price a few months later when manufacturing prices had dropped so as to not lose too much money. With no compition this time around I think they may try this tactic.
Also, if MS does sell the XBox2 at much below production price, they will be hit with anti-dumping provisions (this would not be beneath Sony to encourage.)
I had the same problem. I compare it to the slow bits in Criptocomicon, (stuff like the multi-page letter they read through the wall. Slow and although well written, I had to ask why was it there) but extended to fill a whole book. I put Quicksilver down after a few chapters and instead reread Snowcrash. According to the rewier, the pace picks up in the in the second book, but I don't know if or when I will read it.
I seem to remember something about a brain scanning machine in 1984 that was capable of detecting 'illegal' thoughts at a distance. There was a passage about "worrying about being woken up by the police because he was dreaming of sedition" somewhere near the beginning of the book.
Mind you, its been years since I read it. (1984 to be exact, my how time flies.)
Due to a municipal restructuring that took place a few years back, Orleans is now part of the city of Ottawa. It is sort of a bedroom community on the eastern side of the (now very large) city.
I can only guess their creative genius had to be instantly addressed and they picked the first app they could think of to lay it out on, and excel was just sitting there loaded at the time. Like this packman game made using excel
I think some people either have way too much time on their hands, or they don't know or care that there are better tools avaliable.
If all you have is a hammer, then everything starts to look like a nail
Good point. Another mitigating factor is that Mars is much smaller then Earth, and hence has less gravity to hold onto the atmosphere. Venus is nearly the same size of Earth and has a similar gravity to hold on to the increadably thick atmoshere. Personally, I don't think that it will be practicle to terraform mars by continully adding material to the Martian atmosphere. Mind you I don't work for NASA, so my opinions don't count for much in this area.
There is one major problem with Terraforming Mars. Mars has a virtually non-existant magnetoshere. the Magnetosphere deflects the solar wind arround earth. This means prevents large ammounts of hard radiation from reaching the surface (which would kill basically all life as we know it) as well as preventing the solar wind from blowing away the atmosphere. This is the leading theory about why Mars atmoshpere no longer exists to the degree it once did.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that if IBM buys SCO, then every two-bit scammer will try the same thing (sue IBM hoping IBM will settle/buy them out). IBM knows this and is in the process of driving SCO into the ground to make an example of them.
In the long run, it is (far) cheaper for IBM to fight this case to the bitter end rather then trying to deal with hundreds of similar cases that could arise if IBM buys SCO.
Besides the point, it is not even clear that SCO owns anything at all. SCO claims to have the rights to sub-licence UNIX System V for Novel (its not clear if this agreement is still in effect, for various reasons). From this, SCO claims to have the rights to enforce licencing deals for Novell (via copyrights that may or may not have been transfered) And so on and so forth. With so many ambiguities, it would be sheer madness for IBM to buy SCO just to make the lawsuit go away.
OK, apparently, someone took the "Imagine a beowulf cluster of these" a bit too seriously.
Way to go!
Has anyone attempted a female James Bond, yet?
Yes
The Operative in No one lives forever fits the bill. An great game with a compelling story that for some reason is overlooked a lot. Its sort of a tribute/spoof of the old 60 spy movies/TV shows with a female protaganist. The in-jokes are worth the price of the game alone. (especially the used PS2 games)
Also, a lot of people liked the movies because they were very faithful to the books. Tolkien was a very visual writer, describing the appearance of almost everything. Peter Jackson filmed many of the scenes very similarly to how people imagined them. Compare this to many recent film adaptations of classic books (and comics) that get absolutely slaughtered (I Robot, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, etc) when they are filmed and its easy to rave about the LotR movies.
Worse case scenario, the immune system eaither mis-learns or mutates its defences, and starts attacking the bodys own chemicals. The body produces small ammounts of morphine to regulate pain. Heroin addicts take so much that the body attems to regulate by producing less morphine. When a heroin adic goes through withdrawl, his body essentiall has no natural morhine in it, hence constant pain. If the immune system was trained to destroy morphine, then the recipient could be in a perminent withdrawl. Nicotine mimics a natural nuro-transmitter in the brain. I would hate to see what would happen if a autoimmune reaction against that nuro-transmitter happened.
Complex systems react unpredicably when disrupted. We don't know enough abou the human body to interfear with it in this way.
Ummm, NO.
The X-box is a simplified PC, nothing more. It is not inovative in any meaninful way what-so-ever. All the tools for the Xbox are variants of the PC development tools. The XBox live stuff is simple rehashes of stuff that was done on the PC 5 to 10 years before.
Around 2000, it became clear that the consoles were gaining the advantage over PC simply due to support issues. The game manufatures were getting tired of supporting the increadible range of varient components that could go into a PC, whereas a console had standardised architecture. I heard a story about a major games manufacturer (Activision I think); that a single call to tech support for any problem with a game, wiped out the profit for that unit. There was a major worry about this time that PC's would cease to be a platform that games were developed for. Microsoft was starting to dominate game development the same way they had dominated the desktop with their DirectX APIs when this happened, so what did they do, they created a console that was just a standardised PC, that could only be programmed using their tools. Most of the XBoxes early games were just ports of PC games (some of which had not even been released on PC at the time) Because the XBox is just a PC, it would have been very hard for MS not to put a HD in it.
Have you run test to confirm that this is false? As part of a project to improve the performance of an app that I developed at work, a colleague and I rewrote several key select statements in different manners, and found the select statements using joins were the fastest by far (in a very large table). We think that the DBA team has the database tuned in such a way to cause this, but I have also heard that there is a query optimizer built into the engine (sybase) that works much beter with joins then nested selects.
The only advice I can give is to run tests comparing the performance of different SQL statements that do the same thing to determine which is the fastest. The results may surprise you.
On the CBC's science show Quirks and Quarks this past weekend, they interviewed the leads of both Canadian teams, and both stated that they were planning to make an attempt in August. Thats 6 to 10 weeks from now, so there may still be a race on if the Rutans can't fix the problem right away.
btw. what is Russian for ad-block image?
A better solution would be for the author of the 'flash click to play' extension to add a option to right click on the flash to remove it completely, and or make the default background for floating flash object be semi-transparent so you can see whats underneath them.
The 'cell' is not an individual chip, but a technology to create specialized chips quickly and cheaply using off the shelf designs. Essentially its a form of grid computing where different components are placed on the same chip die. In this case, they will put a chip in the TV that has sub-cores specialized in signal handling and possibly decryption on a chip that has a general purpose core that will act as a traffic-cop routing data to the correct subcommponents. In the PS3, the cell chips will have sub-cores dealing with vector calculations and graphics programming. The the signals traveling between these different sub-cores is similar to network traffic between chips, network communication was included in the design so that multiple cell chips can work together easilly. Although Sony has hyped this as potentially being avaliable in the PS3, it is doubtfull that it will be used to borrow cycles from your TV and microwave when you are the middle of a boss fight. The network latency would be too slow, however, it would be incredably usefull in a cell based supercomputer where there is a much higher density of components.
btw, if some of you think the next logical step is that Monsanto buys both farmers land and start their own company farm, think again, because in a lot of places in Canada (Saskatchewan in particular where the origional case happened), it is illegal for corperations to own farms.
It would not surprise me that the issues raised by this case become so severe, that the Supreme court eventuially overrules its own decision just to restore sanity to the legal system. Here is just a partial list of issues that are raised by this decision.
Do laws and legal precidents dealing with damage caused by livestock extend to patened plants?
Is the "I didn't know" defence become legitimate if it takes a highly trained expert and millions of dollars of equipment to determine if the plant has been pateneded or not?
What happenes if a natural plant is found with the same gene sequence?
what if someone cross breeds a plant with the same gene sequence?
Who is responsible when cross polination occurs in the wild? The owner of the nearest source of the patened plants, or the company who created the seed for not ensuring that is can reproduce normally?
What I can see hapening is that we will get more and more of these restricive IP laws and court cases untill people start complaning too loudly for the clueless politicians to ignore. The poly will then say, "but its out of our hands because its international law and trade restrictions will be placed on us unless we comply." A few years after that, some country will decide that the IP regeme is worse then any ammount of sanctions and change their IP laws to something sane. Shortly after that most other countries will fallow suit.
IMDB entry for hg2g
Also, did anyones flash pause loading at 42%? Mine temperarly paused at 38% and I was quite disapointed.
Actually, I think the whole article is just wierd. At least three topics have been rammed together into this article. Does anyone have any proof that this is actually happening, or is this just some marketing hype that a reporter fell for?
On the topic of Turings death, there was a magazine article that looked into it (American Scientist I think) and raised serious doubts about the suicide theory. They concluded the death was accidental.
Sad, I liked Andromina. It was one of my guilty pleasues watching it.
I remember reading somewhere thast MS's original plan for the XBox was to sell it at a premium for the early adapters who would buy it at any price, and then drop the price a few months later when manufacturing prices had dropped so as to not lose too much money. With no compition this time around I think they may try this tactic.
Also, if MS does sell the XBox2 at much below production price, they will be hit with anti-dumping provisions (this would not be beneath Sony to encourage.)
I had the same problem. I compare it to the slow bits in Criptocomicon, (stuff like the multi-page letter they read through the wall. Slow and although well written, I had to ask why was it there) but extended to fill a whole book. I put Quicksilver down after a few chapters and instead reread Snowcrash. According to the rewier, the pace picks up in the in the second book, but I don't know if or when I will read it.
I seem to remember something about a brain scanning machine in 1984 that was capable of detecting 'illegal' thoughts at a distance. There was a passage about "worrying about being woken up by the police because he was dreaming of sedition" somewhere near the beginning of the book.
Mind you, its been years since I read it. (1984 to be exact, my how time flies.)
Oh wait, you aren't using firefox are you.
Opens page in ie
Oh, that is annoying. How do you stand it???
vows never to use ie again even to run a quick test(for the umpteenth time)
Due to a municipal restructuring that took place a few years back, Orleans is now part of the city of Ottawa. It is sort of a bedroom community on the eastern side of the (now very large) city.
Like this packman game made using excel
I think some people either have way too much time on their hands, or they don't know or care that there are better tools avaliable.
If all you have is a hammer, then everything starts to look like a nail
In terms of actual hardware costs you can almost think of hardware as being free
Says the multi-billonaire
Good point. Another mitigating factor is that Mars is much smaller then Earth, and hence has less gravity to hold onto the atmosphere. Venus is nearly the same size of Earth and has a similar gravity to hold on to the increadably thick atmoshere. Personally, I don't think that it will be practicle to terraform mars by continully adding material to the Martian atmosphere. Mind you I don't work for NASA, so my opinions don't count for much in this area.
There is one major problem with Terraforming Mars. Mars has a virtually non-existant magnetoshere. the Magnetosphere deflects the solar wind arround earth. This means prevents large ammounts of hard radiation from reaching the surface (which would kill basically all life as we know it) as well as preventing the solar wind from blowing away the atmosphere. This is the leading theory about why Mars atmoshpere no longer exists to the degree it once did.