In Germany they wouldn't even let you near a gun. After seeing my -10.25/-11.0 dpt glasses they skipped the entire medical exmination, just performing two sight tests to ascertain that those were indeed my glasses and that I was effectively blind without them. One background check with my oculist later I was classified as T5 (completely unfit for military service).
(Not that I'm complaning; Germany has a mandatory military service, which you can only avoid by either opting to to social work instead, being found unfit or not being drafted because the already have enough recruits. The T5 grade allowed me to attend university about 1.5 years earlier.)
While I certainly could serve with my glasses on, it's not entirely unreasonable to expect them to break or get lost in a combat situation. A soldier who has to rely on spray-and-pray in order to hit any target further than one meter away is a decidedly bad idea (not to mention being unable to tell apart friendly from enemy soldiers, let alone bushes).
The big difference is how it works. The old memory effect dictates that you must completely discharge the battery or lose power. With Li+ cells, however, you're not supposed to discharge them lower than about 40-50% because they lose power by "deep discharges". So there is a significant difference - NiCad and Li+ cells have very different usage requirements.
Yeah, really impressive. I can't hope to get that far - the best I could realistically achieve would be a self-made USB stick. (Actually, I can't even get my hands on the flash chips - the cheapest way to obtain one might just be to buy an USB stick and solder it out...)
They didn't do a Linux version because only 0.0035% of users are identifying themselves as running Linux.
They are, however, locking out about 855,000 Mac users. Not that, compared to ~16M Win users, that's extremely much, but it's not exactly insignificant, either. Not if your standard is to bring your program to everyone, which does fit the BBC.
As far as I know the BBC operates on a business model similar to the German public stations: If you own a TV set you pay the fee. It doesn't matter if you watch the channel, you're paying anyway. (Yeah, that makes it even funnier when they lock out part of the userbase.)
The idea behind the mandatory fee is to keep the stations unbiased by corporate interest and market trends. It does kind of fulfill those goals, the former more than the latter. I don't think it's a bad concept per se, but it is quite annoying when you find out (for example) that you're forcedly financing a business partnership with Microsoft that has exactly zero value for your Windows-free household.
That could be a great feature, or people could just learn to use RAR instead of lame old zip.
People should stop torrenting archives already. The size savings are usually not that great and you lose the ability to select single files to download, which is one of BitTorrent's strengths. It's really annoying when you need a certain thing and have to download ten times as much data because someone stuck it in an archive with lots of other, irrelevant stuff.
Note that USB2 isn't as fast as theoretically rated, usually acheiving something around 320 Mbit/s. So you'd need about 458 minutes or 7.6 hours to fill it.
Maybe this stuff will bring FireWire-3200 to the consumer... (Most likely, however, we'll be stuck with USB 3.0.)
My issue with gconf is not the unified interface (unified interfaces usually are a god idea), it's the fact that what appears to me to be the default editor does throw them all together. When you talk about using gconf you usually talk about this user interface.
Of course, there are some other minor issues with gconf (some people think that XML is not universally a good choice for configration settings), but yeah, it might be the default mode of presentation that makes me hate the thing to death, as it resembles what might be the single worst idea Microsoft ever had. Including Bob.
Their implementation is less daft that Microsoft's, but I think it's still pretty clear to see where they got their ideas from - not many oher people think that providing a unified interface to see in one place the configuration settings for thirty completely unrelated applications is a very good design decision.
It apears to me that the GNOME devs have been deeply enamored with Microsoft technology for quite some time now; they copied the Registry with GConf (and given how much Windows users tend to like the Registry it does take some heavy duty love in order to think it's a good idea to bring it to Linux).
How much influence does de Icaza have within GNOME, by the way?
True. Many younger users couldn't tell me what a CMOS battery was if their life depended on it. They barely know what a driver does (but have no idea why their beta driver hat suboptimal performance and stability). Heck, they buy 12 kRPM hard drive because "my current one is pretty silent and it has 29; the new one has 36. That's just 20% louder".
It gets even better when they think they can tweak their system ("I want to make a RAID-0 because then games will load twice as fast."), outsmart the developer ("My mainboard doesn't offer all possible overclocking options for my CPU. How do I unlock them all?") or develop programs ("I'm writing for.NET 2.0/DirectX 9 so my game will run on all computers."). Heck, my example for the last one was too nice; as the moderator of a small programming forum I had to make a special rule to disallow threads asking "How to make an MMORPG with HTML".
There are some geniuses out there, but most people really do take their computer for granted and don't care about how or why it works. Just like I do with cars, for example. However, I'm smart enough to know that I'm not qualified to install a turbocharger or replace the gasoline with pure NOx. They will learn that, as well - it'll just take some time.
Well, I do enjoy Swing, Dixieland and similar stuff. They were going out of fashion when my parents were young. On the other hand, I also enjoy wildly different music styles like Jazz (which my parents grew up with), chiptunes (those I did grow up with), J-Pop (which, in its current form, is younger than me) and entirely recent creations like Nerdcore Hip Hop or SID Metal.
If asked, I would point out that the best music era was always. People have always produced good stuff and they have always produced drek.
Note that I'm sitting in Europe where copyright works a bit differently. For example, German copyright does cover databases; this protection was demanded by an EU directive, so other Euopean countries will behave similarly.
Actually, "laminated" isn't quite the right word; "multiayer" would fit better. The "laminated" part is at least one plastic layer containing the holograms. Inserting a new photo would be problematic, as EU driver's licenses have the photo and your signature printed on one of the inner layers (you have to go to the authority and hand over your photo and make a signature on a special piece of paper). Also, the background of the (grayscaled) photo is semi-transparent (through dithering, it appears) and I think I can see it having a ripple effect.
Even if you could rip off the top layer(s) and somehow alter the photo without destroying the pattern below it, then you'd have to replace the removed layer(s) and the replacement would have to have the correct holograms. The front is covered in holograms to the point where i'd not recommend examining it while on drugs. It's also pretty hi-res; I'd expect the smallest features of the holograms to be 0.1 mm or less in size.
It would take NOTHING in terms of effort to crank out fake ID's - hell, the province in question (at least at this point) doesn't even use any fort of hologram or anything to secure the ID.
Compare that to German EU driver's licenses, which are laminated plastic cards with a photograph, a holographic metal stripe, about thirty holograms* in various layers on the front, glitter-effect traffic signs, a lenticular area showing traffic signs and part of the licence number and a paper sticker on the backside on which the issuing date is written by hand. Also, it's translucent with one area using rectange on the front and back sides that form an E when light shines through. It also appears that lines on it are alternatively bolded and at regular weight.
Yeah, they were pretty serious about copying with the EU licenses. (Not that we Germans need them for anything but proving we can operate a vehicle - for identification purposes we have ID cards which are somewhat flimsy in comparison, even though having a holographic version of the photo on them is a nice touch.)
Slashdot Mirror
I immediately need to fill out an insurance form, right now!
Howlett was mentally scarred by the whole incident, referring to himself as a large weasel afterwards.
Actually, I think /. works with ISO-8859-1. Umlauts work while the Euro sign doesn't (ruling out 8859-15).
They seriously should consider allowing more characters - the entire first Unicode plane, for example.
An experiment now being repeated in most developed countries...
Except for the fact that now they're experiencing on sane people - you know, the kind of people who elect government officials-- oh, wait...
In Germany they wouldn't even let you near a gun. After seeing my -10.25/-11.0 dpt glasses they skipped the entire medical exmination, just performing two sight tests to ascertain that those were indeed my glasses and that I was effectively blind without them. One background check with my oculist later I was classified as T5 (completely unfit for military service).
(Not that I'm complaning; Germany has a mandatory military service, which you can only avoid by either opting to to social work instead, being found unfit or not being drafted because the already have enough recruits. The T5 grade allowed me to attend university about 1.5 years earlier.)
While I certainly could serve with my glasses on, it's not entirely unreasonable to expect them to break or get lost in a combat situation. A soldier who has to rely on spray-and-pray in order to hit any target further than one meter away is a decidedly bad idea (not to mention being unable to tell apart friendly from enemy soldiers, let alone bushes).
The big difference is how it works. The old memory effect dictates that you must completely discharge the battery or lose power. With Li+ cells, however, you're not supposed to discharge them lower than about 40-50% because they lose power by "deep discharges". So there is a significant difference - NiCad and Li+ cells have very different usage requirements.
Actually, back then "gay" and "tortured" were not too far from each other.
Yeah, really impressive. I can't hope to get that far - the best I could realistically achieve would be a self-made USB stick. (Actually, I can't even get my hands on the flash chips - the cheapest way to obtain one might just be to buy an USB stick and solder it out...)
They didn't do a Linux version because only 0.0035% of users are identifying themselves as running Linux.
They are, however, locking out about 855,000 Mac users. Not that, compared to ~16M Win users, that's extremely much, but it's not exactly insignificant, either. Not if your standard is to bring your program to everyone, which does fit the BBC.
As far as I know the BBC operates on a business model similar to the German public stations: If you own a TV set you pay the fee. It doesn't matter if you watch the channel, you're paying anyway. (Yeah, that makes it even funnier when they lock out part of the userbase.)
The idea behind the mandatory fee is to keep the stations unbiased by corporate interest and market trends. It does kind of fulfill those goals, the former more than the latter. I don't think it's a bad concept per se, but it is quite annoying when you find out (for example) that you're forcedly financing a business partnership with Microsoft that has exactly zero value for your Windows-free household.
Like ".torrent"? Seriously, even the Windows world is slowly realizing that file extensions can be longer than three characters.
As for the GP, I propose "Legion", as in "I am legion" - or "legions of filesharers". The latter does apply to TPB...
Heck, this is exactly the way software names get created. I half-expect someone to come up with a SomeFlavorOfBitTorrent client called "Fenton".
That could be a great feature, or people could just learn to use RAR instead of lame old zip.
People should stop torrenting archives already. The size savings are usually not that great and you lose the ability to select single files to download, which is one of BitTorrent's strengths. It's really annoying when you need a certain thing and have to download ten times as much data because someone stuck it in an archive with lots of other, irrelevant stuff.
Note that USB2 isn't as fast as theoretically rated, usually acheiving something around 320 Mbit/s. So you'd need about 458 minutes or 7.6 hours to fill it.
Maybe this stuff will bring FireWire-3200 to the consumer... (Most likely, however, we'll be stuck with USB 3.0.)
All "amazing density storage" is vaporware
Like perpendicular recording? (And yes, I did hear the term "amazing density" in discussions about perpendicular recording.)
My issue with gconf is not the unified interface (unified interfaces usually are a god idea), it's the fact that what appears to me to be the default editor does throw them all together. When you talk about using gconf you usually talk about this user interface.
Of course, there are some other minor issues with gconf (some people think that XML is not universally a good choice for configration settings), but yeah, it might be the default mode of presentation that makes me hate the thing to death, as it resembles what might be the single worst idea Microsoft ever had. Including Bob.
Their implementation is less daft that Microsoft's, but I think it's still pretty clear to see where they got their ideas from - not many oher people think that providing a unified interface to see in one place the configuration settings for thirty completely unrelated applications is a very good design decision.
It apears to me that the GNOME devs have been deeply enamored with Microsoft technology for quite some time now; they copied the Registry with GConf (and given how much Windows users tend to like the Registry it does take some heavy duty love in order to think it's a good idea to bring it to Linux).
How much influence does de Icaza have within GNOME, by the way?
True. The old 9x BSOD is iconic; the NT one is not.
I forgot to mention what the hard drive has; obviously the user in question was comparing decibel measurements as if they used a linear scale. My bad.
By the way, after hearing what +7 dB actually means he decided to go with a different hard drive instead.
True. Many younger users couldn't tell me what a CMOS battery was if their life depended on it. They barely know what a driver does (but have no idea why their beta driver hat suboptimal performance and stability). Heck, they buy 12 kRPM hard drive because "my current one is pretty silent and it has 29; the new one has 36. That's just 20% louder".
.NET 2.0/DirectX 9 so my game will run on all computers."). Heck, my example for the last one was too nice; as the moderator of a small programming forum I had to make a special rule to disallow threads asking "How to make an MMORPG with HTML".
It gets even better when they think they can tweak their system ("I want to make a RAID-0 because then games will load twice as fast."), outsmart the developer ("My mainboard doesn't offer all possible overclocking options for my CPU. How do I unlock them all?") or develop programs ("I'm writing for
There are some geniuses out there, but most people really do take their computer for granted and don't care about how or why it works. Just like I do with cars, for example. However, I'm smart enough to know that I'm not qualified to install a turbocharger or replace the gasoline with pure NOx. They will learn that, as well - it'll just take some time.
Well, I do enjoy Swing, Dixieland and similar stuff. They were going out of fashion when my parents were young. On the other hand, I also enjoy wildly different music styles like Jazz (which my parents grew up with), chiptunes (those I did grow up with), J-Pop (which, in its current form, is younger than me) and entirely recent creations like Nerdcore Hip Hop or SID Metal.
If asked, I would point out that the best music era was always. People have always produced good stuff and they have always produced drek.
Being an omnivore rocks.
Note that I'm sitting in Europe where copyright works a bit differently. For example, German copyright does cover databases; this protection was demanded by an EU directive, so other Euopean countries will behave similarly.
Actually, "laminated" isn't quite the right word; "multiayer" would fit better. The "laminated" part is at least one plastic layer containing the holograms. Inserting a new photo would be problematic, as EU driver's licenses have the photo and your signature printed on one of the inner layers (you have to go to the authority and hand over your photo and make a signature on a special piece of paper). Also, the background of the (grayscaled) photo is semi-transparent (through dithering, it appears) and I think I can see it having a ripple effect.
Even if you could rip off the top layer(s) and somehow alter the photo without destroying the pattern below it, then you'd have to replace the removed layer(s) and the replacement would have to have the correct holograms. The front is covered in holograms to the point where i'd not recommend examining it while on drugs. It's also pretty hi-res; I'd expect the smallest features of the holograms to be 0.1 mm or less in size.
It would take NOTHING in terms of effort to crank out fake ID's - hell, the province in question (at least at this point) doesn't even use any fort of hologram or anything to secure the ID.
Compare that to German EU driver's licenses, which are laminated plastic cards with a photograph, a holographic metal stripe, about thirty holograms* in various layers on the front, glitter-effect traffic signs, a lenticular area showing traffic signs and part of the licence number and a paper sticker on the backside on which the issuing date is written by hand. Also, it's translucent with one area using rectange on the front and back sides that form an E when light shines through. It also appears that lines on it are alternatively bolded and at regular weight.
Yeah, they were pretty serious about copying with the EU licenses. (Not that we Germans need them for anything but proving we can operate a vehicle - for identification purposes we have ID cards which are somewhat flimsy in comparison, even though having a holographic version of the photo on them is a nice touch.)