Actually the third sentence is the more important one. AFAIK, KDE has realised its version of ActiveX/OLE envisioned from the early beginning. Where is the paradigm shift?
The WM has been replaced. True. Once. Instead of 3 times.
I wouldn't go as far as calling a mail program a core component. So the following is probably of no relevance: As I've used GNOME at that time (0.x - 1.2x), I don not know the old mail program, but a googled kdenetwork-1.0 rpm suggests a program named kmail. The current KDE has a program named kmail 1.5.
But as I noticed, I didn't followed the early development of KDE. I might be wrong here.
Finally a question: How would defiencies in the development process of KDE affect the validty of the authors criticism? I don't think it would make it any less valid.
Re:The only once inside the GNOME-community
on
Has GNOME Become LAME?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
> An 18% increase in size after compression is nothing to boast about. (and the XML can never be smaller, it has more information in it)
You missed the point more important to me: >> As if space for config files would matter...
A increase by some factor is debateable. A percentile increase not. Especially not in such a limited benchmark. On a sidenote: My compact example is even one byte smaller than the given INI-example.
> There's a lot more to validate in XML than simpler formats. Yes, but you don't have to do it. Well, more importantly, I don't have to do it.
>I'm a programmer and XML files hurt my eyes
And it hurts my eyes (as a programmer) to have ever look at a textual-file beside code. I want the frickin data as binary in memory.
> This is a cop out [...] > [...] you might as well go for a binary format
No, it is not. It is human-readable. Visually not as pleasing as an INI-File. But not something you have to rack your brain about. All those people answering here wrote portions of valid XML, in a simple text-box without the use of some XML-editor and with minimal knowledge about XML.
But additionally to editing it with vi, cat, echo, sed, awk, or dontknowwhat, you have the possibility of using any XML-editor which represents the data in a more eye-pleasing form, performs automatic syntax-checks, and saves you some typeing.
Think source-code: You can use your spartanic editor, or your favourite developing enviroment with code completion, syntax check and the like.
> I'll say. I'm a programmer and XML files hurt my eyes. Screw John Doe, *I* don't want to look at them.
I think that is the main problem. Your personal dislike for XML. I don't think, I can discuss your aversion away. I'm not emotional attached to XML. At most I'm slightly unhappy about the redundancy introduced by the opening and closing tags, but it is there, it works, it is becoming standard.
Re:The only once inside the GNOME-community
on
Has GNOME Become LAME?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
As if space for config files would matter... Anyway:
XML is certainly not the be-all and end-all of data formats of data formats, and is certainly sub-optimal in several cases and aspects. I find XML hyped, too. But I see it as a simple syntax.
But now think about what you are optimising for.
Space? Compress your examples: XML=111b INI=94b (bzip2) And what about code-size? Every progam it's own parser. Shudder.
Ease of programming? Ever programmed a validating parser? As for me, I don't want parse a single line of text anymore. Thinking of all the possible deranged things a user or another program can feed into ones program makes me want to hide and curl. Remember, your program has to even tell the user what went wrong.
Ease of use? Well, certainly is the XML-syntax less readable then the INI-format. But as I said before, John Doe is not going to see them. Try an XML-editor, feed it the DTD or Schema, and it will check your modifications.
Interoperatiblity? See XML-editor.
>It's great if you need to store something with a complex heirarchy
I'm not very into XML, but I thought that is one of the deficiencies of XML. I don't know how to store anything, but a tree structures. I wouldn't use it for anything too complex.
Ignore the comparison with KDE for a moment. And the fact that he is pro-KDE. The article is written in such a way, that it provokes. This is the purpose of it. So that people discuss it.
He raises some valid "problems" of GNOME. Those problems are more metaphyiscal, so they might don't actually have to concern you.
He raises the valid question: "What does GNOME stand for?"
The whole project seem to lack consistency in its development process. The whole core parts have been totally replaced. (WM 3 times, Configuration once, FM once). The laudible idea of an "GNU Network Object Model Environment" has been dropped in favour of being a language agnostic desktop enviroment.
Those aren't real problems, but they are probably the reason for the deficiencies of the Gnome desktop in respect to UI consistency, which is the part KDE concentrated on. And meanwhile, KDE gained some language independency of its own.
Please note, that I didn't say that the GNOME Desktop is better or worse than the KDE. It primarily means, GNOME could be better than it currently is, when it had concentrated on their primary goal (Being GNOME).
In the authors admittently slightly provoking words: "GNOME's higher purpose was forgotten somewhere along the line, after which it degenerated into a LAME Franken-GUI."
Re:The only once inside the GNOME-community
on
Has GNOME Become LAME?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
First, XML is human-readable. It is not readable by Jon Doe, but you won't see him sticking his nose into these files anyway. Those people who can't edit an XML file will most certainly be even less inclined to edit a.emacs file.
XML can be so fragile, that they are non-hand editable, but so can be a non XML-file.
XML is a syntax, nothing more.
With that listing, you have essentially shown yourself, what's wrong with the paradigm.
Each and every application has it's own file, where it stores its configuration (which is not a problem) and it it's own syntax.
The problem with each application it's own file is, that they aren't sharing common settings.
The interesting part behind XML is, you don't have to invent your own syntax and implement your own parser. As a result other applications can quite easily access your data, too.
Oh, yes. I can formly see Saddam jumping for joy in expectation of Persian Gulf War II.
> Even then, when we bombed Afghanistan, the precision bombs were so accurate that they could destroy the house of a terrorist without touching the surrounding houses.
First, destroy a house of a alleged terrorist. (With killing everyone in it, who just happens to be in the same house). Second, so accurate, that they accurately destroyed some allied troups.
You do. Sometimes, this is a necessary evil. Or with the words of General Patton: "The Army is not a scalpel... it's a broadsword!". War is never clean. Despite the images from CNN. Keep that both in mind. In case of Afganistan, despite the numerous civilian casualities. It was most likey necessary.
Is it in the case of Saddam Hussein?
> The potential damage he can, will, and does cause to his people and his region is reason enough to use voilence to remove him.
Potential damage should never be a reason. For this reason alone, most goverments could/should be removed.
> The fact that he has horrific weapons and harbors terrorists only adds to our cause.
He allegedly has horrific weapons. The U.S. and U.K. goverment failed to provide evidence, that he actually has such weapons. They have several information, which can be interpreted that way, but no hard evidence.
The support of terrorism probably refers to the alleged meeting of Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi agent in Prague, as this is the only link to "War on Terror". This is doubtable.
Or are you referring to the financial support to Hisbollah? The Hisbollah is responsible for a lot of terroristic acts in Israel, but is also supported by Syria and Iran.
> Your uninformed sarcasm pissses me off.
Where do you get your information? From CNN, Fox News or military briefings?
Don't know about the US, but in Europe and Japan, people tend to treasure findings from centuries and millenias before they lived as their cultural heritage.
Celtic findings in Germany are treasued as a German national treasure.
The Stone Henge as a British national treasure.
Pottery from the Jomon era as Japanese national treasure.
And imagine, no one is asking for their bloodline.
Sometimes culture is more bound to a place than a certain group of people. Despite your particular historic experience, not every time a whole people gets "migrated". Usually they're migrating slowly and a lot of their culture has become part by the later dominating population.
Culture is often influenced by the enviroment, the people are living in.
Not to mention that he might have WMDs, potentially can develop a nuclear weapon in 6 months (since 10 years), is not very coorperative with the inspectors, and has rockets which can fly some km more than the allowed 150km.
In contrast, North-Korea has very likely 2 nuclear-bombs, has definitively nuclear reactor capable producing more and more uranium Saddam could dream of, threw out the inspectors last year and rockets which can reach California.
Did I mention the reeducation camps?
So, when you're a dictator, better have some good nuclear rockets.
Could you please back your statements up with some sort of facts, preferably from a reliable source?
This source seems to suggest otherwise. Btw, the mass-production of solar-cells has begun after the publishing of this paper.
>during their (short) usable lifetime I don't know about your experience. But I've had a solar cell, which has been serving me well for longer than 20 years. Guarantees are usually issued for 20 years lifetime.
Interestingly, I've heard similar stories about nuclear plants. Not that I'm claiming that they are true.
Great idea... abolishing a lot of juidical process. This will make it much more easier to bring those terrorists to justice.
Don't know why the western civilisation came up with such a cumbersome process in the last 4 centuries (with some regional and temporal exceptions)
I like especially Section 501. Reminds me somehow of "All Animals are equal, but some Animals are more equal than others" Or in this case: All Americans are equal, but some Americans are less equal than others
Greetings, Mr. McCarthy, um.. sorry, Mr. Ashcroft.
> So you slashbots should come down from your high horse.
Yeah... it's an fallacy to think that someone has to commit a crime to actually be guilty and punished.
>And "profiling" is a much better way of stopping terrorists instead of stripping down some 80 year old grandma from Kansas City all in the name of political correctness.
Instead, they deny some 74 year old catholic nun from Wisonsin from flying, based on their participation in the pacifist movement. This is, of course, much better.
Be aware of those militant pacifist.
Or those pesky tree-huggers. They cannot be allowed to fly either. Surely, they just want to fly to do some terroristic act. For what other reason should they want to fly? It is against their believe.
So, building up a list of people, who are not allowed to fly, based on their political, social and cultural background is not dubious?
By the way, book stores are also required to tell the FBI about who has bought which books and diving-schools have to inform them about their students. But they are not allowed to make this public.
This is, of course, not the slightest bit disturbing.
Especially since they are either reading books, Muslims, politically active....
Well, let's turn in around, they are not democrats or republicans or policitally uninterested, and white.
Which is, of course, rightfully moderated as Insightful, and probably Interesting, as you explicitly state, that the article already says it.
No blame on you.
To be a little bit more constructive. The largest "classic" Memory Sticks are available to up to 128Mb, the larger ones are already Memory Stick Pro (or Memory Stick Select).
AFAIK, the size limitation is not inherent in the technology of the Memory Sticks (the controller is on the stick). It is probably more a problem of usability (low data-transfer) of the classic sticks.
The Memory Stick Pro features a parallel controller, which twentyfolds the theoretically bandwidth. This new controller makes the new Stick incompatible.
The Clie NX and NZ series and some Vaio notebooks are (or will be) compatible with the Memory Stick Pro format, after a software upgrade.
This begs the question, why won't the SJ33 be compatible with the Memory Stick Pro? Do they produce some retro-version of Memory Stick-controllers for the new SJ33?
So, in words, you're claiming, that the change of the hear rate (h) is mainly proportional to the amount one currently listens to the song?
Don't know about you. But for me, listening to a song usually peaks after a certain time, and then declines.
So, more something along:
h(t) = c * e^(k*w) * cos(w*t) ; k > 2*w
The problem with MTV is, that they're targeting the largest audience (hence mainstream). A large audience is less flexible in accepting new music.
The program (without reading it, due to/.ing) seam to cluster the usership based on their preferences, thus creating smaller communities, which are more suspectible to new influences.
Um... but what happens in DAOC or EQ if you didn't log in for, say, about a week. Nothing really, I'd dare to say.
What happens in a real-time strategy game?
Your defenses have been overrun, your resources captured and your production has plummeted.
> A player that hasn't logged in since April or May 2002 is so far behind that any attempt to play as-is would be hopeless.
Can't imagine that. So, why should other people then begin to play that game? What would that do to (RL) business? They may lag behind relatively to their friends, but still have an advantage over others.
Of course, the game evolves to keep the people playing. But in contrast to strategy games, you'll never lose your once attained level.
>but for high performance applications where both speed and memory are critical, such as game consoles, a monolithic kernel will not cut it
As opposed to a non-monolithic kernel? They usually introduce even more overhead to replace the function calls with message-passing.
>and we feel that a lightweight proprietary OS that is simply a lightweight hardware abstraction layer is still the way to go.
Why do you need hardware abstraction at all? As you said "multiprocess management, memory protection, and the like are not necessary ". Furthermore, a game console is a very homogeneous system and hardware access policies don't have to be enforced either.
So, you'd only need hardware abstraction to ease the programming. This can already solved by libraries. Mayby I'm nitpicking, but calling it an OS seems to me a bit out of proportions.
The headline says it all: Robot for the elderly to become real-life Astro Boy
No flamethrower or electroshocker included. The security, which should be gained by this, is not one against burglers.
It is against dying from mismedication, strokes, and the like. It checks the person in question regularly for life-signs, reminds him/her of the medication and notifies an ambulance if necessary. And additionally gives the feeling of company.
The aversion seems to be a cultural thing: In Japan, inanimate objects are more likely considered to have a soul. The first image of a robot is Astro Boy. In the Western World, the first image is Maria (Metropolis) (or maybe the Golem).
> [...] but the way the EU commission works [...] that individual MEPs can be bribed [...]
You are aware, that the European Commission and the European Parliament are two different entities?
The commission is appointed by the member states (the national goverments) and aproved of the parliament. They are usually not MEPs, but former minister of some national goverment. (source)
But, you are right with the laughable controls over the MEPs. Still, in past, the parliament has been quite in favour to consumer rights. (Maybe because they don't have any real power)
> Because a lot of European states, including the UK, do not have any meaningful right of Fair Use for consumers.
In Germany, IRC, it is (or was) not only allowed to make copies of CDs, it is even allowed to give them to people you have a close relationship with. It is (or was) even explicitly allowed to circumvent copyright measurements for personal uses.
The downside is, that in Germany you pay a certain fee for every blank media (CD-R, cassette, MD: 6/h of recording time) and device (CD-Burner, tape-deck, MD-player) to compensate the artists for the estimated losses.
I'm not quite sure about the current situation, therefor "(or was)". I've found some an article, which mentions Germanys copyright legislation.
There is a large difference between banks and physical applications. Banks work with exact numbers, when you measure you don't. You calculate with unexact values.
The rest is stochastics and theory of errors, which I'm probably not qualified enough to lecture about. Suffice to say, that the probability you have the exact value is practically zero.
The error margin, or more positively formulated, the confidence interval, describes the region in which the real value lies with a probability of 66% (Gaussian-distribution). An interval twice as large gives you 95% certainty.
Lastly, what I tried to emphasise in my summary: It is not a discrepancy between the real value and the accounted value, but between an expected value and the registered amount.
Since a non-neglectable percentage of the readership tends to skip reading the article, and the poster suggest a major mishap, I feel obliged to post a summary:
There is a large discrepancy between the projected output and the registered amount of output.
Partly, this is considered to be due to some less dramatic unaccounted ways of leaving the factory than through the hands of north-korean spies, like dillution in waste-waters and diffusion into other materials.
There is still a large amount left, which cannot have left the factory by these means. Still, it is most likely not 'lost', since it might have not been produced at all. It is a discrepancy between actual and projected numbers.
These discrepancies do always occur since no measurement is perfect. An error margin of 1% can be attributed to the measurement alone. The factory had a discrepancy of 3%.
Both numbers aren't very reassuring. But actually, I'm more afraid of the things that aren't reported.
Slashdot Mirror
> You can do that with plain text configuration files too.
Ok, name me a single validating INI-parser (library).
I assume, when speaking of plain-text, you are referring to plain-text with INI-style syntax, as opposed to plain-text with XML-syntax.
Actually the third sentence is the more important one.
AFAIK, KDE has realised its version of ActiveX/OLE envisioned from the early beginning. Where is the paradigm shift?
The WM has been replaced. True. Once. Instead of 3 times.
I wouldn't go as far as calling a mail program a core component. So the following is probably of no relevance:
As I've used GNOME at that time (0.x - 1.2x), I don not know the old mail program, but a googled kdenetwork-1.0 rpm suggests a program named kmail.
The current KDE has a program named kmail 1.5.
But as I noticed, I didn't followed the early development of KDE. I might be wrong here.
Finally a question: How would defiencies in the development process of KDE affect the validty of the authors criticism?
I don't think it would make it any less valid.
> An 18% increase in size after compression is nothing to boast about. (and the XML can never be smaller, it has more information in it)
You missed the point more important to me:
>> As if space for config files would matter...
A increase by some factor is debateable. A percentile increase not. Especially not in such a limited benchmark. On a sidenote: My compact example is even one byte smaller than the given INI-example.
> There's a lot more to validate in XML than simpler formats.
Yes, but you don't have to do it. Well, more importantly, I don't have to do it.
>I'm a programmer and XML files hurt my eyes
And it hurts my eyes (as a programmer) to have ever look at a textual-file beside code. I want the frickin data as binary in memory.
> This is a cop out [...]
> [...] you might as well go for a binary format
No, it is not.
It is human-readable. Visually not as pleasing as an INI-File. But not something you have to rack your brain about.
All those people answering here wrote portions of valid XML, in a simple text-box without the use of some XML-editor and with minimal knowledge about XML.
But additionally to editing it with vi, cat, echo, sed, awk, or dontknowwhat, you have the possibility of using any XML-editor which represents the data in a more eye-pleasing form, performs automatic syntax-checks, and saves you some typeing.
Think source-code: You can use your spartanic editor, or your favourite developing enviroment with code completion, syntax check and the like.
> I'll say. I'm a programmer and XML files hurt my eyes. Screw John Doe, *I* don't want to look at them.
I think that is the main problem. Your personal dislike for XML. I don't think, I can discuss your aversion away.
I'm not emotional attached to XML. At most I'm slightly unhappy about the redundancy introduced by the opening and closing tags, but it is there, it works, it is becoming standard.
Anyway:XML is certainly not the be-all and end-all of data formats of data formats, and is certainly sub-optimal in several cases and aspects.
I find XML hyped, too. But I see it as a simple syntax.
But now think about what you are optimising for.
Space?
Compress your examples: XML=111b INI=94b (bzip2)
And what about code-size? Every progam it's own parser. Shudder.
Ease of programming?
Ever programmed a validating parser?
As for me, I don't want parse a single line of text anymore. Thinking of all the possible deranged things a user or another program can feed into ones program makes me want to hide and curl.
Remember, your program has to even tell the user what went wrong.
Ease of use?
Well, certainly is the XML-syntax less readable then the INI-format. But as I said before, John Doe is not going to see them.
Try an XML-editor, feed it the DTD or Schema, and it will check your modifications.
Interoperatiblity?
See XML-editor.
>It's great if you need to store something with a complex heirarchy
I'm not very into XML, but I thought that is one of the deficiencies of XML. I don't know how to store anything, but a tree structures.
I wouldn't use it for anything too complex.
Ignore the comparison with KDE for a moment. And the fact that he is pro-KDE. The article is written in such a way, that it provokes. This is the purpose of it. So that people discuss it.
He raises some valid "problems" of GNOME. Those problems are more metaphyiscal, so they might don't actually have to concern you.
He raises the valid question: "What does GNOME stand for?"
The whole project seem to lack consistency in its development process. The whole core parts have been totally replaced. (WM 3 times, Configuration once, FM once). The laudible idea of an "GNU Network Object Model Environment" has been dropped in favour of being a language agnostic desktop enviroment.
Those aren't real problems, but they are probably the reason for the deficiencies of the Gnome desktop in respect to UI consistency, which is the part KDE concentrated on. And meanwhile, KDE gained some language independency of its own.
Please note, that I didn't say that the GNOME Desktop is better or worse than the KDE. It primarily means, GNOME could be better than it currently is, when it had concentrated on their primary goal (Being GNOME).
In the authors admittently slightly provoking words:
"GNOME's higher purpose was forgotten somewhere along the line, after which it degenerated into a LAME Franken-GUI."
First, XML is human-readable. It is not readable by Jon Doe, but you won't see him sticking his nose into these files anyway. Those people who can't edit an XML file will most certainly be even less inclined to edit a .emacs file.
XML can be so fragile, that they are non-hand editable, but so can be a non XML-file.
XML is a syntax, nothing more.
With that listing, you have essentially shown yourself, what's wrong with the paradigm.
Each and every application has it's own file, where it stores its configuration (which is not a problem) and it it's own syntax.
The problem with each application it's own file is, that they aren't sharing common settings.
The interesting part behind XML is, you don't have to invent your own syntax and implement your own parser. As a result other applications can quite easily access your data, too.
> Nobody wants violence except our enemies.
Oh, yes. I can formly see Saddam jumping for joy in expectation of Persian Gulf War II.
> Even then, when we bombed Afghanistan, the precision bombs were so accurate that they could destroy the house of a terrorist without touching the surrounding houses.
First, destroy a house of a alleged terrorist. (With killing everyone in it, who just happens to be in the same house). Second, so accurate, that they accurately destroyed some allied troups.
Some food for though.
> We dont' bomb villages of innocent people.
You do. Sometimes, this is a necessary evil. Or with the words of General Patton: "The Army is not a scalpel... it's a broadsword!". War is never clean. Despite the images from CNN. Keep that both in mind. In case of Afganistan, despite the numerous civilian casualities. It was most likey necessary.
Is it in the case of Saddam Hussein?
> The potential damage he can, will, and does cause to his people and his region is reason enough to use voilence to remove him.
Potential damage should never be a reason. For this reason alone, most goverments could/should be removed.
> The fact that he has horrific weapons and harbors terrorists only adds to our cause.
He allegedly has horrific weapons. The U.S. and U.K. goverment failed to provide evidence, that he actually has such weapons. They have several information, which can be interpreted that way, but no hard evidence.
The support of terrorism probably refers to the alleged meeting of Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi agent in Prague, as this is the only link to "War on Terror". This is doubtable.
Or are you referring to the financial support to Hisbollah? The Hisbollah is responsible for a lot of terroristic acts in Israel, but is also supported by Syria and Iran.
> Your uninformed sarcasm pissses me off.
Where do you get your information? From CNN, Fox News or military briefings?
Don't know about the US, but in Europe and Japan, people tend to treasure findings from centuries and millenias before they lived as their cultural heritage.
Celtic findings in Germany are treasued as a German national treasure.
The Stone Henge as a British national treasure.
Pottery from the Jomon era as Japanese national treasure.
And imagine, no one is asking for their bloodline.
Sometimes culture is more bound to a place than a certain group of people. Despite your particular historic experience, not every time a whole people gets "migrated". Usually they're migrating slowly and a lot of their culture has become part by the later dominating population.
Culture is often influenced by the enviroment, the people are living in.
Not to mention that he might have WMDs, potentially can develop a nuclear weapon in 6 months (since 10 years), is not very coorperative with the inspectors, and has rockets which can fly some km more than the allowed 150km.
In contrast, North-Korea has very likely 2 nuclear-bombs, has definitively nuclear reactor capable producing more and more uranium Saddam could dream of, threw out the inspectors last year and rockets which can reach California.
Did I mention the reeducation camps?
So, when you're a dictator, better have some good nuclear rockets.
3) Do it over several years
4) Have declining sales
5) Blame it on piracy
Well, it is more of a summer house, which is off-grid. So being self-powered is no achievement, since only a radio and some light require some energy.
The point of mentioning it was the life-time of the solar cell.
Being completely self-sufficient in a (more or less) normal life-stile is a little bit more complicated. One cannot rely on photo-voltaic alone.
One has to be a little bit more intelligent in building the house and selecting the equipment.
The keyword is: Zero-Energy Home.
IIRC, those houses are cost effective. But the critical part is, that the initial costs are much higher. But don't take my word for it.
Concerning the cost effectiveness in California, new taxes might totally void it.
Could you please back your statements up with some sort of facts, preferably from a reliable source?
This source seems to suggest otherwise. Btw, the mass-production of solar-cells has begun after the publishing of this paper.
>during their (short) usable lifetime
I don't know about your experience. But I've had a solar cell, which has been serving me well for longer than 20 years. Guarantees are usually issued for 20 years lifetime.
Interestingly, I've heard similar stories about nuclear plants. Not that I'm claiming that they are true.
Great idea... abolishing a lot of juidical process. This will make it much more easier to bring those terrorists to justice.
Don't know why the western civilisation came up with such a cumbersome process in the last 4 centuries (with some regional and temporal exceptions)
I like especially Section 501. Reminds me somehow of
"All Animals are equal, but some Animals are more equal than others"
Or in this case:
All Americans are equal, but some Americans are less equal than others
Greetings, Mr. McCarthy, um.. sorry, Mr. Ashcroft.
Yeah, no one is living at the San Andreas rift. Or Japan for that matter.
And all the people in the other areas will happily welcome the refugees, coming from other countries because the risk is too high living there.
I can pracitcally see the US jumping out of joy to welcome those poor Bangladeshians, because their country is flooded.
> So you slashbots should come down from your high horse.
Yeah... it's an fallacy to think that someone has to commit a crime to actually be guilty and punished.
>And "profiling" is a much better way of stopping terrorists instead of stripping down some 80 year old grandma from Kansas City all in the name of political correctness.
Instead, they deny some 74 year old catholic nun from Wisonsin from flying, based on their participation in the pacifist movement. This is, of course, much better.
Be aware of those militant pacifist.
Or those pesky tree-huggers. They cannot be allowed to fly either. Surely, they just want to fly to do some terroristic act. For what other reason should they want to fly? It is against their believe.
So, building up a list of people, who are not allowed to fly, based on their political, social and cultural background is not dubious?
By the way, book stores are also required to tell the FBI about who has bought which books and diving-schools have to inform them about their students. But they are not allowed to make this public.
This is, of course, not the slightest bit disturbing.
Especially since they are either reading books, Muslims, politically active....
Well, let's turn in around, they are not democrats or republicans or policitally uninterested, and white.
I will avoid the obligatory cites:
1,2
Which is, of course, rightfully moderated as Insightful, and probably Interesting, as you explicitly state, that the article already says it.
No blame on you.
To be a little bit more constructive.
The largest "classic" Memory Sticks are available to up to 128Mb, the larger ones are already Memory Stick Pro (or Memory Stick Select).
AFAIK, the size limitation is not inherent in the technology of the Memory Sticks (the controller is on the stick). It is probably more a problem of usability (low data-transfer) of the classic sticks.
The Memory Stick Pro features a parallel controller, which twentyfolds the theoretically bandwidth. This new controller makes the new Stick incompatible.
The Clie NX and NZ series and some Vaio notebooks are (or will be) compatible with the Memory Stick Pro format, after a software upgrade.
This begs the question, why won't the SJ33 be compatible with the Memory Stick Pro?
Do they produce some retro-version of Memory Stick-controllers for the new SJ33?
Don't know about you. But for me, listening to a song usually peaks after a certain time, and then declines.
So, more something along:The problem with MTV is, that they're targeting the largest audience (hence mainstream). A large audience is less flexible in accepting new music.
The program (without reading it, due to
Um... but what happens in DAOC or EQ if you didn't log in for, say, about a week.
Nothing really, I'd dare to say.
What happens in a real-time strategy game?
Your defenses have been overrun, your resources captured and your production has plummeted.
> A player that hasn't logged in since April or May 2002 is so far behind that any attempt to play as-is would be hopeless.
Can't imagine that. So, why should other people then begin to play that game? What would that do to (RL) business? They may lag behind relatively to their friends, but still have an advantage over others.
Of course, the game evolves to keep the people playing. But in contrast to strategy games, you'll never lose your once attained level.
Pardon, but your post begs some questions:
>but for high performance applications where both speed and memory are critical, such as game consoles, a monolithic kernel will not cut it
As opposed to a non-monolithic kernel? They usually introduce even more overhead to replace the function calls with message-passing.
>and we feel that a lightweight proprietary OS that is simply a lightweight hardware abstraction layer is still the way to go.
Why do you need hardware abstraction at all?
As you said "multiprocess management, memory protection, and the like are not necessary ". Furthermore, a game console is a very homogeneous system and hardware access
policies don't have to be enforced either.
So, you'd only need hardware abstraction to ease the programming. This can already solved by libraries. Mayby I'm nitpicking, but calling it an OS seems to me a bit out of proportions.
The headline says it all: Robot for the elderly to become real-life Astro Boy
No flamethrower or electroshocker included.
The security, which should be gained by this, is not one against burglers.
It is against dying from mismedication, strokes, and the like. It checks the person in question regularly for life-signs, reminds him/her of the medication and notifies an ambulance if necessary. And additionally gives the feeling of company.
The aversion seems to be a cultural thing: In Japan, inanimate objects are more likely considered to have a soul. The first image of a robot is Astro Boy.
In the Western World, the first image is Maria (Metropolis) (or maybe the Golem).
They fool their customer into thinking that their milky double latte is coffee.
> [...] but the way the EU commission works [...] that individual MEPs can be bribed [...]
You are aware, that the European Commission and the European Parliament are two different entities?
The commission is appointed by the member states (the national goverments) and aproved of the parliament. They are usually not MEPs, but former minister of some national goverment. (source)
But, you are right with the laughable controls over the MEPs.
Still, in past, the parliament has been quite in favour to consumer rights.
(Maybe because they don't have any real power)
> Because a lot of European states, including the UK, do not have any meaningful right of Fair Use for consumers.
In Germany, IRC, it is (or was) not only allowed to make copies of CDs, it is even allowed to give them to people you have a close relationship with. It is (or was) even explicitly allowed to circumvent copyright measurements for personal uses.
The downside is, that in Germany you pay a certain fee for every blank media (CD-R, cassette, MD: 6/h of recording time) and device (CD-Burner, tape-deck, MD-player) to compensate the artists for the estimated losses.
I'm not quite sure about the current situation, therefor "(or was)". I've found some an article, which mentions Germanys copyright legislation.
There is a large difference between banks and physical applications.
Banks work with exact numbers, when you measure you don't. You calculate with unexact values.
The rest is stochastics and theory of errors, which I'm probably not qualified enough to lecture about. Suffice to say, that the probability you have the exact value is practically zero.
The error margin, or more positively formulated, the confidence interval, describes the region in which the real value lies with a probability of 66% (Gaussian-distribution). An interval twice as large gives you 95% certainty.
Lastly, what I tried to emphasise in my summary:
It is not a discrepancy between the real value and the accounted value, but between an expected value and the registered amount.
Since a non-neglectable percentage of the readership tends to skip reading the article,
and the poster suggest a major mishap, I feel obliged to post a summary:
There is a large discrepancy between the projected
output and the registered amount of output.
Partly, this is considered to be due to some less dramatic unaccounted ways of
leaving the factory than through the hands of north-korean spies, like dillution in waste-waters and diffusion into other
materials.
There is still a large amount left, which cannot have left the factory by these means.
Still, it is most likely not 'lost', since it might have not been produced at all.
It is a discrepancy between actual and projected numbers.
These discrepancies do always occur since no measurement is perfect. An error margin of 1% can be attributed to the measurement alone. The factory had a discrepancy of 3%.
Both numbers aren't very reassuring. But actually, I'm more afraid of the things that aren't reported.