You'd like this even more then - ski, shoot, hang-glide, sabotage and drive, all set in the next ice age. A shame that there are no modern versions of it.
Indeed, by far the most popular toolkit for writing applications was (and in terms of the sheer mass of supported code, still is) Visual Basic.
You can't get much more abstracted from the Windows API. It struck a nice balance though - you could still *use* the API, you just had to know what you were doing.
C# strikes a great balance ; management love it because you can crank out applications at a VB pace, developers love it because it's new and shiny and not VB (meaning that they avoid the stigma of being a VB developer, and get the higher pay rates associated with a C family language.)
I'm still probably far more productive in VB6 than anything else ; 5 years of hard commercial experience and a large set of libraries don't just evaporate overnight in the face of a new technology. And mocking by the "real" developers aside, if you use good practices, VB code can be just as robust and fast as most C++ desktop apps, with a fraction of the work involved.
As far as Mono is concerned, the most important part is that their Windows.Forms implementation is by and large, much more compatible than it used to be. Which improves the chances of Linux desktop adoption, because as we all know, what makes a desktop useful is DESKTOP APPS. If you can port your desktop app to Linux more easily, people are more likely to take it seriously as a desktop OS. You could argue that this is why MS scrabbled to produce yet another GUI app framework before the ink was really dry on Windows.Forms 2.0 - the last C# app I ported to Linux took two lines of code changed to get running, and afterwards it was truly cross-platform, as executables compiled by both the Mono and.NET compilers ran in either environment quite happily. Aside from very minor differences in font aliasing, you couldn't tell the difference either. That's proper abstraction for you.
The function governing thermal conduction is proportional to length. Therefore, if you can half the thickness of your paste layer, you double the thermal conductivity.
The way it works is that excess paste squishes into the microgrooves - instead of needing immense pressure to squish it all the way out to the edge (which won't happen). This means that the absolute minimum of paste should remain between the flat surfaces. If the grooves are relatively deep but narrow, you should get close to the minimum possible paste thickness (theoretically, you should only need enough paste to fill surface irregularities on the heat transfer surfaces between die and spreader). You still want the spaces between the grooves to be as flat as possible. You only sacrifice a small amount of surface area to the grooves, which is more than made up for by the decreased paste thickness.
And what's the primary means of obtaining hydrogen today? From fossil fuels. The reason so much research is being done into hydrogen is because it maintains the market for the oil barons. It has a lot of PR value - all those wonderful, and scientifically verifiable, quotes about the exhaust from hydrogen engines being nothing but water vapour.
It's good for local emissions as well - zero particulates, zero nitrogen oxides, no sulphur, etc. Absolutely great for meeting strict emissions regulations with no consideration whatsoever about what kind of emissions have to occur elsewhere to generate the stuff.
These reasons are why it's become a poster-boy for politicians with a vested interest in oil. You can pronounce at great length how green your credentials are, all the while smiling inside about how your Exxon shares will remain stable. That's assuming the technology can be made to work - and if it can't, well, you still looked green for the voters, didn't you ? And it distracts attention away from all those dangerous alternate energy sources which have the potential to remove power from oil companies, because many of them depend on a vast distributed production infrastructure composed of low-cost capital, instead of being founded on geographically concentrated extraction zones which are easily defended and require vast investments to exploit, placing them out of the reach of the little guy.
You think they want to lose their power to a bunch of algae farmers (or avocados, or palm oil, or rapeseed, or any oil crop)? Compete with a production system that can increase its output every year because biological organisms reproduce themselves for not much more than water and dirt? Have people *gasp*turning to local producers for their fuel instead of a big multinational No sir. Which is why Bush laid out $1.2 B in 2003 for the hydrogen initiative.
We have plenty of good ways to store solar energy as hydrocarbons (or at least, plants do). The food chain depends on it (except for some unusual examples like thermal ocean vents).
The intrinsic problem is the rate of collection and the effort required to extract that energy. Crude oil is the product of natural processes that have effectively done the thermal depolymerisation (the "turkey guts into oil" reaction) for us. Alas, crude oil represents the product of many millions of years of these processes. We are consuming it at a far greater rate than the biosphere produced it (and the conditions which produced it are gone, in the main).
I think investment in this area is essential. If nothing else, other forms of energy capture do not provide us with viable feedstocks for the manufacturing industries. As oil production dwindles, its role as a feedstock for the plastic, pharmaceutical, and chemical industries is going to become far more of an issue than it's energy content, particularly if we crack fusion or some other energy panacea emerges.
There are some interesting advances in producing algae that are 50% oil by weight. If you could make this work on a small to medium scale, the oil companies ought to be widdling themselves. Or buying up large tracts of desert to put growing frames in (not that they don't already own lots of desert).
I used to prepare the escrow disks for a company writing healthcare software. Emphasis was not placed upon complete documentation. In addition, the proprietary tools (a compiler and various third-party components) were typically not placed on the disk either due to copyright concerns. It would have been impossible to reconstitute the software concerned just from the content of the disk, and getting hold of the required third-party materials is getting harder and harder, principally because most of it is no longer sold. I'm certain that no-one qualified ever checked the functionality of the escrow material, because it would have been instantly apparent that it wasn't quite all there....
If I was still there, and still doing that job, I'd probably recommend that their build system got transferred to a virtual machine, and that a copy of the (open-source, preferably) VM server software, the VM image, and the full source-control repository were all required to be part of the escrow material. And I'd probably be blocked from doing it by management covering their ass. So I'd probably do it anyway, and put the contentious material in a folder marked with the "hidden" attribute. Heheh.
And make no mistakes, if the US Government thought they could get away with it, they would too.
I'ts ostensibly to support "congestion reduction" through road charging. But there are other ways to implement that that don't require a GPS tracker in your car 24/7.
Get the Gang of Four, and other books on O-O like Holub on Patterns.
Don't bother with books aimed purely at C#. If you know OO well, you can appreciate other languages too. I recently went from coding C# to Java for the first time, with very little change of pace, simply because the tools, APIs, syntax and general patterns are so similar. I'd expect the same from C/C++, because the C# syntax is both similar and simpler. In particular, context-completion features with popup help in IDEs mean that I very rarely refer to the docs anymore. VB6 used to pop up just the method signatures, with VS2005 and Eclipse, a short description of the routine pops up as well.
But grokking OO after being a procedural programmer for a long time is the hardest mental hurdle to jump. I worked with a bunch of VB6 programmers who just didn't get it, even though the language supports polymorphism reasonably well. Since I left they've transitioned to C# - I hope they had a major epiphany, because if not, they have a lot of big, static classes with very large methods hanging around.
1.8 million people signed an e-petition protesting the implantation of a GPS tracking device in every car in Britain. Given that there are only 30 million vehicles in Britain (UK Dept of Transport figure), and the average rate of net-literacy, this is a staggering number.
Of course, the government response was to just say "oh, ok, but we're still going to do it anyway". Which isn't surprising ; UK Dept of Transport documents reveal that this system is required to be compatible with European systems, so it looks like it's been decided at a higher level for a long time. Couple this with the push for an independent European GPS system, Galileo, and it looks like a done deal - "They" want to watch where we all go and the route we take to go there. The cover story that it's all to combat congestion on the roads doesn't wash - I myself, a lowly UK gov employee, can conceive of a means to implement a similar scheme that is an order of magnitude cheaper, achieves the stated goal of making people pay to drive on congested roads, and doesn't track your car everywhere it goes (just where it goes on congested roads).
I'd expect to see similar initiatives from all big governments in time. They're scared of the power that information and technology give their populace, because it takes power from them.
The major two reasons for the presence of the track changes feature :
People don't use a version control system for their documents. The MSO format, as a binary format, is not as easy to diff as a text based format.
You can work around these to a degree - you can script the export of text from MSO documents and do comparisons on it. You can even merge documents if you use the Save As XML features and don't mind poking around in XML documents.
The parent comment about awful visualization should not be the case in an open market ; because if the format was open enough a competing software company could write a document comparator that used any damn visualization you liked.
Version control systems for more general use are still a bit immature though.
Of course, if you use the output of the exercise to RUN the air conditioning system.....
Heat pumps are far over-unity for the heat they move vs the energy they are fed. This neatly counteracts the low efficiency of generating heat through human effort.
Storing the energy in batteries would be a very minor way of moving heat out of the gym compared to powering the aircon.
Five or six people on exercise bicycles could generate a megawatt
To put this in perspective, this is like saying each person is outputting sufficient energy to boil 166 jug kettles simultaneously.
Please, think about your numbers before you post them. I think you mean a kilowatt. These people would be hotter than the Human Torch, people would be running, screaming, their lycra pants melting from their roasting flesh.
While I agree that the wasted energy which is ordinarily all just converted into heat in the gym atmosphere would do something useful before it ends up in it's ground state, if you could generate a megawatt from six people on bicycles, every major city in China would be a roiling cloud of vapour. Either that, or they'd have built a huge deathray and vapourised the West by now.
Frankly, you can't really expect people to want to pay people in the UK (or the USA) to do *anything*. Why? Because it's so much cheaper to pay the Chinese to do it.
This isn't rocket science. It's the difference between our lifestyles. If you want food shipped from all over the world, world class healthcare, enormous amounts of pointless travel and lots of high-end consumer luxuries, you have to pay for it. Companies know that if they employ people in western nations, then THEY are going to have to pay for it. They prefer to pay for a lifestyle low on consumer goods, fossil fuels, and the other little luxuries in life (healthcare, freedom to travel) because it's so much cheaper.
Of course, it begs the question, what do you do when you've outsourced everything and your target demographic no longer exists because they no longer have jobs, and the workers who make your products cannot afford them for the same reason that you employed them in the first place....
The best message I've seen in a game was in Hostile Waters.
The line? I can't find the script.. but the scene is just simply a bunch of national flags flying toward the camera and burning, and the gist of it is that at some point in the future, everyone realises that all the fighting is a bunch of shit and that if everyone would just get along with each other it would all be much nicer. The game is spent fighting against a cabal of the old power-brokers who want things back the way they were before (artificial scarcity, centralized control).
Warren Ellis was much more eloquent about it than was. This scene, for all it's primitive rendering, usually makes me cry. Because it's something that *matters*. Something noble.
They also fund the Dirac video codec development, so they're not all bad.
And let's face it, the alternative the BBC used to support was RealMedia, which is if anything, more evil than Microsoft because the player is such a nasty piece of work. The BBC had an agreement with Real to distribute a version which didn't contain all the evil adware for a long while, but actually finding it was an exercise...
The spongiform nature of the sponge makes a natural insulator - if you boil your sponge in a pan, the centre may well stay cool for a reasonably long time, especially if the sponge is already wet when you put it in.
I presently have 2 300GB drives in my media server, 500GB of which is given over to DVB-T (television) streams and compressed videos. They cost me about $150 (£75) apiece.
Capacity is important to me, therefore, as that partition is perpetually about 98% full (although I suspect that it also be full if it was three times the size, I'd just keep more of the good stuff for longer).
But yes, price is also important. The drives I bought were in the "sweet spot" where the cost per GB was low. The higher densities mean that you can make drives with fewer platens and importantly, heads. Heads being the most expensive part of the drive, and platens being the part that makes a drive consume more power, cheaper, quieter, less hungry drives should be a natural side product of gargantuan behemoths that merely consume the same amount of power as current models whilst costing around the same but holding an awful lot more data.
The huge data sizes are just a consequence of the 3.5" form factor. Conversely, 2.5" drives are now getting respectably capacious - today I bought a 160GB bus powered drive that rests comfortably on my open hand. Enough to back up my laptop, tote my entire music collection around on, and store a fairly heft wodge of whatever else I fancy.
Incidentally, larger drives speed up data operations, not the inverse. You are confusing a bigger drive with a bigger filesystem - a larger filesystem will take longer to defrag, true, but putting it on a larger physical drive will almost always increase performance as
* The data rate past the head increases
* The latency decreases (the increased density means the head travels a shorter distance to go places
* Fragmentation will decrease as larger drives have larger expanses of contiguous free space.
Plus, for your example of search taking longer, not only does putting it on a larger drive improve seek times and data rates, but gives you enough space to put on index on as well (and the indexing will run faster because the drive runs faster, etc, etc). Yes, if you start putting more data in your filesystem, things will take longer, but that's only made POSSIBLE by a larger drive, it's the users choice, not the drives fault.
It is at least better in some ways than those people who think that a RAID array is an excuse not to have a backup.
Hardware failure is not the sole cause of data loss - in fact, I'd be prepared to believe that data loss down to "software" failure is more common, be it a human being who accidentally bangs "delete", or a virus, or bad software corrupting the records, etc..
I'm not saying it IS more common, but it's certainly plausible.
However, the attitude here displayed by someone who is in insurance and thus supposed to understand the benefits of a good fallback plan..... I would recommend he goes for a RAID of some sort, with a hard drive caddy that receives the backups with the drive cartridges rotated offsite periodically.
You are correct about the duplication costs being low, but ignoring the development and support costs is just living in a fantasy world.
What you mean to say is that with software, the cost tends toward the low cost of duplication as the number of copies approaches infinity. Since we do not have an infinite users on this planet, it's not zero.
Ignoring the costs of open-source development is fallacious also. All software costs time to develop, and requires infrastructure to develop and distribute. To say that this is free is tripe. Some of it is contributed for zero money by altruistic developers, yes, but they will typically be supported by other sources of income without which they could not contribute. Many OSS projects have full time developers paid for or employed by large commercial concerns, not least of which those employed by the likes of the big commercial distros, the software houses like CollabNet who sponsor the development of Subversion because it complements their paid-for infrastructure products. Or companies that work on software designed to support their other work and have the decency to open-source it if it's been based on other OSS products.
Take hardware drivers for Linux. To paraphrase a scene from Fight Club, at each hardware manufacturer, there is a man who's job it is to apply the Formula. If the number of potential first-year sales to Linux clients multiplied by the per-unit profit on the hardware minus the average cost of supporting a Linux user, is less than the cost of porting the driver software to Linux, then they don't do it. And even if they do it, they are probably not going to open-source the code if it does something clever that raises their product above the ordinary. The only way that a driver will subsequently be developed for that hardware is if someone pays the cost of doing so, whether that's with their time and skill, or by hiring someone to spend their time and skill. And the motivation is the same - someone wants to use that hardware on Linux badly enough that they are prepared to expend an effort. Which means that they must wish to benefit from that. Which is profit (in the monetary or the personal sense).
The profit exists because without it, literally no-one would develop software except for the fun of noodling around with algorithms.
Even if Linux was entirely written for no money (which it isn't), the only reason it gets written is because people want to get stuff done with their computers. The writing of operating systems and indeed all software is therefore a cost associated with the use of computers. The OSS model works because it distributes this cost amongst two groups - those who altruistically donate the fruits of their efforts to the community, and those corporates who participate in the great OSS bargain - they get a free ride on the licensing so long as they also contribute. Even the users of OSS can contribute by submitting bug reports (which are just as valuable as source code). The Windows model spreads the cost more or less evenly amongst those who use the software, but also makes a handsome profit on each unit.
Who is to say which is more efficient? I have no doubt that the Windows model promotes a tremendous amount of R&D because MS can afford it. On the other hand, even on my small scale (one developer) software projects with a user base around 10 users, I find that the ones that improve the fastest are the ones that get used the most. You can't ignore the fact that developing the software is what I get paid to do though, and for our particular itches, you're not going to find any OSS team willing to scratch them.
Heh, Windows 98 taught me that lesson - it loves to utterly destroy any existing OS installs on a given disk. After you've repartitioned the drive and installed Win2k and SuSe so you can play new games, old games and experiment with Linux, only to find that Win98 has other ideas, and they don't include none of those darned new fangled OSs, no sir.
I chose Gentoo in the first instance because it was the only distro I could get my TV server hardware working properly on ; but having played with SuSe, Ubuntu and Mandrake in the process I would probably still choose Gentoo, because Gentoo has taught me so much about Linux. At the time I first used it you were required to dive under the bonnet and get your hands dirty with a text editor and the command line, although I gather this has become rather easier in recent times.
Usability is another question - I still can't find the GUI to change the screen resolution in KDE or Gnome. Such a simple setting should not have an experienced user and programmer hunting and cursing for up to an hour before giving up entirely and just changing the text file. My TV server has forsaken any kind of window manager altogether - it just uses a raw X server to run MythTV under and that's all I need.
The more paranoid amongst us would speculate that this sort of capability is one of the reasons that companies are scrabbling around so much trying to perfect Treacherous Computing and DRM.
You can bet your butt that as soon as the first device capable of manufacturing all of the parts involved in its own construction from simple raw materials is produced, a "matterware hacker" is going to feel the urge to make an open-source variant. From there on it's an inevitable progression to the complete breakdown of the consumer society - why purchase products from a big company when you can download the specs and print your own? Make your own energy collectors and raw material processors and your only constraints would be time and knowledge. And the beauty of knowledge is that when people get together and hand it around for free, everyone becomes richer without impoverishing themselves.
This idea of course, terrifies those who are hooked on the hierarchical structure of power and control that looms over our world today, either because they fear destructive chaos or because they are addicted to the power. But if these technologies are pursued to their logical limits, the only possible end states are universal wealth, universal control, or global extinction. Mankind has proven time and again that if you can conceive of a technology, and it is possible, then it will be achieved. If freedom is to prevail, then the hackers are going to have to be the ones to save us all.
Ok, maybe DRM is explicable in terms of present content-industry greed. But DRM on "matterware" is a logical extension, and the stakes are far higher than whether you get to listen to the latest RIAA sponsored aural insult or watch the steam rise from the latest Hollywood heap.
I preordered my Wii from PC World a month before release, and so far, no Wii. I was operating under the assumption that they might be one of the less well-frequented retails, and was encouraged to see them closing off preorders after I ordered, expecting that this was a sign of honest pre-allocation rules. To be fair, Nintendo have been shipping short orders to the UK.
They are now listing the expected release date on my order as 31st January.... I really, really hope they are just being pessimistic to cover their ass. They go out of their way to make it hard to cancel too, with no discernable means of doing so on the website.. at least play.com get this right - you can cancel a preorder with a nice clearly labelled button and it's made clear that there are no penalties for doing so.
Also have a bunch of stuff on order with play.com and Amazon. Looks like Amazon might be coming through, as my order is listed as "Dispatching soon..."
Ah well. The rumours I hear is that the next shipment is Wednesday. Whether that's Wednesday 13th or the 20th I don't know. Fingers crossed, eh?
My 2 1/2 daughter had her state-mandated development assessment this week. The health visitor actually told us not to educate her too much on the grounds that if she was too far ahead of her school classmates she might not fit in. My comment was that that was the poorest excuse for mediocrity I've ever heard.
My daughter is obviously taking after her parents, who were both precocious children. In a culture where every other conceivable "difference" is sacrosanct and treated with kid gloves, our most intelligent children are being given very short thrift. You don't see state-sponsored "special" schools coping with their needs. Intelligence should be lauded and cultivated, instead, the culture is to exclude and mock these people.
The accelerometers in the controller are of the same sort that trigger airbags and the disk-headcrash-avoidance feature of laptop computers.
Your feet would not need to be still : the impact of your foot on the floor followed by it's raising would result in a marked and sudden change of acceleration vector, so you only have to detect the trough in the curve.
If anything, 2 Wiimotes should be a far more capable controller for dance games than the standard DDR gamepad. Four wiimotes should be able to act as a full dance controller with all four limbs represented. I'm not sure how many channels the accelerometer has, or how many the nunchuk has, but maybe a nunchuk (with a cable extension and some sort of webbing to stop it flying around) could replace the arm or leg sensor and therefore you could have full head-to-head dance matches with each player wearing webbing holding 2 Wiimotes in place and all four limbs on each player motion capped.
Right now, you could play DDR by writing an abstraction layer which converted mocapped leg gestures into hits on virtual gamepad buttons - you would have to cope with re-centering issues, but otherwise it should be simple enough.
This has actually interested me enough to want to get hold of some Wiimotes and a bluetooth adapter and see what the protocols and capabilities are like. If they are good enough for DDR motion capture, maybe they might even be good enough for semi-professional machinima.
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You'd like this even more then - ski, shoot, hang-glide, sabotage and drive, all set in the next ice age. A shame that there are no modern versions of it.
Midwinter
Indeed, by far the most popular toolkit for writing applications was (and in terms of the sheer mass of supported code, still is) Visual Basic.
.NET compilers ran in either environment quite happily. Aside from very minor differences in font aliasing, you couldn't tell the difference either. That's proper abstraction for you.
You can't get much more abstracted from the Windows API. It struck a nice balance though - you could still *use* the API, you just had to know what you were doing.
C# strikes a great balance ; management love it because you can crank out applications at a VB pace, developers love it because it's new and shiny and not VB (meaning that they avoid the stigma of being a VB developer, and get the higher pay rates associated with a C family language.)
I'm still probably far more productive in VB6 than anything else ; 5 years of hard commercial experience and a large set of libraries don't just evaporate overnight in the face of a new technology. And mocking by the "real" developers aside, if you use good practices, VB code can be just as robust and fast as most C++ desktop apps, with a fraction of the work involved.
As far as Mono is concerned, the most important part is that their Windows.Forms implementation is by and large, much more compatible than it used to be. Which improves the chances of Linux desktop adoption, because as we all know, what makes a desktop useful is DESKTOP APPS. If you can port your desktop app to Linux more easily, people are more likely to take it seriously as a desktop OS. You could argue that this is why MS scrabbled to produce yet another GUI app framework before the ink was really dry on Windows.Forms 2.0 - the last C# app I ported to Linux took two lines of code changed to get running, and afterwards it was truly cross-platform, as executables compiled by both the Mono and
The function governing thermal conduction is proportional to length. Therefore, if you can half the thickness of your paste layer, you double the thermal conductivity.
The way it works is that excess paste squishes into the microgrooves - instead of needing immense pressure to squish it all the way out to the edge (which won't happen). This means that the absolute minimum of paste should remain between the flat surfaces. If the grooves are relatively deep but narrow, you should get close to the minimum possible paste thickness (theoretically, you should only need enough paste to fill surface irregularities on the heat transfer surfaces between die and spreader). You still want the spaces between the grooves to be as flat as possible. You only sacrifice a small amount of surface area to the grooves, which is more than made up for by the decreased paste thickness.
And what's the primary means of obtaining hydrogen today? From fossil fuels. The reason so much research is being done into hydrogen is because it maintains the market for the oil barons. It has a lot of PR value - all those wonderful, and scientifically verifiable, quotes about the exhaust from hydrogen engines being nothing but water vapour.
It's good for local emissions as well - zero particulates, zero nitrogen oxides, no sulphur, etc. Absolutely great for meeting strict emissions regulations with no consideration whatsoever about what kind of emissions have to occur elsewhere to generate the stuff.
These reasons are why it's become a poster-boy for politicians with a vested interest in oil. You can pronounce at great length how green your credentials are, all the while smiling inside about how your Exxon shares will remain stable. That's assuming the technology can be made to work - and if it can't, well, you still looked green for the voters, didn't you ? And it distracts attention away from all those dangerous alternate energy sources which have the potential to remove power from oil companies, because many of them depend on a vast distributed production infrastructure composed of low-cost capital, instead of being founded on geographically concentrated extraction zones which are easily defended and require vast investments to exploit, placing them out of the reach of the little guy.
You think they want to lose their power to a bunch of algae farmers (or avocados, or palm oil, or rapeseed, or any oil crop)? Compete with a production system that can increase its output every year because biological organisms reproduce themselves for not much more than water and dirt? Have people *gasp* turning to local producers for their fuel instead of a big multinational No sir. Which is why Bush laid out $1.2 B in 2003 for the hydrogen initiative.
We have plenty of good ways to store solar energy as hydrocarbons (or at least, plants do). The food chain depends on it (except for some unusual examples like thermal ocean vents).
The intrinsic problem is the rate of collection and the effort required to extract that energy. Crude oil is the product of natural processes that have effectively done the thermal depolymerisation (the "turkey guts into oil" reaction) for us. Alas, crude oil represents the product of many millions of years of these processes. We are consuming it at a far greater rate than the biosphere produced it (and the conditions which produced it are gone, in the main).
I think investment in this area is essential. If nothing else, other forms of energy capture do not provide us with viable feedstocks for the manufacturing industries. As oil production dwindles, its role as a feedstock for the plastic, pharmaceutical, and chemical industries is going to become far more of an issue than it's energy content, particularly if we crack fusion or some other energy panacea emerges.
There are some interesting advances in producing algae that are 50% oil by weight. If you could make this work on a small to medium scale, the oil companies ought to be widdling themselves. Or buying up large tracts of desert to put growing frames in (not that they don't already own lots of desert).
I used to prepare the escrow disks for a company writing healthcare software. Emphasis was not placed upon complete documentation. In addition, the proprietary tools (a compiler and various third-party components) were typically not placed on the disk either due to copyright concerns. It would have been impossible to reconstitute the software concerned just from the content of the disk, and getting hold of the required third-party materials is getting harder and harder, principally because most of it is no longer sold. I'm certain that no-one qualified ever checked the functionality of the escrow material, because it would have been instantly apparent that it wasn't quite all there....
If I was still there, and still doing that job, I'd probably recommend that their build system got transferred to a virtual machine, and that a copy of the (open-source, preferably) VM server software, the VM image, and the full source-control repository were all required to be part of the escrow material. And I'd probably be blocked from doing it by management covering their ass. So I'd probably do it anyway, and put the contentious material in a folder marked with the "hidden" attribute. Heheh.
.. and the rest of the EU as well.
And make no mistakes, if the US Government thought they could get away with it, they would too.
I'ts ostensibly to support "congestion reduction" through road charging. But there are other ways to implement that that don't require a GPS tracker in your car 24/7.
Get the Gang of Four, and other books on O-O like Holub on Patterns.
Don't bother with books aimed purely at C#. If you know OO well, you can appreciate other languages too. I recently went from coding C# to Java for the first time, with very little change of pace, simply because the tools, APIs, syntax and general patterns are so similar. I'd expect the same from C/C++, because the C# syntax is both similar and simpler. In particular, context-completion features with popup help in IDEs mean that I very rarely refer to the docs anymore. VB6 used to pop up just the method signatures, with VS2005 and Eclipse, a short description of the routine pops up as well.
But grokking OO after being a procedural programmer for a long time is the hardest mental hurdle to jump. I worked with a bunch of VB6 programmers who just didn't get it, even though the language supports polymorphism reasonably well. Since I left they've transitioned to C# - I hope they had a major epiphany, because if not, they have a lot of big, static classes with very large methods hanging around.
We don't ask for it. We even protest it.
1.8 million people signed an e-petition protesting the implantation of a GPS tracking device in every car in Britain. Given that there are only 30 million vehicles in Britain (UK Dept of Transport figure), and the average rate of net-literacy, this is a staggering number.
Of course, the government response was to just say "oh, ok, but we're still going to do it anyway". Which isn't surprising ; UK Dept of Transport documents reveal that this system is required to be compatible with European systems, so it looks like it's been decided at a higher level for a long time. Couple this with the push for an independent European GPS system, Galileo, and it looks like a done deal - "They" want to watch where we all go and the route we take to go there. The cover story that it's all to combat congestion on the roads doesn't wash - I myself, a lowly UK gov employee, can conceive of a means to implement a similar scheme that is an order of magnitude cheaper, achieves the stated goal of making people pay to drive on congested roads, and doesn't track your car everywhere it goes (just where it goes on congested roads).
I'd expect to see similar initiatives from all big governments in time. They're scared of the power that information and technology give their populace, because it takes power from them.
The major two reasons for the presence of the track changes feature :
People don't use a version control system for their documents.
The MSO format, as a binary format, is not as easy to diff as a text based format.
You can work around these to a degree - you can script the export of text from MSO documents and do comparisons on it. You can even merge documents if you use the Save As XML features and don't mind poking around in XML documents.
The parent comment about awful visualization should not be the case in an open market ; because if the format was open enough a competing software company could write a document comparator that used any damn visualization you liked.
Version control systems for more general use are still a bit immature though.
Of course, if you use the output of the exercise to RUN the air conditioning system.....
Heat pumps are far over-unity for the heat they move vs the energy they are fed. This neatly counteracts the low efficiency of generating heat through human effort.
Storing the energy in batteries would be a very minor way of moving heat out of the gym compared to powering the aircon.
To put this in perspective, this is like saying each person is outputting sufficient energy to boil 166 jug kettles simultaneously.
Please, think about your numbers before you post them. I think you mean a kilowatt. These people would be hotter than the Human Torch, people would be running, screaming, their lycra pants melting from their roasting flesh.
While I agree that the wasted energy which is ordinarily all just converted into heat in the gym atmosphere would do something useful before it ends up in it's ground state, if you could generate a megawatt from six people on bicycles, every major city in China would be a roiling cloud of vapour. Either that, or they'd have built a huge deathray and vapourised the West by now.
Frankly, you can't really expect people to want to pay people in the UK (or the USA) to do *anything*. Why? Because it's so much cheaper to pay the Chinese to do it.
This isn't rocket science. It's the difference between our lifestyles. If you want food shipped from all over the world, world class healthcare, enormous amounts of pointless travel and lots of high-end consumer luxuries, you have to pay for it. Companies know that if they employ people in western nations, then THEY are going to have to pay for it. They prefer to pay for a lifestyle low on consumer goods, fossil fuels, and the other little luxuries in life (healthcare, freedom to travel) because it's so much cheaper.
Of course, it begs the question, what do you do when you've outsourced everything and your target demographic no longer exists because they no longer have jobs, and the workers who make your products cannot afford them for the same reason that you employed them in the first place....
The best message I've seen in a game was in Hostile Waters.
The line? I can't find the script.. but the scene is just simply a bunch of national flags flying toward the camera and burning, and the gist of it is that at some point in the future, everyone realises that all the fighting is a bunch of shit and that if everyone would just get along with each other it would all be much nicer. The game is spent fighting against a cabal of the old power-brokers who want things back the way they were before (artificial scarcity, centralized control).
Warren Ellis was much more eloquent about it than was. This scene, for all it's primitive rendering, usually makes me cry. Because it's something that *matters*. Something noble.
They also fund the Dirac video codec development, so they're not all bad.
And let's face it, the alternative the BBC used to support was RealMedia, which is if anything, more evil than Microsoft because the player is such a nasty piece of work. The BBC had an agreement with Real to distribute a version which didn't contain all the evil adware for a long while, but actually finding it was an exercise...
The spongiform nature of the sponge makes a natural insulator - if you boil your sponge in a pan, the centre may well stay cool for a reasonably long time, especially if the sponge is already wet when you put it in.
The same principle is used for another kind of sponge.
Using the microwave means that the sponge will heat on the inside as well as the outside.
I presently have 2 300GB drives in my media server, 500GB of which is given over to DVB-T (television) streams and compressed videos. They cost me about $150 (£75) apiece.
Capacity is important to me, therefore, as that partition is perpetually about 98% full (although I suspect that it also be full if it was three times the size, I'd just keep more of the good stuff for longer).
But yes, price is also important. The drives I bought were in the "sweet spot" where the cost per GB was low. The higher densities mean that you can make drives with fewer platens and importantly, heads. Heads being the most expensive part of the drive, and platens being the part that makes a drive consume more power, cheaper, quieter, less hungry drives should be a natural side product of gargantuan behemoths that merely consume the same amount of power as current models whilst costing around the same but holding an awful lot more data.
The huge data sizes are just a consequence of the 3.5" form factor. Conversely, 2.5" drives are now getting respectably capacious - today I bought a 160GB bus powered drive that rests comfortably on my open hand. Enough to back up my laptop, tote my entire music collection around on, and store a fairly heft wodge of whatever else I fancy.
Incidentally, larger drives speed up data operations, not the inverse. You are confusing a bigger drive with a bigger filesystem - a larger filesystem will take longer to defrag, true, but putting it on a larger physical drive will almost always increase performance as
* The data rate past the head increases
* The latency decreases (the increased density means the head travels a shorter distance to go places
* Fragmentation will decrease as larger drives have larger expanses of contiguous free space.
Plus, for your example of search taking longer, not only does putting it on a larger drive improve seek times and data rates, but gives you enough space to put on index on as well (and the indexing will run faster because the drive runs faster, etc, etc). Yes, if you start putting more data in your filesystem, things will take longer, but that's only made POSSIBLE by a larger drive, it's the users choice, not the drives fault.
That's not entirely spurious.
It is at least better in some ways than those people who think that a RAID array is an excuse not to have a backup.
Hardware failure is not the sole cause of data loss - in fact, I'd be prepared to believe that data loss down to "software" failure is more common, be it a human being who accidentally bangs "delete", or a virus, or bad software corrupting the records, etc..
I'm not saying it IS more common, but it's certainly plausible.
However, the attitude here displayed by someone who is in insurance and thus supposed to understand the benefits of a good fallback plan..... I would recommend he goes for a RAID of some sort, with a hard drive caddy that receives the backups with the drive cartridges rotated offsite periodically.
Total crap.
You are correct about the duplication costs being low, but ignoring the development and support costs is just living in a fantasy world.
What you mean to say is that with software, the cost tends toward the low cost of duplication as the number of copies approaches infinity. Since we do not have an infinite users on this planet, it's not zero.
Ignoring the costs of open-source development is fallacious also. All software costs time to develop, and requires infrastructure to develop and distribute. To say that this is free is tripe. Some of it is contributed for zero money by altruistic developers, yes, but they will typically be supported by other sources of income without which they could not contribute. Many OSS projects have full time developers paid for or employed by large commercial concerns, not least of which those employed by the likes of the big commercial distros, the software houses like CollabNet who sponsor the development of Subversion because it complements their paid-for infrastructure products. Or companies that work on software designed to support their other work and have the decency to open-source it if it's been based on other OSS products.
Take hardware drivers for Linux. To paraphrase a scene from Fight Club, at each hardware manufacturer, there is a man who's job it is to apply the Formula. If the number of potential first-year sales to Linux clients multiplied by the per-unit profit on the hardware minus the average cost of supporting a Linux user, is less than the cost of porting the driver software to Linux, then they don't do it. And even if they do it, they are probably not going to open-source the code if it does something clever that raises their product above the ordinary. The only way that a driver will subsequently be developed for that hardware is if someone pays the cost of doing so, whether that's with their time and skill, or by hiring someone to spend their time and skill. And the motivation is the same - someone wants to use that hardware on Linux badly enough that they are prepared to expend an effort. Which means that they must wish to benefit from that. Which is profit (in the monetary or the personal sense).
The profit exists because without it, literally no-one would develop software except for the fun of noodling around with algorithms.
Even if Linux was entirely written for no money (which it isn't), the only reason it gets written is because people want to get stuff done with their computers. The writing of operating systems and indeed all software is therefore a cost associated with the use of computers. The OSS model works because it distributes this cost amongst two groups - those who altruistically donate the fruits of their efforts to the community, and those corporates who participate in the great OSS bargain - they get a free ride on the licensing so long as they also contribute. Even the users of OSS can contribute by submitting bug reports (which are just as valuable as source code). The Windows model spreads the cost more or less evenly amongst those who use the software, but also makes a handsome profit on each unit.
Who is to say which is more efficient? I have no doubt that the Windows model promotes a tremendous amount of R&D because MS can afford it. On the other hand, even on my small scale (one developer) software projects with a user base around 10 users, I find that the ones that improve the fastest are the ones that get used the most. You can't ignore the fact that developing the software is what I get paid to do though, and for our particular itches, you're not going to find any OSS team willing to scratch them.
Heh, Windows 98 taught me that lesson - it loves to utterly destroy any existing OS installs on a given disk. After you've repartitioned the drive and installed Win2k and SuSe so you can play new games, old games and experiment with Linux, only to find that Win98 has other ideas, and they don't include none of those darned new fangled OSs, no sir.
I learned to install Win98 *first*.
I chose Gentoo in the first instance because it was the only distro I could get my TV server hardware working properly on ; but having played with SuSe, Ubuntu and Mandrake in the process I would probably still choose Gentoo, because Gentoo has taught me so much about Linux. At the time I first used it you were required to dive under the bonnet and get your hands dirty with a text editor and the command line, although I gather this has become rather easier in recent times.
Usability is another question - I still can't find the GUI to change the screen resolution in KDE or Gnome. Such a simple setting should not have an experienced user and programmer hunting and cursing for up to an hour before giving up entirely and just changing the text file. My TV server has forsaken any kind of window manager altogether - it just uses a raw X server to run MythTV under and that's all I need.
The more paranoid amongst us would speculate that this sort of capability is one of the reasons that companies are scrabbling around so much trying to perfect Treacherous Computing and DRM.
You can bet your butt that as soon as the first device capable of manufacturing all of the parts involved in its own construction from simple raw materials is produced, a "matterware hacker" is going to feel the urge to make an open-source variant. From there on it's an inevitable progression to the complete breakdown of the consumer society - why purchase products from a big company when you can download the specs and print your own? Make your own energy collectors and raw material processors and your only constraints would be time and knowledge. And the beauty of knowledge is that when people get together and hand it around for free, everyone becomes richer without impoverishing themselves.
This idea of course, terrifies those who are hooked on the hierarchical structure of power and control that looms over our world today, either because they fear destructive chaos or because they are addicted to the power. But if these technologies are pursued to their logical limits, the only possible end states are universal wealth, universal control, or global extinction. Mankind has proven time and again that if you can conceive of a technology, and it is possible, then it will be achieved. If freedom is to prevail, then the hackers are going to have to be the ones to save us all.
Ok, maybe DRM is explicable in terms of present content-industry greed. But DRM on "matterware" is a logical extension, and the stakes are far higher than whether you get to listen to the latest RIAA sponsored aural insult or watch the steam rise from the latest Hollywood heap.
I preordered my Wii from PC World a month before release, and so far, no Wii. I was operating under the assumption that they might be one of the less well-frequented retails, and was encouraged to see them closing off preorders after I ordered, expecting that this was a sign of honest pre-allocation rules. To be fair, Nintendo have been shipping short orders to the UK.
They are now listing the expected release date on my order as 31st January.... I really, really hope they are just being pessimistic to cover their ass. They go out of their way to make it hard to cancel too, with no discernable means of doing so on the website.. at least play.com get this right - you can cancel a preorder with a nice clearly labelled button and it's made clear that there are no penalties for doing so.
Also have a bunch of stuff on order with play.com and Amazon. Looks like Amazon might be coming through, as my order is listed as "Dispatching soon..."
Ah well. The rumours I hear is that the next shipment is Wednesday. Whether that's Wednesday 13th or the 20th I don't know. Fingers crossed, eh?
I completely agree that it's a cultural problem.
My 2 1/2 daughter had her state-mandated development assessment this week. The health visitor actually told us not to educate her too much on the grounds that if she was too far ahead of her school classmates she might not fit in. My comment was that that was the poorest excuse for mediocrity I've ever heard.
My daughter is obviously taking after her parents, who were both precocious children. In a culture where every other conceivable "difference" is sacrosanct and treated with kid gloves, our most intelligent children are being given very short thrift. You don't see state-sponsored "special" schools coping with their needs. Intelligence should be lauded and cultivated, instead, the culture is to exclude and mock these people.
The accelerometers in the controller are of the same sort that trigger airbags and the disk-headcrash-avoidance feature of laptop computers.
Your feet would not need to be still : the impact of your foot on the floor followed by it's raising would result in a marked and sudden change of acceleration vector, so you only have to detect the trough in the curve.
If anything, 2 Wiimotes should be a far more capable controller for dance games than the standard DDR gamepad. Four wiimotes should be able to act as a full dance controller with all four limbs represented. I'm not sure how many channels the accelerometer has, or how many the nunchuk has, but maybe a nunchuk (with a cable extension and some sort of webbing to stop it flying around) could replace the arm or leg sensor and therefore you could have full head-to-head dance matches with each player wearing webbing holding 2 Wiimotes in place and all four limbs on each player motion capped.
Right now, you could play DDR by writing an abstraction layer which converted mocapped leg gestures into hits on virtual gamepad buttons - you would have to cope with re-centering issues, but otherwise it should be simple enough.
This has actually interested me enough to want to get hold of some Wiimotes and a bluetooth adapter and see what the protocols and capabilities are like. If they are good enough for DDR motion capture, maybe they might even be good enough for semi-professional machinima.