We don't quite have the liberal attitudes that Europeans do - we used to have a TV show that just showed foreign TV commercials so we could (amongst other things) gawp at the pretty Swedish ladies with their shirts off.
The American attitude seems so schizo though - they'll sexualize everything to the hilt, but no further. Lots of cleavage and skin, even on very young ladies, but heaven forbid you reveal anything that everyone sees every morning in the mirror...
OTOH, a VPN and an open ssh port is less secure then either one on it's own. I agree, it's a very small difference, but I can see where they are coming from.
VPN is, conversely, much more of a pleasure on Linux than it is on Windows. The Windows VPN client will only route my packets over the VPN, locking me out of my local machines, printer, and my spiffy 30Mbit/s network connection. Linux was easy to set up with the right network-manager plugin (YMMV), and routes my packets the way I want it to, so I get the best of both worlds. I'm looking forward to the upcoming Ubuntu release which doesn't even route DNS over your VPN unless it's for a machine on the office network.
They didn't get the RIGHT idea ; it was originally deployed on Excel. Integers for columns looked much like integers for rows, and absolutes looked much like relatives. A prefix carrying whether it was an X or Y coordinate was very helpful (you should rarely add X to Y).
Charles Simonyi (the Hungarian) documented this as "type", without imagining that someone would think this meant "datatype". He later stated that he should have said "kind".
The VBA / VB team got ahold of it and started the horrible gobbledegook standard of prefixing every variable with a truncated version of it's datatype, which is redundant (the compiler knows what type it is, and a good IDE should be able to tell you pretty quickly), misleading (when you change the type but not the prefix) and tedious (when you DO bother to change the prefix and mess up your version control history with reams of pointless changes).
Here's a similar issue cited : Vista refuses to work with some DHCP servers - the presence of a registry setting to turn this behaviour off (the default value is "1" for on) reveals that rather than just stick to a DHCP client that works as standard, MS deliberately broke it so it would be harder to work with any DHCP server that wasn't Windows.
Sure, but I don't think it's like Minimata Bay (the textbook example of toxic bioconcentration).
Firstly, the important isotopes will not be heavy metals. Therefore
* They will not tend to accumulate in marine life as they will be excreted as fast as they are ingested
* They will not tend to accumulate in the local bottom sediment, but be dispersed more rapidly
There are rules about public servants accepting hospitality. In my department, we're not even allowed to let someone buy us a few sandwiches for a stand-up buffet.
It sounds rather strict, but it's proven that it skews your judgement - it's human nature to feel obligated to someone who does something nice for you, something that pharmaceutical reps understand only too well, with their habits of feeding doctors well and providing them with plenty of (branded) free geegaws like laser pointers, pens, etc.
Yes, but if there is a profit, it's not going to care for someone, it's lining someone's pocket.
Plus the mechanism you use to gather the profit is horrendously inefficient - for that 15% margin you are essentially doubling your costs by paying for all the insurance bureaucracy on one side and the bureaucracy on the healthcare side designed to interface with it.
The USA pays double per capita what it's next nearest neighbour among the G8 nations spends on healthcare, for comparable outcomes.
It's a different world ; the culture of "bedroom programmers" we had in the UK grew up in the wake of the 8-bit home computer revolution.
The computer systems sold today emphasise pre-packaged software and it's utility. The computers of the 8-bit era emphasised experimentation and learning - they all shipped with a programming language and a manual. Most of them booted straight into the programming environment.
The Raspberry Pi is an attempt to recapture some of this culture. But it has so many other things to compete with. Back then, kids TV in the UK was only on 2 channels and occupied only a few hours a day. Once it stopped, all you had to do was read, or use your computer. Now there are multiple channels that run for much longer hours, an internet full of possibilities, games consoles, portable devices, etc.
It's much harder to get a hook into that natural childlike curiosity. It's much easier for parents to use the pre-packaged computer systems to occupy their children, and much more likely, because they have better marketing budgets. Part of the reason RasPi is gaining the traction it has, is because those of us who remember the BBC Micro are interested, but I would bet you it's not even on the radar of most of the younger generation (unlike Moshi Monsters). I know that curiosity is there - my 7 year old daughter was charmed yesterday by the ability to control a flashing LED from an Arduino - but how many parents these days are geek enough to have an Arduino lying around, or have the time to help their children work it out?
Back in my youth, simple computers that you had to understand to use were the only game in town, now the best games in town are in full 3D. I think the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer had this right - you have to start simple.
Even that fit right, to a degree. They chose regional accents for Game of Thrones that fit the fictional geography as mapped to the real UK - the Northerners sounded Northern, the rich Lannisters were clearly from the more affluent Southern regions, etc. They didn't sound like everyone around you, wherever you lived, but they did sound appropriate to their parts.
When you replace a proprietary driver with a free one, it stands to reason that it won't contain any code from the proprietary version.
It doesn't necessarily follow - the copyright holder can license his code however he likes. This is how dual-licensing projects roll. As long as they hold the copyright on all of their code, they could open-source all of it tomorrow.
But your other point is sound - there's a great deal of well thought out code in common in most of the OSS drivers in the kernel, and I suspect the binary blob drivers probably duplicate a lot of feature that can now go through the kernel routines instead.
They did? I just fired up version 11 for the first time in ages (because now I use Chromium most of the time), and it's add-on compatibility checker just switched off my favourite add-on for the 8th time. I guess it's because it has an explicitly defined upper version number which I've been raising (but I didn't know you could leave the upper end off).
The real annoyance for me is the version numbering / compatibility scheme. There are add-ins that are still relevant, and still work perfectly, but you have to go through a song and dance to install them every time the version numbers change, the song and dance being unpacking them, editing the version numbers in their metadata, and repacking them, or finding the add-in in your profile from an older version and editing it there.
If they could fix this, that would be much better. Instead of add-ins declaring which versions they are compatible with, it should be possible to compute which APIs they access, and whether their behaviour has changed.
In the case of TinyMCE, I'm not sure what the issue is, unless people are packaging it as an add-in - my only encounters with it are as something embedded in a web page, so it would naturally have to cope with a wide variety of browsers by default.
They're also carbon neutral - the stuff about them being "the lungs of the world" is crap - but they do moderate climate, and the carbon that is locked up in them shouldn't be released.
And that neglects their real value, as a source of genetic diversity, and immense beauty.
Even better, hire the 5th guy to look after the other 4 - since his role is just as important as theirs (they are all cogs in the same soulless machine) - pay him the same. I dare anyone to begrudge it to the guy who gets your lunch, does your shopping, does the stupid paperwork for you, etc. Not only would productivity increase even more, he'd get a job that at least had purpose.
Our management uses the "we have had a deadline set from above, so we will set another arbitrary deadline N months beforehand, and not tell you" technique. So we end up compromising on design, throwing out requirements, even when we estimate (correctly) that the actual work the software is designed to enable will take N weeks on delivery, not N months.
LED lamps are pretty good for maintenance work. Much more robust than CFLs or incandescents (because they are solid state electronics), lighter, and because they are so efficient, they can run off batteries, so no cable to add extra weight or get tied up in.
If they are shiny on top to prevent solar absorbtion, they are probably dark at the rear for maximum radiation ; the reason you see the shiny side most of the time is that the back side of solar panels is not as photogenic as the sun-facing panels.
I had this exactly happen to me ; my phone was placed on the IMEI blacklist and refused to connect to the network any more.
The first service rep I contacted made a show of checking but denied that it was connected. She issued an RMA for the phone.
The phone in question was not even in use at the time - I was going on a stag weekend and didn't want to damage my shiny new phone with drunken stripper antics, so I put my SIM card in my crappy old one. I couldn't imagine what kind of fault could develop when the phone was safely switched off in my sock drawer, so I pushed the matter on my providers support forums. It turned out that it WAS on the blacklist. This was reverted after some more phone calls.
It was right royal pain in the arse - I was without my smartphone for a couple of weeks and had to go back to using my RAZR. I suspected that it was some kind of automated system reacting to my migration of the SIM card from phone to phone, but they flat out denied they have any such system.
IMEI numbers do have a checksum, but apparently it's quite weak - the only other explanation is that someone else with the same phone model (IMEI numbers encode the model) reported their phone stolen and the wrong number ended up in the database.
On balance though, I'd rather have this system, because it raises the barrier for phone theft. I don't hear stories of people being mugged for their phone any more.
I think it is valid - the iPad took a micro-SIM, the carriers didn't want people taking the mini-SIM from their iPhone with it's generous data allowance and shoving it in the iPad. They wanted to sell yet another data plan to that customer.
Their reactor design is certainly the most elegant, being the only device I've seen that proposes collecting the energy in a solid-state manner, and not just boiling a damn great kettle like everything else. It's also one of the smaller scale devices, the design reactor fitting in a shipping container and projected to cost on the order of a million dollars rather than being in the billions, producing on the order of 5 MW, making it a shoe-in for military funding to prime the development pump (the military would go ape for something the size of a shipping container that can produce 5 MW without having to ship in diesel fuel).
It doesn't require rare and expensive tritium fuel. If their project manages to prove over-unity it would also seem to have the fewest engineer hurdles to becoming a commercial product, the difficulties mostly surrounding the construction of really fast high power switches, and an X-photoelectric collector.
Their operating budget is tiny compared to the likes of NIF and ITER as well ; it would be great to see even a few percent of these budgets distributed to alternative approaches.
Slashdot Mirror
Even in the UK, we thought that was just amusing.
We don't quite have the liberal attitudes that Europeans do - we used to have a TV show that just showed foreign TV commercials so we could (amongst other things) gawp at the pretty Swedish ladies with their shirts off.
The American attitude seems so schizo though - they'll sexualize everything to the hilt, but no further. Lots of cleavage and skin, even on very young ladies, but heaven forbid you reveal anything that everyone sees every morning in the mirror...
OTOH, a VPN and an open ssh port is less secure then either one on it's own. I agree, it's a very small difference, but I can see where they are coming from.
VPN is, conversely, much more of a pleasure on Linux than it is on Windows. The Windows VPN client will only route my packets over the VPN, locking me out of my local machines, printer, and my spiffy 30Mbit/s network connection. Linux was easy to set up with the right network-manager plugin (YMMV), and routes my packets the way I want it to, so I get the best of both worlds. I'm looking forward to the upcoming Ubuntu release which doesn't even route DNS over your VPN unless it's for a machine on the office network.
They didn't get the RIGHT idea ; it was originally deployed on Excel. Integers for columns looked much like integers for rows, and absolutes looked much like relatives. A prefix carrying whether it was an X or Y coordinate was very helpful (you should rarely add X to Y).
Charles Simonyi (the Hungarian) documented this as "type", without imagining that someone would think this meant "datatype". He later stated that he should have said "kind".
The VBA / VB team got ahold of it and started the horrible gobbledegook standard of prefixing every variable with a truncated version of it's datatype, which is redundant (the compiler knows what type it is, and a good IDE should be able to tell you pretty quickly), misleading (when you change the type but not the prefix) and tedious (when you DO bother to change the prefix and mess up your version control history with reams of pointless changes).
Here's a similar issue cited : Vista refuses to work with some DHCP servers - the presence of a registry setting to turn this behaviour off (the default value is "1" for on) reveals that rather than just stick to a DHCP client that works as standard, MS deliberately broke it so it would be harder to work with any DHCP server that wasn't Windows.
Sure, but I don't think it's like Minimata Bay (the textbook example of toxic bioconcentration).
Firstly, the important isotopes will not be heavy metals. Therefore
* They will not tend to accumulate in marine life as they will be excreted as fast as they are ingested
* They will not tend to accumulate in the local bottom sediment, but be dispersed more rapidly
Secondly, radioisotopes decay, unlike mercury.
Here is a much more readily comprehensible chart courtesy of XKCD.
There are rules about public servants accepting hospitality. In my department, we're not even allowed to let someone buy us a few sandwiches for a stand-up buffet.
It sounds rather strict, but it's proven that it skews your judgement - it's human nature to feel obligated to someone who does something nice for you, something that pharmaceutical reps understand only too well, with their habits of feeding doctors well and providing them with plenty of (branded) free geegaws like laser pointers, pens, etc.
Yes, but if there is a profit, it's not going to care for someone, it's lining someone's pocket.
Plus the mechanism you use to gather the profit is horrendously inefficient - for that 15% margin you are essentially doubling your costs by paying for all the insurance bureaucracy on one side and the bureaucracy on the healthcare side designed to interface with it.
The USA pays double per capita what it's next nearest neighbour among the G8 nations spends on healthcare, for comparable outcomes.
It's a different world ; the culture of "bedroom programmers" we had in the UK grew up in the wake of the 8-bit home computer revolution.
The computer systems sold today emphasise pre-packaged software and it's utility. The computers of the 8-bit era emphasised experimentation and learning - they all shipped with a programming language and a manual. Most of them booted straight into the programming environment.
The Raspberry Pi is an attempt to recapture some of this culture. But it has so many other things to compete with. Back then, kids TV in the UK was only on 2 channels and occupied only a few hours a day. Once it stopped, all you had to do was read, or use your computer. Now there are multiple channels that run for much longer hours, an internet full of possibilities, games consoles, portable devices, etc.
It's much harder to get a hook into that natural childlike curiosity. It's much easier for parents to use the pre-packaged computer systems to occupy their children, and much more likely, because they have better marketing budgets. Part of the reason RasPi is gaining the traction it has, is because those of us who remember the BBC Micro are interested, but I would bet you it's not even on the radar of most of the younger generation (unlike Moshi Monsters). I know that curiosity is there - my 7 year old daughter was charmed yesterday by the ability to control a flashing LED from an Arduino - but how many parents these days are geek enough to have an Arduino lying around, or have the time to help their children work it out?
Back in my youth, simple computers that you had to understand to use were the only game in town, now the best games in town are in full 3D. I think the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer had this right - you have to start simple.
Sean Bean is British ; TFA even notes that he's from Yorkshire, even though he now lives in London. Mark Addy and Lena Headey are also from Yorkshire.
Although his RP accent (as showcased in Goldeneye) is bloody atrocious, which may be why you think he's not from Britain.
Even that fit right, to a degree. They chose regional accents for Game of Thrones that fit the fictional geography as mapped to the real UK - the Northerners sounded Northern, the rich Lannisters were clearly from the more affluent Southern regions, etc. They didn't sound like everyone around you, wherever you lived, but they did sound appropriate to their parts.
More like this, probably
When you replace a proprietary driver with a free one, it stands to reason that it won't contain any code from the proprietary version.
It doesn't necessarily follow - the copyright holder can license his code however he likes. This is how dual-licensing projects roll. As long as they hold the copyright on all of their code, they could open-source all of it tomorrow.
But your other point is sound - there's a great deal of well thought out code in common in most of the OSS drivers in the kernel, and I suspect the binary blob drivers probably duplicate a lot of feature that can now go through the kernel routines instead.
They did? I just fired up version 11 for the first time in ages (because now I use Chromium most of the time), and it's add-on compatibility checker just switched off my favourite add-on for the 8th time. I guess it's because it has an explicitly defined upper version number which I've been raising (but I didn't know you could leave the upper end off).
The real annoyance for me is the version numbering / compatibility scheme. There are add-ins that are still relevant, and still work perfectly, but you have to go through a song and dance to install them every time the version numbers change, the song and dance being unpacking them, editing the version numbers in their metadata, and repacking them, or finding the add-in in your profile from an older version and editing it there.
If they could fix this, that would be much better. Instead of add-ins declaring which versions they are compatible with, it should be possible to compute which APIs they access, and whether their behaviour has changed.
In the case of TinyMCE, I'm not sure what the issue is, unless people are packaging it as an add-in - my only encounters with it are as something embedded in a web page, so it would naturally have to cope with a wide variety of browsers by default.
They're also carbon neutral - the stuff about them being "the lungs of the world" is crap - but they do moderate climate, and the carbon that is locked up in them shouldn't be released.
And that neglects their real value, as a source of genetic diversity, and immense beauty.
Even better, hire the 5th guy to look after the other 4 - since his role is just as important as theirs (they are all cogs in the same soulless machine) - pay him the same. I dare anyone to begrudge it to the guy who gets your lunch, does your shopping, does the stupid paperwork for you, etc. Not only would productivity increase even more, he'd get a job that at least had purpose.
Our management uses the "we have had a deadline set from above, so we will set another arbitrary deadline N months beforehand, and not tell you" technique. So we end up compromising on design, throwing out requirements, even when we estimate (correctly) that the actual work the software is designed to enable will take N weeks on delivery, not N months.
LED lamps are pretty good for maintenance work. Much more robust than CFLs or incandescents (because they are solid state electronics), lighter, and because they are so efficient, they can run off batteries, so no cable to add extra weight or get tied up in.
If they are shiny on top to prevent solar absorbtion, they are probably dark at the rear for maximum radiation ; the reason you see the shiny side most of the time is that the back side of solar panels is not as photogenic as the sun-facing panels.
Do they brick your phone, or brick your SIM? The phone doesn't pay the bills, the subscriber does.
I had this exactly happen to me ; my phone was placed on the IMEI blacklist and refused to connect to the network any more.
The first service rep I contacted made a show of checking but denied that it was connected. She issued an RMA for the phone.
The phone in question was not even in use at the time - I was going on a stag weekend and didn't want to damage my shiny new phone with drunken stripper antics, so I put my SIM card in my crappy old one. I couldn't imagine what kind of fault could develop when the phone was safely switched off in my sock drawer, so I pushed the matter on my providers support forums. It turned out that it WAS on the blacklist. This was reverted after some more phone calls.
It was right royal pain in the arse - I was without my smartphone for a couple of weeks and had to go back to using my RAZR. I suspected that it was some kind of automated system reacting to my migration of the SIM card from phone to phone, but they flat out denied they have any such system.
IMEI numbers do have a checksum, but apparently it's quite weak - the only other explanation is that someone else with the same phone model (IMEI numbers encode the model) reported their phone stolen and the wrong number ended up in the database.
On balance though, I'd rather have this system, because it raises the barrier for phone theft. I don't hear stories of people being mugged for their phone any more.
The French should remind themselves that their motto is Liberté, égalité, fraternité, and that all three bits are important.
I think it is valid - the iPad took a micro-SIM, the carriers didn't want people taking the mini-SIM from their iPhone with it's generous data allowance and shoving it in the iPad. They wanted to sell yet another data plan to that customer.
I would mod up, but I have already commented.
Their reactor design is certainly the most elegant, being the only device I've seen that proposes collecting the energy in a solid-state manner, and not just boiling a damn great kettle like everything else. It's also one of the smaller scale devices, the design reactor fitting in a shipping container and projected to cost on the order of a million dollars rather than being in the billions, producing on the order of 5 MW, making it a shoe-in for military funding to prime the development pump (the military would go ape for something the size of a shipping container that can produce 5 MW without having to ship in diesel fuel).
It doesn't require rare and expensive tritium fuel. If their project manages to prove over-unity it would also seem to have the fewest engineer hurdles to becoming a commercial product, the difficulties mostly surrounding the construction of really fast high power switches, and an X-photoelectric collector.
Their operating budget is tiny compared to the likes of NIF and ITER as well ; it would be great to see even a few percent of these budgets distributed to alternative approaches.