The browser you suggest would be great right up till you try and use it to view a web page. Yes, there are a few websites out there that are 100% following all the specs but they are in the minority and likely to remain so for a good while yet. I wanted to try and make a couple of the sites I look after use only valid XHTML and CSS etc but in teh end I just gave up as getting to look I wanted and obeying the specs just made development to costly. When the specs are good enought to use I'll use them until then it has to be the road of least resistance.
Beers might have been a little stronger than they are today but they weren't >15%. It simply isnt' possible to brew much greater than 15% and still have something that is drinkable. Even with the specially bred yeasts that we have now designed specifically to produce alchohol we are topping out aroung 20 to 25%. This is one of the main limiting factors in swithcing from an oil based society to an ethanol based society. The reason wine is around 12% to 16% alcohol is because that is the limit that the yeast will brew to it dies then and sinks to the bottom. The high alcohol stops the wine going off. Beer doesn't brew they high because it isn't provided with as much sugar. It's the hops in the beer that help stop it going off. I suppose it would be possible to brew a very strong beer with wine yeast as long as you used only a minimal amount of hops but it wouldn't be very nice beer. The specialist high alcohol yeast produce too many by products that taste foul to be used in brewing.
Just make damn sure that there are no (huge) bugs in the bios and burn it to a chip that can't be flashed. I admit that this is perfect for _everyone_ but I'd bet that 99% of computers never have the BIOS flashed so why make it writeable at all. The people that might want to flash their BIOS are probably also the sort of people that would pay a little more for an flashable version. Assuming you want a fairly generic BIOS that will work for a number of machine configurations make one with a tiny bit of writable memory that _just_ stores settings (e.g. non-executable). I imagine this sort of arrangement would be cost effective for tier one manufacturers.
Hey, I blew myself up as well. I wasn't quite a lucky though. My clothes and hair caught alight and I was fairly badly burnt on my hands and face. Still made a good recovery and I don't look any more disfigured than I was before;o). I agree though. I wouldn't recommend it as a hobby.
But completely the wrong decision for content creators. If there was no money in making content then very few people would make it. I would still add things to my (main) website as I enjoy helping people but I can tell you that the money it brings in is a really big incentive to add more content and work harder. So you have a choice: Option 1) A little bit of content and its free for anyone to do anything they like with. Option 2) Decent amounts of content that I provide for free but that I exercise a few rights over such as you can't republish it without permission. Only someone that doesn't produce anything would want option 1.
I don't know what it's like in the US but over on this side of the pond teaching establishments (schools and colleges mainly) are treated differently to individuals and businesses. While a school could get away with photocopying a chapter of a book and distributing it a business probably couldn't. Even saying that the rules have been more strongly enforced against schools in recent years and they struggle to get away with printing chapters off now.
What I don't understand is why people feel this is right at all. Is it simply because Google puts a frame across the top that says "this is a cached page". What if that frame was not included? It would be the same content that was provided but nearly indistinguishable from the original site (in some cases). Is it still right then? If it is then you are basically saying that it's ok to republish any work as long as you provide a note saying it's republished.
My site has Google ads but I don't see that that as a conflict of interest as they are part of the page just like ads from, say, double click would be. Some of the Google ads do display so Google isn't going out its way to block Google ads - I just don't think the cached page is linked enough / viewed enough to get a full complement of ads.
The cached version of the content I'm seeing has two ads above the main content and a search for ads box above the menu. The main site has a fair few more as you can see.
While I admit that as an end user this is a useful feature it doesn't give Google the right to republish (my) work without my permission. In fact I would go as far as to say that it is worse if I have removed the content and I am specifically denying people access to the work. To draw an analogy to regular publishing what you are suggesting is that if an author (or whoever the copyright owner is) decides not to publish a book any more "the people" have a right to just go and print themselves off a copy or photocopy the libraries copy. I think part of the problem lies in the confusion surround the word free. Something that is given away for free doesn't necessarly mean that it has no value. I don't mind making my work free to view because some kind people donate a little money or click an ad but costing no money to view and giving up my copyright are two fundamentally different things.
Two things: if Googles cache vanished tomorrow the Internet would still work. Copyright is implicit - you don't have to apply for it or add any notices to your work for it to apply (it is recommended that you display a copyright notice but _not_ required).
I just checked this out with a number of my pages. There are substantially fewer ads on cached pages (1) than the real page on the site (4). The cached page is bang up to date (I checked a page that hasn't changed for a while). How can you argue, therefore, that I am not at least potentially loosing out on revenue?
I'm sure plenty of the material in the Google cache is there in breach of copyright law as well but they aren't being held accounatable for that so why should they be for mp3s? I think this might be a case of six of one and half a dozen of the other.
True, but there is a subtle difference between the Google cache and your local cache - Google are making money from displaying other peoples work. Ok maybe it's not 100% direct, they don't have adverts on the cached page (yet) but it is an additional service they are providing that draws people. More people == more money ergo you can conclude that they are profiting by displaying our work.
To perhaps make it clearer: Many of the articles I write are one page long and my time is funded by the adverts on my site. The cached google page shows the whole of an article but far fewer adverts than the real page therefore I am losing out on revenue because of Googles cache. I think it is difficult to argue that Googles use is fair as they are displaying the whole article. Fair use was supposed to protect people that wanted a snippet or two for review purposes and that sort of thing.
Imagine if you reprinted a chapter of a book or the leading article of a newspaper. You would be sued before you knew what was happening and yet Google seem to get away with copying and republishing whole websites.
A while ago I went to my first trade event as a potential buyer and for the most part the show was professional and well run. The stands were tidy and the people running them helpful and polite. There is, however, one stand that has really stuck in my mind and that was the one with the "booth babe". Maybe I'm naive but I didn't expect it at all as this was a professional event. My first response was shock my first thought was "I wouldn't deal with them if you paid me". After talking to the other suppliers I wandered over to this stand simply because I felt I might as well do the lot. I was expecting their offerings to be poor and guess what I wasn't disapointed - even their sales guy was a prat. I wonder how much that event has cost them in terms of lost sales?
Perhaps my view of the US is a little wrong. The impression I got was that 60 to 70% of the population lived on the east or west coast, primarily in the large towns and cities, with huge tracts of land in the middle that were practically devoid of people. While on average the country isn't densily populated you have to admit it has areas where the density is very high and areas where it is very low. That is in contrast to the UK where there is a more even spread of people.
Anyway, I always wondered why the states didn't build massive (and I mean really massive) solar power stations out in the deserts. Just take the Mojave for isntance. There is 65,000 km2 of space there to collect sun alone. If that can't power the country...
Yes, we set aside large amounts of land and we waste a good deal of food but there is no way we could feed the world on what we produce. We would need to set aside _vast_ quantities of land to generate all our power from renewables. It might be possible to farm some of that land as well but my guess would be that one way or another we would end up improting food or power. It would be interesting to do the calculation to figure out just how much land would be needed. Should be possible to find the figures for how much power the UK uses, the size of the average wind turnine and its peak power output. That would give a lower limit.
I believe it is done via root squashing. Unless you specifically allow it you can't do root like things on the NFS mounts (such as deleting arbitary files) even if you are root on your machine. I forget exactly how it works as I set up and forgot about my NFS system a while ago but I left root squash on and it trips me up now and then. Physical intruders (someone pluging a computer into the network) aren't something I particularly worry about as I have a large iron bar next to me to hit anyone breaking in to my house with.
...but it's easy for a country covered in trees with a population of 27 people to eliminate it's dependency on fossil fuels - you just burn trees instead (or use a couple of wind turbines). The situation is quite a bit different in more densily populated countries like the UK (383 people / sq Km, Sweeded is 20 people / sq Km) or places like the US where the bulk of the population is very much concentrated in one or two general areas. In the case of the UK I doubt we have the land mass to derive all our power from renewable sources _and_ produce enough food to feed ourselves. In the case of the US I'm sure they have the space but it's a long way from where the power is needed and therefore transmission losses are going to be huge.
Sorry to any Swedish reading this I know you have more than 27 people but you have got to admit you have a lot of space per person.
Since discovering the joys of NFS I've not looked back (yes I do know what samba is and I run a samba server). Compared to Samba, NFS is almost too simple and reliable. Give me my complixity and unreliablity back!
I gave up on speech recognition as everything but a toy a while ago but your tip could lead to some interesting mistakes. Take for instance the sentence fragment "Runing to the door". If it is pronounced as you suggest it could easliy be misunderstood by the machine to be "run in to the door" which could have nasty consequences.
I realize that Anericans and British (English at least;o)) speak essentially the same language but I have yet to find any speech recognition software that can get more than roughly 85% of what I say correct. I have a fairly soft neutral english accent with pretty good enunciation so I would have expectd to be getting a recognition rate in the high 90%s. I'm wondering if, as most of this software is developed in the US, it is tuned specifically to pick up on english with a US accent? I realize that you train the software for your voice but AIUI all you are doing is tuning a basic speech model. Has anyone else had this problem or is it just me?
Am I the only person left that likes to see a bit of dare devil in the people that try and push the boundaries.? The land speed record for cars, for isntance, has just become dull because the teams working on it are just too professional and there is only a tiny chance that something will go horribly wrong (a bit like F1 really). This, however, is "cool". There is a really good chance this guy could kill himself but he does it anyway to push the limits a bit.
Perhaps it's a little sick but there is no enjoyment in watching / following something like this if there isn't at least a moderate chance of failure. IMHO F1 would be improved if they removed the safety features and let computers drive the cars. We might get back to the good old days where there was some radical innovation (I remember one team fitted a massive fan to the bottom of the car to suck it down and another had a car with 6 wheels at one point).
...when do we hit the hit wall. I know that we can got for liquid cooling etc etc but we must surely be approaching the point where processors can't get much fast simply because the cooling solutions are becoming impractical.
Fair enough there will be some people that will be happy to have cryo units strapped to the side of their boxen but I think most computers are already a little on the large side considering what's in them.
I suppose one thing that hasn't been done on a large scale yet is ducted inputs and outputs. I imagine having the ability to draw in cooler air from outside the case would make for a fair advantage but this would require a redesign of the basic case which manufacturers are loathed to do.
I would be interested to know if anyone has studied this problem and come to any conculsions about whether will will hit the limit of Moore's law first or just be unable to cool a processor first.
Surely if you drop the voltage your are going to have to under-clock the processor (reasoning that to over-clock you need to increase the voltage). Most processors for laptops already throttle the processor down when under light load now-a-days which must be a great energy saving. Would under volting it really then save more or would you just end up with a laptop that is dog slow? I'm sure if it was this easy one of the big laptop producers would already be doing it as a 20% increase for basically nothing would give them a fantastic advantage.
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The browser you suggest would be great right up till you try and use it to view a web page. Yes, there are a few websites out there that are 100% following all the specs but they are in the minority and likely to remain so for a good while yet. I wanted to try and make a couple of the sites I look after use only valid XHTML and CSS etc but in teh end I just gave up as getting to look I wanted and obeying the specs just made development to costly. When the specs are good enought to use I'll use them until then it has to be the road of least resistance.
Beers might have been a little stronger than they are today but they weren't >15%. It simply isnt' possible to brew much greater than 15% and still have something that is drinkable. Even with the specially bred yeasts that we have now designed specifically to produce alchohol we are topping out aroung 20 to 25%. This is one of the main limiting factors in swithcing from an oil based society to an ethanol based society. The reason wine is around 12% to 16% alcohol is because that is the limit that the yeast will brew to it dies then and sinks to the bottom. The high alcohol stops the wine going off. Beer doesn't brew they high because it isn't provided with as much sugar. It's the hops in the beer that help stop it going off. I suppose it would be possible to brew a very strong beer with wine yeast as long as you used only a minimal amount of hops but it wouldn't be very nice beer. The specialist high alcohol yeast produce too many by products that taste foul to be used in brewing.
Just make damn sure that there are no (huge) bugs in the bios and burn it to a chip that can't be flashed. I admit that this is perfect for _everyone_ but I'd bet that 99% of computers never have the BIOS flashed so why make it writeable at all. The people that might want to flash their BIOS are probably also the sort of people that would pay a little more for an flashable version. Assuming you want a fairly generic BIOS that will work for a number of machine configurations make one with a tiny bit of writable memory that _just_ stores settings (e.g. non-executable). I imagine this sort of arrangement would be cost effective for tier one manufacturers.
Hey, I blew myself up as well. I wasn't quite a lucky though. My clothes and hair caught alight and I was fairly badly burnt on my hands and face. Still made a good recovery and I don't look any more disfigured than I was before ;o). I agree though. I wouldn't recommend it as a hobby.
But completely the wrong decision for content creators. If there was no money in making content then very few people would make it. I would still add things to my (main) website as I enjoy helping people but I can tell you that the money it brings in is a really big incentive to add more content and work harder. So you have a choice: Option 1) A little bit of content and its free for anyone to do anything they like with. Option 2) Decent amounts of content that I provide for free but that I exercise a few rights over such as you can't republish it without permission. Only someone that doesn't produce anything would want option 1.
I don't know what it's like in the US but over on this side of the pond teaching establishments (schools and colleges mainly) are treated differently to individuals and businesses. While a school could get away with photocopying a chapter of a book and distributing it a business probably couldn't. Even saying that the rules have been more strongly enforced against schools in recent years and they struggle to get away with printing chapters off now.
What I don't understand is why people feel this is right at all. Is it simply because Google puts a frame across the top that says "this is a cached page". What if that frame was not included? It would be the same content that was provided but nearly indistinguishable from the original site (in some cases). Is it still right then? If it is then you are basically saying that it's ok to republish any work as long as you provide a note saying it's republished.
My site has Google ads but I don't see that that as a conflict of interest as they are part of the page just like ads from, say, double click would be. Some of the Google ads do display so Google isn't going out its way to block Google ads - I just don't think the cached page is linked enough / viewed enough to get a full complement of ads.
Anyway, cached version and the real version.
The cached version of the content I'm seeing has two ads above the main content and a search for ads box above the menu. The main site has a fair few more as you can see.
While I admit that as an end user this is a useful feature it doesn't give Google the right to republish (my) work without my permission. In fact I would go as far as to say that it is worse if I have removed the content and I am specifically denying people access to the work. To draw an analogy to regular publishing what you are suggesting is that if an author (or whoever the copyright owner is) decides not to publish a book any more "the people" have a right to just go and print themselves off a copy or photocopy the libraries copy. I think part of the problem lies in the confusion surround the word free. Something that is given away for free doesn't necessarly mean that it has no value. I don't mind making my work free to view because some kind people donate a little money or click an ad but costing no money to view and giving up my copyright are two fundamentally different things.
Two things: if Googles cache vanished tomorrow the Internet would still work. Copyright is implicit - you don't have to apply for it or add any notices to your work for it to apply (it is recommended that you display a copyright notice but _not_ required).
I just checked this out with a number of my pages. There are substantially fewer ads on cached pages (1) than the real page on the site (4). The cached page is bang up to date (I checked a page that hasn't changed for a while). How can you argue, therefore, that I am not at least potentially loosing out on revenue?
Well said. I can't believe that Google have been getting away with it for as long as they have and this ruling seems totally back to front.
I'm sure plenty of the material in the Google cache is there in breach of copyright law as well but they aren't being held accounatable for that so why should they be for mp3s? I think this might be a case of six of one and half a dozen of the other.
True, but there is a subtle difference between the Google cache and your local cache - Google are making money from displaying other peoples work. Ok maybe it's not 100% direct, they don't have adverts on the cached page (yet) but it is an additional service they are providing that draws people. More people == more money ergo you can conclude that they are profiting by displaying our work.
To perhaps make it clearer: Many of the articles I write are one page long and my time is funded by the adverts on my site. The cached google page shows the whole of an article but far fewer adverts than the real page therefore I am losing out on revenue because of Googles cache. I think it is difficult to argue that Googles use is fair as they are displaying the whole article. Fair use was supposed to protect people that wanted a snippet or two for review purposes and that sort of thing.
Imagine if you reprinted a chapter of a book or the leading article of a newspaper. You would be sued before you knew what was happening and yet Google seem to get away with copying and republishing whole websites.
A while ago I went to my first trade event as a potential buyer and for the most part the show was professional and well run. The stands were tidy and the people running them helpful and polite. There is, however, one stand that has really stuck in my mind and that was the one with the "booth babe". Maybe I'm naive but I didn't expect it at all as this was a professional event. My first response was shock my first thought was "I wouldn't deal with them if you paid me". After talking to the other suppliers I wandered over to this stand simply because I felt I might as well do the lot. I was expecting their offerings to be poor and guess what I wasn't disapointed - even their sales guy was a prat. I wonder how much that event has cost them in terms of lost sales?
Perhaps my view of the US is a little wrong. The impression I got was that 60 to 70% of the population lived on the east or west coast, primarily in the large towns and cities, with huge tracts of land in the middle that were practically devoid of people. While on average the country isn't densily populated you have to admit it has areas where the density is very high and areas where it is very low. That is in contrast to the UK where there is a more even spread of people.
Anyway, I always wondered why the states didn't build massive (and I mean really massive) solar power stations out in the deserts. Just take the Mojave for isntance. There is 65,000 km2 of space there to collect sun alone. If that can't power the country...
Yes, we set aside large amounts of land and we waste a good deal of food but there is no way we could feed the world on what we produce. We would need to set aside _vast_ quantities of land to generate all our power from renewables. It might be possible to farm some of that land as well but my guess would be that one way or another we would end up improting food or power. It would be interesting to do the calculation to figure out just how much land would be needed. Should be possible to find the figures for how much power the UK uses, the size of the average wind turnine and its peak power output. That would give a lower limit.
I believe it is done via root squashing. Unless you specifically allow it you can't do root like things on the NFS mounts (such as deleting arbitary files) even if you are root on your machine. I forget exactly how it works as I set up and forgot about my NFS system a while ago but I left root squash on and it trips me up now and then. Physical intruders (someone pluging a computer into the network) aren't something I particularly worry about as I have a large iron bar next to me to hit anyone breaking in to my house with.
...but it's easy for a country covered in trees with a population of 27 people to eliminate it's dependency on fossil fuels - you just burn trees instead (or use a couple of wind turbines). The situation is quite a bit different in more densily populated countries like the UK (383 people / sq Km, Sweeded is 20 people / sq Km) or places like the US where the bulk of the population is very much concentrated in one or two general areas. In the case of the UK I doubt we have the land mass to derive all our power from renewable sources _and_ produce enough food to feed ourselves. In the case of the US I'm sure they have the space but it's a long way from where the power is needed and therefore transmission losses are going to be huge.
Sorry to any Swedish reading this I know you have more than 27 people but you have got to admit you have a lot of space per person.
Since discovering the joys of NFS I've not looked back (yes I do know what samba is and I run a samba server). Compared to Samba, NFS is almost too simple and reliable. Give me my complixity and unreliablity back!
I gave up on speech recognition as everything but a toy a while ago but your tip could lead to some interesting mistakes. Take for instance the sentence fragment "Runing to the door". If it is pronounced as you suggest it could easliy be misunderstood by the machine to be "run in to the door" which could have nasty consequences.
I realize that Anericans and British (English at least ;o)) speak essentially the same language but I have yet to find any speech recognition software that can get more than roughly 85% of what I say correct. I have a fairly soft neutral english accent with pretty good enunciation so I would have expectd to be getting a recognition rate in the high 90%s. I'm wondering if, as most of this software is developed in the US, it is tuned specifically to pick up on english with a US accent? I realize that you train the software for your voice but AIUI all you are doing is tuning a basic speech model. Has anyone else had this problem or is it just me?
Am I the only person left that likes to see a bit of dare devil in the people that try and push the boundaries.? The land speed record for cars, for isntance, has just become dull because the teams working on it are just too professional and there is only a tiny chance that something will go horribly wrong (a bit like F1 really). This, however, is "cool". There is a really good chance this guy could kill himself but he does it anyway to push the limits a bit.
Perhaps it's a little sick but there is no enjoyment in watching / following something like this if there isn't at least a moderate chance of failure. IMHO F1 would be improved if they removed the safety features and let computers drive the cars. We might get back to the good old days where there was some radical innovation (I remember one team fitted a massive fan to the bottom of the car to suck it down and another had a car with 6 wheels at one point).
...when do we hit the hit wall. I know that we can got for liquid cooling etc etc but we must surely be approaching the point where processors can't get much fast simply because the cooling solutions are becoming impractical.
Fair enough there will be some people that will be happy to have cryo units strapped to the side of their boxen but I think most computers are already a little on the large side considering what's in them.
I suppose one thing that hasn't been done on a large scale yet is ducted inputs and outputs. I imagine having the ability to draw in cooler air from outside the case would make for a fair advantage but this would require a redesign of the basic case which manufacturers are loathed to do.
I would be interested to know if anyone has studied this problem and come to any conculsions about whether will will hit the limit of Moore's law first or just be unable to cool a processor first.
Information want's to be free!
Surely if you drop the voltage your are going to have to under-clock the processor (reasoning that to over-clock you need to increase the voltage). Most processors for laptops already throttle the processor down when under light load now-a-days which must be a great energy saving. Would under volting it really then save more or would you just end up with a laptop that is dog slow? I'm sure if it was this easy one of the big laptop producers would already be doing it as a 20% increase for basically nothing would give them a fantastic advantage.