Wouldn't it have been easier to just attach a chromophore to the hyrdophilic end of the surfactant? Maybe add a few hydroxy groups to make sure the hydrophilic end stays that way and hey presto couloured bubbles. Sigh. To easy. Give me a hard problem.
I thought the state had to be changed to measure it or am I confusing a technique used in quantum crytography with this technique in quantum computing. As an ex-chemist my understanding of things quantum was never that good anyway but I seem to remember someone saying that in order to measure something you had to change it. Any physicists in the house?
I hear what you are saying but it would, IMHO, be unwise to underestimate the importance of this for AMD. Perhaps it was just a physological barrier but it is saying to the world "yes AMD in now mature enough for everyone". Hopefully this will happen with Linux one day as well.
until AMD starts to become / feel like an evil giant corp then. It seems to happen to every company soon after it gets it's, or at least a, big break. It's even starting to happen to Google. The company starts off with high minded ideals grows a bit on teh back of its initially supportes then suddenly starts wanting to own everything. I suppose it's just the lure of money but it's a shame it happens. Hope it doesn't happen to AMD because my view of them, and I may well be totally wrong, is a bunch of hard working people that started off fighting a battle that everyone thought they would lose in 10 minutes flat. But through determination and quality products they have succeded in making something of themselves. Everyone loves the under-dog:o)
Eh? How can you claim that most of the Apache Java stuff is buggy. I've been using the frouts of various Apache Java projects for years in numerous projects and have yet to find a serious bug. Perhaps I haven't been pushing the packages to their limit or something. The only projects that I have found to be a bit quirky is FOP but that's hardly supprising as it's never actually been properly released.
As for Tomcat being a security problem don't forget that it was never intended to be a replacement for a commercial offering (it was supposed to be the RI for the servlet and JSP specs) the community just sort of forced it into that role.
I think one of the most interesting problems that might be encountered when we do finally figure out how to make people live longer / forever is what will happen to the brain / mind. It seems that some people are able to keep their brain active and stay alert until they are 100+ but that number is very small. Most seem to slip into a dotage for 20 odd years before dying. I wonder if anyone is addressing this problem. My personal take on it is that a lot of the problem is due to under-stimulation caused by a lack of social interaction. Maybe there is some deeper chemical / biological reason though and the brain just wears out.
Well someone round here has brushed up on their biology a bit. This has got to be the most science based post I have ever seen:o). Now if you could just explain what you were talking about...
Hmmm, maybe but only for specific tasks. On one hand there is Linux which is free, doesn't require me to give away personal details or sit watching ads all day but it's quite ready for prime time. On the other hand these is an ad supported Windows which will probably be quite invasive but is well supplied with software.
I suppose it comes down to how invasive the ads are. If they require you to fill in forms and actually watch the ads (say for 5 minutes after you log in) then I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole. If it was just a box up the top that displayed new ads I would just tune it out like I do all other ads.
It is a little different to every other piece of OSS in one really important way - loads of people use it. It is the one real shining jewel of the OSS community so we should give it plenty of column inches.
Before I get flamed out of existance I am not saying that there aren't other good pieces of OSS - there are plenty - but Firefox / Mozilla is the _only_ one that a good number of non-geeks use (although I imagine Azureus comes close but that's a bit hard to promote).
If it works that's some pretty impressive technology but I suspect it has a few problems that aren't mentioned that are currently impossible to solve. What makes me think this is the way that all the major electronic manufacturers aren't falling over themselves to buy this company or developer their own version. If this really worked the first person to market would make a fortune. Who knows, maybe they have soved the difficult problems. It would be good if they had.
I'm going to try very hard not to bash/. to hard for the content of the articles but you have got to admit that they have dropped in quality over the last few years and they didn't start of that high. I used to be able to lose a good few hours reading/. now I'm lucky if I can lose an hour. I am pretty sure that the number of regular readers of/. has dropped dramatically as well. When I started reading/. it pretty common to get 1000 posts per article before it left the front page. What do we get now, maybe 500 on a good stir-up-the-crowd article. Yes it might be that more people are choosing to lurk but I think a more likely reason is that people are drifting away some something that isn't staying fresh and alive. I for one would have liked to have seen, for instance, a move to a CSS driven site and multiple skins a long time ago. Then start building on more features. Yes most features would probably be duds but it would have given us something new to play with and complain about. Even the polls have become stale and boring when once they brought some humour to the site. I'll probably still keep reading/. for a long while yet but I find myself increasing looking for other news for nerd outlets.
WTH is this obsession with install time and boot time all about? I couldn't care less if install time was 15 minutes or a day. I've always got plenty of other things to be getting on with. Even if I didn't have one day out of the amount of time I would generally be working with the machine would be tiny
The thing that takes the time for me is upgrades and configuration. I run Debian so upgrades are probably about as smooth as they get for any Linux distro but the number of times a little something goes wrong and needs manually fixing is amazing (yes I could run stable and not suffer as many problems but I like to be at least fairly up to date). I suppose the reason this doesn't happen on windows is simply because you rarely update the installed applications. Even so it would be nice if updates were less likely to mangle the system.
I'm not addicted I just have to play for 8 hours a day. I'm not addicted I tell you. Damn it - you don't understand. The voices in my head tell me to do it. You'll have to pry the game from my cold dead fingers.
Where the first few people to walk on the moon that messy?. I suppose the price of a good cleaning service up there is pretty high so I can understand it. There's real potential to make some serious money offering the first lunar cleaning service. Damn, no one steal my idea please.
While I am sure there will be plenty of purists out there that will be up in arms at this I think it might be quite a good thing. Anything that gets people interested in reading and expanding their mind has got to be good even if it means dumbing down some old masterpieces to get them interested. What concerns me about this, however, is their stated reason for doing it:
remember key plots and quotes, and raise up educational standards
Surely remembering plots and quotes isn't why we get our students to read these works. Many modern works have plots that are just a involved, often more involved. Quotes are good if you're a bit dim and need to sound intelligent for 30 seconds but not a lot else.
As for their choice of material, well, I'm sure it will mostly be Shakespeare simce he's the only person most people seem to be able to name. That's a real shame because, personally, I don't enjoy reading Shakespeare. He wrote plays - plays are supposed to be watched. There are plenty of people who wrote books why not try promoting them instead?
I admit that if you want a very small number of photographs every now and then (say 2 or 3 a month) then online printing isn't worth it because, as you point out, shipping costs swamp the printing costs. I would argue, however, that most people aren't in that situation. If you print a fair number of photographs in one go (traditially a films worth) then online printing is cheaper. If you print one or two a year then online may well still be cheaper simply because you didn't need to buy the printer. It's a tough call but my guess would be that the vast majority of people could save money printing online.
As for shipping prices I think you should shop around a bit. I just got 60 photos printed for IIRC 11p a shot + 99p postage.
Unless you are into printing up your home made porn why would you print photographs at home? I always used to think it was a good idea price wise (even when I worked for a online photo printing outfit) as print shops didn't really cater for digital images and prices were stupid. The real print shops quickly got their act together and made home printing totally uneconomical. I admit there is a break even point where very large prints are cheaper to do yourself but only if you don't take into account the thousands spent on buying a large format printer. These printer manufacturer must be laughing all the way to the bank.
Maybe I'm missing something here but what's to stop a spyware producer from just copying the seal of approval and sticking it to the front of his product? The threat of legal action I hear you cry. I don't think Mr Spyware Producer really cares all that much about breaking the law so that's hardly a deterent.
Perhaps if AOL made it public knowledge they would send "da boys" round if they caught anyone copying the certificate that would slow some people down. Perhaps a fitting punishment would be being crushed under a million AOL cds pushed one at a time through a giant letterbox.
Slashdot Mirror
Now there is only one thing stopping me using it.... the price.
Seriously though I would like to see a (native) XML datatype in Postgres that would be a nice little extension.
Wait, don't tell me it's already got one and I missed it :o)
Yeah, that's a hard one. I've been working on it for a long while but I've yet to come up with a good solution.
Wouldn't it have been easier to just attach a chromophore to the hyrdophilic end of the surfactant? Maybe add a few hydroxy groups to make sure the hydrophilic end stays that way and hey presto couloured bubbles. Sigh. To easy. Give me a hard problem.
Is there a website with more information? I tried your profile home page address but it's busted.
I thought the state had to be changed to measure it or am I confusing a technique used in quantum crytography with this technique in quantum computing. As an ex-chemist my understanding of things quantum was never that good anyway but I seem to remember someone saying that in order to measure something you had to change it. Any physicists in the house?
are there any examples of them being "non-evil" besides providing a good, cheap product?
I think that's about enough to be considered non-evil now isn't it considering how most businesses carry on?
I hear what you are saying but it would, IMHO, be unwise to underestimate the importance of this for AMD. Perhaps it was just a physological barrier but it is saying to the world "yes AMD in now mature enough for everyone". Hopefully this will happen with Linux one day as well.
The last Intel machine I owned was a 386.
until AMD starts to become / feel like an evil giant corp then. It seems to happen to every company soon after it gets it's, or at least a, big break. It's even starting to happen to Google. The company starts off with high minded ideals grows a bit on teh back of its initially supportes then suddenly starts wanting to own everything. I suppose it's just the lure of money but it's a shame it happens. Hope it doesn't happen to AMD because my view of them, and I may well be totally wrong, is a bunch of hard working people that started off fighting a battle that everyone thought they would lose in 10 minutes flat. But through determination and quality products they have succeded in making something of themselves. Everyone loves the under-dog :o)
a Beowulf cluster of these puppies...
...Oh, we don't really need to Google seem to be building one.
Eh? How can you claim that most of the Apache Java stuff is buggy. I've been using the frouts of various Apache Java projects for years in numerous projects and have yet to find a serious bug. Perhaps I haven't been pushing the packages to their limit or something. The only projects that I have found to be a bit quirky is FOP but that's hardly supprising as it's never actually been properly released.
As for Tomcat being a security problem don't forget that it was never intended to be a replacement for a commercial offering (it was supposed to be the RI for the servlet and JSP specs) the community just sort of forced it into that role.
...is how to get a number one spot in the natural listings. Sigh.
I think one of the most interesting problems that might be encountered when we do finally figure out how to make people live longer / forever is what will happen to the brain / mind. It seems that some people are able to keep their brain active and stay alert until they are 100+ but that number is very small. Most seem to slip into a dotage for 20 odd years before dying. I wonder if anyone is addressing this problem. My personal take on it is that a lot of the problem is due to under-stimulation caused by a lack of social interaction. Maybe there is some deeper chemical / biological reason though and the brain just wears out.
Well someone round here has brushed up on their biology a bit. This has got to be the most science based post I have ever seen :o). Now if you could just explain what you were talking about...
Hmmm, maybe but only for specific tasks. On one hand there is Linux which is free, doesn't require me to give away personal details or sit watching ads all day but it's quite ready for prime time. On the other hand these is an ad supported Windows which will probably be quite invasive but is well supplied with software.
I suppose it comes down to how invasive the ads are. If they require you to fill in forms and actually watch the ads (say for 5 minutes after you log in) then I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole. If it was just a box up the top that displayed new ads I would just tune it out like I do all other ads.
It is a little different to every other piece of OSS in one really important way - loads of people use it. It is the one real shining jewel of the OSS community so we should give it plenty of column inches.
Before I get flamed out of existance I am not saying that there aren't other good pieces of OSS - there are plenty - but Firefox / Mozilla is the _only_ one that a good number of non-geeks use (although I imagine Azureus comes close but that's a bit hard to promote).
If it works that's some pretty impressive technology but I suspect it has a few problems that aren't mentioned that are currently impossible to solve. What makes me think this is the way that all the major electronic manufacturers aren't falling over themselves to buy this company or developer their own version. If this really worked the first person to market would make a fortune. Who knows, maybe they have soved the difficult problems. It would be good if they had.
bow down to our fearless mice overloads (and may I strongly suggest you do the same).
I'm going to try very hard not to bash /. to hard for the content of the articles but you have got to admit that they have dropped in quality over the last few years and they didn't start of that high. I used to be able to lose a good few hours reading /. now I'm lucky if I can lose an hour. I am pretty sure that the number of regular readers of /. has dropped dramatically as well. When I started reading /. it pretty common to get 1000 posts per article before it left the front page. What do we get now, maybe 500 on a good stir-up-the-crowd article. Yes it might be that more people are choosing to lurk but I think a more likely reason is that people are drifting away some something that isn't staying fresh and alive. I for one would have liked to have seen, for instance, a move to a CSS driven site and multiple skins a long time ago. Then start building on more features. Yes most features would probably be duds but it would have given us something new to play with and complain about. Even the polls have become stale and boring when once they brought some humour to the site. I'll probably still keep reading /. for a long while yet but I find myself increasing looking for other news for nerd outlets.
WTH is this obsession with install time and boot time all about? I couldn't care less if install time was 15 minutes or a day. I've always got plenty of other things to be getting on with. Even if I didn't have one day out of the amount of time I would generally be working with the machine would be tiny
The thing that takes the time for me is upgrades and configuration. I run Debian so upgrades are probably about as smooth as they get for any Linux distro but the number of times a little something goes wrong and needs manually fixing is amazing (yes I could run stable and not suffer as many problems but I like to be at least fairly up to date). I suppose the reason this doesn't happen on windows is simply because you rarely update the installed applications. Even so it would be nice if updates were less likely to mangle the system.
I'm not addicted I just have to play for 8 hours a day. I'm not addicted I tell you. Damn it - you don't understand. The voices in my head tell me to do it. You'll have to pry the game from my cold dead fingers.
Where the first few people to walk on the moon that messy?. I suppose the price of a good cleaning service up there is pretty high so I can understand it. There's real potential to make some serious money offering the first lunar cleaning service. Damn, no one steal my idea please.
While I am sure there will be plenty of purists out there that will be up in arms at this I think it might be quite a good thing. Anything that gets people interested in reading and expanding their mind has got to be good even if it means dumbing down some old masterpieces to get them interested. What concerns me about this, however, is their stated reason for doing it:
remember key plots and quotes, and raise up educational standards
Surely remembering plots and quotes isn't why we get our students to read these works. Many modern works have plots that are just a involved, often more involved. Quotes are good if you're a bit dim and need to sound intelligent for 30 seconds but not a lot else.
As for their choice of material, well, I'm sure it will mostly be Shakespeare simce he's the only person most people seem to be able to name. That's a real shame because, personally, I don't enjoy reading Shakespeare. He wrote plays - plays are supposed to be watched. There are plenty of people who wrote books why not try promoting them instead?
I admit that if you want a very small number of photographs every now and then (say 2 or 3 a month) then online printing isn't worth it because, as you point out, shipping costs swamp the printing costs. I would argue, however, that most people aren't in that situation. If you print a fair number of photographs in one go (traditially a films worth) then online printing is cheaper. If you print one or two a year then online may well still be cheaper simply because you didn't need to buy the printer. It's a tough call but my guess would be that the vast majority of people could save money printing online.
As for shipping prices I think you should shop around a bit. I just got 60 photos printed for IIRC 11p a shot + 99p postage.
Unless you are into printing up your home made porn why would you print photographs at home? I always used to think it was a good idea price wise (even when I worked for a online photo printing outfit) as print shops didn't really cater for digital images and prices were stupid. The real print shops quickly got their act together and made home printing totally uneconomical. I admit there is a break even point where very large prints are cheaper to do yourself but only if you don't take into account the thousands spent on buying a large format printer. These printer manufacturer must be laughing all the way to the bank.
Maybe I'm missing something here but what's to stop a spyware producer from just copying the seal of approval and sticking it to the front of his product? The threat of legal action I hear you cry. I don't think Mr Spyware Producer really cares all that much about breaking the law so that's hardly a deterent.
Perhaps if AOL made it public knowledge they would send "da boys" round if they caught anyone copying the certificate that would slow some people down. Perhaps a fitting punishment would be being crushed under a million AOL cds pushed one at a time through a giant letterbox.