Do you have any other useless conclusions I can ignore?
Here's a cup of hot water.
Here's the same cup 3 hours later - its stone cold.
Except, rather than have the film crew hanging around for three hours, I chucked the hot water and filled it up with cold and filmed that.
So, the laws of thermodynamics are clearly useless, and can be ignored.
So why don't they show the AA taking the latest hot rod to the manufacturers to have the engine replaced?
Er... because the engine management system in the 'latest hot rod' would have screamed blue murder and cut the engine before that happened? Because you're less likely to run out of fuel in the first place if you're talking about a 10 minute refuelling stop rather than an hour or three recharging? In any case, assuming you've got the nous to pull over just before you run dry, all you need is to have someone fetch a can of fuel.
By analogy, if the safeties in an electric car failed and actually let you run it down to 0V, you'd fuck the batteries, and they represent a significant fraction of the value of the car.
Oh, yes, and Top Gear have frequently shown 'hot rods' breaking down, blowing up, grounding on car-park ramps, needing a PhD to start, drinking absurd amounts of fuel etc.
No, no you wouldn't. You'd fill up at least 50% more than required.
OK, lets try this slowly and see if you get it:
You can refuel a standard car from empty to full in a couple of minutes. The difference between putting in 'just enough' and 'plenty' is likely to be a matter of seconds.
To fully recharge an electric car takes a couple of hours on a standard charger or about an hour on a 'supercharger'. If you're stuck with a slow charger then it makes perfect sense to put in just enough to get you to a fast charger or to make it to your overnight stop.
Because of the time taken to recharge, the current scarcity of charging points - especially fast ones, and the consequences of running out at the roadside - electric cars are going to be far more dependent on accurate range indicators than regular ones.
They showed what would almost certainly happen in reality, under a given set of circumstances.
However, what with TV production schedules, budgets etc. (and probably not wanting to really push the car all the way back to the hangar) they acted it out, rather than actually driving the car until it turned into a brick on wheels.
In other news, food 'prepared' on cookery shows is probably stone cold and dried to a husk by the time the guests taste it and obediently go 'yum'. The windows behind TV presenters on news shows are added in post-production. When someone uses a phone on TV, even in a documentary, there isn't actually someone on the other end. When you see an interview, unless its actually live, the interviewer has probably re-recorded his side of the conversation after the fact, and the editor has probably cut out a load of 'ums' and 'ers' from the guest's responses.
To summarise - if you see it on TV it has probably been staged somehow. The issue is whether the claims are honest.
This isn't the kids of car you plan long cross country tips in anyway. (Well until the infrastructure is there). This is the one you drive every day to work and the grocery store.
That's not what Tesla is selling - do these cars look like they're on a grocery run? OK, you don't shoot car porn on the parking lot of the local mall, but notice how they're headlining the range (while failing to point out that, when that's up, the car is a brick for an hour or so). If I was spending $60k on a car, it would be precisely because I wanted something comfortable for long trips. If you can afford $60k for a Tesla and a similar price for a 'long trip' car then why not send the freakin' maid to get the groceries?
The idea of a small electric 'second car' for commuting/grocery runs is fine (maybe not as small as this but that's the general principle) - provided you have somewhere to charge it overnight. The idea of a plug-in hybrid that can get through a typical day on an overnight charge without starting the petrol engine is also fine. (Lets assume that your electricity is coming from a nice green source and not the local coal-burner) The idea of an electric-only 'primary' car that will leave you high and dry if you deviate from your meticulous journey plan.
"What? The baby's coming? It wasn't due until Saturday! No, of course I can't come now, I've just got in from a 200-mile drive and the car's recharging! Whaddya mean 'take the bus'? I didn't pay $60k for a car so I could take the bus!?"
In a way, the original Telsa Roadster made more sense - if you're trying to justify buying an expensive roadster on practical grounds you're doing it wrong. The model S is pretending to be a regular car. The X is a SUV, for fsck's sake!
In a regular car you can refuel in 5 minutes at any gas station. If you do run out, all you need is a jerrycan of fuel (unless you stupid enough to run a diesel or fuel injection engine bone dry - assuming a modern engine-management system will let you do that).
In an electric car, even with fast charging, you need to plan your journey around meal breaks - if not overnight stays - at service stations with charging points. If you run out, the car is bricked and has to be towed.
Even if NYT, Top Gear etc. may (or may not) have used a bit of journalistic license to make this point, it doesn't change the reality.
What's needed is a standard battery pack - when its empty you turn up at a service station and some sort of automated forklift system unhooks the flat battery and slots in a freshly charged one. The system then checks the battery's built in status indicator and works out how much you owe based on remaining charge level and the amount of 'wear' on the battery since it was last changed. Solves the slow recharge problem, and also allows you to spread the cost of the battery pack over time.
(Basically, the business model used for propane tanks for boats & camping - you don't sit around at the store while they refill your tank).
I use single letter suffixes for units. I refuse to do multi letter ones. What I use now works fine.
Unfortunately, SI has cybersquatted all the good suffixes with useless units like Amps, Watts and... oh damn, Pascals.
Suggest using characters 128-256 from the 1979 OSI Superboard 2 ROM so 2^16 bytes becomes [picture of tree]Bytes and 2^64 becomes [rear half of starship Enterprise]Bytes.
(I was once writing a silly game in BASIC and got the screen bounds checking wrong - the program stopped with an error and, when I listed it, I found the Enterprise stuck in the middle of a line of code...)
OK, lets invent some common-sense usage that isn't too incompatible with the real usage:
"K" (note capital K as distinct from 'k', the SI prefix for 1000) is a unit meaning 2^10 bytes. It is not a prefix, it is not an abbreviation, it is pronounced "kay". "Kilobytes" is plain wrong (because kilo- means 1000), "KB or KBytes" is a redundancy. This is not too distant from how it gets used in the real world, and the difference between a kiolbyte and a K is pretty small.
"Mega/M", "Giga/G", "Tera/T" are well-established, formally-defined SI prefixes meaning 10^6, 10^9, 10^12 respectively. Having the same prefix mean different things when attached to different units is ridiculous, so a "megabyte" or "MB" can only sensibly refer to 10^6 bytes. While "1MB = 1024K" might have been acceptable back in the day when 1MB was an absolute shedload of memory and a Terabyte was science fiction, the discrepancy between 'decimal' and 'binary' interpretations increases in both absolute and proportional terms when you start talking about modern memory capacities.
The SI MiB/GiB notation completely misses the point, because its still based on a sequence of numbers that roughly correspond to 10^(3N) based on our convention of writing decimal> numbers in groups of 3 digits - yet if 'roughly corresponds' is good enough then you might as well stick to MB/GB/TB. When working with binary numbers, we tend to write them in groups of 4 (i.e. hex digits) or 8 (bytes/characters). So one possibility would be a set of prefixes based on 2^(4N), i.e.:
I imagine Copernicus hearing something along those lines, then Galileo.
Yeah, but they were up against religious dogma and personality cults, in a time where the modern concept of science hadn't fully evolved.
Times change. Galileo and Copernicus pissed off a bunch of narrow-minded greybeards defending mainly religious dogma in a time when the whole concept of rigourous science based on mathematics, logic and systematic experiments was in its infancy.
Violating conservation of momentum contradicts a whole series of well established, thoroughly-tested scientific theories which have been successfully used to predict natural phenomenon and perform feats of technology. If Galileo's critics had a track record of using the theory epicycles to (e.g.) firing off a hunk of metal to slingshot around each or the outer planets in turn then they might have been in a better position to criticise.
Doesn't mean there's no dogma in science - but it is a lot harder than it used to be.
The patent system promotes innovation. Who is going to invest years of money and time to develope new technologies if they are going to be copied by everyone else without remuneration?
Who is going to invest years of money and time to develop new technologies when, as soon as they try and sell them, they're hit with a dozen crippling expensive lawsuits from patent trolls and large monopolies who have gamed the system to secure shedloads of vague, over-broad patents?
The patent system is a nice idea that just plain doesn't work - see debacles like the Apple/Samsung war (...and lets not take sides - that is a debacle from every direction with stupid over-broad patents on both sides and a floundering jury asked to make an impossible decision). It relies on a distinction between "obvious" and "non-obvious" that can't be satisfactorily defined and is such a specialised area of law that only megacorps can afford decent representation. Anybody with the necessary polymath genius credentials to be a patent officer is going to be so bored by the job that they just end up sitting and daydreaming about riding beams of light...
If patents are taken away then maybe something is needed to replace them. As far as software is concerned that already exists - it's called 'copyright'. In the case of medicine, all civilised countries have a system of regulation and approval for new treatments, which could easily incorporate a limited period of exclusivity.
As for patents and innovation - do you like using the Internet? That was built on open source and open protocols. Do you think that would exist in anything like its current form if all the protocols had been patented by big monopolies back in the 1980s? Enjoy using your AT&T(r) Compuserve(r) Email(tm) 2013(tm) system. Not Microsoft or Apple, note, they wouldn't have existed if Bill and the Steves had been nuked by IBM patent lawyers as soon as they tried to distribute computer software.
Funny that, all those big software companies that didn't need patents when they were exploding out of their parents garages but, now they're huge multinationals with skyscrapers and dominant market positions, suddenly see them as essential to 'innovation'.
As a tablet it, uh... has really good benchmark results... for a tablet. If you put up with all the heat, battery life and bulk issues it's awesome!
As a laptop it, uh... has really good benchmark results... for a tablet. If you put up with all the ergonomic problems and the crap touchpad, it's awesome!
Indeed - especially with all those nice ultrabooks around that are barely bigger, heavier or more expensive than this.
This device does not exist because there is a need or demand for a tablet-laptop halfbreed. It exists because Microsoft's only hope of breaking into the tablet market is to convince people that they need a tablet that can run legacy Windows apps. That's the only USP that Microsoft can offer, arriving this late to the party.
Yet all the evidence from the success of the iPad and the failure of WIndows Tablet Edition points to the contrary: a tablet has less functionality than a laptop by design and what people need is software that has been designed from the ground up for touchscreen use.
Of course, Microsoft has a lot of marketing clout and are big enough to survive a few false starts, so I wouldn't count them out just yet. If they were like any other company they'd have been bankrupted by Vista and the Office Ribbon.
the amount of bitching i hear about unity versus the amount of time it takes to install something else (TM) is ridiculous.
It depends about whether you give a flying fuck about the long-term success of Linux. If you don't, sure, switch to KDE, MATE, XFCE or whatever, or just switch distro.
However, if Linux is going to be a contender, then the 'out-of-the-box' experience of one of the most popular and widely publicised Linux distros is pretty damned important, however easy or not it is for an existing Linux-head to fix. In its heyday, Ubuntu was both a 'safe pair of hands' for newbies and a solid distro for everyone else, and Canonical deserve a large slab of kudos for hlping raise the profile of Linux.
UI design has always been the weakest part of Linux - and just as the GUI was beginning to mature the folks at Gnome and Canonical suddenly dump it all in favour of a dumbed-down netbook/tablet-style launcher when even Netbooks had dumped the whole "launcher" idea. OK, Microsoft has done the same, but they have such a huge market share and a big stack of cash that they can piss off users and get away with it.
I think the problem is rather less about the actual horse meat and more about deception.
Well, looking at the reader comments on this bit of naval gazing by the BBC there's a fairly rich brew of reasons ranging from sentimentality, to an association with knackers yards and horsemeat being seen as pet food. There's no shortage of people with silly ideas about which animals it is 'right' to eat - but after the Mad Cow Disease debacle (during which ministers fed beef burgers to their kids to prove that they were safe... then decided that, oh dear, maybe they weren't) theres also a lot of sensitivity about accountability and traceability which, as you say, is the sensible concern.
Personally, I'm relieved and surprised to find that 'value' beef burgers actually contain meat from named mammals.:-)
I think Elite was "of its time" - and if you want a nostalgia trip there is always Oolite. I'm not sure that even a good modernised version will re-capture the magic.
There were several grounddbreaking aspects of the original Elite:
(1) the 3D graphics. They look so rubbish now, and even Oolite is nothing to write home about by modern graphical standards, its hard to convey how amazingly jaw-droppingly good they looked back in the 80s. On the original BBC Micro version they'd even done s hack to switch display mode 3/4 of the way down the screen so that the space view was in 320-pixel-wide monochrome (the retina display of its day*) and the control panel was in low-res colour. I'm sure that the new version will have good graphics, but will it stand out?
(2) the vast, generative universe - although it didn't take a genius to work out how it was done this gave the impression of a huge space that nobody could ever explore fully, and its something that the otherwise more modern successors like the 'X' series and 'Freelancer' failed to recreate. Now, if Braben can take that and run with it to the extent of creating a massive universe with distinctive graphics in each system, maybe even generative ship designs, he might have something.
(3) Imagination (and the manual) - I'm sure Elite didn't invent the idea of the almost totally 'in universe' manual, but Elite was a classic example of that art, seeded with red herrings such as rock hermits and generation ships (which may have cropped up in later versions or in Oolite but certainly didn't exist in the original version). You actually felt as if there might be strange things out there to discover... and the graphics (while good for the day) were sparse enough to leave a lot to your imagination (in the same way that novels have better special effects than films, 2GB of texture memory and 512 parallel shader units can't compete with a healthy imagination).
(4) The self-directed play concept: you decide what your mission is.
The only modern game that I can think of that has come close to the appeal of Elite is actually Minecraft. In fact, it has a lot in common in that it combines a massive generative world with free exploration and self-imposed objectives. Actually, I think Notch's upcoming space game sounds as/more interesting than Elite.
Judging from the combat in the video they have abandoned Newtonian physics, and in doing so probably thrown the baby out with the bathwater. If I wanted "fighter jets in space" I can play X3.
Since the original Elite didn't use Newtonian physics I don't think "thrown out" is the right phrase. There's a place in the world for Newtonian (or even relativistic) 'games' for simulation fans, but Elite has always been 'arcade' physics (and, IMHO, the more playable for it).
You're right though - there have been a number of (probably Elite-inspired) games that offer arcade shoot-ups and trading (I quite liked Freelancer) including the aforementioned OOlite which is a fairly faithful, lightly modernised and expanded recreation of Elite which scratches those nostalgic itches.
I do not understand how society could even function if you cannot at least quote with citations someone else without breaking the law.
As others have said, short quotations are OK.
As for the format shifting/ripping thing, everybody just ignores it. In the UK, even the recording industry isn't terminally stupid enough to prosecute people copying a CD they bought onto a MP3 player. However, if you make hardware that rips CDs then be careful how you advertise it (Note: before you start frothing at the mouth too much, these people weren't prosecuted - they were just told by the independent advertising industry watchdog to change their advert, because someone raised a complaint that was petty but legally correct).
The best 2nd language for a programmer is naturally English. What your first language is depends on your nationality.
As the old joke goes:
Q: What do you call a person who speaks 3 languages? A: Trilingual
Q: What do you call a person who speaks 2 languages? A: Bilingual
Q: What do you call a person who only speaks 1 language? A: English
More seriously, though, unless you're interested in studying languages for the sake of it (nothing wrong with that) I don't see any point in learning a second language unless going to have an opportunity to use it for real - or you're never actually going to become fluent in it. The reason that there's any truth in the joke is that native English speakers already know the most useful second language. Certainly in Europe it's the de-facto language for international projects and conferences.
Personally, I have a qualification called "O-Level French" - for the benefit of those not familiar with the pre-1988 UK Education system, that's a certificate that proves that you can't speak French... and while the residual smattering did prove useful when I spent 2 weeks in Quebec, that seems scant payback for all those hours in class. If I could go back in time and choose again I think I'd go for Spanish, which I would actually have found useful from time to time.
Yeah, apparently no security is better then some security according to google.
No, more like 'No security is better than the illusion of security". Self-signed certificates are for testing and development, in the wild they are as secure as a wet paper bag, especially if you authorise some 'unattended' service to accept them automatically. It's no good Alice sending a message "securely" to Bob, if Bob turns out to be Eve with a false moustache and a pair of socks stuffed down her pants. Yes, the CA model is much less secure than the theoretical maximum security of SSL, but the alternative is to deliver keys and confirm identities in person (don't forget to check for socks).
Whenever you click 'Yeah, whatever, trust this certificate' you are taking a risk. If you set your GMail account to (effectively) say 'Yeah, whatever' every time it checks your mail, even if you're not online, then you're asking Google to take that risk for you.
Remember that however much you understand the risks, Google is dealing with every Tom, Dick and Harry (...probably including some 2-bit ISPs and employers who are using the same self-signed certificate for everything).
Got certificate from startssl, but it's a pain. Couple of hours of totally pointless work.
Yes. How dare Google charge you $0.00 per month and not come round and fix your home email server for you. Maybe they should put a lot of time and effort into allowing you to install your own root cert on Gmail - which probably opens up all sorts of liabilities for them and will probably be as much hassle for you as getting a proper cert.
And, yes, I use self-signed certs for some things, myself - thanks, Google, for the timely reminder to get off my arse and fix that.
I thought this was all about open source and stuff. Aren't these Apple Stores completely contrary to the spirit of OSS?
Yeah, but the Pi is all about getting kids to tweak and rewrite software, so unlike Apple they probably have a large, enticing "Get the source" button on every app...
Lets have a look.
Somewhere around here...
Where is it...
On LibreOffice surely, I know that's LGPL...
You may not modify or redistribute this content.
Oh dear...
Never mind, they must be raising money for the Pi foundation - I'm sure this is on the site somewhere, but my browser seems to have a bug causing it to disappear.
Nowadays, there are emulators and roms for just about every piece of older hardware, including the "Speccy".
There must be plenty of dead Speccys around, and a Raspberry Pi would fit inside the box nicely. Hooking up the Speccy keyboard to the Pi's I/O pins and knocking up a driver can't be rocket science, then you could...
...install a BBC Micro emulator on it and have a decent computer (ducks and runs for cover...!)
Aaah, we had proper platform loyalty wars back in the good old days - so much better than all this cissy modern Fanbois vs. Fandroids rubbish. Tim Cook and Eric Schmitt might talk up a storm but you wouldn't see them in a pub sorting it out like men (See about half way down the page...) Anyway Tim Cook would probably have ended up in the wrong pub.
The Census question [warning - PDF] on religion is "What is your religion: None/Christian/Buddhist/Hindu/Jewish/Muslim/Sikh/Other (write in).
Some people feel that, despite the "None" option, this exaggerates the number of religious people by not distinguishing between those with a serious religious commitment and those who just tick the name of their preferred provider of wedding, funeral and baby-naming services (or feel obliged to tick 'Christian' because their parents had them baptised).
If the Jedi campaign had a point, it was to highlight this. I vaguely remember that one of the secularist organisations had a more serious campaign.
If being an atheist, Christian or Jedi ever becomes a matter that gets you brought to the attention of the Secret Service in the UK, we're beyond fucked already.
No but it might, for instance, influence such policies as support for faith-based schools or discussing whether public bodies represent the community.
Slashdot Mirror
Poor businessmen?
This move got their little shop a namecheck in the national news in the UK. Ker-ching!
Do you have any other useless conclusions I can ignore?
Here's a cup of hot water.
Here's the same cup 3 hours later - its stone cold.
Except, rather than have the film crew hanging around for three hours, I chucked the hot water and filled it up with cold and filmed that.
So, the laws of thermodynamics are clearly useless, and can be ignored.
So why don't they show the AA taking the latest hot rod to the manufacturers to have the engine replaced?
Er... because the engine management system in the 'latest hot rod' would have screamed blue murder and cut the engine before that happened? Because you're less likely to run out of fuel in the first place if you're talking about a 10 minute refuelling stop rather than an hour or three recharging? In any case, assuming you've got the nous to pull over just before you run dry, all you need is to have someone fetch a can of fuel.
By analogy, if the safeties in an electric car failed and actually let you run it down to 0V, you'd fuck the batteries, and they represent a significant fraction of the value of the car.
Oh, yes, and Top Gear have frequently shown 'hot rods' breaking down, blowing up, grounding on car-park ramps, needing a PhD to start, drinking absurd amounts of fuel etc.
And you'd do that in a standard car?
No, no you wouldn't. You'd fill up at least 50% more than required.
OK, lets try this slowly and see if you get it:
You can refuel a standard car from empty to full in a couple of minutes. The difference between putting in 'just enough' and 'plenty' is likely to be a matter of seconds.
To fully recharge an electric car takes a couple of hours on a standard charger or about an hour on a 'supercharger'. If you're stuck with a slow charger then it makes perfect sense to put in just enough to get you to a fast charger or to make it to your overnight stop.
Because of the time taken to recharge, the current scarcity of charging points - especially fast ones, and the consequences of running out at the roadside - electric cars are going to be far more dependent on accurate range indicators than regular ones.
What happened with Top Gear?
They showed what would almost certainly happen in reality, under a given set of circumstances.
However, what with TV production schedules, budgets etc. (and probably not wanting to really push the car all the way back to the hangar) they acted it out, rather than actually driving the car until it turned into a brick on wheels.
In other news, food 'prepared' on cookery shows is probably stone cold and dried to a husk by the time the guests taste it and obediently go 'yum'. The windows behind TV presenters on news shows are added in post-production. When someone uses a phone on TV, even in a documentary, there isn't actually someone on the other end. When you see an interview, unless its actually live, the interviewer has probably re-recorded his side of the conversation after the fact, and the editor has probably cut out a load of 'ums' and 'ers' from the guest's responses.
To summarise - if you see it on TV it has probably been staged somehow. The issue is whether the claims are honest.
This isn't the kids of car you plan long cross country tips in anyway. (Well until the infrastructure is there). This is the one you drive every day to work and the grocery store.
That's not what Tesla is selling - do these cars look like they're on a grocery run? OK, you don't shoot car porn on the parking lot of the local mall, but notice how they're headlining the range (while failing to point out that, when that's up, the car is a brick for an hour or so). If I was spending $60k on a car, it would be precisely because I wanted something comfortable for long trips. If you can afford $60k for a Tesla and a similar price for a 'long trip' car then why not send the freakin' maid to get the groceries?
The idea of a small electric 'second car' for commuting/grocery runs is fine (maybe not as small as this but that's the general principle) - provided you have somewhere to charge it overnight. The idea of a plug-in hybrid that can get through a typical day on an overnight charge without starting the petrol engine is also fine. (Lets assume that your electricity is coming from a nice green source and not the local coal-burner) The idea of an electric-only 'primary' car that will leave you high and dry if you deviate from your meticulous journey plan.
"What? The baby's coming? It wasn't due until Saturday! No, of course I can't come now, I've just got in from a 200-mile drive and the car's recharging! Whaddya mean 'take the bus'? I didn't pay $60k for a car so I could take the bus!?"
In a way, the original Telsa Roadster made more sense - if you're trying to justify buying an expensive roadster on practical grounds you're doing it wrong. The model S is pretending to be a regular car. The X is a SUV, for fsck's sake!
Awkward reality:
In a regular car you can refuel in 5 minutes at any gas station. If you do run out, all you need is a jerrycan of fuel (unless you stupid enough to run a diesel or fuel injection engine bone dry - assuming a modern engine-management system will let you do that).
In an electric car, even with fast charging, you need to plan your journey around meal breaks - if not overnight stays - at service stations with charging points. If you run out, the car is bricked and has to be towed.
Even if NYT, Top Gear etc. may (or may not) have used a bit of journalistic license to make this point, it doesn't change the reality.
What's needed is a standard battery pack - when its empty you turn up at a service station and some sort of automated forklift system unhooks the flat battery and slots in a freshly charged one. The system then checks the battery's built in status indicator and works out how much you owe based on remaining charge level and the amount of 'wear' on the battery since it was last changed. Solves the slow recharge problem, and also allows you to spread the cost of the battery pack over time.
(Basically, the business model used for propane tanks for boats & camping - you don't sit around at the store while they refill your tank).
I use single letter suffixes for units. I refuse to do multi letter ones. What I use now works fine.
Unfortunately, SI has cybersquatted all the good suffixes with useless units like Amps, Watts and... oh damn, Pascals.
Suggest using characters 128-256 from the 1979 OSI Superboard 2 ROM so 2^16 bytes becomes [picture of tree]Bytes and 2^64 becomes [rear half of starship Enterprise]Bytes.
(I was once writing a silly game in BASIC and got the screen bounds checking wrong - the program stopped with an error and, when I listed it, I found the Enterprise stuck in the middle of a line of code...)
OK, lets invent some common-sense usage that isn't too incompatible with the real usage:
"K" (note capital K as distinct from 'k', the SI prefix for 1000) is a unit meaning 2^10 bytes. It is not a prefix, it is not an abbreviation, it is pronounced "kay". "Kilobytes" is plain wrong (because kilo- means 1000), "KB or KBytes" is a redundancy. This is not too distant from how it gets used in the real world, and the difference between a kiolbyte and a K is pretty small.
"Mega/M", "Giga/G", "Tera/T" are well-established, formally-defined SI prefixes meaning 10^6, 10^9, 10^12 respectively. Having the same prefix mean different things when attached to different units is ridiculous, so a "megabyte" or "MB" can only sensibly refer to 10^6 bytes. While "1MB = 1024K" might have been acceptable back in the day when 1MB was an absolute shedload of memory and a Terabyte was science fiction, the discrepancy between 'decimal' and 'binary' interpretations increases in both absolute and proportional terms when you start talking about modern memory capacities.
The SI MiB/GiB notation completely misses the point, because its still based on a sequence of numbers that roughly correspond to 10^(3N) based on our convention of writing decimal> numbers in groups of 3 digits - yet if 'roughly corresponds' is good enough then you might as well stick to MB/GB/TB. When working with binary numbers, we tend to write them in groups of 4 (i.e. hex digits) or 8 (bytes/characters). So one possibility would be a set of prefixes based on 2^(4N), i.e.:
1 byte = 16 bytes, 256bytes, 4096 bytes, 16384 bytes, 65536 bytes...
That might mean too many prefixes, so lets bring in Moores law and go exponential , with 2^(2^N)
2^0 = 1 byte = 1 byte (duh!) = 1B
2^2 = 4 bytes = 1 word = 1Wd
2^4 = 16 bytes = 1 gulp = 1Gu
2^8 = 256 bytes = 1 page = 1Pa
2^16 = 65536 bytes = 1 cpm = 1Cp (max RAM of a 16 bit address bus)
2^32 = 4294967296 = 1 amiga = 1Am (max RAM of a 32 bit address bus)
2^64 = 1 shedload = 1Sl (max RAM of a 64-bit address bus)
2^128 = 1 internet = 1In (IPv6, of course)
...and, of course, nobody will ever need more memory than that.
(Must do some work now so can't double-check math or invent better unit names - also, true pedants please s/byte/octet/ in the above).
I imagine Copernicus hearing something along those lines, then Galileo.
Yeah, but they were up against religious dogma and personality cults, in a time where the modern concept of science hadn't fully evolved.
Times change. Galileo and Copernicus pissed off a bunch of narrow-minded greybeards defending mainly religious dogma in a time when the whole concept of rigourous science based on mathematics, logic and systematic experiments was in its infancy.
Violating conservation of momentum contradicts a whole series of well established, thoroughly-tested scientific theories which have been successfully used to predict natural phenomenon and perform feats of technology. If Galileo's critics had a track record of using the theory epicycles to (e.g.) firing off a hunk of metal to slingshot around each or the outer planets in turn then they might have been in a better position to criticise.
Doesn't mean there's no dogma in science - but it is a lot harder than it used to be.
The patent system promotes innovation. Who is going to invest years of money and time to develope new technologies if they are going to be copied by everyone else without remuneration?
Who is going to invest years of money and time to develop new technologies when, as soon as they try and sell them, they're hit with a dozen crippling expensive lawsuits from patent trolls and large monopolies who have gamed the system to secure shedloads of vague, over-broad patents?
The patent system is a nice idea that just plain doesn't work - see debacles like the Apple/Samsung war (...and lets not take sides - that is a debacle from every direction with stupid over-broad patents on both sides and a floundering jury asked to make an impossible decision). It relies on a distinction between "obvious" and "non-obvious" that can't be satisfactorily defined and is such a specialised area of law that only megacorps can afford decent representation. Anybody with the necessary polymath genius credentials to be a patent officer is going to be so bored by the job that they just end up sitting and daydreaming about riding beams of light...
If patents are taken away then maybe something is needed to replace them. As far as software is concerned that already exists - it's called 'copyright'. In the case of medicine, all civilised countries have a system of regulation and approval for new treatments, which could easily incorporate a limited period of exclusivity.
As for patents and innovation - do you like using the Internet? That was built on open source and open protocols. Do you think that would exist in anything like its current form if all the protocols had been patented by big monopolies back in the 1980s? Enjoy using your AT&T(r) Compuserve(r) Email(tm) 2013(tm) system. Not Microsoft or Apple, note, they wouldn't have existed if Bill and the Steves had been nuked by IBM patent lawyers as soon as they tried to distribute computer software.
Funny that, all those big software companies that didn't need patents when they were exploding out of their parents garages but, now they're huge multinationals with skyscrapers and dominant market positions, suddenly see them as essential to 'innovation'.
TLDNR summary of Anandtech review:
As a tablet it, uh... has really good benchmark results... for a tablet. If you put up with all the heat, battery life and bulk issues it's awesome!
As a laptop it, uh... has really good benchmark results... for a tablet. If you put up with all the ergonomic problems and the crap touchpad, it's awesome!
Why not buy a laptop?
Indeed - especially with all those nice ultrabooks around that are barely bigger, heavier or more expensive than this.
This device does not exist because there is a need or demand for a tablet-laptop halfbreed. It exists because Microsoft's only hope of breaking into the tablet market is to convince people that they need a tablet that can run legacy Windows apps. That's the only USP that Microsoft can offer, arriving this late to the party.
Yet all the evidence from the success of the iPad and the failure of WIndows Tablet Edition points to the contrary: a tablet has less functionality than a laptop by design and what people need is software that has been designed from the ground up for touchscreen use.
Of course, Microsoft has a lot of marketing clout and are big enough to survive a few false starts, so I wouldn't count them out just yet. If they were like any other company they'd have been bankrupted by Vista and the Office Ribbon.
the amount of bitching i hear about unity versus the amount of time it takes to install something else (TM) is ridiculous.
It depends about whether you give a flying fuck about the long-term success of Linux. If you don't, sure, switch to KDE, MATE, XFCE or whatever, or just switch distro.
However, if Linux is going to be a contender, then the 'out-of-the-box' experience of one of the most popular and widely publicised Linux distros is pretty damned important, however easy or not it is for an existing Linux-head to fix. In its heyday, Ubuntu was both a 'safe pair of hands' for newbies and a solid distro for everyone else, and Canonical deserve a large slab of kudos for hlping raise the profile of Linux.
UI design has always been the weakest part of Linux - and just as the GUI was beginning to mature the folks at Gnome and Canonical suddenly dump it all in favour of a dumbed-down netbook/tablet-style launcher when even Netbooks had dumped the whole "launcher" idea. OK, Microsoft has done the same, but they have such a huge market share and a big stack of cash that they can piss off users and get away with it.
Before the spelling pedants arrive:
s/naval/navel/
I think the problem is rather less about the actual horse meat and more about deception.
Well, looking at the reader comments on this bit of naval gazing by the BBC there's a fairly rich brew of reasons ranging from sentimentality, to an association with knackers yards and horsemeat being seen as pet food. There's no shortage of people with silly ideas about which animals it is 'right' to eat - but after the Mad Cow Disease debacle (during which ministers fed beef burgers to their kids to prove that they were safe... then decided that, oh dear, maybe they weren't) theres also a lot of sensitivity about accountability and traceability which, as you say, is the sensible concern.
Personally, I'm relieved and surprised to find that 'value' beef burgers actually contain meat from named mammals. :-)
I think Elite was "of its time" - and if you want a nostalgia trip there is always Oolite. I'm not sure that even a good modernised version will re-capture the magic.
There were several grounddbreaking aspects of the original Elite:
(1) the 3D graphics. They look so rubbish now, and even Oolite is nothing to write home about by modern graphical standards, its hard to convey how amazingly jaw-droppingly good they looked back in the 80s. On the original BBC Micro version they'd even done s hack to switch display mode 3/4 of the way down the screen so that the space view was in 320-pixel-wide monochrome (the retina display of its day*) and the control panel was in low-res colour. I'm sure that the new version will have good graphics, but will it stand out?
(2) the vast, generative universe - although it didn't take a genius to work out how it was done this gave the impression of a huge space that nobody could ever explore fully, and its something that the otherwise more modern successors like the 'X' series and 'Freelancer' failed to recreate. Now, if Braben can take that and run with it to the extent of creating a massive universe with distinctive graphics in each system, maybe even generative ship designs, he might have something.
(3) Imagination (and the manual) - I'm sure Elite didn't invent the idea of the almost totally 'in universe' manual, but Elite was a classic example of that art, seeded with red herrings such as rock hermits and generation ships (which may have cropped up in later versions or in Oolite but certainly didn't exist in the original version). You actually felt as if there might be strange things out there to discover... and the graphics (while good for the day) were sparse enough to leave a lot to your imagination (in the same way that novels have better special effects than films, 2GB of texture memory and 512 parallel shader units can't compete with a healthy imagination).
(4) The self-directed play concept: you decide what your mission is.
The only modern game that I can think of that has come close to the appeal of Elite is actually Minecraft. In fact, it has a lot in common in that it combines a massive generative world with free exploration and self-imposed objectives. Actually, I think Notch's upcoming space game sounds as/more interesting than Elite.
Judging from the combat in the video they have abandoned Newtonian physics, and in doing so probably thrown the baby out with the bathwater. If I wanted "fighter jets in space" I can play X3.
Since the original Elite didn't use Newtonian physics I don't think "thrown out" is the right phrase. There's a place in the world for Newtonian (or even relativistic) 'games' for simulation fans, but Elite has always been 'arcade' physics (and, IMHO, the more playable for it).
You're right though - there have been a number of (probably Elite-inspired) games that offer arcade shoot-ups and trading (I quite liked Freelancer) including the aforementioned OOlite which is a fairly faithful, lightly modernised and expanded recreation of Elite which scratches those nostalgic itches.
He *could* care less, so he does care for them then?
Here's a quick explanation.
Without fair use provisions until now?
I do not understand how society could even function if you cannot at least quote with citations someone else without breaking the law.
As others have said, short quotations are OK.
As for the format shifting/ripping thing, everybody just ignores it. In the UK, even the recording industry isn't terminally stupid enough to prosecute people copying a CD they bought onto a MP3 player. However, if you make hardware that rips CDs then be careful how you advertise it (Note: before you start frothing at the mouth too much, these people weren't prosecuted - they were just told by the independent advertising industry watchdog to change their advert, because someone raised a complaint that was petty but legally correct).
The best 2nd language for a programmer is naturally English. What your first language is depends on your nationality.
As the old joke goes:
Q: What do you call a person who speaks 3 languages? A: Trilingual
Q: What do you call a person who speaks 2 languages? A: Bilingual
Q: What do you call a person who only speaks 1 language? A: English
More seriously, though, unless you're interested in studying languages for the sake of it (nothing wrong with that) I don't see any point in learning a second language unless going to have an opportunity to use it for real - or you're never actually going to become fluent in it. The reason that there's any truth in the joke is that native English speakers already know the most useful second language. Certainly in Europe it's the de-facto language for international projects and conferences.
Personally, I have a qualification called "O-Level French" - for the benefit of those not familiar with the pre-1988 UK Education system, that's a certificate that proves that you can't speak French... and while the residual smattering did prove useful when I spent 2 weeks in Quebec, that seems scant payback for all those hours in class. If I could go back in time and choose again I think I'd go for Spanish, which I would actually have found useful from time to time.
Yeah, apparently no security is better then some security according to google.
No, more like 'No security is better than the illusion of security". Self-signed certificates are for testing and development, in the wild they are as secure as a wet paper bag, especially if you authorise some 'unattended' service to accept them automatically. It's no good Alice sending a message "securely" to Bob, if Bob turns out to be Eve with a false moustache and a pair of socks stuffed down her pants. Yes, the CA model is much less secure than the theoretical maximum security of SSL, but the alternative is to deliver keys and confirm identities in person (don't forget to check for socks).
Whenever you click 'Yeah, whatever, trust this certificate' you are taking a risk. If you set your GMail account to (effectively) say 'Yeah, whatever' every time it checks your mail, even if you're not online, then you're asking Google to take that risk for you.
Remember that however much you understand the risks, Google is dealing with every Tom, Dick and Harry (...probably including some 2-bit ISPs and employers who are using the same self-signed certificate for everything).
Got certificate from startssl, but it's a pain. Couple of hours of totally pointless work.
Yes. How dare Google charge you $0.00 per month and not come round and fix your home email server for you. Maybe they should put a lot of time and effort into allowing you to install your own root cert on Gmail - which probably opens up all sorts of liabilities for them and will probably be as much hassle for you as getting a proper cert.
And, yes, I use self-signed certs for some things, myself - thanks, Google, for the timely reminder to get off my arse and fix that.
I thought this was all about open source and stuff. Aren't these Apple Stores completely contrary to the spirit of OSS?
Yeah, but the Pi is all about getting kids to tweak and rewrite software, so unlike Apple they probably have a large, enticing "Get the source" button on every app...
Lets have a look.
Somewhere around here...
Where is it...
On LibreOffice surely, I know that's LGPL...
You may not modify or redistribute this content.
Oh dear...
Never mind, they must be raising money for the Pi foundation - I'm sure this is on the site somewhere, but my browser seems to have a bug causing it to disappear.
Nowadays, there are emulators and roms for just about every piece of older hardware, including the "Speccy".
There must be plenty of dead Speccys around, and a Raspberry Pi would fit inside the box nicely. Hooking up the Speccy keyboard to the Pi's I/O pins and knocking up a driver can't be rocket science, then you could...
...install a BBC Micro emulator on it and have a decent computer (ducks and runs for cover...!)
Aaah, we had proper platform loyalty wars back in the good old days - so much better than all this cissy modern Fanbois vs. Fandroids rubbish. Tim Cook and Eric Schmitt might talk up a storm but you wouldn't see them in a pub sorting it out like men (See about half way down the page...) Anyway Tim Cook would probably have ended up in the wrong pub.
What's wrong with the Cenus anyway?
The Census question [warning - PDF] on religion is "What is your religion: None/Christian/Buddhist/Hindu/Jewish/Muslim/Sikh/Other (write in).
Some people feel that, despite the "None" option, this exaggerates the number of religious people by not distinguishing between those with a serious religious commitment and those who just tick the name of their preferred provider of wedding, funeral and baby-naming services (or feel obliged to tick 'Christian' because their parents had them baptised).
If the Jedi campaign had a point, it was to highlight this. I vaguely remember that one of the secularist organisations had a more serious campaign.
If being an atheist, Christian or Jedi ever becomes a matter that gets you brought to the attention of the Secret Service in the UK, we're beyond fucked already.
No but it might, for instance, influence such policies as support for faith-based schools or discussing whether public bodies represent the community.