The secretary could improve her worst case time by putting a limit (determined heuristically) on the size of the stack, and when the stack gets much bigger than this, organizing the oldest files alphabetically. This is equivalent to the way I organize my desk: every few weeks when it gets truly unbearable, I put all the stuff I'm not currently using away.
An empty table is like unused RAM: why not use it as a file cache?
Two spaces aren't ignored by browsers for aesthetic reasons, but because the general policy is to ignore any repeated whitespace, meaning basically ( |\t|\n)+ are all treated the same.
I'm not sure what "modern word processor" you're using, but in OpenOffice, and presumably Word, the space after a period is no longer than a space elsewhere. And in general, how can we expect a computer to distinguish between an abbreviation and a complete sentence? Better to just type two spaces.
The main reason people think it doesn't matter anymore is that in HTML, and by extension on most forums, typing two spaces makes no difference anyway.
Even better, just make a USB doohickey that appears to computers as a USB keyboard, which would have a standard adapter you could plug the electrodes into. The device could also train through that interface: you open up a text editor and put it in training mode, and it would type out any prompts it needs to give you. The only real problem is if the process is too CPU- or memory-intensive to run on a cheap embedded device.
Just out of curiosity, why does Visual Studio need to be run as admin? I could understand if you were debugging kernel stuff, or profiling the entire system, or debugging processes that aren't yours. But for everyday stuff, why?
I enjoyed The Corporation, and it does make some good points. But if you can call it "even-handed" with a straight face, you need to work on your critical thinking skills.
Those pendulum ball desk thingies would only transmit signals instantaneously if they were perfectly rigid, which they are not. In reality, they only transmit signals at the speed of sound through steel (or whatever they're made of). And in fact, relativity sets an upper limit on rigidity, because the speed of sound can't be faster than c. (To take an 1800's view, c is the speed of sound in aether.)
To those of you who think signals in a wire travel faster than c, you're simply wrong. The signal velocity will always be less than c. This does not preclude measuring the speed of light with electrical equipment, you just have to be a bit more careful to take other delays into account. There are cases where the phase velocity could be higher than c, but that doesn't allow you to transmit information or energy that fast.
If you were able to transmit information faster than light, then to an observer moving past you sufficiently quickly, you would be transmitting information back in time. That's why we're pretty sure it's impossible.
In a lightning storm you have all sorts of crazy electrostatic fields, which could cause the strange motions and floating of ball lightning. Remember, these balls are lightweight.
I would argue that those people haven't made an informed decision about whether they want DRM, they just don't care. Since they've (almost) never been offered legal downloads without DRM, we don't really know which they'd choose.
I wouldn't want regulation prohibiting DRM. But I am strongly against the current laws that give them legal backing, which say breaking DRM is illegal even if you were allowed to make that copy. And I wouldn't be opposed to a law saying you can't have it both ways, that is, DRM or copyright, pick one.
The only reason FairPlay JustWorks for consumers is because it doesn't work for the RIAA, who are really annoyed that it lets you burn CDs. And with FairPlay you're living on borrowed time - at any point, the RIAA could force Apple to revoke this and other "rights" retroactively, and there'd be no legal way for you to keep what "rights" you (thought you) paid for. So it works only because people either don't know or don't care about these risks.
Letting the free market decide is a bit dangerous here, because in the popular* music industry, there are not multiple independent producers, there is an oligopoly. (* I'm ignoring the independent music scene, because it will still be quite a while before they will be able to compete with the RIAA's marketing machine.)
Well actually, we are the entire music market, and we have decided we don't want DRM. The only reason that's irrelevant is because DRM is not being sold to us by the music industry, it's being sold to the music industry by the computer industry.
It is actually a practical impossibility to design such a DRM scheme. If I were to give you a 5 1/2" floppy right now, could you extract the data? Probably half of us could not, even if allowed hours to root through our attic for dusty old equipment. But with floppies, we have the advantage of knowing the format, and we're not at the mercy of some long-defunct website to give us decryption keys.
Copyright protection currently lasts so long that if content were to survive until it enters the public domain, it would need to be format-shifted ten or fifteen times. But the whole point of DRM is to preclude format-shifting, since that's indistinguishable from illegal copying. Tell you what: in 70+(life of author)+(RIAA campaign donations/$100M) years, if you can successfully and legally give me a copy of some 2007-vintage DRM-encumbered music, I'll eat my hat.
The reason they're particular about the polarity is that the wet paper is not the dielectric, it's an electrode. An aluminum oxide coating on one of the sheets of foil is the dielectric. This is very thin, which is why it works so well. When the current flows the right way, the electrolyte maintains the coating, but when current flows the other way, it eats it away.
Well, I don't know about network limits, if any. Vista Home Basic lacks Aero, the 3D display manager, and Media Center, a MythTV knockoff; both of which are present in Home Premium. Above that is Ultimate, which also has the features of the business systems, plus some unspecified downloadable addons.
Firefox becoming popular is one of the best things that could have happened for Linux. If IE were the only browser in Windows, then Firefox would be unfamiliar to users, and more websites would be IE-only. Now, if someone wants to go to Linux, it's "Sweet, I can still use Firefox", instead of "So now I have to use Firefox, and I can't visit my bank's website?" If it's true that Linux adoption has slowed, it's more likely because the operating system is now less important than the browser, so there's less reason to use the better OS instead of the one you already have.
Even if artificially restricting software to Linux would be good for Linux's popularity, I don't think it should be done. Microsoft doesn't port their software to Linux because they're greedy bastards. Isn't open source supposed to be above that?
As one of the few people who doesn't get confused and scared and curl up in a fetal position and cry if a control panel has too many options, I say, screw those people who do. Let them use Windows or Apple or Gnome, if they're so bent on catering to those people. But in 20 years they'll all be dead, just like the idiots who can't program their VCRs are dying off now. In the meantime, can there please be at least a little software that isn't designed for the lowest common denominator?
For $110 you can get an OEM version of XP Media Center Edition with free upgrade to Vista Home Premium. (at least you could a few weeks ago, not sure when the deadlines are).
Interestingly enough, with unlimited goods such as copies of existing data, it's the reverse: if left to their own devices, people will excercise their right to trade freely with one another, and the only way to enforce Capitalism is at the point of a gun.
Slashdot Mirror
The secretary could improve her worst case time by putting a limit (determined heuristically) on the size of the stack, and when the stack gets much bigger than this, organizing the oldest files alphabetically. This is equivalent to the way I organize my desk: every few weeks when it gets truly unbearable, I put all the stuff I'm not currently using away.
An empty table is like unused RAM: why not use it as a file cache?
Stackenblocken!
Two spaces aren't ignored by browsers for aesthetic reasons, but because the general policy is to ignore any repeated whitespace, meaning basically ( |\t|\n)+ are all treated the same.
I'm not sure what "modern word processor" you're using, but in OpenOffice, and presumably Word, the space after a period is no longer than a space elsewhere. And in general, how can we expect a computer to distinguish between an abbreviation and a complete sentence? Better to just type two spaces.
The main reason people think it doesn't matter anymore is that in HTML, and by extension on most forums, typing two spaces makes no difference anyway.
Even better, just make a USB doohickey that appears to computers as a USB keyboard, which would have a standard adapter you could plug the electrodes into. The device could also train through that interface: you open up a text editor and put it in training mode, and it would type out any prompts it needs to give you. The only real problem is if the process is too CPU- or memory-intensive to run on a cheap embedded device.
Just out of curiosity, why does Visual Studio need to be run as admin? I could understand if you were debugging kernel stuff, or profiling the entire system, or debugging processes that aren't yours. But for everyday stuff, why?
I enjoyed The Corporation, and it does make some good points. But if you can call it "even-handed" with a straight face, you need to work on your critical thinking skills.
Those pendulum ball desk thingies would only transmit signals instantaneously if they were perfectly rigid, which they are not. In reality, they only transmit signals at the speed of sound through steel (or whatever they're made of). And in fact, relativity sets an upper limit on rigidity, because the speed of sound can't be faster than c. (To take an 1800's view, c is the speed of sound in aether.)
To those of you who think signals in a wire travel faster than c, you're simply wrong. The signal velocity will always be less than c. This does not preclude measuring the speed of light with electrical equipment, you just have to be a bit more careful to take other delays into account. There are cases where the phase velocity could be higher than c, but that doesn't allow you to transmit information or energy that fast.
If you were able to transmit information faster than light, then to an observer moving past you sufficiently quickly, you would be transmitting information back in time. That's why we're pretty sure it's impossible.
As you approach the escape velocity, the period of the orbit will increase without bound.
In a lightning storm you have all sorts of crazy electrostatic fields, which could cause the strange motions and floating of ball lightning. Remember, these balls are lightweight.
I would argue that those people haven't made an informed decision about whether they want DRM, they just don't care. Since they've (almost) never been offered legal downloads without DRM, we don't really know which they'd choose.
I wouldn't want regulation prohibiting DRM. But I am strongly against the current laws that give them legal backing, which say breaking DRM is illegal even if you were allowed to make that copy. And I wouldn't be opposed to a law saying you can't have it both ways, that is, DRM or copyright, pick one.
It's OK, he's really just a creepy but scientifically-inclined midget.
The pirate is (potentially) hurting the middleman and the artist. The middleman is retaliating against everyone.
The only reason FairPlay JustWorks for consumers is because it doesn't work for the RIAA, who are really annoyed that it lets you burn CDs. And with FairPlay you're living on borrowed time - at any point, the RIAA could force Apple to revoke this and other "rights" retroactively, and there'd be no legal way for you to keep what "rights" you (thought you) paid for. So it works only because people either don't know or don't care about these risks.
Letting the free market decide is a bit dangerous here, because in the popular* music industry, there are not multiple independent producers, there is an oligopoly. (* I'm ignoring the independent music scene, because it will still be quite a while before they will be able to compete with the RIAA's marketing machine.)
Well actually, we are the entire music market, and we have decided we don't want DRM. The only reason that's irrelevant is because DRM is not being sold to us by the music industry, it's being sold to the music industry by the computer industry.
It is actually a practical impossibility to design such a DRM scheme. If I were to give you a 5 1/2" floppy right now, could you extract the data? Probably half of us could not, even if allowed hours to root through our attic for dusty old equipment. But with floppies, we have the advantage of knowing the format, and we're not at the mercy of some long-defunct website to give us decryption keys.
Copyright protection currently lasts so long that if content were to survive until it enters the public domain, it would need to be format-shifted ten or fifteen times. But the whole point of DRM is to preclude format-shifting, since that's indistinguishable from illegal copying. Tell you what: in 70+(life of author)+(RIAA campaign donations/$100M) years, if you can successfully and legally give me a copy of some 2007-vintage DRM-encumbered music, I'll eat my hat.
"burst"
The reason they're particular about the polarity is that the wet paper is not the dielectric, it's an electrode. An aluminum oxide coating on one of the sheets of foil is the dielectric. This is very thin, which is why it works so well. When the current flows the right way, the electrolyte maintains the coating, but when current flows the other way, it eats it away.
Well, I don't know about network limits, if any. Vista Home Basic lacks Aero, the 3D display manager, and Media Center, a MythTV knockoff; both of which are present in Home Premium. Above that is Ultimate, which also has the features of the business systems, plus some unspecified downloadable addons.
How many Libraries of Congress is that?
Firefox becoming popular is one of the best things that could have happened for Linux. If IE were the only browser in Windows, then Firefox would be unfamiliar to users, and more websites would be IE-only. Now, if someone wants to go to Linux, it's "Sweet, I can still use Firefox", instead of "So now I have to use Firefox, and I can't visit my bank's website?" If it's true that Linux adoption has slowed, it's more likely because the operating system is now less important than the browser, so there's less reason to use the better OS instead of the one you already have.
Even if artificially restricting software to Linux would be good for Linux's popularity, I don't think it should be done. Microsoft doesn't port their software to Linux because they're greedy bastards. Isn't open source supposed to be above that?
As one of the few people who doesn't get confused and scared and curl up in a fetal position and cry if a control panel has too many options, I say, screw those people who do. Let them use Windows or Apple or Gnome, if they're so bent on catering to those people. But in 20 years they'll all be dead, just like the idiots who can't program their VCRs are dying off now. In the meantime, can there please be at least a little software that isn't designed for the lowest common denominator?
For $110 you can get an OEM version of XP Media Center Edition with free upgrade to Vista Home Premium. (at least you could a few weeks ago, not sure when the deadlines are).
Interestingly enough, with unlimited goods such as copies of existing data, it's the reverse: if left to their own devices, people will excercise their right to trade freely with one another, and the only way to enforce Capitalism is at the point of a gun.