That's real ingenuity and intelligence: not throwing money at getting incredible machines to do things for you, but working out what you can do with off-the-shelf stuff and designing a system around it. People have already spent a lot on big telescopes for extrasolar planet hunting.
According to this article the motion sensor is actually a three-axis accelerometer.
Indeed, "Sudden Motion Sensor" is something of a misnomer. In actual fact, it is as you say a battery of accelerometers, and the OS parks the heads when it reads near-zero (rather than very high) acceleration on all axes, i.e. freefall. The name makes it sound more like it activates on impact or something.
I really couldn't say way, but really attention-seekingly bad design almost always signifies a crackpot's website.
All-bold paragraphs, too many different fonts, unpleasant use of primary and secondary colours (especially in solid-colour backgrounds), and, even more than the rest, all-centred paragraphs are almost always found on the websites of conspiracy theorist, UFO nuts or new religions. Seriously, search for some conspiracy or new-age related terms on the web, and you'll see what I mean (this generally only applies to people trying to let people know what they think, not to people trying to make a profit).
Well, I *think* that USB "sound cards" are fairly standard, because I use a USB handset on Gentoo Linux, and the relevant kernel module is called snd-usb-audio or some such, not snd-usb-[manufacturer] or whatever.
It shouldn't be too hard to take an existing USB sound card with audio out and microphone ports and hack up a phone adaptor for it yourself - it would be a pretty cool project.
The article seems to have gone down before it could be mirrored, but there is an article on the same story here.
It doesn't really seem to explain WTF they think they mean, or what they've been taking. Is there somewhere where I can just download the Java source code, modify it, and distribute it, or do I need special permission and a weird license? That's not open source. If that's what they meant by their promise to open source everything, they lied.
The REALLY concerning thing is that on my machine, the majority of strings returned aren't self-referential.
I presume the strings you found got into your RAM (or, technically, swap) either through reading the sig in the first place or through typing the command (at least one llama for storing the HTML source, a few for parsing and displaying the page, a few for entering the whole command line, a few for the single command "grep llama", and some misc. stuff I can't quite understand, like your shell's history).
I chose llama because it's my personal metasyntactic variable (everybody has a file/variable name they use after foo/bar/etc., don't they?). On my machine, I find a truly terrifying number of llama references I really can't remember or imagine creating.
I've had "wordpad conversations". You use something like VNC, which gives you a window which shows the contents of another machine's display and forwards mouse/keystrokes. You type in Wordpad. You press return. The other person (actually sitting at the remote machine) types on the next line and presses return. Repeat. If you're both polite, you can manage not to type at the same time too often.
A population is considered protected if greater than a certain percentage of people are immune, because beyond that point an outbreak will tend to die out as people get better faster than others are infected. If the vaccine fails in 10% of people, it shouldn't really matter. However, worries (and tabloid scares) about side effects lead to too many people refusing the vaccine, which starts to put a lot of people in danger.
There is also the problem of people avoiding the vaccine because of the autism scare. I've heard teenagers refusing school MMR vaccinations because of it, because no one has explained to them that they are too old to "catch autism" from the jab.
I think he probably wants to look impressive. I'm sure Hu isn't giving Gates something for nothing because he thinks Gates is starving to death. I think he sees Gates as someone it would be useful to have on his side.
Recently, the Chinese government has talked about creating their own Linux distro, ostensibly because they were worried about an American firm controlling their IT infrastructure, but probably because controlling their own OS would give them more power over normal computer users (I'm not sure anyone would have been able to make them stick with the GPL). If he obliges Gates by enforcing Microsoft's copyright (across a country of 1 billion people, that's a pretty big present), you can bet Gates is gonna give them something in return.
And whatever it is isn't going to help normal Chinese citizens use computers to communicate about controversial topics.
Slashdot Mirror
That's real ingenuity and intelligence: not throwing money at getting incredible machines to do things for you, but working out what you can do with off-the-shelf stuff and designing a system around it. People have already spent a lot on big telescopes for extrasolar planet hunting.
KWord already does ODF!
I really couldn't say way, but really attention-seekingly bad design almost always signifies a crackpot's website.
All-bold paragraphs, too many different fonts, unpleasant use of primary and secondary colours (especially in solid-colour backgrounds), and, even more than the rest, all-centred paragraphs are almost always found on the websites of conspiracy theorist, UFO nuts or new religions. Seriously, search for some conspiracy or new-age related terms on the web, and you'll see what I mean (this generally only applies to people trying to let people know what they think, not to people trying to make a profit).
Never mind Perl, what about every networked OS available?
You don't get karma from Funny mods.
Well, I *think* that USB "sound cards" are fairly standard, because I use a USB handset on Gentoo Linux, and the relevant kernel module is called snd-usb-audio or some such, not snd-usb-[manufacturer] or whatever.
It shouldn't be too hard to take an existing USB sound card with audio out and microphone ports and hack up a phone adaptor for it yourself - it would be a pretty cool project.
That's the SDK. It's for developing Java applications. There isn't link on that page for the JRE, which would let you actually run Java apps.
Also, it seems to have an interesting license.
The article seems to have gone down before it could be mirrored, but there is an article on the same story here.
It doesn't really seem to explain WTF they think they mean, or what they've been taking. Is there somewhere where I can just download the Java source code, modify it, and distribute it, or do I need special permission and a weird license? That's not open source. If that's what they meant by their promise to open source everything, they lied.
Someone probably got confused and thought he was talking ironically about GNU Hurd, which is always funny.
Oh look, electronic equipment is faster and smaller than it used to be lololol!!!
FFS. This is front-page news?
The REALLY concerning thing is that on my machine, the majority of strings returned aren't self-referential.
I presume the strings you found got into your RAM (or, technically, swap) either through reading the sig in the first place or through typing the command (at least one llama for storing the HTML source, a few for parsing and displaying the page, a few for entering the whole command line, a few for the single command "grep llama", and some misc. stuff I can't quite understand, like your shell's history).
I chose llama because it's my personal metasyntactic variable (everybody has a file/variable name they use after foo/bar/etc., don't they?). On my machine, I find a truly terrifying number of llama references I really can't remember or imagine creating.
I'll adjust my grammar accordingly.
Now that I can't ask "how much salt" you have, I'll have to always ask "how many atoms of salt" you have.
I've had "wordpad conversations". You use something like VNC, which gives you a window which shows the contents of another machine's display and forwards mouse/keystrokes. You type in Wordpad. You press return. The other person (actually sitting at the remote machine) types on the next line and presses return. Repeat. If you're both polite, you can manage not to type at the same time too often.
The number of bugs. "Bug" is a countable noun, like "chair", not an uncountable noun, like "salt".
I really cannot think of a scarier idea than Microsoft working with the Union Aerospace Corporation.
Cheap, remotely controllable, and now programmable in real languages. Could these be used for cheap research into AI navigation?
Pressed submit too soon...
A population is considered protected if greater than a certain percentage of people are immune, because beyond that point an outbreak will tend to die out as people get better faster than others are infected. If the vaccine fails in 10% of people, it shouldn't really matter. However, worries (and tabloid scares) about side effects lead to too many people refusing the vaccine, which starts to put a lot of people in danger.
There is also the problem of people avoiding the vaccine because of the autism scare. I've heard teenagers refusing school MMR vaccinations because of it, because no one has explained to them that they are too old to "catch autism" from the jab.
Is that an upper-case "5" at the start of that sentence?
This is very interesting; can you provide a link?
A modification to the nucleus's repair mechanisms seems more likely than redundancy in every affected gene.
Agreed. Other than the music store, I'm almost sure that iTunes's features are actually a subset of amaroK's (yes, that includes iPod support).
And what about the discordian callender?
(Type ddate on most Linux boxes)
I think he probably wants to look impressive. I'm sure Hu isn't giving Gates something for nothing because he thinks Gates is starving to death. I think he sees Gates as someone it would be useful to have on his side.
Recently, the Chinese government has talked about creating their own Linux distro, ostensibly because they were worried about an American firm controlling their IT infrastructure, but probably because controlling their own OS would give them more power over normal computer users (I'm not sure anyone would have been able to make them stick with the GPL). If he obliges Gates by enforcing Microsoft's copyright (across a country of 1 billion people, that's a pretty big present), you can bet Gates is gonna give them something in return.
And whatever it is isn't going to help normal Chinese citizens use computers to communicate about controversial topics.