Do you also hate it when proprietary vendors add free functionality to their systems and wipe out companies that use to sell that functionality? Or when they use a proprietary undocmented protocol? Or when they use an open protocol with their own extensions? Or when they document their own document standard and submit it to a standard body?
Actually moderation is sort of like a Trolling Credit system. So if you troll or defy the groupthink you get modded down and eventually end up posting at -1 if your registered or get IP blocked if you're an AC.
But if you post a few informative comments, i.e. comments that more people like than dislike you earn karma. You can then spend it on trolling or arguing with conventional wisdom. Or in Carbon Credit terms you get to keep trolling so long as you post the odd Trolling Credit comment which is not completely obnoxious. You can also claim you're Trolling Neutral so long as your karma isn't dropping.
Of course some people are so irritating they manage to get modded down for agreeing with groupthink, like the dreaded twitter sockpuppets.
The downside is that he seems to have used Google translate to translate his document into English. I hexdumped some exFAT volumes and he seems to be correct about what the fields in the boot sector and directory entries mean.
Executive summary. exFAT has, at least when Vista formats a disk, one FAT that is basically the same as FAT32 except that all 32 bits of the entries are used rather than the upper 4 bits being reserved.
The boot sector layout is new and the main difference that the volume size in sectors is now a 64 bit entry. Cluster size is a byte allowing upto 2^256 sectors per cluster, though the Microsoft implementations have a limit of 32MB.
So you could have 2^32 clusters, upto 32MB each. For a reasonable cluster size of 64KB you can have 2^48 bytes or so sized filesystems.
Directory entries have a new layout with no short filenames. The file size is 64 bit, to allow files bigger than 4GB, which is the most pressing limitation with FAT32. There are also special nameless files. One is a bitmap of free clusters, the other is a table to convert Unicode characters to uppercase, since this is part of the filename hashing.
Adding a bitmap is to speed up free space. Finding free space in FAT requires reading the FAT until you find a free cluster. Each fat entry is 32 bits, and the FAT would grow to 16GB on a 2^32 cluster volume. Adding a bitmap with one bit per cluster makes the worst case read a mere 512MB, perhaps 10 seconds or so on a modern drive. Of course the normal case is that you search from the last cluster allocated and find a free cluster much quicker than this. In fact you could cache the bitmap and most likely you find a sector in the same cache line that you found the last one. With a smaller device of course, the bitmap will be smaller too. If you were really feeling adventurous you could compress the bitmap into extents of free clusters and use those to allocate free space instantly most of the time.
So it's more or less FAT32 with the legacy stuff removed, volume size in sectors and file size in bytes fields widened from 32 to 64 bits and a cluster allocation bitmap ( Tanaka-san calls this KURASUTABITTOMAPPU, a sort of Japanesified version of cluster bitmap ) added to speed up free space searches. You can have volumes of upto 2^32 clusters or 2^64 sectors and files of upto 2^64 bytes.
Windows CE supports a transactional version of exFAT. I'd guess this has two FATs and switches between them to get transaction safety.
Incidentally, if this ends up part of something like SDXC it will be quite cheap to license, so I'd expect consumer electronics devices that need to support big files to start to use it as well as or even instead of FAT32. It wouldn't be hard to write a driver that supports both. The Microsoft exFAT driver in Vista works fine on XP. I'd guess someone will write a Linux driver once the reverse engineered internals become well known. It's not clear what patents Microsoft have on this. My guess is that they won't sue end users for using it, but they may approach Linux vendors like they did with Novell.
For better or for worse the FDA regulates medicine in the US. They decided that orgone energy was bullshit and that it was being advertised as a medical treatment and banned it.
Actually I don't have a problem with this. You can sell what you want, but if you want to claim it has medical benefits you need to get it FDA approved, which implies a bunch of tests. The FDA regulates these.
I'm sure that before they made those claims, they consulted all the sages they could find in yellow pages.
No way man, experts and sages have all been paid off by Big WiFi.
Incidentally, does anyone else find it ironic when hippies loudly proclaim that pot is harmless and then show signs of serious paranoia when they explain that it is only illegal because of some complicated conspiracy?
Even though I thought it was a stupid idea, it did have one redeeming point. It would have turned a small segment of the population in those countries into producers instead of keeping them as consumers.
When they decided to support Windows, that killed the only positive point I could see in it. They would be kept as consumers.
That's nonsense. As the inimitable Linux Hater put it
http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/2008/05/olpc-sees-light.html Hmm, so some governments looked at the problem and thought: "Well we'd like to give computers to our children, so lets go with a solution that teaches them a platform that nobody else uses, and one that teaches them skills that they can use to produce volunteer software projects for free. Being able to participate in open software projects on their spare time will make their other problems like hunger, poverty, and disease seem insignificant. That sounds like a great idea!"
A few minutes later, after that good African Ganja wore off.. "Wait. What the fuck. This is a terrible idea! Of the small percentage of children who will even learn to turn these things on, we want them to learn Windows, and make us the CA$H MONEY."
You can't blame them. Look how much the money the Microsoft ecosystem makes. Not just for MS, but for all the other companies involved. The Linux ecosystem? Please. If you're going for your first piece of the pie, you're gonna go for the bigger pie.
Besides how many of these kids are going to become programmers anyway? Probably like 0.0001%. But you know, Ubuntu needs another person to work on their shit for free, so it's worth it right? Nevermind teaching the 99.9999% of the other kids about computer skills that matter.
Of course the best way to turn people from consumers into producers would have been to actually set up a laptop factory in the third world. Look at how the Taiwanese have been turned from consumers into producers by churning out laptops.
Face it a bunch of nerds in the first world built a laptop with no clue about what kids in the third world want or need. That's the real problem with socialized programs - they give too much power to the people that run them and none to the people that are supposed to benefit.
Well nothing. If the OLPC project had managed to ship laptops to the Nigerian Government which could be sold at a higher market price in the US, it's fair to assume we'd all be getting spammed with people offering to sell them to us and seeing them turn up on eBay.
Negroponte was asked about this and said that the laptop was green and obviously educational and people other than children would be ashamed to be seen with them since they were obviously stolen. I know people who grew up in Nigeria and they laughed their asses off at this. The main reason most Nigerians are poor is because the elite don't feel ashamed about corruption.
Congratulations, you crushed a competitor and, at the same time, destroyed hope for millions of needy people.
Even if you disagree that third world governments buying these laptops would have done anything, at least it might have gotten them interested in greater investment in education.. it might have gotten them thinking that more of the first world actually gives a shit.
All those millions of needy people would be better off making cheap laptops and exporting them to the first world in return for an above average (for their country) wage. That's how Taiwan, South Korea and Japan got rich. And once industry arrives people will compete to get better jobs and companies will try to climb up the supply chain to high skill, higher paid business models.
In fact for laptops there is a whole scale from people assembling things for $1 a day up to designers making more than $1 per minute. Once people see that, they'll start to value education.
If you want to make the third world rich, you're better off building stuff there. Charity and aid create a dependency culture and prop up a corrupt and parasitic elite and have almost no effect on development.
Depending on people 'giving a shit' or caring about strangers is a waste of time because on average they don't. The one thing you can rely on is their desire to get rich and make sure their children start off higher up the food chain than they did. If you're a official in a kleptocratic government, the best way to do this is to embezzle aid money, and resell charity laptops on eBay. If you're a worker in a laptop factory they best way to do this is to spend your wages on education for your kids. And if you own the laptop factory, the best way to do this is to move up the supply chain.
Alan Sugar would have been hilarious in this project. When he bought Sinclair they were working on a ridiculously half assed flat CRT display for a project called Pandora. Guy Kewney had a demo and said that "You put your chin on a leather chinrest and refocused your eyes and after a few seconds you could see four lines of twenty green characters floating eerily in the infinite distance". Alan Sugar attended a demonstration too, and after than Sinclair stopped mentioning the project. Kewney asked him and the converation went like this
GK: "Do you plan to use the technology in the Pandora project commercially?" AS: "Have you seen it?" GK: "Yes" AS: "Well then."
Pandora was a classic Sinclairism really. LCDs were expensive so they tried to find a cheaper alternative but they didn't have the resources, or the industrialisation skills to make it work. By the time they burned through lots of funds on research, LCDs were cheaper and far outperformed their quirky bent CRT design. Mind you I bet the Japanese spent far more getting LCDs to that point.
Actually it turns out that they didn't invent the bent CRT, and weren't the only company trying to commercialise it.
http://www.thevalvepage.com/tv/sinclair/ftv1/ftv1.htm Although Sinclair seems to get credited for the invention of the unusual C.R.T., it was in fact the brain child of Doctor D. Gabor in the mid 1950's (follow this link for a period magazine article). Yet having spent 6 years developing the set, Sinclair was actually pipped to the post by a similar sideways tube design from Sony. However the writing was on the wall for this type of C.R.T. ; in 1977, when sSinclair lauched their first pocket TV (the MTV1) Hitachi displayed a prototype television that was the first to use a new display technology, namely LCD. Then in the same year as this FTV1 model was lauched Casio (and possibly Seiko) launched the first production televisions utilising an LCD screen.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/09/national/nationalspecial/09military.html?pagewanted=print WASHINGTON, Sept. 8 - As New Orleans descended into chaos last week and Louisiana's governor asked for 40,000 soldiers, President Bush's senior advisers debated whether the president should speed the arrival of active-duty troops by seizing control of the hurricane relief mission from the governor.
For reasons of practicality and politics, officials at the Justice Department and the Pentagon, and then at the White House, decided not to urge Mr. Bush to take command of the effort. Instead, the Washington officials decided to rely on the growing number of National Guard personnel flowing into Louisiana, who were under Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco's control.
The debate began after officials realized that Hurricane Katrina had exposed a critical flaw in the national disaster response plans created after the Sept. 11 attacks. According to the administration's senior domestic security officials, the plan failed to recognize that local police, fire and medical personnel might be incapacitated.
As criticism of the response to Hurricane Katrina has mounted, one of the most pointed questions has been why more troops were not available more quickly to restore order and offer aid. Interviews with officials in Washington and Louisiana show that as the situation grew worse, they were wrangling with questions of federal/state authority, weighing the realities of military logistics and perhaps talking past each other in the crisis.
To seize control of the mission, Mr. Bush would have had to invoke the Insurrection Act, which allows the president in times of unrest to command active-duty forces into the states to perform law enforcement duties. But decision makers in Washington felt certain that Ms. Blanco would have resisted surrendering control, as Bush administration officials believe would have been required to deploy active-duty combat forces before law and order had been re-established.
While combat troops can conduct relief missions without the legal authority of the Insurrection Act, Pentagon and military officials say that no active-duty forces could have been sent into the chaos of New Orleans on Wednesday or Thursday without confronting law-and-order challenges.
But just as important to the administration were worries about the message that would have been sent by a president ousting a Southern governor of another party from command of her National Guard, according to administration, Pentagon and Justice Department officials.
So Bush's advisers clearly thought Blanco was incompetent and discussed using the Insurrection Act to send Federal troops and decided against it. This was in 2005. In 2006 they modified the Insurrection Act.
The original wording of the Act required the conditions as worded in Paragraph (2), above, to be met as the result of
insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy
The new wording of the Act, as amended, still requires the same conditions as worded in Paragraph (2), above, but those conditions could, after the changes, also be a result of
natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition
and only if
domestic violence has occurred to such an extent that the constituted authorities of the State or possession are incapable of maintaining public order.
I think it's a test to see how many slashdotters can spot satire. I must say they seem to be doing better than I expected. Presumably if the satire detection had been sufficiently low Taco would have announced that Slashdot would no longer be available as a website, and instead we would have to pay money to move to a commune in Waco to get the stories read to us.
Dialing a phone with a rotary wheel will actually be a whole lot easier in my mind than typing an email with a whole wheel. I don't see how this process is faster than me typing exactly what I want. Imagine trying to program with that thing. Predictive text will not be any help with odd variables names and punctuation marks all over the place. This to me is definitely overkill.
It's quick than you think. Suppose you wanted to type Whoosh! to inform someone that they had missed a joke. Once you enter Wh you can just select Whoosh! from the dropdown list.
I am repeating this ad nauseum but it's really the best, most effective solution.
1. Stop buying new music 2. Stop going to shows of new acts 3. Don't "pirate"[sic] music, just KILL the demand. P2P only lends credence, however tenuous, that they are "losing" money due to "theft"[sic]. 4. Don't listen to top 40 radio 5. Did I mention stop uploading/downloading music on P2P networks? Boycott the big labels.
Bankrupt the RIAA(or whatever it's called in your respective country) members. Then, sanity will be restored to copyright.
Oh, in case you think your favorite label is an indie, remember this family tree - it's a little out of date but you'll see that a lot of "indie" labels you like, aren't! Check it out:
Actually most people over about 35 tend to do these things by default. The music that gets hyped, mass marketed and pirated is basically ephemera anyway - it is hyped ruthless and sells a vast number of copies for a few months and then disappears completely. It's the cultural equivalent of pumping and dumping some worthless stock.
I suspect DRM only makes sense for pump'n'dump media. The point of it, and legal threats to sharers is to delay the time when it is available for free on P2P networks and try to intimidate people into buying rather than pirating. If you expect to sell a lot of copies for a few months and then have it disappear, the more time it is unavailable on P2P the better.
I read some article on Gamasutra about video game protection. It was cracked of course, but it took a few months. The vast majority of sales for the game took place in those few months, by the time it was cracked the pumping had stopped. Very few sales were likely by that point, so the publishers weren't concerned about the crack. In fact no one was even concerned about the game at that point.
If you ignoring the pumping, you won't even know what you're missing with things like this most of the time. As you get older you tend to be more immune to this sort of thing naturally.
If you use a GPL licensed C library then everything you link to it would be covered by the GPL. Even an LGPL'd library is problematic e.g.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Lesser_General_Public_License#Differences_from_the_GPL The main difference between the GPL and the LGPL is that the latter can be linked to (in the case of a library, 'used by') a non-(L)GPLed program, which may be free software or proprietary software.[1] This non-(L)GPLed program can then be distributed under any chosen terms if it is not a derivative work. If it is a derivative work, then the terms must allow "modification for the customer's own use and reverse engineering for debugging such modifications." Whether a work that uses an LGPL program is a derivative work or not is a legal issue. A standalone executable that dynamically links to a library is generally accepted as not being a derivative work. It would be considered a "work that uses the library" and paragraph 5 of the LGPL applies. A program that contains no derivative of any portion of the Library, but is designed to work with the Library by being compiled or linked with it, is called a "work that uses the Library". Such a work, in isolation, is not a derivative work of the Library, and therefore falls outside the scope of this License.
Essentially, it must be possible for the software to be linked with a newer version of the LGPL-covered program. The most commonly used method for doing so is to use "a suitable shared library mechanism for linking". Alternatively, a statically linked library is allowed if either source code or linkable object files are provided.
One feature of the LGPL is that one can convert any LGPLed piece of software into a GPLed piece of software (section 3 of the license). This feature is useful for direct reuse of LGPLed code in GPLed libraries and applications, or if one wants to create a version of the code that software companies cannot use in proprietary software products.
There are two issues here - whether your embedded system image consisting of your code and the LGPL code is a "derivative work" and how you plan to allow end users to update the library.
Basically using this sort of code in an embedded system where you don't have the rights to release all of the source code is a bit unwise.
The two cases are different though. If Lotus won't run on Dos version X+1, people will stick with Dos version X. I.e. Microsoft lose money. It's in their interests to make sure that Lotus works on each new Dos.
It would have been hard to get Windows to run properly on any Dos except MS Dos given the amount of patching Windows needed to do to Dos to work - Windows patched both the Dos code and data segments, neither of which are publically documented and both of which were very different in DR Dos. And the net result of all that work would be Microsoft would lose money because people would run Windows on DR Dos rather than MS Dos.
Still in the end they disabled the AARD code so that DR could make DR Dos compatible. From what I heard they did this by faking version checks, setting up a victim data segment that looked like MS Dos and trying to emulate the changes applications made in that victim data segment in the real DR Dos data segment. This was obviously a bit brittle, and you'd be crazy to run Windows on anything but MS Dos if you knew how much patching it needed to do.
Those ships were armed to the teeth. The captain had dictatorial powers too, at least when they were away from base. The Federation probably didn't seem like the good guys to the less technologically advanced races they encountered. Of course according to the TV series they seem benign, but maybe that is just because the Captain of the ship chucked anyone who told the truth about his murderous piracy out of the airlock, so only hagiographic accounts remained.
Incidentally, I'm fully in favour of this Obama move. Those alien untermenschen won't know what hit 'em when the Earth Federation comes calling for slaves (notice the number of aliens working in menial jobs in Trek?), booty and lebensraum.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, you'd seem cooler if you signed your posts
Da Naris.
Who da Naris? You da Naris!
Do you also hate it when proprietary vendors add free functionality to their systems and wipe out companies that use to sell that functionality? Or when they use a proprietary undocmented protocol? Or when they use an open protocol with their own extensions? Or when they document their own document standard and submit it to a standard body?
Actually moderation is sort of like a Trolling Credit system. So if you troll or defy the groupthink you get modded down and eventually end up posting at -1 if your registered or get IP blocked if you're an AC.
But if you post a few informative comments, i.e. comments that more people like than dislike you earn karma. You can then spend it on trolling or arguing with conventional wisdom. Or in Carbon Credit terms you get to keep trolling so long as you post the odd Trolling Credit comment which is not completely obnoxious. You can also claim you're Trolling Neutral so long as your karma isn't dropping.
Of course some people are so irritating they manage to get modded down for agreeing with groupthink, like the dreaded twitter sockpuppets.
exFAT has been reverse engineered by some Japanese guy here
http://bbs.znpc.net/viewthread.php?tid=5366&page=1#pid33197
The downside is that he seems to have used Google translate to translate his document into English. I hexdumped some exFAT volumes and he seems to be correct about what the fields in the boot sector and directory entries mean.
Executive summary. exFAT has, at least when Vista formats a disk, one FAT that is basically the same as FAT32 except that all 32 bits of the entries are used rather than the upper 4 bits being reserved.
The boot sector layout is new and the main difference that the volume size in sectors is now a 64 bit entry. Cluster size is a byte allowing upto 2^256 sectors per cluster, though the Microsoft implementations have a limit of 32MB.
So you could have 2^32 clusters, upto 32MB each. For a reasonable cluster size of 64KB you can have 2^48 bytes or so sized filesystems.
Directory entries have a new layout with no short filenames. The file size is 64 bit, to allow files bigger than 4GB, which is the most pressing limitation with FAT32. There are also special nameless files. One is a bitmap of free clusters, the other is a table to convert Unicode characters to uppercase, since this is part of the filename hashing.
Adding a bitmap is to speed up free space. Finding free space in FAT requires reading the FAT until you find a free cluster. Each fat entry is 32 bits, and the FAT would grow to 16GB on a 2^32 cluster volume. Adding a bitmap with one bit per cluster makes the worst case read a mere 512MB, perhaps 10 seconds or so on a modern drive. Of course the normal case is that you search from the last cluster allocated and find a free cluster much quicker than this. In fact you could cache the bitmap and most likely you find a sector in the same cache line that you found the last one. With a smaller device of course, the bitmap will be smaller too. If you were really feeling adventurous you could compress the bitmap into extents of free clusters and use those to allocate free space instantly most of the time.
So it's more or less FAT32 with the legacy stuff removed, volume size in sectors and file size in bytes fields widened from 32 to 64 bits and a cluster allocation bitmap ( Tanaka-san calls this KURASUTABITTOMAPPU, a sort of Japanesified version of cluster bitmap ) added to speed up free space searches. You can have volumes of upto 2^32 clusters or 2^64 sectors and files of upto 2^64 bytes.
Windows CE supports a transactional version of exFAT. I'd guess this has two FATs and switches between them to get transaction safety.
Incidentally, if this ends up part of something like SDXC it will be quite cheap to license, so I'd expect consumer electronics devices that need to support big files to start to use it as well as or even instead of FAT32. It wouldn't be hard to write a driver that supports both. The Microsoft exFAT driver in Vista works fine on XP. I'd guess someone will write a Linux driver once the reverse engineered internals become well known. It's not clear what patents Microsoft have on this. My guess is that they won't sue end users for using it, but they may approach Linux vendors like they did with Novell.
Free third party tools can format drives upto 2TB
http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/fat32format.htm
For better or for worse the FDA regulates medicine in the US. They decided that orgone energy was bullshit and that it was being advertised as a medical treatment and banned it.
Actually I don't have a problem with this. You can sell what you want, but if you want to claim it has medical benefits you need to get it FDA approved, which implies a bunch of tests. The FDA regulates these.
Those were Ogrons.
I'm sure that before they made those claims, they consulted all the sages they could find in yellow pages.
No way man, experts and sages have all been paid off by Big WiFi.
Incidentally, does anyone else find it ironic when hippies loudly proclaim that pot is harmless and then show signs of serious paranoia when they explain that it is only illegal because of some complicated conspiracy?
Even though I thought it was a stupid idea, it did have one redeeming point. It would have turned a small segment of the population in those countries into producers instead of keeping them as consumers.
When they decided to support Windows, that killed the only positive point I could see in it. They would be kept as consumers.
That's nonsense. As the inimitable Linux Hater put it
http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/2008/05/olpc-sees-light.html
Hmm, so some governments looked at the problem and thought: "Well we'd like to give computers to our children, so lets go with a solution that teaches them a platform that nobody else uses, and one that teaches them skills that they can use to produce volunteer software projects for free. Being able to participate in open software projects on their spare time will make their other problems like hunger, poverty, and disease seem insignificant. That sounds like a great idea!"
A few minutes later, after that good African Ganja wore off.. "Wait. What the fuck. This is a terrible idea! Of the small percentage of children who will even learn to turn these things on, we want them to learn Windows, and make us the CA$H MONEY."
You can't blame them. Look how much the money the Microsoft ecosystem makes. Not just for MS, but for all the other companies involved. The Linux ecosystem? Please. If you're going for your first piece of the pie, you're gonna go for the bigger pie.
Besides how many of these kids are going to become programmers anyway? Probably like 0.0001%. But you know, Ubuntu needs another person to work on their shit for free, so it's worth it right? Nevermind teaching the 99.9999% of the other kids about computer skills that matter.
Of course the best way to turn people from consumers into producers would have been to actually set up a laptop factory in the third world. Look at how the Taiwanese have been turned from consumers into producers by churning out laptops.
Face it a bunch of nerds in the first world built a laptop with no clue about what kids in the third world want or need. That's the real problem with socialized programs - they give too much power to the people that run them and none to the people that are supposed to benefit.
Well nothing. If the OLPC project had managed to ship laptops to the Nigerian Government which could be sold at a higher market price in the US, it's fair to assume we'd all be getting spammed with people offering to sell them to us and seeing them turn up on eBay.
Negroponte was asked about this and said that the laptop was green and obviously educational and people other than children would be ashamed to be seen with them since they were obviously stolen. I know people who grew up in Nigeria and they laughed their asses off at this. The main reason most Nigerians are poor is because the elite don't feel ashamed about corruption.
Congratulations, you crushed a competitor and, at the same time, destroyed hope for millions of needy people.
Even if you disagree that third world governments buying these laptops would have done anything, at least it might have gotten them interested in greater investment in education.. it might have gotten them thinking that more of the first world actually gives a shit.
All those millions of needy people would be better off making cheap laptops and exporting them to the first world in return for an above average (for their country) wage. That's how Taiwan, South Korea and Japan got rich. And once industry arrives people will compete to get better jobs and companies will try to climb up the supply chain to high skill, higher paid business models.
In fact for laptops there is a whole scale from people assembling things for $1 a day up to designers making more than $1 per minute. Once people see that, they'll start to value education.
If you want to make the third world rich, you're better off building stuff there. Charity and aid create a dependency culture and prop up a corrupt and parasitic elite and have almost no effect on development.
Depending on people 'giving a shit' or caring about strangers is a waste of time because on average they don't. The one thing you can rely on is their desire to get rich and make sure their children start off higher up the food chain than they did. If you're a official in a kleptocratic government, the best way to do this is to embezzle aid money, and resell charity laptops on eBay. If you're a worker in a laptop factory they best way to do this is to spend your wages on education for your kids. And if you own the laptop factory, the best way to do this is to move up the supply chain.
Alan Sugar would have been hilarious in this project. When he bought Sinclair they were working on a ridiculously half assed flat CRT display for a project called Pandora. Guy Kewney had a demo and said that "You put your chin on a leather chinrest and refocused your eyes and after a few seconds you could see four lines of twenty green characters floating eerily in the infinite distance". Alan Sugar attended a demonstration too, and after than Sinclair stopped mentioning the project. Kewney asked him and the converation went like this
GK: "Do you plan to use the technology in the Pandora project commercially?"
AS: "Have you seen it?"
GK: "Yes"
AS: "Well then."
Pandora was a classic Sinclairism really. LCDs were expensive so they tried to find a cheaper alternative but they didn't have the resources, or the industrialisation skills to make it work. By the time they burned through lots of funds on research, LCDs were cheaper and far outperformed their quirky bent CRT design. Mind you I bet the Japanese spent far more getting LCDs to that point.
Actually it turns out that they didn't invent the bent CRT, and weren't the only company trying to commercialise it.
http://www.thevalvepage.com/tv/sinclair/ftv1/ftv1.htm
Although Sinclair seems to get credited for the invention of the unusual C.R.T., it was in fact the brain child of Doctor D. Gabor in the mid 1950's (follow this link for a period magazine article). Yet having spent 6 years developing the set, Sinclair was actually pipped to the post by a similar sideways tube design from Sony. However the writing was on the wall for this type of C.R.T. ; in 1977, when sSinclair lauched their first pocket TV (the MTV1) Hitachi displayed a prototype television that was the first to use a new display technology, namely LCD. Then in the same year as this FTV1 model was lauched Casio (and possibly Seiko) launched the first production televisions utilising an LCD screen.
That's not the lesson here. If you move away from the One True OS you will lose your job, even if you change your mind later on.
Apostasy is not something that is forgiven upon recantation.
Hmm, it was an interesting situation
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/09/national/nationalspecial/09military.html?pagewanted=print
WASHINGTON, Sept. 8 - As New Orleans descended into chaos last week and Louisiana's governor asked for 40,000 soldiers, President Bush's senior advisers debated whether the president should speed the arrival of active-duty troops by seizing control of the hurricane relief mission from the governor.
For reasons of practicality and politics, officials at the Justice Department and the Pentagon, and then at the White House, decided not to urge Mr. Bush to take command of the effort. Instead, the Washington officials decided to rely on the growing number of National Guard personnel flowing into Louisiana, who were under Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco's control.
The debate began after officials realized that Hurricane Katrina had exposed a critical flaw in the national disaster response plans created after the Sept. 11 attacks. According to the administration's senior domestic security officials, the plan failed to recognize that local police, fire and medical personnel might be incapacitated.
As criticism of the response to Hurricane Katrina has mounted, one of the most pointed questions has been why more troops were not available more quickly to restore order and offer aid. Interviews with officials in Washington and Louisiana show that as the situation grew worse, they were wrangling with questions of federal/state authority, weighing the realities of military logistics and perhaps talking past each other in the crisis.
To seize control of the mission, Mr. Bush would have had to invoke the Insurrection Act, which allows the president in times of unrest to command active-duty forces into the states to perform law enforcement duties. But decision makers in Washington felt certain that Ms. Blanco would have resisted surrendering control, as Bush administration officials believe would have been required to deploy active-duty combat forces before law and order had been re-established.
While combat troops can conduct relief missions without the legal authority of the Insurrection Act, Pentagon and military officials say that no active-duty forces could have been sent into the chaos of New Orleans on Wednesday or Thursday without confronting law-and-order challenges.
But just as important to the administration were worries about the message that would have been sent by a president ousting a Southern governor of another party from command of her National Guard, according to administration, Pentagon and Justice Department officials.
So Bush's advisers clearly thought Blanco was incompetent and discussed using the Insurrection Act to send Federal troops and decided against it. This was in 2005. In 2006 they modified the Insurrection Act.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurrection_Act#Differences_between_old_and_new_wording
Differences between old and new wording
The original wording of the Act required the conditions as worded in Paragraph (2), above, to be met as the result of
insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy
The new wording of the Act, as amended, still requires the same conditions as worded in Paragraph (2), above, but those conditions could, after the changes, also be a result of
natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition
and only if
domestic violence has occurred to such an extent that the constituted authorities of the State or possession are incapable of maintaining public order.
They should make it in 3D, then it would feel like you were falling into a bottomless pit of letters and punctuation.
Maybe you could turn it into a video game, Litratcha eHro.
I think it's a test to see how many slashdotters can spot satire. I must say they seem to be doing better than I expected. Presumably if the satire detection had been sufficiently low Taco would have announced that Slashdot would no longer be available as a website, and instead we would have to pay money to move to a commune in Waco to get the stories read to us.
Dialing a phone with a rotary wheel will actually be a whole lot easier in my mind than typing an email with a whole wheel. I don't see how this process is faster than me typing exactly what I want. Imagine trying to program with that thing. Predictive text will not be any help with odd variables names and punctuation marks all over the place. This to me is definitely overkill.
It's quick than you think. Suppose you wanted to type Whoosh! to inform someone that they had missed a joke. Once you enter Wh you can just select Whoosh! from the dropdown list.
I like the way this has been modded Troll.
-1 Inconvenient Truth would be more honest.
I can haz Linuxes?
Memez are in ur brainz, sappin ur intelligences.
I am repeating this ad nauseum but it's really the best, most effective solution.
1. Stop buying new music
2. Stop going to shows of new acts
3. Don't "pirate"[sic] music, just KILL the demand. P2P only lends credence, however tenuous, that they are "losing" money due to "theft"[sic].
4. Don't listen to top 40 radio
5. Did I mention stop uploading/downloading music on P2P networks? Boycott the big labels.
Bankrupt the RIAA(or whatever it's called in your respective country) members. Then, sanity will be restored to copyright.
Oh, in case you think your favorite label is an indie, remember this family tree - it's a little out of date but you'll see that a lot of "indie" labels you like, aren't! Check it out:
http://www.arancidamoeba.com/mrr/whoownswho2.html
Actually most people over about 35 tend to do these things by default. The music that gets hyped, mass marketed and pirated is basically ephemera anyway - it is hyped ruthless and sells a vast number of copies for a few months and then disappears completely. It's the cultural equivalent of pumping and dumping some worthless stock.
I suspect DRM only makes sense for pump'n'dump media. The point of it, and legal threats to sharers is to delay the time when it is available for free on P2P networks and try to intimidate people into buying rather than pirating. If you expect to sell a lot of copies for a few months and then have it disappear, the more time it is unavailable on P2P the better.
I read some article on Gamasutra about video game protection. It was cracked of course, but it took a few months. The vast majority of sales for the game took place in those few months, by the time it was cracked the pumping had stopped. Very few sales were likely by that point, so the publishers weren't concerned about the crack. In fact no one was even concerned about the game at that point.
If you ignoring the pumping, you won't even know what you're missing with things like this most of the time. As you get older you tend to be more immune to this sort of thing naturally.
All those are either GPL or LGPL.
If you use a GPL licensed C library then everything you link to it would be covered by the GPL. Even an LGPL'd library is problematic e.g.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Lesser_General_Public_License#Differences_from_the_GPL
The main difference between the GPL and the LGPL is that the latter can be linked to (in the case of a library, 'used by') a non-(L)GPLed program, which may be free software or proprietary software.[1] This non-(L)GPLed program can then be distributed under any chosen terms if it is not a derivative work. If it is a derivative work, then the terms must allow "modification for the customer's own use and reverse engineering for debugging such modifications." Whether a work that uses an LGPL program is a derivative work or not is a legal issue. A standalone executable that dynamically links to a library is generally accepted as not being a derivative work. It would be considered a "work that uses the library" and paragraph 5 of the LGPL applies.
A program that contains no derivative of any portion of the Library, but is designed to work with the Library by being compiled or linked with it, is called a "work that uses the Library". Such a work, in isolation, is not a derivative work of the Library, and therefore falls outside the scope of this License.
Essentially, it must be possible for the software to be linked with a newer version of the LGPL-covered program. The most commonly used method for doing so is to use "a suitable shared library mechanism for linking". Alternatively, a statically linked library is allowed if either source code or linkable object files are provided.
One feature of the LGPL is that one can convert any LGPLed piece of software into a GPLed piece of software (section 3 of the license). This feature is useful for direct reuse of LGPLed code in GPLed libraries and applications, or if one wants to create a version of the code that software companies cannot use in proprietary software products.
There are two issues here - whether your embedded system image consisting of your code and the LGPL code is a "derivative work" and how you plan to allow end users to update the library.
Basically using this sort of code in an embedded system where you don't have the rights to release all of the source code is a bit unwise.
The two cases are different though. If Lotus won't run on Dos version X+1, people will stick with Dos version X. I.e. Microsoft lose money. It's in their interests to make sure that Lotus works on each new Dos.
It would have been hard to get Windows to run properly on any Dos except MS Dos given the amount of patching Windows needed to do to Dos to work - Windows patched both the Dos code and data segments, neither of which are publically documented and both of which were very different in DR Dos. And the net result of all that work would be Microsoft would lose money because people would run Windows on DR Dos rather than MS Dos.
Still in the end they disabled the AARD code so that DR could make DR Dos compatible. From what I heard they did this by faking version checks, setting up a victim data segment that looked like MS Dos and trying to emulate the changes applications made in that victim data segment in the real DR Dos data segment. This was obviously a bit brittle, and you'd be crazy to run Windows on anything but MS Dos if you knew how much patching it needed to do.
Classed as science vessels? LOL!
Those ships were armed to the teeth. The captain had dictatorial powers too, at least when they were away from base. The Federation probably didn't seem like the good guys to the less technologically advanced races they encountered. Of course according to the TV series they seem benign, but maybe that is just because the Captain of the ship chucked anyone who told the truth about his murderous piracy out of the airlock, so only hagiographic accounts remained.
Incidentally, I'm fully in favour of this Obama move. Those alien untermenschen won't know what hit 'em when the Earth Federation comes calling for slaves (notice the number of aliens working in menial jobs in Trek?), booty and lebensraum.
Are those the lardasses that post +5 Insightful stuff or the lardasses that repost dumb racism trolls at -1 TouchTheMonolithMonkeyBoy ?
Do not feed the trolls.