Most people listen to music while doing something else, such as driving, ironing, gardening, trolling slashdot, etc.
The best music to troll to is alternative rock like Laibach since everything they did was a troll to dim witted lefties. Most real punk rockers would appreciate the concept of trolling too - consider Sid Vicious in his Swastika T shirt. Sid probably didn't like the Nazis, he just wanted to trigger a debate on their alleged crimes. Post Dead Kennedies however punks have a simplistic worldview where the US is evil and its opponents are good. If you argue with any part of it, you must be evil.
Not coincidentally, this worldview is identical to the Bush supporters' worldview they pretend to hate but with all the signs reversed, a sort of ideological mirror image. This sort of music is therefore very bad to troll to, since it is just designed to agree with the prejudices of its fans, much like Fox News does for Republicans.
If I were flaming slashdot or driving however I'd go for Neanderthal, irony challenged Rap music. Or Post DK punk, something dumb and angry.
What happens if all the alternatives games have these terms? Or there are no alternative games?
And example would be banking in the UK. Even thóugh in theory there are four or five highstreet banks and you can change between them, few people do because most banks have the same terms. For example they all decided to charge for cash withdrawals from other banks machine within days of each other. Similarly, when charges for cashing cheques increase, the increase is done by all the banks simultaneously. So it's not cynical to say that a cartel is operating and the government should start to check for unconscionable terms. Actually, the banks seem to understand this. If you write to them and complain the back down, and every so often they will make some change which is outrageously expensive and then one of them will buckle under public pressure. And then of course all the others do, which is just more evidence of a cartel.
Now there's nothing except convenience stopping people using an offshore bank for example, but many of those are being bought up by high street banks or building societies.
Actually, in an efficient capitalist country like the UK or the US, it is almost inevitable that this sort of thing will develop. State of the art business is about state of the art contracts, and those are the ones which benefit you most. Even Adam Smith knew about this
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.
One of the things I liked about Sweden was that businesses have much less of a tendency towards unconscionable contract terms. But that's partly because it is a less capitalist place. It seems to me that you need capitalism but yout also need some cartel busting system of laws. Which the US seems to have, if this judgement is representative.
There's something very Orwellian about a system that grants people "Karma" and labels them "Insightful" or "Interesting" for agreeing with groupthink or moderating it up. Whereas if you disagree with groupthink you get labelled a Troll, irrespective of how good your argument is. And if you mod it up you get penalised in metamoderation. I should know, I've tested various posting and modding arguments from the plausible to the utterly ludicrous and the moderation is solely dependent on whether you back the popular side.
These legal stories are particularly obnoxious in that respect - there are heaps of comments which start with IANAL but end with a highly tenuous legal explanation of why legally their favoured side will win. If you argue for the popular side, you get modded up, and if you argue for the unpopular side you get modded down. Kind of ironic actually, whereas most slashdotters rightly despise American high school culture where popular=right regardless of intelligence, in practice there's no difference between that and slashdot.
The only possible way in which a EULA would be legal would be if it granted you some right that you didn't already have. The legal technicality that is used by software is that copying the program from the install media to your disk and then to RAM requires extra rights (not valid in all jurisdictions). For hardware, there is no such loophole. If you didn't agree to the contract before sale, then they can't enforce it afterwards.
They could do a Gateway Bios License which would be a copyright license like the GPL rather than an EULA. When you first boot the machine, it would pop up a box where you could scroll through the legalese using the keyboard and select OK or Cancel. Only after that would the hard disk boot sector be loaded. A flag would be set in CMOS after the first agreement so that you only do it once. If you select Cancel, the same screen would pop up until you clicked OK or returned the machine.
Since the Gateway Bios License is a copyright license rather than an EULA, if you don't agree to it you don't have the right to use the Bios under copyright law, much in the same way that you don't have the right to use GPL software unless you accept the terms of the GPL. Maybe the Bios should copy itself into Ram to make the a copyright license necessary for the end user.
Unless the Robson spec requires an NDA and custom IDE commands, then we'll hear lots of moaning about WinHardisks.
Hmm, Robson depends one something called ReadyDrive so the OS can hint to tha harddisk what should be cached -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReadyDrive#ReadyDrive ReadyDrive is a feature of Windows Vista that enables Windows Vista PCs equipped with a hybrid drive to boot up faster, resume from hibernation in less time, and preserve battery power. Hybrid hard drives are a new type of hard disk that integrates non-volatile flash memory with a traditional hard drive.
In June 2006, David Morgenstern wrote an article for eWeek suggesting that ReadyDrive might sacrifice data integrity for speed and battery savings.[2]
The drive-side functionality will be standardized in ATA-8
Looks like Linux will need to wait for the standard, unless Microsoft are feeling generous.
It would be pretty funny if MSI and all the other Taiwanese manufacturers all agreed at IDF that they wouldn't deploy Robson on the desktop for another year.
And then a bit later HULK SMASH! MSI start shipping Robson cache modules bundled with motherboards. That's the reason all the boards shipped with that funny connector on them marked "Factory test only, not a Robson connector".
What about dumb cellphones, I can garuantee that almost none of those would use a 32 bit chip, the almost is because invariably some products end up over-engineered.
ARM7TDMI is a tiny macrocell, even on something like a Nokia 5110 it doesn't take up too much space on the ASIC. Thumb code is pretty dense, and an Arm cell has good mips/watt.
There may be no crime perpetuated by the villagers themselves but what of visitors?
My Dad told me two stories about visitors to the village. In one, a large group of gypsies arrived and camped on one of the fields. They had lots of dogs running around, music playing, hordes of verminous children shouting and so on. The villagers watched them from inside their houses, and from inside the pub. After a while, some local emerged from the pub and gave the gypsies some friendly advice. There are lots of farms there, and farmers don't like to see dogs off the leash. The gypsies told him to f*ck off. He went back into the pub. Night fell, and everyone eventually went to sleep, even though the gypsies made a lot of noise late into the night.
When they woke up, the gypsies found all their dogs had been shot in the night. All the locals have shotguns, and some of them went hunting carrying them, walking past the gypsy encampment. The gypsies took the hint and left that day.
In the second, the locals told my parents that they before my parents bought a house there, people had seen them driving around, and thought it was suspicious. Someone had checked up on their license plate and other people had talked to them. Eventually word spread that they were basically civilised people planning to move there. Then the surveillance stopped.
So there's a kind of authentication process. If you show some respect, all is ok. But if the gypsies hadn't of taken the hint, things would have got really nasty. The police are essentially part of the system, so it's not like there are any laws restraining people from protecting it.
It's a sort of oligarchic utopia utopia really, an example of a society that works well because it ignores liberal sacred cows like the right to privacy. I rather admire that, and want to try to extend that system to the UK as a whole. There are clear analogies for example from the gypsies to criminals or fundamentalist Muslims and from my parents to people who are moving to the UK in good faith. The UK hasn't traditional been a country of universal rights, that's an idea no older than the current Labour government. They've backed down on it somewhat.
The Mail on Sunday is a Tory paper and interestingly they also link to an article on "Human rights nonsense", about how extending rights to people that are hostile to civilisation hampers the government. They mention approvingly that the Tories will derogate from the human rights act.
In village terms, you could say that the FTAC is the locals in the pub, and the terrorists suspects are the gypsies. Some people are alien to culture of the UK and the people that run it can quite legitimately decide to deny them rights that they would have if they made some attempt to fit it. Most of the people in the village are Tory voters, and now that Blair is going, ironically brought down by the far left, there is a fair chance that derogation will end its brief experiment with US style inalienable rights.
I think there is something a bit morally questionable about really late abortions. Mind you, I'd fix it by making early abortions really easy to get. E.g. make pills like RU486 over the counter and allow surgical abortion on demand.
Incidentally, my Dad is a biologist and he reckons that your nervous system isn't wired up until a few months after birth, so even Roman style infanticide is not a problem morally from his point of view.
Now I don't think that the government should stop people having late abortions - I personally think it's questionable but I can see that it is subjective. But actually killing babies seems to be ok to criminalize.
So essentially I think stopping birth goes from completely OK at conception to wrong just after birth and the percentage wrongness level increases monotonically between the two. But this is subjective as I say, and it is possible that future discoveries may prove that the curve is different.
If I were a pro choice American for example, I think the curve would be somewhat similar to this, but if I were pro life it would be much steeper. Catholics for example seem to think that contraception and abortion are both wrong, though perhaps in practice abortion is more wrong than contraception. Come to think of it, I don't think their system of morality has this sort of curve, since it's not better to turn late abortions into early ones and early abortion into contraception.
I actually think this sort of subtlety is lost on people who base their morality on the laws of some obscure, Taliban like, tribe like the ones mentioned in the Old Testatment, Torah or the Quran.
Is it really a troll though? I think our President was right to stick to his guns and veto short term morally questionable hacks like embryonic stem cells. He may not be a man of science, but he is a man of God and his religious faith was enough to tell him sacrificing all those poor babies to allow a few godless heathens to avoid going to hell for a few months is a bad idea. If they were good Christians they would know that the Lord will reward them with eternity in paradise after they die.
I like the idea of a Panopticon style world actually, with no privacy at all. My parents live in a distinctly non private village where everyone knows what everyone else is doing and it has no crime whatsoever.
you can never get 3D in a computer monitor, they have height and width there is no depth, although some fancy graphics can simulate that third dimension however it is not real, i say let Nvidia develop 2D to the best of its abilities and let the game developers continue to fool idiots in to thinking there is a third dimension on their 2D monitors...
Yeah, I don't like it when artists use evil tricks like perspective too! They should be honest like they were back in ancient egypt.
The only really lossless format would be to have the band follow you around and perform for you on command. Then every performance would be a lossless copy of itself by definition.
No it's not. I've heard lots of live performances that sound a lot worse than even a bootleg tape due to acoustics, crowd noise, drunken singing drummers and the like.
A CD recorded in studio, or even an MP3 of that CD is usually better sound quality than a live performance. Mind you, people don't go to live performances because of sound quality, do they?
Serif Page Plus is free unlike Photoshop, doesn't suck balls and it does layers and so on. I only use it to put captions on cats and make "I'd hit it pics". Like the other day, I did one based on the image from The Terminator. At the top I replaced the 6502 code from the original with
ORG $600 Loop:
LDA It
JSR Hit
JMP Loop
No idea if it supports CMYK though, for obvious reasons
Yeah yeah, that's what they claim. But you can always change missles quickly once you have launch sites.
They don't need to do that. If they wanted to nuke Russia they could do it from the US, or a submarine, or a cruise missile launched from a packing crate or mobile launcher. If Poland or the Czech Republic were threatened with Russian invasion, they'd probably let the US do it. But at the moment they just don't want to because Russia isn't a credible threat.
The US knows this and has given up on a balance of power. They've left the ABM treaty and most of Eastern Europe has escaped from Russian domination and is therefore quite keen on the US. But they know that a balance of power won't work with the next generation of nuclear powers - they basically want to have thousands of nukes and a defensive shield that requires any potential adversary to have at least hundreds to have a chance of harming them before they are fried.
The fact of the matter is that Russia doesn't matter anymore - the US and their allies in Europe are going for omnipotence, and there's nothing that Russia can do about it, short of a premptive attack. And that would be suicide.
Nvdia said something about "doing object orientation in hardware - it's very neat" as a reason for keeping the code secret. Maybe it's bullshit, but I can imagine something like that. Consider, the graphics card implements a bunch of interfaces, a contigous bunch of hardware registers analogous to a C++ interface.
The hardware contains information to say which interface is present at which offset. You could use GUIDs, COM style but these are probably overkill - a simple table of integers would be ok, e.g. 0x01 for Framebuffer, 0x02 for Cursor, 0x03 for BitBlt, 0x04 for TriangleRenderer.
So the code which tries to set up a framebuffer can search for a Framebuffer interface, write in the timing values and it's good to go. Or the code which handles Cursors or BitBlts can search for the interface. If the card has 3D, it will have some version of the TriangleRenderer interface.
The cool thing is that a universal driver becomes quite natural - once some cards support and interface, the software needs to support it to. But if you run the code on a board which doesn't support an interface you can just ignore that.
In a Windows driver incidentally (at least up to Win2k&XP), this is quite easy to handle. The minimum functionality is a framebuffer, any hardware you support above that is done by passing function pointers back to Windows at init time. If you provide an implementation of hardware cursors for example, it will be used but otherwise the GDI will use a software cursor. The designer can choose to only accelerate the most common cases of cursors and so on too - the function can 'punt' stuff back to the GDI if it can't handle it.
ATI has had WHQL ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHQL_Testing ) certified new driver releases for years now. NVidia has only recently been able to get their new releases WHQL qualified.
It's almost as if no real person is ENTIRELY good or bad. Could that be?
It's probably true, technically. Hitler built some good roads and Stalin's dash for industrialization allowed the Russians to fight off the Germans and conquer half of Europe. On the other hand, him and Stalin killed and enslaved millions and if they had succeeded, the world would have ended up entirely dominated by large tyrannical empires, 1984 style which makes them quite literally enemies of civilisation. So in practice the approximation that Hitler and Stalin are bad is extraordinarily close to the truth.
Anyway, Stalin alone was not responsible for destroying the Bolsheviks.
Umm, yes he was. Wikipedia doesn't have a kill rate for Stalin and Old Bolsheviks, but he was remarkably successful.
Incidentally, there was a chilling story about the NKVD and the Gestapo in the time between the Nazi Soviet Pact and the German invasion of Russia. Even though they were technically still enemies, the Gestapo would tell the NKVD when Communists were being exiled. Apparantly, the NKVD regarded people that had been abroad with suspicion and they were invariably arrested and sent to labour camps, so they asked the Gestapo to tip them off. Similarly, the NKVD handed back German and Austrian communists to the Gestapo as "unwanted aliens".
Pretty early on they found it hard to cope with actually running a country and started squabbling amongst themselves.
I think the squabbling was symptomatic of an interregnum after Lenin became unable to rule. Once another Czar appeared it would have ended, whether that Czar was Trotsky or Stalin. And either way it would have ended badly for the people doing the squabbling.
That's a myth spread by Hollywood movies. For most of the world's history, the majority of people lived under a government much more evil than the current American one, in societies where science and art had all but ground to a halt and the vast majority of people were not in the slightest bit free. And up to the end of WWII or maybe even the Cold War it was quite likely that all of the world's population would end up living under one, forever.
Your less than 1% number is also questionable, here's a UA string "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; WOPR; klingon) Gecko/20070602 BonEcho/2.0.0.4", here's another "Lynx/2.8.6 libwww-FM/2.14 SSL-MM/1.4.1 OpenSSL/0.9.8d". And no, TCP fingerprinting isn't going to work either thanks to packet normalization at my firewall.
Even if all counter.com's 'Unknown' systems are running Linux, it's still less common than Windows NT or Windows 98, both of which are ignored by most software vendors these days.
Re:The next "One major danger"...
on
GPLv2 Vs. GPLv3
·
· Score: 1
Bandwagon jumpers are not welcome among realMacgeeks. Keep your filthy PC fingers to yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the spirit. Crank up the Rage Against the Machine!
Most people listen to music while doing something else, such as driving, ironing, gardening, trolling slashdot, etc.
The best music to troll to is alternative rock like Laibach since everything they did was a troll to dim witted lefties. Most real punk rockers would appreciate the concept of trolling too - consider Sid Vicious in his Swastika T shirt. Sid probably didn't like the Nazis, he just wanted to trigger a debate on their alleged crimes. Post Dead Kennedies however punks have a simplistic worldview where the US is evil and its opponents are good. If you argue with any part of it, you must be evil.
Not coincidentally, this worldview is identical to the Bush supporters' worldview they pretend to hate but with all the signs reversed, a sort of ideological mirror image. This sort of music is therefore very bad to troll to, since it is just designed to agree with the prejudices of its fans, much like Fox News does for Republicans.
If I were flaming slashdot or driving however I'd go for Neanderthal, irony challenged Rap music. Or Post DK punk, something dumb and angry.
THAT'S NOT TRUE. HEARING LOSS CAUSED BY LOUD MUSIC IS A MYTH SPREAD BY BORING PEOPLE.
I had to put this in because the lameness filter doesn't have a sense of humour or irony.
And example would be banking in the UK. Even thóugh in theory there are four or five highstreet banks and you can change between them, few people do because most banks have the same terms. For example they all decided to charge for cash withdrawals from other banks machine within days of each other. Similarly, when charges for cashing cheques increase, the increase is done by all the banks simultaneously. So it's not cynical to say that a cartel is operating and the government should start to check for unconscionable terms. Actually, the banks seem to understand this. If you write to them and complain the back down, and every so often they will make some change which is outrageously expensive and then one of them will buckle under public pressure. And then of course all the others do, which is just more evidence of a cartel.
Now there's nothing except convenience stopping people using an offshore bank for example, but many of those are being bought up by high street banks or building societies.
Actually, in an efficient capitalist country like the UK or the US, it is almost inevitable that this sort of thing will develop. State of the art business is about state of the art contracts, and those are the ones which benefit you most. Even Adam Smith knew about this
One of the things I liked about Sweden was that businesses have much less of a tendency towards unconscionable contract terms. But that's partly because it is a less capitalist place. It seems to me that you need capitalism but yout also need some cartel busting system of laws. Which the US seems to have, if this judgement is representative.
There's something very Orwellian about a system that grants people "Karma" and labels them "Insightful" or "Interesting" for agreeing with groupthink or moderating it up. Whereas if you disagree with groupthink you get labelled a Troll, irrespective of how good your argument is. And if you mod it up you get penalised in metamoderation. I should know, I've tested various posting and modding arguments from the plausible to the utterly ludicrous and the moderation is solely dependent on whether you back the popular side.
These legal stories are particularly obnoxious in that respect - there are heaps of comments which start with IANAL but end with a highly tenuous legal explanation of why legally their favoured side will win. If you argue for the popular side, you get modded up, and if you argue for the unpopular side you get modded down. Kind of ironic actually, whereas most slashdotters rightly despise American high school culture where popular=right regardless of intelligence, in practice there's no difference between that and slashdot.
The only possible way in which a EULA would be legal would be if it granted you some right that you didn't already have. The legal technicality that is used by software is that copying the program from the install media to your disk and then to RAM requires extra rights (not valid in all jurisdictions). For hardware, there is no such loophole. If you didn't agree to the contract before sale, then they can't enforce it afterwards.
They could do a Gateway Bios License which would be a copyright license like the GPL rather than an EULA. When you first boot the machine, it would pop up a box where you could scroll through the legalese using the keyboard and select OK or Cancel. Only after that would the hard disk boot sector be loaded. A flag would be set in CMOS after the first agreement so that you only do it once. If you select Cancel, the same screen would pop up until you clicked OK or returned the machine.
Since the Gateway Bios License is a copyright license rather than an EULA, if you don't agree to it you don't have the right to use the Bios under copyright law, much in the same way that you don't have the right to use GPL software unless you accept the terms of the GPL. Maybe the Bios should copy itself into Ram to make the a copyright license necessary for the end user.
A lot of posts here are easier to read if you mentally replace IANAL with EOF, i.e. stop reading at that point.
Unless the Robson spec requires an NDA and custom IDE commands, then we'll hear lots of moaning about WinHardisks.
e
Hmm, Robson depends one something called ReadyDrive so the OS can hint to tha harddisk what should be cached -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReadyDrive#ReadyDriv
ReadyDrive is a feature of Windows Vista that enables Windows Vista PCs equipped with a hybrid drive to boot up faster, resume from hibernation in less time, and preserve battery power. Hybrid hard drives are a new type of hard disk that integrates non-volatile flash memory with a traditional hard drive.
In June 2006, David Morgenstern wrote an article for eWeek suggesting that ReadyDrive might sacrifice data integrity for speed and battery savings.[2]
The drive-side functionality will be standardized in ATA-8
Looks like Linux will need to wait for the standard, unless Microsoft are feeling generous.
It would be pretty funny if MSI and all the other Taiwanese manufacturers all agreed at IDF that they wouldn't deploy Robson on the desktop for another year.
And then a bit later HULK SMASH! MSI start shipping Robson cache modules bundled with motherboards. That's the reason all the boards shipped with that funny connector on them marked "Factory test only, not a Robson connector".
What about dumb cellphones, I can garuantee that almost none of those would use a 32 bit chip, the almost is because invariably some products end up over-engineered.
/ 835.html
I'm not sure that is true.
http://www.arm.com/markets/mobile_solutions/armpp
ARM7TDMI is a tiny macrocell, even on something like a Nokia 5110 it doesn't take up too much space on the ASIC. Thumb code is pretty dense, and an Arm cell has good mips/watt.
There may be no crime perpetuated by the villagers themselves but what of visitors?
/ news/news.html?in_article_id=457934&in_page_id=177 0&ct=5
My Dad told me two stories about visitors to the village. In one, a large group of gypsies arrived and camped on one of the fields. They had lots of dogs running around, music playing, hordes of verminous children shouting and so on. The villagers watched them from inside their houses, and from inside the pub. After a while, some local emerged from the pub and gave the gypsies some friendly advice. There are lots of farms there, and farmers don't like to see dogs off the leash. The gypsies told him to f*ck off. He went back into the pub. Night fell, and everyone eventually went to sleep, even though the gypsies made a lot of noise late into the night.
When they woke up, the gypsies found all their dogs had been shot in the night. All the locals have shotguns, and some of them went hunting carrying them, walking past the gypsy encampment. The gypsies took the hint and left that day.
In the second, the locals told my parents that they before my parents bought a house there, people had seen them driving around, and thought it was suspicious. Someone had checked up on their license plate and other people had talked to them. Eventually word spread that they were basically civilised people planning to move there. Then the surveillance stopped.
So there's a kind of authentication process. If you show some respect, all is ok. But if the gypsies hadn't of taken the hint, things would have got really nasty. The police are essentially part of the system, so it's not like there are any laws restraining people from protecting it.
It's a sort of oligarchic utopia utopia really, an example of a society that works well because it ignores liberal sacred cows like the right to privacy. I rather admire that, and want to try to extend that system to the UK as a whole. There are clear analogies for example from the gypsies to criminals or fundamentalist Muslims and from my parents to people who are moving to the UK in good faith. The UK hasn't traditional been a country of universal rights, that's an idea no older than the current Labour government. They've backed down on it somewhat.
E.g. look at this
http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/pages/live/articles
The Mail on Sunday is a Tory paper and interestingly they also link to an article on "Human rights nonsense", about how extending rights to people that are hostile to civilisation hampers the government. They mention approvingly that the Tories will derogate from the human rights act.
In village terms, you could say that the FTAC is the locals in the pub, and the terrorists suspects are the gypsies. Some people are alien to culture of the UK and the people that run it can quite legitimately decide to deny them rights that they would have if they made some attempt to fit it. Most of the people in the village are Tory voters, and now that Blair is going, ironically brought down by the far left, there is a fair chance that derogation will end its brief experiment with US style inalienable rights.
Yeah, damn straight.
I think there is something a bit morally questionable about really late abortions. Mind you, I'd fix it by making early abortions really easy to get. E.g. make pills like RU486 over the counter and allow surgical abortion on demand.
Incidentally, my Dad is a biologist and he reckons that your nervous system isn't wired up until a few months after birth, so even Roman style infanticide is not a problem morally from his point of view.
Now I don't think that the government should stop people having late abortions - I personally think it's questionable but I can see that it is subjective. But actually killing babies seems to be ok to criminalize.
So essentially I think stopping birth goes from completely OK at conception to wrong just after birth and the percentage wrongness level increases monotonically between the two. But this is subjective as I say, and it is possible that future discoveries may prove that the curve is different.
If I were a pro choice American for example, I think the curve would be somewhat similar to this, but if I were pro life it would be much steeper. Catholics for example seem to think that contraception and abortion are both wrong, though perhaps in practice abortion is more wrong than contraception. Come to think of it, I don't think their system of morality has this sort of curve, since it's not better to turn late abortions into early ones and early abortion into contraception.
I actually think this sort of subtlety is lost on people who base their morality on the laws of some obscure, Taliban like, tribe like the ones mentioned in the Old Testatment, Torah or the Quran.
Is it really a troll though? I think our President was right to stick to his guns and veto short term morally questionable hacks like embryonic stem cells. He may not be a man of science, but he is a man of God and his religious faith was enough to tell him sacrificing all those poor babies to allow a few godless heathens to avoid going to hell for a few months is a bad idea. If they were good Christians they would know that the Lord will reward them with eternity in paradise after they die.
Oh wait, nevermind.
I like the idea of a Panopticon style world actually, with no privacy at all. My parents live in a distinctly non private village where everyone knows what everyone else is doing and it has no crime whatsoever.
you can never get 3D in a computer monitor, they have height and width there is no depth, although some fancy graphics can simulate that third dimension however it is not real, i say let Nvidia develop 2D to the best of its abilities and let the game developers continue to fool idiots in to thinking there is a third dimension on their 2D monitors...
Yeah, I don't like it when artists use evil tricks like perspective too! They should be honest like they were back in ancient egypt.
The only really lossless format would be to have the band follow you around and perform for you on command. Then every performance would be a lossless copy of itself by definition.
No it's not. I've heard lots of live performances that sound a lot worse than even a bootleg tape due to acoustics, crowd noise, drunken singing drummers and the like.
A CD recorded in studio, or even an MP3 of that CD is usually better sound quality than a live performance. Mind you, people don't go to live performances because of sound quality, do they?
Yeah yeah, that's what they claim. But you can always change missles quickly once you have launch sites.
They don't need to do that. If they wanted to nuke Russia they could do it from the US, or a submarine, or a cruise missile launched from a packing crate or mobile launcher. If Poland or the Czech Republic were threatened with Russian invasion, they'd probably let the US do it. But at the moment they just don't want to because Russia isn't a credible threat.
The US knows this and has given up on a balance of power. They've left the ABM treaty and most of Eastern Europe has escaped from Russian domination and is therefore quite keen on the US. But they know that a balance of power won't work with the next generation of nuclear powers - they basically want to have thousands of nukes and a defensive shield that requires any potential adversary to have at least hundreds to have a chance of harming them before they are fried.
The fact of the matter is that Russia doesn't matter anymore - the US and their allies in Europe are going for omnipotence, and there's nothing that Russia can do about it, short of a premptive attack. And that would be suicide.
Nvdia said something about "doing object orientation in hardware - it's very neat" as a reason for keeping the code secret. Maybe it's bullshit, but I can imagine something like that. Consider, the graphics card implements a bunch of interfaces, a contigous bunch of hardware registers analogous to a C++ interface.
The hardware contains information to say which interface is present at which offset. You could use GUIDs, COM style but these are probably overkill - a simple table of integers would be ok, e.g. 0x01 for Framebuffer, 0x02 for Cursor, 0x03 for BitBlt, 0x04 for TriangleRenderer.
So the code which tries to set up a framebuffer can search for a Framebuffer interface, write in the timing values and it's good to go. Or the code which handles Cursors or BitBlts can search for the interface. If the card has 3D, it will have some version of the TriangleRenderer interface.
The cool thing is that a universal driver becomes quite natural - once some cards support and interface, the software needs to support it to. But if you run the code on a board which doesn't support an interface you can just ignore that.
In a Windows driver incidentally (at least up to Win2k&XP), this is quite easy to handle. The minimum functionality is a framebuffer, any hardware you support above that is done by passing function pointers back to Windows at init time. If you provide an implementation of hardware cursors for example, it will be used but otherwise the GDI will use a software cursor. The designer can choose to only accelerate the most common cases of cursors and so on too - the function can 'punt' stuff back to the GDI if it can't handle it.
ATI has had WHQL ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHQL_Testing ) certified new driver releases for years now. NVidia has only recently been able to get their new releases WHQL qualified.
;-)
So this must be about ATI then
It's almost as if no real person is ENTIRELY good or bad. Could that be?
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It's probably true, technically. Hitler built some good roads and Stalin's dash for industrialization allowed the Russians to fight off the Germans and conquer half of Europe. On the other hand, him and Stalin killed and enslaved millions and if they had succeeded, the world would have ended up entirely dominated by large tyrannical empires, 1984 style which makes them quite literally enemies of civilisation. So in practice the approximation that Hitler and Stalin are bad is extraordinarily close to the truth.
Anyway, Stalin alone was not responsible for destroying the Bolsheviks.
Umm, yes he was. Wikipedia doesn't have a kill rate for Stalin and Old Bolsheviks, but he was remarkably successful.
Incidentally, there was a chilling story about the NKVD and the Gestapo in the time between the Nazi Soviet Pact and the German invasion of Russia. Even though they were technically still enemies, the Gestapo would tell the NKVD when Communists were being exiled. Apparantly, the NKVD regarded people that had been abroad with suspicion and they were invariably arrested and sent to labour camps, so they asked the Gestapo to tip them off. Similarly, the NKVD handed back German and Austrian communists to the Gestapo as "unwanted aliens".
http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/showthread.p
Pretty early on they found it hard to cope with actually running a country and started squabbling amongst themselves.
I think the squabbling was symptomatic of an interregnum after Lenin became unable to rule. Once another Czar appeared it would have ended, whether that Czar was Trotsky or Stalin. And either way it would have ended badly for the people doing the squabbling.
Which could be fired at russia.
You mean "could be fired at incoming Russian ICBMS".
These missiles are purely defensive - they are only designed to destroy missiles.
Rice claimed they don't even have warheads, which is plausible for a hit to kill interceptor.
Doesn't evil ultimately destroy itself? ;)
That's a myth spread by Hollywood movies. For most of the world's history, the majority of people lived under a government much more evil than the current American one, in societies where science and art had all but ground to a halt and the vast majority of people were not in the slightest bit free. And up to the end of WWII or maybe even the Cold War it was quite likely that all of the world's population would end up living under one, forever.
Your less than 1% number is also questionable, here's a UA string "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; WOPR; klingon) Gecko/20070602 BonEcho/2.0.0.4", here's another "Lynx/2.8.6 libwww-FM/2.14 SSL-MM/1.4.1 OpenSSL/0.9.8d". And no, TCP fingerprinting isn't going to work either thanks to packet normalization at my firewall.
Even if all counter.com's 'Unknown' systems are running Linux, it's still less common than Windows NT or Windows 98, both of which are ignored by most software vendors these days.
Bandwagon jumpers are not welcome among real Mac geeks. Keep your filthy PC fingers to yourself.
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