Umm, no they won't. These devices will suposedly form ad hoc networks. There's a fair way from that to a decent speed connection to the outside world.
Personally, I think they whole idea is total vapor. The saddest thing would be if Negroponte gets a load of cash from third world governments and the UN and then fails to deliver anything useful. If he had a prototype, with all the promised features, I'd be less skeptical but lets see which bits haven't been demo'd.
* The processor. The wiki page * The dual mode screen * The peer to peer wifi * Actually building a machine with all the features for $100. PDAs, which are actually lower spec (slower CPU-no wifi) sell for much more. The build cost is higher too I think, and that's buying off the shelf parts. Something novel like the dual mode screen might be much more expensive. Or it might not work.
And the idea that some rich dude in America will get third world governments to bulk order is bogus on all sorts of levels. Firstly, he's a rich guy, and he should fund the development himself. Secondly, he doesn't have any idea what the users want / need. Secondly, even if he makes a prototype and the governments buy millions, there's zero chance that the resulting laptops will end up where they are needed. Third world countries are run by and for the benefit of small corrupt cliques - that's the reason that they're third world countries. If they bought a million laptops, most of them would end up on eBay, or in the internet cafes in the capital, or they would just sit unused in warehouses.
Fabrication technology depends on how deep your pockets are, and Intel has very deep pockets. AMD beat them with a better architecture in the P4/Athlon generation by enough to nullify their fabrication advantage. And Itanium (where they probably spent their design resources) looks like it will die.
But in the long run they have a new x86 design team in Israel, and if you couple that with the access to better fabs they may win out in the long run. And if Itanium dies and they only have to build x86 cores, they have more design teams than AMD. They could probably design 3x as many x86 cores as AMD in a given period. E.g at the moment they have P4, Pentium M, Yonah, and soon the NGMA ones.
On the other hand, deep pockets implies a big company, and big companies tend to make bad choices (like Itanium and Netburst) when it comes down to technical strategy.
But from the perspective of Steve Jobs, it probably came down to a cost issue. Apple could continue to support PowerPC, where the cost per die is lower, but they probably have other costs like paying chipset designers*, or they could pick Intel at a steep discount for some period and no other costs.
And from Intel's point of view, they have another closed platform to replace Itanium and complement the open PC one.
* Actually, it's might be even worse than that if when Apple signed up to PowerPC they agreed on some kind of financial commitment to share the costs of keeping it alive. Back when it looked like it would replace x86, that was probably a good idea. Now that x86 seems to have won on the desktop, and PPC is targeting games consoles and embedded stuff, it's not.
There are, for instance, a couple of EU member nations that, if they were to have a civil wars spring up, it could have thoroughly unpredictable consequences internationally
Who do you mean?
I can imagine Greece vs Turkey (ok not EU), Hungary vs Romania as full on wars as opposed to civil ones. And the worst thing is that in Hungary vs Romania it could start up as war inside Romania against the Hungarian minority, Kosovo style.
Mind you, it's pretty magical how these sort of things seem to recede with a bit of spin doctoring. Guess all those diplomats working at Nato and the EU aren't completely useless after all. And the dire consequences for any politician in the EU for fighting a war against a minority has been demonstrated by what happened to Milosevic*. And it's easier to get rich if you're not fighting a war. So all the pressures are against this.
So I'd say that the chance of any kind of war inside the EU is very low for the forseeable future.
* Actually, the most remarkable thing about the Milosevic thing is how far Nato was willing to go to stop him. The British government threatened an US/UK/Nato invasion of Serbia from Albania backed by MLRS strikes across the border. So I think the chance of future politicians going the Milosevic route is essentially zero.
What are the symptoms of Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome?
Symptoms usually begin one to three weeks after exposure to infected deer mice. HPS is characterized by fever, chills and muscle aches, followed by the abrupt onset of respiratory distress and shortness of breath. The muscle aches are severe, involving the thighs, hips, back and sometimes the shoulder. Other symptoms include nausea, vomiting, and abdominal pain.
Well I always feel like that. I figured it was just the cigarettes and bad diet. Which reminds me, bit early for lunch, good job someone's left a few cheetos on my desk, behind the monitor.
Damnit, some smartass has put cheetos in mouse traps all over the place. Very funny, fratboy.
Where is hantavirus found and how common is it?
The deer mouse (Peromyscus maniculatus) is the main carrier of hantavirus in the western United States; however, all wild rodents should be avoided. The deer mouse can carry and shed the virus without showing any signs of being sick. In Washington, about 14% of over 1,100 deer mice tested have been hantavirus positive.
Hmm, I'll be on the look out for those fuckers.
What does the deer mouse look like?
The deer mouse is about six inches long to the tip of its tail. It is grayish to light brown on top, with a white belly, large ears, and a furry tail that is white on the underside. Deer mice live in all parts of Washington, but mainly in rural areas. In comparison, the house mouse (Mus musculus) is grayish to light brown entirely (not white on the belly), with scales showing on its tail.
The other week, I think I saw a rodent in the server room. It's a good job I put down those traps with poison bait. I guess these deer mice will eat cheetos and rat poison will kill 'em, right?
I have an Athlon because it run the kind of applications I run faster than an equivalent Pentium 4. But I have a problem with these model numbers. Mhz was a kind of Gold Standard for chips. You basically bought your favourite (micro)architecture in the highest speed grade you could afford. No one could cheat on this, since Mhz was something you could measure with a scope, at least in practice. Then AMD had an architecture which was quick but harder to crank up to higher clock rates, so they moved to model numbers. It didn't matter though, because the processor performance was linked to Intel Mhz. They underpriced the chips too, to make them more attractive.
But now both AMD and Intel use model numbers, and they are quickly becoming more abstract. In an economic sense, we've lost the gold standard completely, there is now no way to tell how fast a chip is by looking at the label. Isn't there a danger of inflation in the long run, so AMD will sell the Athlon X4+ 64+ 96500+ vs the Intel Core Duo Pro Plus 840002, and both of them will run about the same speed as one of todays high end chips because both Intel and AMD will have fallen completely off the Moore's law curve?
And soon of course, there won't be any desktop architectures other than x86-64, and high clock rates / per core performance is being de emphasized. Could this be the coming of a plateau, where CPU performance increases gradually fall to some lower rate?
As a certified Internet Lawyer I can advise you that it doesn't apply to FreeBSD. That's right, use Linux and go a federal pound me in the ass prison, or use FreeBSD and stay, well Free.
Hence the name.
Here's an Operating System fud^H^H^Hfact sheet
1) Windows. Expensive. Not FreeBSD. You may BURN in HELL forever if you use it. 2) Linux. Free Unix type OS, unquantifiable risk of prison rape. No strlcat. 3) NetBSD. Let's face it do you really need all those platforms? Why not concentrate on optimising for today's mainstream hardware. My friend Bob installed it on his new box, and it caught fire and burned down his house. 4) OpenBSD. Kick ass security. Theo seems a bit odd. Lags a bit feature and driver wise. There are reports that OpenBSD users may die of untreatable brain cancer. 5) MacOs. Slick. Good for clients. Expensive. You may have to grow a goatee, wear black polo necks. Mac OS users won't accept you as one of them, they will mock your dress sense behind your back.
Face it, FreeBSD is the best choice for every person in the world. Fact.
I see what you mean, but I'm a skeptical that you can really predict things like this at the level of "Eastern Thinking" vs "Western Thinking".
I mean if you were a Martian looking at the causes of the most wars, then it seems to me that you could make a vary good argument that if the people in power had been slightly different, e.g. if it was their opponent certainly, but quite often just their deputy or probable successors in charge instead of them, then either the war wouldn't have happened or it would have turned out completely differently.
Some wars, like World War I, seem to have a horrible inevitability about them, but most seem to be more due to the personalities involved. E.g. WWII (Hitler), Korea (Stalin/Kim Il Sung), Vietnam ( Ho Chi Minh ) right up to the Gulf War I (Saddam), Afghanistan (Bin Laden) and Iraq ( GWB ).
So who's to say that someone charismatic might not seize power in China and try to resolve the Taiwan issue, even if you're right that conventional wisdom there is to tolerate the status quo.
I think in the long run, China will liberalise and then the Taiwan issue will become moot. But in the short term, Chinese admirals have made some very irresponsible comments about sinking UK carriers. And while I think that the current Chinese politicians have probably privately ruled out a conflict with the US the grounds that it's a completely batshit insane idea, that's not what the public policy is. Chinese foreign policy is that Taiwan is a renegade province, and China will invade if it declares independence. During the liberalisation, it's possible that people may sieze power who want to actually implement the policy.
Inside Taiwan, there are a bunch of people who are in favour of declaring independence, at least in public. In private, I'm sure that the US has convinced them that this is a very unwise course to take, to say the least? Once again, there's a mismatch between ultrahawkish public policy of the DPP, in favour of independence, and private pragmatism.
So in the long term, I think the issue will resolve itself. Doing anything to tip the military balance in favour of China is a bad idea in the short term though, since it could pitch the world into WWIII.
And as far as French policy, I agree that they are trying to immunize themselves against American hegemony, rather than plotting to fight a war against America, but I think there is a significant risk that they will destablise things that they don't understand. Also, they work on the assumption that the EU is a unified block which they can use to counter the Americans, and this is not the case. At least half of the EU, including Holland (where I guess you're from) and the UK (where I'm from) have tended to be fairly pro American for much the reasons you describe, even when the American administration was under the control of people that should probably not in retrospect have been given access to sharp cutlery, let alone the nuclear launch codes. So they run the risk of splitting the EU into a pro American camp, and a anti American one, and/or encouraging predatory dictatorships.
The conference, on the "Future of Transatlantic Military Space Relations", was held at London's Royal United Services Institute, this month. A senior European delegate said: "The Americans were very calm. They made it clear that they would attempt what they called reversible action, but, if necessary, they would use irreversible action."
The US would first try unilaterally to jam Gallileo's signals, but if this failed it would use attack satellites to destroy one or all of its units, in an unprecedented Star Wars-style raid.
If a battle between the US and China goes nuclear, then we're all completely screwed anyway.
It's possible that they could back down after a few ships are sunk, but I wouldn't bet on it. But the best way to avoid a war is to make sure that the US has overwhelming military superiority, and that's easier if the Chinese don't have access to precision guided munitions.
Yeah, if I was in the Pentagon, I'd build some kind of anti Galileo system, if I couldn't get a per region off switch. Oddly enough, one of the justifications for Galileo is that it is supposed to be immune from US military interference. Actually, if a conflict between China and the US broke out, the Galileo satellites would probably be destroyed to stop the Chinese benefiting from them, whereas civillian GPS signals would just be jammed over the conflict area. So airliners in the EU area would be better off using GPS.
Hmm, good to see that French/EU military planning has embraced concepts like irony, unlike those simplistic Americans.
Well I kind of figured that France/EU institutions would lead the anti US camp, and Britain the pro US one. The rest would either back one side to varying extents or stay neutral. If you take that to it's logical conclusion, it's a pretty chilling prospect, since neither country is known for backing down in such things.
The irony of course, is that the main argument for EU integration was to make a future war in Europe impossible. But the view of the US taken by the EU bureaucrats is actually sabotaging this in the long run.
And China, Russia and so one will try to take advantage of the split too. Both have joined the Galileo project, and both will presumably supply technology based on it directly to rogue states, even if the French don't.
So technically, I think it's a nice system. In terms of geopolitics, it's a classic example of the EU establishment's hatred of the US blinding them to far more serious threats over the next few decades.
I really wonder what the implications of this are if the US squared off with China over Taiwan for example. I don't really have a problem with the EU wanting to have an "ndependent defense identity" or whatever, the problem is if it ends up giving a leg up to China or North Korea, or even Iran in a future conflict with the US. Since EU countries would either be on the same side as the US, or neutral this would be seriously self defeating. Actually, I do have a problem with the EU buereacracy's implicit assumption that the US is a strategic competitor, since it could develop into a very dangerous rivalry in the long run, and no one in the EU has ever voted on this policy.
Well according to the GPL version 4, if you kill companies that violate the GPL, you will spend eternity in heaven with 72 virgins.
Cynics have said that the virgins are male and it just feels like eternity, but they are probably shills in the service of Microsoft, the Great Satan of software.
I mentioned some time back that I was going to get myself a GP2X for Christmas. And so I did. Well, actually, under the Rules of Christmas at our house, my wife officially "got" it for me, just like I "got" her present for her. After seventeen years of marriage, shortcuts are allowed.
First impressions: I love this little unit. Runs a Linux 2.4 kernel, plays movies with mplayer, already has MAME ported to it... Really, it has everything in a handheld game/media machine that a hacker-in-the-old-meaning could want. Except for one thing. The kernel source code.
How could this be? This is Linux we're talking about! The open source poster child! (It most likely is GNU/Linux at that. I haven't poked around enough to see what other components surround the kernel. At the very least, bash is present.)
Well, it seems that the company that created the GP2X, Gamepark Holdings, is a couple of guys in some office space in Seoul. Perhaps some of you who follow the popular blogs remember Cory Doctorow's posts on BoingBoing.net when the GP2X was announced. He noticed the dreaded acronym DRM on their website, and raised alarms. Later, it was explained by the only person at Gamepark Holdings who speaks English that they didn't really understand what they were saying.
Apparently, they don't seem to understand the GPL, either. They (and their subcontractor Dignsys, who actually did the Linux port for the GP2X) have been approached repeatedly for release of their modified version of the Linux kernel. Reluctantly, they finally did so, releasing an early, out-of-date prerelease version of the source, which is useless to the developer community who would like to hunt down some of the current bugs. There are active discussions on the GP2X developer boards on the topic, as people try to find the best way to get Gamepark Holdings and Dignsys to comply with the GPL by releasing source concurrently with each new release of the GP2X kernel. Of course, as these sorts of threads tend to do, accusations have flown about all parties involved, most of it totally speculative.
So, herein lies the problem. This handful of early adopters, mostly in Europe and the Americas, is searching for a way to convince Gamepark Holdings and Dignsys to do what the GPL requires of them, without taking down the companies. This is a niche product, and they could complain until the cows come home and never get timely releases of the source. Someone with a bit of PR clout must be brought into the picture. But who? Linus? RMS? Cory? Larry? CmdrTaco?
After puzzling for a while (and yes, my puzzler was sore afterwards), I figured it was time to test the blogosphere. I decided to write a post about the situation as I saw it. This post. Now, I'll submit it to the tastemakers and see if anyone is interested.
I don't think it means anything. As far as I can tell, the patents cover one algorithm for the generation of short filenames from long ones.
You can format a volume by writing a bootsector, clearing out the FATS and writing an empty root directory. No filename creation is necessary, and so you don't infringe on any patents I'm aware of.
You could, I suspect, write a FAT file system which supports long filenames and doesn't use any of the techiques mentioned in the patent I think. In fact it would be interesting if someone who knows about patent law could confirm this.
First some background - each filename on a FAT partition has a short filename. It may also have a long filename. Most of the time, the short filename is essentially invisible to the user. Windows, Linux and Mac will only ever display the long one. Dos and bootstrap code relies on the short filename, but that's a very special case. Short filenames must be unique though, since chkdsk will 'fix' the disk in bad ways otherwise.
Essentially, I'm thinking about using a different algorithm to generate short names, something like appending the file's position in the directory in Base 32, e.g. 0-9A-V. Since FAT directories can have at most 65536 files and usually have far fewer, this is pretty compact. There's a corner case where someone tries to create a file which collides with this scheme, but I think that it's solvable, especially if you can live with the limitation that you can only open files by their long filename.
I'll write a web page with the solution, so it can't be patented by anyone.
Slashdot Mirror
Umm, no they won't. These devices will suposedly form ad hoc networks. There's a fair way from that to a decent speed connection to the outside world.
Personally, I think they whole idea is total vapor. The saddest thing would be if Negroponte gets a load of cash from third world governments and the UN and then fails to deliver anything useful. If he had a prototype, with all the promised features, I'd be less skeptical but lets see which bits haven't been demo'd.
* The processor. The wiki page
* The dual mode screen
* The peer to peer wifi
* Actually building a machine with all the features for $100. PDAs, which are actually lower spec (slower CPU-no wifi) sell for much more. The build cost is higher too I think, and that's buying off the shelf parts. Something novel like the dual mode screen might be much more expensive. Or it might not work.
And the idea that some rich dude in America will get third world governments to bulk order is bogus on all sorts of levels. Firstly, he's a rich guy, and he should fund the development himself. Secondly, he doesn't have any idea what the users want / need. Secondly, even if he makes a prototype and the governments buy millions, there's zero chance that the resulting laptops will end up where they are needed. Third world countries are run by and for the benefit of small corrupt cliques - that's the reason that they're third world countries. If they bought a million laptops, most of them would end up on eBay, or in the internet cafes in the capital, or they would just sit unused in warehouses.
I prefer.
Give a man a Twinkie, he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to steal Twinkies and he'll eat for ever.
or
Give a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Not really.
Fabrication technology depends on how deep your pockets are, and Intel has very deep pockets. AMD beat them with a better architecture in the P4/Athlon generation by enough to nullify their fabrication advantage. And Itanium (where they probably spent their design resources) looks like it will die.
But in the long run they have a new x86 design team in Israel, and if you couple that with the access to better fabs they may win out in the long run. And if Itanium dies and they only have to build x86 cores, they have more design teams than AMD. They could probably design 3x as many x86 cores as AMD in a given period. E.g at the moment they have P4, Pentium M, Yonah, and soon the NGMA ones.
On the other hand, deep pockets implies a big company, and big companies tend to make bad choices (like Itanium and Netburst) when it comes down to technical strategy.
But from the perspective of Steve Jobs, it probably came down to a cost issue. Apple could continue to support PowerPC, where the cost per die is lower, but they probably have other costs like paying chipset designers*, or they could pick Intel at a steep discount for some period and no other costs.
And from Intel's point of view, they have another closed platform to replace Itanium and complement the open PC one.
* Actually, it's might be even worse than that if when Apple signed up to PowerPC they agreed on some kind of financial commitment to share the costs of keeping it alive. Back when it looked like it would replace x86, that was probably a good idea. Now that x86 seems to have won on the desktop, and PPC is targeting games consoles and embedded stuff, it's not.
There are, for instance, a couple of EU member nations that, if they were to have a civil wars spring up, it could have thoroughly unpredictable consequences internationally
Who do you mean?
I can imagine Greece vs Turkey (ok not EU), Hungary vs Romania as full on wars as opposed to civil ones. And the worst thing is that in Hungary vs Romania it could start up as war inside Romania against the Hungarian minority, Kosovo style.
Mind you, it's pretty magical how these sort of things seem to recede with a bit of spin doctoring. Guess all those diplomats working at Nato and the EU aren't completely useless after all. And the dire consequences for any politician in the EU for fighting a war against a minority has been demonstrated by what happened to Milosevic*. And it's easier to get rich if you're not fighting a war. So all the pressures are against this.
So I'd say that the chance of any kind of war inside the EU is very low for the forseeable future.
* Actually, the most remarkable thing about the Milosevic thing is how far Nato was willing to go to stop him. The British government threatened an US/UK/Nato invasion of Serbia from Albania backed by MLRS strikes across the border. So I think the chance of future politicians going the Milosevic route is essentially zero.
Well I always feel like that. I figured it was just the cigarettes and bad diet. Which reminds me, bit early for lunch, good job someone's left a few cheetos on my desk, behind the monitor.
Damnit, some smartass has put cheetos in mouse traps all over the place. Very funny, fratboy.
Hmm, I'll be on the look out for those fuckers.
The other week, I think I saw a rodent in the server room. It's a good job I put down those traps with poison bait. I guess these deer mice will eat cheetos and rat poison will kill 'em, right?
Oh shit.
I have an Athlon because it run the kind of applications I run faster than an equivalent Pentium 4. But I have a problem with these model numbers. Mhz was a kind of Gold Standard for chips. You basically bought your favourite (micro)architecture in the highest speed grade you could afford. No one could cheat on this, since Mhz was something you could measure with a scope, at least in practice. Then AMD had an architecture which was quick but harder to crank up to higher clock rates, so they moved to model numbers. It didn't matter though, because the processor performance was linked to Intel Mhz. They underpriced the chips too, to make them more attractive.
But now both AMD and Intel use model numbers, and they are quickly becoming more abstract. In an economic sense, we've lost the gold standard completely, there is now no way to tell how fast a chip is by looking at the label. Isn't there a danger of inflation in the long run, so AMD will sell the Athlon X4+ 64+ 96500+ vs the Intel Core Duo Pro Plus 840002, and both of them will run about the same speed as one of todays high end chips because both Intel and AMD will have fallen completely off the Moore's law curve?
And soon of course, there won't be any desktop architectures other than x86-64, and high clock rates / per core performance is being de emphasized. Could this be the coming of a plateau, where CPU performance increases gradually fall to some lower rate?
As a certified Internet Lawyer I can advise you that it doesn't apply to FreeBSD. That's right, use Linux and go a federal pound me in the ass prison, or use FreeBSD and stay, well Free.
Hence the name.
Here's an Operating System fud^H^H^Hfact sheet
1) Windows. Expensive. Not FreeBSD. You may BURN in HELL forever if you use it.
2) Linux. Free Unix type OS, unquantifiable risk of prison rape. No strlcat.
3) NetBSD. Let's face it do you really need all those platforms? Why not concentrate on optimising for today's mainstream hardware. My friend Bob installed it on his new box, and it caught fire and burned down his house.
4) OpenBSD. Kick ass security. Theo seems a bit odd. Lags a bit feature and driver wise. There are reports that OpenBSD users may die of untreatable brain cancer.
5) MacOs. Slick. Good for clients. Expensive. You may have to grow a goatee, wear black polo necks. Mac OS users won't accept you as one of them, they will mock your dress sense behind your back.
Face it, FreeBSD is the best choice for every person in the world. Fact.
There is an ERROR in your post.
If your business is in words then proper spelling and grammar are part of being professional.
I've corrected the subject too, like the humourless Nazi I am.
Make sure the story is not a dupe of another story with minor variations.
Quite often you have the same story twice with minor variations, and it's kind of annoying.
Make sure it's not a dupe. It's very annoying to read the same story twice, with minor variations.
We should have a "-1 GRAMMER NOOB!11!" mod category.
I see what you mean, but I'm a skeptical that you can really predict things like this at the level of "Eastern Thinking" vs "Western Thinking".
I mean if you were a Martian looking at the causes of the most wars, then it seems to me that you could make a vary good argument that if the people in power had been slightly different, e.g. if it was their opponent certainly, but quite often just their deputy or probable successors in charge instead of them, then either the war wouldn't have happened or it would have turned out completely differently.
Some wars, like World War I, seem to have a horrible inevitability about them, but most seem to be more due to the personalities involved. E.g. WWII (Hitler), Korea (Stalin/Kim Il Sung), Vietnam ( Ho Chi Minh ) right up to the Gulf War I (Saddam), Afghanistan (Bin Laden) and Iraq ( GWB ).
So who's to say that someone charismatic might not seize power in China and try to resolve the Taiwan issue, even if you're right that conventional wisdom there is to tolerate the status quo.
Don't forget Poland!
I think in the long run, China will liberalise and then the Taiwan issue will become moot. But in the short term, Chinese admirals have made some very irresponsible comments about sinking UK carriers. And while I think that the current Chinese politicians have probably privately ruled out a conflict with the US the grounds that it's a completely batshit insane idea, that's not what the public policy is. Chinese foreign policy is that Taiwan is a renegade province, and China will invade if it declares independence. During the liberalisation, it's possible that people may sieze power who want to actually implement the policy.
Inside Taiwan, there are a bunch of people who are in favour of declaring independence, at least in public. In private, I'm sure that the US has convinced them that this is a very unwise course to take, to say the least? Once again, there's a mismatch between ultrahawkish public policy of the DPP, in favour of independence, and private pragmatism.
So in the long term, I think the issue will resolve itself. Doing anything to tip the military balance in favour of China is a bad idea in the short term though, since it could pitch the world into WWIII.
And as far as French policy, I agree that they are trying to immunize themselves against American hegemony, rather than plotting to fight a war against America, but I think there is a significant risk that they will destablise things that they don't understand. Also, they work on the assumption that the EU is a unified block which they can use to counter the Americans, and this is not the case. At least half of the EU, including Holland (where I guess you're from) and the UK (where I'm from) have tended to be fairly pro American for much the reasons you describe, even when the American administration was under the control of people that should probably not in retrospect have been given access to sharp cutlery, let alone the nuclear launch codes. So they run the risk of splitting the EU into a pro American camp, and a anti American one, and/or encouraging predatory dictatorships.
http://uplink.space.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=b
If a battle between the US and China goes nuclear, then we're all completely screwed anyway.
It's possible that they could back down after a few ships are sunk, but I wouldn't bet on it. But the best way to avoid a war is to make sure that the US has overwhelming military superiority, and that's easier if the Chinese don't have access to precision guided munitions.
Yeah, if I was in the Pentagon, I'd build some kind of anti Galileo system, if I couldn't get a per region off switch. Oddly enough, one of the justifications for Galileo is that it is supposed to be immune from US military interference. Actually, if a conflict between China and the US broke out, the Galileo satellites would probably be destroyed to stop the Chinese benefiting from them, whereas civillian GPS signals would just be jammed over the conflict area. So airliners in the EU area would be better off using GPS.
Hmm, good to see that French/EU military planning has embraced concepts like irony, unlike those simplistic Americans.
Well I kind of figured that France/EU institutions would lead the anti US camp, and Britain the pro US one. The rest would either back one side to varying extents or stay neutral. If you take that to it's logical conclusion, it's a pretty chilling prospect, since neither country is known for backing down in such things.
The irony of course, is that the main argument for EU integration was to make a future war in Europe impossible. But the view of the US taken by the EU bureaucrats is actually sabotaging this in the long run.
And China, Russia and so one will try to take advantage of the split too. Both have joined the Galileo project, and both will presumably supply technology based on it directly to rogue states, even if the French don't.
So technically, I think it's a nice system. In terms of geopolitics, it's a classic example of the EU establishment's hatred of the US blinding them to far more serious threats over the next few decades.
Yeah, that'll come in handy for Chinese missiles.
e tail.jsp?id=21977
http://www.gpsworld.com/gpsworld/article/articleD
I really wonder what the implications of this are if the US squared off with China over Taiwan for example. I don't really have a problem with the EU wanting to have an "ndependent defense identity" or whatever, the problem is if it ends up giving a leg up to China or North Korea, or even Iran in a future conflict with the US. Since EU countries would either be on the same side as the US, or neutral this would be seriously self defeating. Actually, I do have a problem with the EU buereacracy's implicit assumption that the US is a strategic competitor, since it could develop into a very dangerous rivalry in the long run, and no one in the EU has ever voted on this policy.
Calm down my friend, it's the other way around.
Yup, 72. Islam is remarkably resistant to inflation in such things, since no fundamentalist would change the numbers in the original passage.
5 2388,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/wtccrash/story/0,1300,5
BTW, does anyone else see the resemblance between Richard Dawkins and Oolon Colluphid in Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy?
Well according to the GPL version 4, if you kill companies that violate the GPL, you will spend eternity in heaven with 72 virgins.
Cynics have said that the virgins are male and it just feels like eternity, but they are probably shills in the service of Microsoft, the Great Satan of software.
Works here, TFA in full :
I mentioned some time back that I was going to get myself a GP2X for Christmas. And so I did. Well, actually, under the Rules of Christmas at our house, my wife officially "got" it for me, just like I "got" her present for her. After seventeen years of marriage, shortcuts are allowed.
First impressions: I love this little unit. Runs a Linux 2.4 kernel, plays movies with mplayer, already has MAME ported to it... Really, it has everything in a handheld game/media machine that a hacker-in-the-old-meaning could want. Except for one thing. The kernel source code.
How could this be? This is Linux we're talking about! The open source poster child! (It most likely is GNU/Linux at that. I haven't poked around enough to see what other components surround the kernel. At the very least, bash is present.)
Well, it seems that the company that created the GP2X, Gamepark Holdings, is a couple of guys in some office space in Seoul. Perhaps some of you who follow the popular blogs remember Cory Doctorow's posts on BoingBoing.net when the GP2X was announced. He noticed the dreaded acronym DRM on their website, and raised alarms. Later, it was explained by the only person at Gamepark Holdings who speaks English that they didn't really understand what they were saying.
Apparently, they don't seem to understand the GPL, either. They (and their subcontractor Dignsys, who actually did the Linux port for the GP2X) have been approached repeatedly for release of their modified version of the Linux kernel. Reluctantly, they finally did so, releasing an early, out-of-date prerelease version of the source, which is useless to the developer community who would like to hunt down some of the current bugs. There are active discussions on the GP2X developer boards on the topic, as people try to find the best way to get Gamepark Holdings and Dignsys to comply with the GPL by releasing source concurrently with each new release of the GP2X kernel. Of course, as these sorts of threads tend to do, accusations have flown about all parties involved, most of it totally speculative.
So, herein lies the problem. This handful of early adopters, mostly in Europe and the Americas, is searching for a way to convince Gamepark Holdings and Dignsys to do what the GPL requires of them, without taking down the companies. This is a niche product, and they could complain until the cows come home and never get timely releases of the source. Someone with a bit of PR clout must be brought into the picture. But who? Linus? RMS? Cory? Larry? CmdrTaco?
After puzzling for a while (and yes, my puzzler was sore afterwards), I figured it was time to test the blogosphere. I decided to write a post about the situation as I saw it. This post. Now, I'll submit it to the tastemakers and see if anyone is interested.
I don't think it means anything. As far as I can tell, the patents cover one algorithm for the generation of short filenames from long ones.
You can format a volume by writing a bootsector, clearing out the FATS and writing an empty root directory. No filename creation is necessary, and so you don't infringe on any patents I'm aware of.
See this tool for an example
http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/fat32format.htm
You could, I suspect, write a FAT file system which supports long filenames and doesn't use any of the techiques mentioned in the patent I think. In fact it would be interesting if someone who knows about patent law could confirm this.
First some background - each filename on a FAT partition has a short filename. It may also have a long filename. Most of the time, the short filename is essentially invisible to the user. Windows, Linux and Mac will only ever display the long one. Dos and bootstrap code relies on the short filename, but that's a very special case. Short filenames must be unique though, since chkdsk will 'fix' the disk in bad ways otherwise.
Essentially, I'm thinking about using a different algorithm to generate short names, something like appending the file's position in the directory in Base 32, e.g. 0-9A-V. Since FAT directories can have at most 65536 files and usually have far fewer, this is pretty compact. There's a corner case where someone tries to create a file which collides with this scheme, but I think that it's solvable, especially if you can live with the limitation that you can only open files by their long filename.
I'll write a web page with the solution, so it can't be patented by anyone.
You can format big drives to FAT32 in Windows with this tool
http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/fat32format.htm