Yep, assuming that you have a cell grid covering the better part of a geographic area. A phone that's just turned on with a user who expects coverage wherever he goes costs almost as much as one with a limited, but regular, usage of SMS and voice. Still, the first one can get off far cheaper than the second, simply because users seem more willing to accept paying for actual actions, than just waiting. The interesting aspect in this light is that the text message might very well transfer as much information as a phone call of equivalent cost. The fact that the data content is far smaller is simply due to the ingenious idea of letting the user do the compression.
As you can now download the instructions for all kits as PDF from Lego's website, each kit contains a custom piece sold only with that kit to encourage purchase thereof[citation needed]. Those damn HW dongles!
IE is special because the mess is frequently created by a sloppy DOCTYPE and browser detection. That is, the version that IE gets, through CSS hacks and possible server-side user-agent detection, is not strict, while the one that Firefox sees might actually be strict.
No, it was released after Windows 2000 and certainly inferior for any work task. It was never supported as an enterprise network client (worse than 98 in that aspect) and the plans for Whistler were quite clear. The repeat with Windows 7 "soon" would be a similarity, but it's more like XP coming soon after 2000. The development on Windows has been focused on the server release for the past 14 months or so. Vista added very little for a corporate customer before, but it at least might make sense now. As I understand it, SP1 is supposed to bring Vista rather close to the Windows 2008 codebase, so they're closer together than XP (5.1) and 2003 (5.2) was.
Yeah, HIV research, mostly done in labs in industrialized countries, is exactly the type of activity that will make the Windows marketshare explode. Some of the charitable activities of Microsoft can be questioned, but little of those of the Gates Foundation , at least not through the MS relation.
I also suspect that most people would agree that public ownership of the means of production in some industries (fire department, basic scientific research, health care, etc..) may not be such a bad idea after all.
WRONG!
Theses are services and produces nothing. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Means_of_production/ From that very article: "This term has been more simply described as the resources and apparatus by which goods and services are created. In an agrarian society it is the soil and the shovel, in an industrial society, it is the mines and the factories." (BTW, the slash in your link resulted in a 404 at first.)
We certainly do have some pecularities, but the economy of Sweden these days is far from socialistic. The government sector is huge and the taxes high, but isn't it reasonable to define socialism as community-owned (state or cooperatives) companies/industry? While there are some, and were more in the past, most companies are fairly normal ones (publicly traded or private). These days, I even think France might have a larger share of state-owned companies and industry ventures. It's not just a matter of "socialism being implemented in the good way", but "socialists mainly staying within a free-market framework".
Agreed! Everyone who failed to load ansi.sys and get a gloriously colored DOS prompt can turn his geek card back in. (Lifelong UNIX usage is a valid excuse, but that doesn't seem to be the case for the OP...)
Let me count the limitations of the DOS commandline:
No history functions. Not even the up arrow to get the previous command.
Has noone used DOSKEY? I've seen this in several threads now, and it's one aspect of DOS that is not true. Features introduced in MS-DOS 5 should be fair game. (And F3 worked to recall the latest command before that.)
After all, who wants to waste precious clock cycles swapping out to refresh some widget?
Nah, CPU/RAM/Video card improvements render this point moot.
The real question is: Who wants to deal with vast amounts of UI library, tons of little form files, and intricate event models for managing all of the user state?
It's the 20% of the app taking 80% of the time, in addition to making all of that sweet logic you wrote kinda hard to use on multiple platforms.
UI stuff, while certainly important, can be some of the least fun parts of a project to work on. What's worse? Printing?
Consistent error handling? (Especially in a GUI...) And now, by consistent, I mean error handling that's just as good as the thing you did in the places where you really hit a bug during testing and had to check it, or where you expect a real error to happen. A big catch clause around everything dosen't count. You also need to report it to the user, making sense while also providing enough details to be useful in debugging.
It's even more of a burden when you realize that some neat optimization (probably some kind of caching) will fail just due to the problem of stale info or false assumptions in the event of error somewhere, even when it will work 99.9 % of the time.
Considering the problems of the seafloor, at this point we have better maps of Mars than Earth. A lot of effort has been spent on Mars. Meanwhile, Mercury, Venus and Pluto are all more or less unexplored. For Venus, even sending probes don't help us too far, go inside the atmosphere and the equipment is destroyed, stay outside and you don't see all that much. Pluto and Mercury, well, it's just a matter of getting around to actually go there. I think it's wise to do so now. I find the simple prospect of possible water ice in cool craters on the surface fascinating.
Looking at this new machine, I really like that they've lowered the weight more and slightly increased the screen size; however, I have to wonder what the point of a 1440X900 resolution is at 13' inches. If we scale WUXGA (1920x1200) from 15.4 to 13.3, we would almost precisely get WSXGA (1680x1050) instead. This still means a lower dot-pitch than on my current 15.4 machine, and if I could get a 14.1 one with a 1920x1200 panel, I would do it in a snap. An ultra-portable with a screen with reasonably high resolution is also something very attractive, 1280x800 feels extremely cramped.
Just a thought: the (supposed) increased failure rate for HDDs wouldn't come within 6 months. During the first period, it's instead perfectly reasonable that the reduced number of power-on hours decreases the calendar-based failure rate. The interesting issue is whether your HDD failure rates increases significantly within a 1-3 year timeframe.
this "AI" isn't really learning anything, it's just dealing with missing variables. It can't make any cognitive leaps from the human equivalent of "intuition", it can't re-apply what it's learned (though in this specific case that's probably more due to the restraints of the tiny and simplistic environment), and if I read the article correctly (nor did I read the research paper) it doesn't properly make informed decisions, and all of its actions are entirely predetermined
That's the only AI we've ever developed. As you point out, it's completely incapable of doing anything original. It's called weak AI, as opposed to strong AI, which exhibits general intelligence. Strong AI is strictly limited to science fiction at this point. All along, we've also seen a shift in specific tasks, where we once thought that they would require strong AI. I would expect machine translation to be one area where larger data sets and only slightly more complex models (which are possible to train, thanks to the larger datasets), might result in the conclusion that good translation actually doesn't require understanding, or that this weak AI, at some level, shows equivalent understanding, even though it still wouldn't be able to practice it generally.
With the risk of resurrecting a/. fad of old, a space elevator on the moon is much more realistic than the Earth counterpart right now. No atmosphere, a much lower gravity well (less public opinion with more or less irrational fears). With that kind of approach, one would get a surface and a good way to transport things. Considering the issues of communication lag, and the latency for physical transport, I think that it's most likely that the first major presence outside Earth should be within a few lightseconds of here. Basically, that means the moon.
Don't you think that the far longer distance to the asteroids make the overhead of a human presence on the trip there somewhat bigger, compared to a trip to the moon? A continuous presence on the moon would be realistic before 2030, reusing the same equipment with different crews. I fail to see that on the asteroids. Heck, for the moon it would even be possible to get down to Earth in a somewhat conceivable manner in a medical emergency, not so in the asteroid belt. (Ok, we can choose to land on one that passes nearby, but then it's a very limited time window anyway. It's a series of short excursions, not a permanent project.)
VBA relies on COM and parts of the original (up to VB6) VB engine to do its job. The Mac layer was based on a COM implementation on Mac. To continue the licensing scheme, they would have to maintain the complete library and eventually port it to 64-bitness. Just keeping the bits needed for Office can be simpler. At least, they won't have to maintain an external-product quality interface to the host application developers anymore. VBA support in a future Office release might be done through process separation and a separate thunking layer (moving all the COM servers out of the actual process and making those talk to the actual Office applications through the new API), or translation on the fly to a new environment. Keeping support doesn't have to mean that the current environment really stays there.
n being what? The beauty of it is that it's quite nice, when related to the number of pixels. The problem is the horrible non-locality when literally bouncing around the scene.
What possible reason could France have for this law, besides being successfully bought by big business?
Quite sad really. The notion that it helps small retailers, so business, but not necessarily big business. The publishers and the retail sector can gain from it, while those interested to compete on price and the general public do not, at least not related to their book purchases.
Isn't the release of plain crappy C code the pinnacle of openness? There are lots of FOSS projects with a bunch of crappy C code and quite limited docs. For the MS Office format, an open source licensed version of a parser that would expose something like a subset of the Word COM object model as a DOM would be more useful than hundreds of pages of docs. If that's not enough, one could go into the code itself.
356 KM is not really that far. I know people who commute that far every day to work. One or two ways? 200 miles, for the metrically challenged, seems quite hefty. I know that there are people with that kind of commute, but what percentage would they constitute of the total (the total population or the total number of miles).
256 bits is rougly 256/10*3 > 76 digits of accuracy. If we want floating point, we need to devote some of that to the exponent, let's say we keep the mantissa at 200 bits. Then we still have 60 digits, or More Than Enough(TM) (especially since you can do arbitrary-precision arithmetics anyway if you really want to).
They certainly do have the resources to write fuck-off letters in response to take-down notices, even when the argument is more based on the fact that the material might violate privacy or be a medical risk (i.e. some unfinished self-treatment package that was evaluated in a study, but still seemed official enough). And, still, they do remove some material.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but the /. crowd also can get kind of agitated when it comes to license issues and GPL violations.
Yep, assuming that you have a cell grid covering the better part of a geographic area. A phone that's just turned on with a user who expects coverage wherever he goes costs almost as much as one with a limited, but regular, usage of SMS and voice. Still, the first one can get off far cheaper than the second, simply because users seem more willing to accept paying for actual actions, than just waiting. The interesting aspect in this light is that the text message might very well transfer as much information as a phone call of equivalent cost. The fact that the data content is far smaller is simply due to the ingenious idea of letting the user do the compression.
IE is special because the mess is frequently created by a sloppy DOCTYPE and browser detection. That is, the version that IE gets, through CSS hacks and possible server-side user-agent detection, is not strict, while the one that Firefox sees might actually be strict.
No, it was released after Windows 2000 and certainly inferior for any work task. It was never supported as an enterprise network client (worse than 98 in that aspect) and the plans for Whistler were quite clear. The repeat with Windows 7 "soon" would be a similarity, but it's more like XP coming soon after 2000. The development on Windows has been focused on the server release for the past 14 months or so. Vista added very little for a corporate customer before, but it at least might make sense now. As I understand it, SP1 is supposed to bring Vista rather close to the Windows 2008 codebase, so they're closer together than XP (5.1) and 2003 (5.2) was.
Yeah, HIV research, mostly done in labs in industrialized countries, is exactly the type of activity that will make the Windows marketshare explode. Some of the charitable activities of Microsoft can be questioned, but little of those of the Gates Foundation , at least not through the MS relation.
We certainly do have some pecularities, but the economy of Sweden these days is far from socialistic. The government sector is huge and the taxes high, but isn't it reasonable to define socialism as community-owned (state or cooperatives) companies/industry? While there are some, and were more in the past, most companies are fairly normal ones (publicly traded or private). These days, I even think France might have a larger share of state-owned companies and industry ventures. It's not just a matter of "socialism being implemented in the good way", but "socialists mainly staying within a free-market framework".
Agreed! Everyone who failed to load ansi.sys and get a gloriously colored DOS prompt can turn his geek card back in. (Lifelong UNIX usage is a valid excuse, but that doesn't seem to be the case for the OP...)
Let me count the limitations of the DOS commandline:
Has noone used DOSKEY? I've seen this in several threads now, and it's one aspect of DOS that is not true. Features introduced in MS-DOS 5 should be fair game. (And F3 worked to recall the latest command before that.)
The real question is: Who wants to deal with vast amounts of UI library, tons of little form files, and intricate event models for managing all of the user state?
It's the 20% of the app taking 80% of the time, in addition to making all of that sweet logic you wrote kinda hard to use on multiple platforms.
UI stuff, while certainly important, can be some of the least fun parts of a project to work on. What's worse? Printing?
Consistent error handling? (Especially in a GUI...) And now, by consistent, I mean error handling that's just as good as the thing you did in the places where you really hit a bug during testing and had to check it, or where you expect a real error to happen. A big catch clause around everything dosen't count. You also need to report it to the user, making sense while also providing enough details to be useful in debugging.
It's even more of a burden when you realize that some neat optimization (probably some kind of caching) will fail just due to the problem of stale info or false assumptions in the event of error somewhere, even when it will work 99.9 % of the time.
Considering the problems of the seafloor, at this point we have better maps of Mars than Earth. A lot of effort has been spent on Mars. Meanwhile, Mercury, Venus and Pluto are all more or less unexplored. For Venus, even sending probes don't help us too far, go inside the atmosphere and the equipment is destroyed, stay outside and you don't see all that much. Pluto and Mercury, well, it's just a matter of getting around to actually go there. I think it's wise to do so now. I find the simple prospect of possible water ice in cool craters on the surface fascinating.
Just a thought: the (supposed) increased failure rate for HDDs wouldn't come within 6 months. During the first period, it's instead perfectly reasonable that the reduced number of power-on hours decreases the calendar-based failure rate. The interesting issue is whether your HDD failure rates increases significantly within a 1-3 year timeframe.
With the risk of resurrecting a /. fad of old, a space elevator on the moon is much more realistic than the Earth counterpart right now. No atmosphere, a much lower gravity well (less public opinion with more or less irrational fears). With that kind of approach, one would get a surface and a good way to transport things. Considering the issues of communication lag, and the latency for physical transport, I think that it's most likely that the first major presence outside Earth should be within a few lightseconds of here. Basically, that means the moon.
Don't you think that the far longer distance to the asteroids make the overhead of a human presence on the trip there somewhat bigger, compared to a trip to the moon? A continuous presence on the moon would be realistic before 2030, reusing the same equipment with different crews. I fail to see that on the asteroids. Heck, for the moon it would even be possible to get down to Earth in a somewhat conceivable manner in a medical emergency, not so in the asteroid belt. (Ok, we can choose to land on one that passes nearby, but then it's a very limited time window anyway. It's a series of short excursions, not a permanent project.)
VBA relies on COM and parts of the original (up to VB6) VB engine to do its job. The Mac layer was based on a COM implementation on Mac. To continue the licensing scheme, they would have to maintain the complete library and eventually port it to 64-bitness. Just keeping the bits needed for Office can be simpler. At least, they won't have to maintain an external-product quality interface to the host application developers anymore. VBA support in a future Office release might be done through process separation and a separate thunking layer (moving all the COM servers out of the actual process and making those talk to the actual Office applications through the new API), or translation on the fly to a new environment. Keeping support doesn't have to mean that the current environment really stays there.
n being what? The beauty of it is that it's quite nice, when related to the number of pixels. The problem is the horrible non-locality when literally bouncing around the scene.
Quite sad really. The notion that it helps small retailers, so business, but not necessarily big business. The publishers and the retail sector can gain from it, while those interested to compete on price and the general public do not, at least not related to their book purchases.
Isn't the release of plain crappy C code the pinnacle of openness? There are lots of FOSS projects with a bunch of crappy C code and quite limited docs. For the MS Office format, an open source licensed version of a parser that would expose something like a subset of the Word COM object model as a DOM would be more useful than hundreds of pages of docs. If that's not enough, one could go into the code itself.
I bet they would be nailed in an anti-trust case in Alliance courts.
256 bits is rougly 256/10*3 > 76 digits of accuracy. If we want floating point, we need to devote some of that to the exponent, let's say we keep the mantissa at 200 bits. Then we still have 60 digits, or More Than Enough(TM) (especially since you can do arbitrary-precision arithmetics anyway if you really want to).
They certainly do have the resources to write fuck-off letters in response to take-down notices, even when the argument is more based on the fact that the material might violate privacy or be a medical risk (i.e. some unfinished self-treatment package that was evaluated in a study, but still seemed official enough). And, still, they do remove some material.