If you came up with an improvement to a simple machine on a home improvement product (which, I could be wrong, but I'm assuming you just dabble in it and are not a full-time professional), then I can pretty much guarantee that at least 5% of people in similar situations would come up with the same idea. Cleverness is valuable, but more common than you seem to think. This is exactly the kind of thing I think should NOT be patentable. What gives you the right to prevent other people from using this idea if they come up with it on their own? You can't even prove that you came up with it first. There could be over 100 people who have seen the exact same possibility and just never said anything.
Next, "small" ideas will never make anyone money regardless of a patent system, for the same reason that open source succeeds. If a company has a choice between 2 ideas, and one costs money, they will tend toward the free one even if it isn't as good as the one that costs money. Thats just how it works. If you present a nifty idea like "one click purchases" and let someone know that it will require royalties, they will design their online store without the feature just to avoid the hassle of divying out royalty fees. Even if the rates are reasonable. They might just avoid the patent to spite you.
Ultimately, the company that produces something should try to hire clever people so that they can get small innovations into their product. But, even in my own job I have seen small ideas that might improve some aspect of the product, and even after suggesting them they get turned down. Why? Because the cost of altering things to make the change would be high, and the preceived value added to the product doesn't justify it. This wouldn't change even if I patented the idea and tried to sell it to my company. If they won't implement it for free, then they sure aren't going to pay money for it. If someone else sees the idea and patents it? well that just guarantees that the idea will never be used at all. By the time 20 years are up the device will be obsolete. If it isn't patented? perhaps there will be a product redesign at some point and I can suggest the idea again.
My thought is that people don't need any encouragement to share their ideas. If its a useful idea, they'll use it. If it has an obvious implementation, it will be "shared" by default. Granting protection is just a governmental favor to 1) help them recoup the development costs and 2) make sure the implementation is made public and isn't lost. For "clever but obvious" ideas, there isn't really any development cost, and there's no secret to the implementation. So why patent them?
The only remaining reason is to "compensate someone monetarily for their cleverness", which as far as I'm concerned, they don't really need. Clever people enjoy being clever. They get to take credit for the invention which is also a benefit. Money and monopolies just tangle up the system. (and prevent the next clever guy from using his idea without paying royalties... or maybe prevent it altogether if the first inventor is feeling protective of the idea)
How about this standard instead: Its obvious if someone can figure out how to do it without looking at the details of the patent:-)
In other words, we grant the monopoly in exchange for the details of how to do it. If we don't need the details, we don't grant the monopoly. If someone has a clever idea with an obvious implementation... well, they get to see how fast they can take it to market before competitors get wind of it and the competition begins.
The test would be quite easy: have the inventor submit the goal their invention solves. Have a team of 5 patent examiners describe how they would implement the goal. Then have the inventor submit the details, and strike every claim that was mentioned by the examiners.
Assuming you have a lazer powerful enough to create instant several-mile-long ionized paths, you could go "lightning-farming" during storms. Instead of having tons of stations and lightning rods, you would have one station with an insane capacitor bank which would "shoot" promising-looking clouds in an attempt to get a lightning discharge. You could then use the insane capacitor bank to drive the laser multiple more times, discharging all the nearby clouds, until you ran out of clouds or until the capacitors were full. You would then power the electric grid for a while until more clouds moved in, or until you thought they had recharged enough to make it worth the next round of shots.
Um, because nobody cares? because playing on a split screen sucks beyond belief? I have never enjoyed any game that required a split screen. In any PvP game it spoils any attempts at stealth or suprise. You know what weapon your enemy has, where they are, and what they're planning to do to you. You can see the traps they plant, you know how much health they have, who else they're fighting, and can pick the perfect time to jump in and kill both of them. And to top it all off, you're trying to play on a tiny little screen.
Also, a majority of households have 17" or 19" monitors, and they can't hit those resolutions anyway. thus we're talking about a very small market for the quad-screen-1280x1024 gamers.
I think PC game makers figure that they can leave that small portion of the market who is willing to play a suspenseless game on a 8"x6" window to the consoles.
I apologize for not looking up the link, but google for "slipstream". You can take your installation disc and apply all the service packs to it. Then you have an install disc that installs SP4 and detects all newer hardware at install time. Also, reduces the time window where you're vulnerable to worms while getting the updates. Also prevents you from having to reboot the system 10 times while getting all the components that can't be installed concurrently.
While I don't agree with several of the items on that list, I found the PDF (which is quite long) to be so interesting and insightful I literally spent several hours reading it. followed by a number of google searches to verify enough of it that I was confident that it could be true.
Spoiler: The paper, among many other things, indicates that a massive Israeli lobbying group (which I had never even heard of) could be a primary reason that we ended up invading iraq!
Because of course nobody who is sane could possibly vote other than the way I do. I mean, to even have the slightest doubt in my party is a sure sign that someone is a fool. How can someone possibly even call it a "decision". I think it more akin to a logical consequence. Either you're with us, or you're one of those raving other-party nutjobs that disgrace this planet with their nonsense. Anyone who can think coherently enough to weigh the issues would obviously not vote for them, and if somehow you end up in a state of indecision, it means you have multiple personalities of which one is a raving lunatic, and you need to seek mental help to get that personality silenced so that your unencumbered sane personality can vote for my party.
I retract the statement just made. I tried "grep -R foo" in/etc, and after running it 5 times it ran diskless. The only argument to be made would be about who has the best cache replacement algorithm.
Swap to disk??? It sounds to me like they're just being selective and preemptive about what they disk-cache. It would be rather stupid to put the disk-cache in disk-swap... (unless it was flash-swap)
Personally, I've always liked Win2k's caching... quite a lot better luck than i've had with linux. Try a file text-search (grep equivalent) over a couple hundred meg of files. then do the search again with a different string. Win2K will still have most of this in RAM, and the second search will run like lightning. Try it on linux and you get... well, ok, so I've never timed it. But I always see the HDD light run on the second search on Linux, where windows can sometimes serve the entire thing out of memory.
I didn't start my unix experience on Gentoo (FreeBSD, rather) but I do remember what it was like to be completely new to the system.
Things that a complete newbie does not know:
ls
mount
tar
man
grep
/etc
editing make.conf
making symlinks
/boot
boot loaders, in general
compiling a kernel, by hand
installing a kernel, by hand
editing/etc/passwd
knowing the basic pieces of software, what they do, and how they are divided by purpose: cron, a system logger, Xorg, apache, etc etc etc.
When Gentoo sits you down and says "type this", any curious user will say "hm, what is this, what is it doing..." and learn a little bit in the process. Exercise builds skill. If you see it, you might get a little knowledge, but if you do it, you are actually learning. Kind of the hands-on concept.
I guess the point is that Gentoo is for people who are curious and interested in the workings of Unix. Yes, it is possible to use Gentoo if you pretend that typing some long crazy string corresponds to what would be a button click in another distro, but for that kind of user, there's no point. Non-curious users will simply type keystrokes and learn nothing. and then get fed up. and then quit and use a different distro.
Also, even at the later stage of emerging things, you do still learn various things thanks to "emerge portage", and "etc-update". Also, to get most daemon programs to run as needed you will need to edit their conf files, and play with symlinks, and edit rc.conf, and conf.d and friends. Heck, I never understood the Linux rc script system when I was using Debian, but I learned it pretty quick when Gentoo started changing things and adding boot-time messages like "/etc/hostname is depricated, use/etc/conf.d/hostname instead".
And, when a user finally gets tired of not having sound and tackles ALSA, they get to learn all sorts of fun things like/dev nodes, devfs, udev, modules.conf, lspci, recompiling the kernel with and without alsa built-in, or as a separate module, or as a userspace lib... and I'd better stop here before I start an ALSA flamewar.
And yes, not reading the handbook is suiscide, and the forums are the lifeblood of Gentoo.
So... I'd been thinking along these lines for quite a while, and sort of working on a idea where you have a forum system with ratings etc. but then also have a "summarize" feature where an editor comes along and summarizes a set of posts. Then, rather than hunting through all the posts, new people could come by and just read the summary. Or, if they want, dig into the individual posts and reply to them. Then, replying to either the summary or the original posts would mark the summary as needing a revision, which would attract an editor to come by and integrate any new useful facts or ideas.
Then... I realized that we almost have the framework for this with Backslash! We've got the posting system, the ratings system, and an easy way to browse therough the important posts looking for useful bits to repost as the summary. All we'd need is a mentality of treating the data from an encyclopedia point of view, a way to add lots of editors (high karma, and good ratings on editing skills?), and articles searchable by topic which never "expire". Oh, and the way to flag the topic as needing a re-edit.
Also, instead of quoting people literally, we would want to just summarize their thoughts into the mix, with maybe a link to the post they made.
Choosing editors (to write or update summaries) could be done on the same random-selection process that they use for choosing moderators, and maybe assign editor priveleges more often to those whose summaries are highly rated.
Also, as a final note, I would like it if posts were not assigned to a particular topic, but free-floating nodes of a graph, where a node could have multiple parents and multiple children. Maybe just links between post objects that have a relational property to them, like "Reply", "Reference", "Correction".
And as a final-final idea, I would also want the comments to be updatable by the person who made them (with a history) and retractable if that person decided to change their mind. (leaving the post and its history, but "muting" it from the discussion with some sort of "this post has been retracted by author, click here to view edit history")
Ok... so maybe Backslash doesn't have very many of these points covered. but its still sort of a neat name.
After getting fund raiser calls from various "State Troopers", "Widows of Firefighters", etc charities, I hunted around on google and found out that these are from companies who go around calling charities, and offering to donate somewhat large (on the scale of the organization, which can be small) constant sums of money in exchange for permission to use their name. The "charity" involved can be something as lame as the union for police officers of a particular county. In other words, they might not be in your area, or even be worth donating money to.
The companies then sell this permission to other companies who do the actual calling.
End result is that the charity gets some relatively small cash, and some company gets the ability to farm up mass sums of money in their name.
DO NOT GIVE TO THEM EVER! ... or give them fake donation information... I wonder if that would be legal or not...
Blow on the motherboard to keep it from freezing
on
Computer Voodoo?
·
· Score: 1
I once helped a friend build a new comp, and it would freeze after about 15 mins of Warcraft 3. I suspected overheating, so I opened up the case and felt components to see which were overheating... nothing obvious. So, I tried blowing on the motherboard near the ram... and it unfroze! and then re-froze. The hilarious part was that a fan didn't seem to do the trick- it had to be a human blowing on it. so i spent the next 2 minutes blowing on the motherboard while he tried navigating the menus to get back out of warcraft.
I guess the part that was really wierd was that the comp didn't bluescreen. It would just freeze until the temperature came back down, and then resume operation like nothing was wrong.
He later RMA'd the thing to get one that was less tempermental.
Re:What's wrong with the interface?
on
Beginning GIMP
·
· Score: 1
I can live with the multiple-document thing that so many other people complain about. i might even have been able to put up with the old hundred-deep-nested menus if i had known where evrything was.
However, the one thing that shall cause me to never again touch GIMP as long as I live was the first time I tried using it for a non-obvious real task.
I wanted to
open an image
select a region
"lift" the region into a separate layer
apply a fuzzy light effect (lens flare, etc) on the lower layer without affecting the lifted image
re-merge the layers with the upper layer obscuring the lower layer
I kid you not, it took me FIVE FREAKING HOURS to do this. I don't recall the details anymore, but I had a fantasticly hard time of lifting my selection into a new layer. Then I had a hard time getting my light effect to apply to the lower layer, and then I may even have had a hard time merging them again. Why? Was the problem that I didn't understand layers? No. It was mostly GIMP not giving me enough feedback about selecting layers for operations that can't happen, and not explaining why nothing appeared to happen after I used a tool or option, and hiding the options I wanted way down in the menus where nobody can find them.
I also wanted to tile an image in the background, and never did find a way to do it in GIMP. I used paint instead, and then pulled that in as another layer.
What pissed me off was that I could quite easily have done this with Adobe Photodeluxe (which came with my old scanner, and needs Win98 in order to run), in about 15 minutes. That program was a hundred times more intuitive than gimp. I picked it up, did stuff, and never needed to read a manual. With GIMP, I just have no luck. ever. I'm a programmer, too.
Oh, and how about editing individual pixels on an icon? there's another one you'll never figure out without reading up on it.
Oh, and how about GIFs? The patent has expired, folks. Photodeluxe could save GIFs with reduced color counts (2, 4, 8, 16, etc) that embarras the size of JPEG and PNG. Sure would love to have a new tool that could pull that off.
If you decide to use this definition of soul... then there's not really anything to get upset about. Your consciousness would then be a state machine, whose output is a product of the current state and the inputs. If you duplicate the machine and its state, and then resume processing with both, then both of them are "you" at the moment they are started, however as the state of each machine begins to differentiate, they would no longer be the same person.
In that sense, "you" is a continuously changing variable. You derive your individuality from the address of your variable (the atoms of your body). You also derive continuity from the memories of important past states, much like edits to software with a change log. In that sense, cloning yourself would be like forking the project. Both have the old states of "you" in the change history. You could claim that one is more legitimate than the other based on variable address, but both contain the same value at the moment the cloning takes place.
In this mentality, "right to life" is the desire to continue the progress of your state machine. If RL had save points where you could upload a graph of your atomic structure, then you shouldn't worry about doing foolish things that might get you killed, since they could just recycle your matter into a replica of your saved state and resume execution. If your execution resumes, then the "you" of some recent state is still alive.
If you want to take the religious spin on this, things get a lot more complicated. Starting with the assumption that you have a soul, given to you by God, you have to assume that this Soul is driving the decisions of your mind. If you freeze your mind, the soul will either go dormant, or leave for Heaven, or reside in some temporary space until it can reclaim the body.
Cloning (like duplication, not embryonic cloning) gets even more crazy. Either God will give your soul control over both bodies (or maybe this will be an intrinsic property of a soul, that all bodies that it matches will be available for control), or leave one "soulless" in such a way that it has no proper judgement (like some sort of animal with advanced intellectual abilities), or grant a new soul to the new copy. It might also be possible that body, and not the soul, maintains state history (memory) and so each body would behave the same over time despite not knowing the thoughts or actions of the other body.
The interesting question there is whether a linked soul would be mutable or immutable, and whether race conditions would occour. This could lead to a buffer overflow that would allow us to hack into God's network and access the secrets we've always wanted to know.
And, once God realizes he's been hacked, he might just shut down the whole machine and call an early finish to the project. In short, Christians should be very worried about human suspension and duplication, and pass laws against it.
I think its kind of funny that all the ancestors (or even parents) of people born in the US are here because they didn't like where they were and wanted to "leave it behind" (bad blanket statement, I guess, but whatever) Things that come to mind are the 16-18th century catholic church and european monarchies, and just general poverty and economic disasters.
Now, their descendants in the US have created such an unpleasant corporate/political juggernaut that we're considering moving away from it... and some of the options are those places that we left, which in the meantime have been hammered straight by the people who stayed.
In contrast, keep in mind the middle-east situations, where (as I've heard it told) the large Jewish populations moved out of the area after WWII to re-found israel and evade the nutty militant islamic folks... who then (with much less opposition) reshaped the government into the crazy stuff we see in Iran and Iraq and etc. So keep in mind that "all that is needed for evil men to succeed, is for good men to do nothing"(or leave).
So the real answer, of course, is for us to take a stand and etc blah blah blah etc... which we aren't going to do since we're all thoughtful non-assertive computer nerds. Perhaps the best strategy would be to work on changing the non-assertive part? The EFF does this, but they don't seem to carry enough political clout to get things done. Maybe we need some sort of system (communications software/website, social networking something-or-other) that can help us actually lobby for things? I apologize for this thought ending in unanswered questions, but I think we all need to be asking these questions instead of wondering whether we should move.
And one last note about China... I think China has a certian appeal that people overlook. Yes, they've got a tyrannical government and people don't have any say in what happens, but at the same time... there's a human element to it. When I see America, I see a machine. A giant uncontrolled machine that doesn't really have any goal other than going faster. It finds that going downhill makes it go faster, and so it does, regardless of whether it wants to be at the bottom of the hill later on, or how unpleasant the crash will be.
China, on the other hand, knows where it is going (at least for the next couple decades). It strives to "be better". To have an technological revolution to put it on par with America. China has a self-image that it wants to improve. If a set of laws doesn't benefit the country, they aren't used. If communism isn't going to give them the economy they want, they use parts of capitalism and free market. If they have to control how many children a person has to save the nation from collapse, they do it. If China wants to brag that they have all their own software and aren't dependant on American stuff, then the government supports its development.
I can't really say any of those things about America. If some small-time developer in America comes up with a great idea and gets sued over stupid patent laws, they go down in flames, and the rest of us sit around like nascar fans and say "wow, look at that crash! It didn't affect my beer though, so I guess I have nothing to complain about". If the big (and important to the economy) corporations get massively sued, people sit around and fantasize that it could be them some day "and then, I'll invent something cool and MS will steal it, and I'll be like WHAM, B***, EAT THAT". meanwhile nobody is looking after the health of the economy, or health of innovation, or health of the environment, or doing any planning of big things in general.
I wish... that the role of President was superceded by a new role called "National Visionary". This person would look for things wrong with the nation, and try to propose solutions to them. He would be given power and authority to put things before congress, and help shape where the attention in Washington is focused. This per
I have a friend working in the patent office who says that they actually don't have a test for obviousness. The way he told it, sometime back in the 80s there was a big fuss about the patent office rejecting everything, and they went from a "applicant proves non-obviousness to get patent" model to a "examiner proves obviousness to reject" model.
It is of course nearly impossible to prove that something is obvious, and back up that claim when the indignant raving "inventor" comes in to protest and complain. My impression is that prior art is the only thing used by the patent office to determine whether or not to award the patent, using the (flawed) logic: "it is obvious if someone else thought of it first [and didn't patent it]".
My friend also related (second-hand) some funny stories about applicants who were banned from the office for behavior-type stuff, like attacking the examiner who rejected their patent. You have to keep in mind that these patent folks are working in a public office, and don't really have an incentive to annoy the percentage of nutjobs who file for patents of crazy/obvious stuff.
The idea is to submerge the entire computer in vegetable (or better, mineral) oil. This cools ALL components at a lot less cost than a bunch of watercool components, and at less effort as well.
Ok, first part was right- DOS, then Win1-3 on top. Win1-3 used dos's device drivers to operate the comp's hardware. I call that building the OS on top of DOS. DOS was single-threaded. Win1-3 used cooperative multitasking, which means that the OS itself was really just an elaborate extensible single-threaded program. You were running multiple "programs" (more like relocatable code blocks, really), and control would switch from one to the next when they called "GetMessage". If your program went into an infinite loop without calling this function, it was time for CTRL-ALT-DEL.
Win95 brought 2 main things with it- the Win32 API (for windowing, process/thread stuff, etc, all designed for 32-bit), and native device drivers. Win95 had some DOS compatibility in it, and needed to be able to use DOS drivers for backward compatibility. However, many DOS drivers no longer worked (like, network stuff- I seem to remember that the Novell drivers stopped working with Win95 and we had to get new ones) so you can't say that Win95 was built on top of DOS. It just had a lot of backward compatibility. Most notably, Win95 had real multithreading. It could actually divide processor time between jobs, and divide it between threads within a process without any programmer gymnastics.
The difference between Win95 and WinNT4 was that 95 didn't have separate memory spaces. Each program was just using space in the giant pool of memory, and could overwrite other programs' data at will. yada yada performance video games etc. WinNT4 was actually stable, and provided each prog with a separate memory space, and required complicated (for someone who's never dealt with it before) memory mapping in order to share data between apps. In Win95/98/ME, all you had to do to share data was pass a pointer using a window message to the other prog's main window;-) They could access it just fine.
Win98 was Win95 with more device drivers and more APIs and more GUI features. WinME was Win98 with more device drivers and more APIs and more GUI features. None of this line had protected memory regions. This is why WinME sucked so badly- it had a few bugs and they could take down the system since everything was so tightly integrated.
Win2K was WinNT with most of Win98's functionality. WinNT had been gaining functionality over time, with SP1/SP2/SP3/SP4, but when they finally got it so that it could run most Win98 progs, (and a bunch of API calls that were only on Win9X for some reason) they released it as Win2K. Win2K has a DOS emulator in it, and is itself completely incompatible with DOS. It is completely invalid to say that 2K is in any way based on DOS. I still use Win2K. Win2K is solid stable etc, and I've had uptimes as high as 83 days, while using it under very high load, such as running JBuilder 9 and WoW at the same time, along with Trillian, Winamp, Cygwin's X server, and a whole host of other nifty software. (the thing that ended my uptime was, of course, Windows Media Player, haha. I opened it by accident instead of VLC. I have since deleted its exe) Most of my uptimes are ended by power outages.
WinXP was just Win2K with some improved legacy emulation ("pretend to be Win95 for this program") some (improved?) networking like the firewall, and some additional GUI stuff, like styled window borders. Oh and remote desktop features. (which have been possible all along, since Win95 or so, but never implemented. Those curious should investigate the Windows Metafile ".WMF")
Vista seems that its main attraction will be the GUI, again. But we'll see.
Slashdot Mirror
If you came up with an improvement to a simple machine on a home improvement product (which, I could be wrong, but I'm assuming you just dabble in it and are not a full-time professional), then I can pretty much guarantee that at least 5% of people in similar situations would come up with the same idea. Cleverness is valuable, but more common than you seem to think. This is exactly the kind of thing I think should NOT be patentable. What gives you the right to prevent other people from using this idea if they come up with it on their own? You can't even prove that you came up with it first. There could be over 100 people who have seen the exact same possibility and just never said anything. Next, "small" ideas will never make anyone money regardless of a patent system, for the same reason that open source succeeds. If a company has a choice between 2 ideas, and one costs money, they will tend toward the free one even if it isn't as good as the one that costs money. Thats just how it works. If you present a nifty idea like "one click purchases" and let someone know that it will require royalties, they will design their online store without the feature just to avoid the hassle of divying out royalty fees. Even if the rates are reasonable. They might just avoid the patent to spite you. Ultimately, the company that produces something should try to hire clever people so that they can get small innovations into their product. But, even in my own job I have seen small ideas that might improve some aspect of the product, and even after suggesting them they get turned down. Why? Because the cost of altering things to make the change would be high, and the preceived value added to the product doesn't justify it. This wouldn't change even if I patented the idea and tried to sell it to my company. If they won't implement it for free, then they sure aren't going to pay money for it. If someone else sees the idea and patents it? well that just guarantees that the idea will never be used at all. By the time 20 years are up the device will be obsolete. If it isn't patented? perhaps there will be a product redesign at some point and I can suggest the idea again.
My thought is that people don't need any encouragement to share their ideas. If its a useful idea, they'll use it. If it has an obvious implementation, it will be "shared" by default. Granting protection is just a governmental favor to 1) help them recoup the development costs and 2) make sure the implementation is made public and isn't lost. For "clever but obvious" ideas, there isn't really any development cost, and there's no secret to the implementation. So why patent them?
The only remaining reason is to "compensate someone monetarily for their cleverness", which as far as I'm concerned, they don't really need. Clever people enjoy being clever. They get to take credit for the invention which is also a benefit. Money and monopolies just tangle up the system. (and prevent the next clever guy from using his idea without paying royalties... or maybe prevent it altogether if the first inventor is feeling protective of the idea)
How about this standard instead: Its obvious if someone can figure out how to do it without looking at the details of the patent :-)
In other words, we grant the monopoly in exchange for the details of how to do it. If we don't need the details, we don't grant the monopoly. If someone has a clever idea with an obvious implementation... well, they get to see how fast they can take it to market before competitors get wind of it and the competition begins.
The test would be quite easy: have the inventor submit the goal their invention solves. Have a team of 5 patent examiners describe how they would implement the goal. Then have the inventor submit the details, and strike every claim that was mentioned by the examiners.
Done deal.
Just to spell out the full idea:
Assuming you have a lazer powerful enough to create instant several-mile-long ionized paths, you could go "lightning-farming" during storms. Instead of having tons of stations and lightning rods, you would have one station with an insane capacitor bank which would "shoot" promising-looking clouds in an attempt to get a lightning discharge. You could then use the insane capacitor bank to drive the laser multiple more times, discharging all the nearby clouds, until you ran out of clouds or until the capacitors were full. You would then power the electric grid for a while until more clouds moved in, or until you thought they had recharged enough to make it worth the next round of shots.
see title
Tetris could be the exception. but you also don't need 1280x1024 for each sub-screen ;-)
I think the zoom-to-fit model used by smash brothers is the perfect way to do single-screen multiplayer, btw.
Um, because nobody cares? because playing on a split screen sucks beyond belief? I have never enjoyed any game that required a split screen. In any PvP game it spoils any attempts at stealth or suprise. You know what weapon your enemy has, where they are, and what they're planning to do to you. You can see the traps they plant, you know how much health they have, who else they're fighting, and can pick the perfect time to jump in and kill both of them. And to top it all off, you're trying to play on a tiny little screen.
Also, a majority of households have 17" or 19" monitors, and they can't hit those resolutions anyway. thus we're talking about a very small market for the quad-screen-1280x1024 gamers.
I think PC game makers figure that they can leave that small portion of the market who is willing to play a suspenseless game on a 8"x6" window to the consoles.
I apologize for not looking up the link, but google for "slipstream". You can take your installation disc and apply all the service packs to it. Then you have an install disc that installs SP4 and detects all newer hardware at install time. Also, reduces the time window where you're vulnerable to worms while getting the updates. Also prevents you from having to reboot the system 10 times while getting all the components that can't be installed concurrently.
(Similar to "mod parent up")
While I don't agree with several of the items on that list, I found the PDF (which is quite long) to be so interesting and insightful I literally spent several hours reading it. followed by a number of google searches to verify enough of it that I was confident that it could be true.
Spoiler: The paper, among many other things, indicates that a massive Israeli lobbying group (which I had never even heard of) could be a primary reason that we ended up invading iraq!
Because of course nobody who is sane could possibly vote other than the way I do. I mean, to even have the slightest doubt in my party is a sure sign that someone is a fool. How can someone possibly even call it a "decision". I think it more akin to a logical consequence. Either you're with us, or you're one of those raving other-party nutjobs that disgrace this planet with their nonsense. Anyone who can think coherently enough to weigh the issues would obviously not vote for them, and if somehow you end up in a state of indecision, it means you have multiple personalities of which one is a raving lunatic, and you need to seek mental help to get that personality silenced so that your unencumbered sane personality can vote for my party.
I retract the statement just made. I tried "grep -R foo" in /etc, and after running it 5 times it ran diskless. The only argument to be made would be about who has the best cache replacement algorithm.
Swap to disk??? It sounds to me like they're just being selective and preemptive about what they disk-cache. It would be rather stupid to put the disk-cache in disk-swap... (unless it was flash-swap) Personally, I've always liked Win2k's caching... quite a lot better luck than i've had with linux. Try a file text-search (grep equivalent) over a couple hundred meg of files. then do the search again with a different string. Win2K will still have most of this in RAM, and the second search will run like lightning. Try it on linux and you get... well, ok, so I've never timed it. But I always see the HDD light run on the second search on Linux, where windows can sometimes serve the entire thing out of memory.
I didn't start my unix experience on Gentoo (FreeBSD, rather) but I do remember what it was like to be completely new to the system.
Things that a complete newbie does not know:
When Gentoo sits you down and says "type this", any curious user will say "hm, what is this, what is it doing..." and learn a little bit in the process. Exercise builds skill. If you see it, you might get a little knowledge, but if you do it, you are actually learning. Kind of the hands-on concept.
I guess the point is that Gentoo is for people who are curious and interested in the workings of Unix. Yes, it is possible to use Gentoo if you pretend that typing some long crazy string corresponds to what would be a button click in another distro, but for that kind of user, there's no point. Non-curious users will simply type keystrokes and learn nothing. and then get fed up. and then quit and use a different distro.
Also, even at the later stage of emerging things, you do still learn various things thanks to "emerge portage", and "etc-update". Also, to get most daemon programs to run as needed you will need to edit their conf files, and play with symlinks, and edit rc.conf, and conf.d and friends. Heck, I never understood the Linux rc script system when I was using Debian, but I learned it pretty quick when Gentoo started changing things and adding boot-time messages like "/etc/hostname is depricated, use /etc/conf.d/hostname instead".
And, when a user finally gets tired of not having sound and tackles ALSA, they get to learn all sorts of fun things like /dev nodes, devfs, udev, modules.conf, lspci, recompiling the kernel with and without alsa built-in, or as a separate module, or as a userspace lib... and I'd better stop here before I start an ALSA flamewar.
And yes, not reading the handbook is suiscide, and the forums are the lifeblood of Gentoo.
So... I'd been thinking along these lines for quite a while, and sort of working on a idea where you have a forum system with ratings etc. but then also have a "summarize" feature where an editor comes along and summarizes a set of posts. Then, rather than hunting through all the posts, new people could come by and just read the summary. Or, if they want, dig into the individual posts and reply to them. Then, replying to either the summary or the original posts would mark the summary as needing a revision, which would attract an editor to come by and integrate any new useful facts or ideas.
Then... I realized that we almost have the framework for this with Backslash! We've got the posting system, the ratings system, and an easy way to browse therough the important posts looking for useful bits to repost as the summary. All we'd need is a mentality of treating the data from an encyclopedia point of view, a way to add lots of editors (high karma, and good ratings on editing skills?), and articles searchable by topic which never "expire". Oh, and the way to flag the topic as needing a re-edit.
Also, instead of quoting people literally, we would want to just summarize their thoughts into the mix, with maybe a link to the post they made.
Choosing editors (to write or update summaries) could be done on the same random-selection process that they use for choosing moderators, and maybe assign editor priveleges more often to those whose summaries are highly rated.
Also, as a final note, I would like it if posts were not assigned to a particular topic, but free-floating nodes of a graph, where a node could have multiple parents and multiple children. Maybe just links between post objects that have a relational property to them, like "Reply", "Reference", "Correction".
And as a final-final idea, I would also want the comments to be updatable by the person who made them (with a history) and retractable if that person decided to change their mind. (leaving the post and its history, but "muting" it from the discussion with some sort of "this post has been retracted by author, click here to view edit history")
Ok... so maybe Backslash doesn't have very many of these points covered. but its still sort of a neat name.
After getting fund raiser calls from various "State Troopers", "Widows of Firefighters", etc charities, I hunted around on google and found out that these are from companies who go around calling charities, and offering to donate somewhat large (on the scale of the organization, which can be small) constant sums of money in exchange for permission to use their name. The "charity" involved can be something as lame as the union for police officers of a particular county. In other words, they might not be in your area, or even be worth donating money to.
The companies then sell this permission to other companies who do the actual calling.
End result is that the charity gets some relatively small cash, and some company gets the ability to farm up mass sums of money in their name.
DO NOT GIVE TO THEM EVER!
... or give them fake donation information... I wonder if that would be legal or not...
I once helped a friend build a new comp, and it would freeze after about 15 mins of Warcraft 3. I suspected overheating, so I opened up the case and felt components to see which were overheating... nothing obvious. So, I tried blowing on the motherboard near the ram... and it unfroze! and then re-froze. The hilarious part was that a fan didn't seem to do the trick- it had to be a human blowing on it. so i spent the next 2 minutes blowing on the motherboard while he tried navigating the menus to get back out of warcraft. I guess the part that was really wierd was that the comp didn't bluescreen. It would just freeze until the temperature came back down, and then resume operation like nothing was wrong. He later RMA'd the thing to get one that was less tempermental.
I can live with the multiple-document thing that so many other people complain about. i might even have been able to put up with the old hundred-deep-nested menus if i had known where evrything was.
However, the one thing that shall cause me to never again touch GIMP as long as I live was the first time I tried using it for a non-obvious real task.
I wanted to
I kid you not, it took me FIVE FREAKING HOURS to do this. I don't recall the details anymore, but I had a fantasticly hard time of lifting my selection into a new layer. Then I had a hard time getting my light effect to apply to the lower layer, and then I may even have had a hard time merging them again. Why? Was the problem that I didn't understand layers? No. It was mostly GIMP not giving me enough feedback about selecting layers for operations that can't happen, and not explaining why nothing appeared to happen after I used a tool or option, and hiding the options I wanted way down in the menus where nobody can find them.
I also wanted to tile an image in the background, and never did find a way to do it in GIMP. I used paint instead, and then pulled that in as another layer.
What pissed me off was that I could quite easily have done this with Adobe Photodeluxe (which came with my old scanner, and needs Win98 in order to run), in about 15 minutes. That program was a hundred times more intuitive than gimp. I picked it up, did stuff, and never needed to read a manual. With GIMP, I just have no luck. ever. I'm a programmer, too.
Oh, and how about editing individual pixels on an icon? there's another one you'll never figure out without reading up on it.
Oh, and how about GIFs? The patent has expired, folks. Photodeluxe could save GIFs with reduced color counts (2, 4, 8, 16, etc) that embarras the size of JPEG and PNG. Sure would love to have a new tool that could pull that off.
If you decide to use this definition of soul... then there's not really anything to get upset about. Your consciousness would then be a state machine, whose output is a product of the current state and the inputs. If you duplicate the machine and its state, and then resume processing with both, then both of them are "you" at the moment they are started, however as the state of each machine begins to differentiate, they would no longer be the same person.
In that sense, "you" is a continuously changing variable. You derive your individuality from the address of your variable (the atoms of your body). You also derive continuity from the memories of important past states, much like edits to software with a change log. In that sense, cloning yourself would be like forking the project. Both have the old states of "you" in the change history. You could claim that one is more legitimate than the other based on variable address, but both contain the same value at the moment the cloning takes place.
In this mentality, "right to life" is the desire to continue the progress of your state machine. If RL had save points where you could upload a graph of your atomic structure, then you shouldn't worry about doing foolish things that might get you killed, since they could just recycle your matter into a replica of your saved state and resume execution. If your execution resumes, then the "you" of some recent state is still alive.
If you want to take the religious spin on this, things get a lot more complicated. Starting with the assumption that you have a soul, given to you by God, you have to assume that this Soul is driving the decisions of your mind. If you freeze your mind, the soul will either go dormant, or leave for Heaven, or reside in some temporary space until it can reclaim the body.
Cloning (like duplication, not embryonic cloning) gets even more crazy. Either God will give your soul control over both bodies (or maybe this will be an intrinsic property of a soul, that all bodies that it matches will be available for control), or leave one "soulless" in such a way that it has no proper judgement (like some sort of animal with advanced intellectual abilities), or grant a new soul to the new copy. It might also be possible that body, and not the soul, maintains state history (memory) and so each body would behave the same over time despite not knowing the thoughts or actions of the other body.
The interesting question there is whether a linked soul would be mutable or immutable, and whether race conditions would occour. This could lead to a buffer overflow that would allow us to hack into God's network and access the secrets we've always wanted to know.
And, once God realizes he's been hacked, he might just shut down the whole machine and call an early finish to the project. In short, Christians should be very worried about human suspension and duplication, and pass laws against it.
I think its kind of funny that all the ancestors (or even parents) of people born in the US are here because they didn't like where they were and wanted to "leave it behind" (bad blanket statement, I guess, but whatever) Things that come to mind are the 16-18th century catholic church and european monarchies, and just general poverty and economic disasters.
Now, their descendants in the US have created such an unpleasant corporate/political juggernaut that we're considering moving away from it... and some of the options are those places that we left, which in the meantime have been hammered straight by the people who stayed.
In contrast, keep in mind the middle-east situations, where (as I've heard it told) the large Jewish populations moved out of the area after WWII to re-found israel and evade the nutty militant islamic folks... who then (with much less opposition) reshaped the government into the crazy stuff we see in Iran and Iraq and etc. So keep in mind that "all that is needed for evil men to succeed, is for good men to do nothing"(or leave).
So the real answer, of course, is for us to take a stand and etc blah blah blah etc ... which we aren't going to do since we're all thoughtful non-assertive computer nerds. Perhaps the best strategy would be to work on changing the non-assertive part? The EFF does this, but they don't seem to carry enough political clout to get things done. Maybe we need some sort of system (communications software/website, social networking something-or-other) that can help us actually lobby for things? I apologize for this thought ending in unanswered questions, but I think we all need to be asking these questions instead of wondering whether we should move.
And one last note about China... I think China has a certian appeal that people overlook. Yes, they've got a tyrannical government and people don't have any say in what happens, but at the same time... there's a human element to it. When I see America, I see a machine. A giant uncontrolled machine that doesn't really have any goal other than going faster. It finds that going downhill makes it go faster, and so it does, regardless of whether it wants to be at the bottom of the hill later on, or how unpleasant the crash will be.
China, on the other hand, knows where it is going (at least for the next couple decades). It strives to "be better". To have an technological revolution to put it on par with America. China has a self-image that it wants to improve. If a set of laws doesn't benefit the country, they aren't used. If communism isn't going to give them the economy they want, they use parts of capitalism and free market. If they have to control how many children a person has to save the nation from collapse, they do it. If China wants to brag that they have all their own software and aren't dependant on American stuff, then the government supports its development.
I can't really say any of those things about America. If some small-time developer in America comes up with a great idea and gets sued over stupid patent laws, they go down in flames, and the rest of us sit around like nascar fans and say "wow, look at that crash! It didn't affect my beer though, so I guess I have nothing to complain about". If the big (and important to the economy) corporations get massively sued, people sit around and fantasize that it could be them some day "and then, I'll invent something cool and MS will steal it, and I'll be like WHAM, B***, EAT THAT". meanwhile nobody is looking after the health of the economy, or health of innovation, or health of the environment, or doing any planning of big things in general.
I wish... that the role of President was superceded by a new role called "National Visionary". This person would look for things wrong with the nation, and try to propose solutions to them. He would be given power and authority to put things before congress, and help shape where the attention in Washington is focused. This per
I actually laughed harder at "if it moves, shoot it" than any other title on that page. I guess it was more 'funny' than it was 'bad', though.
I have a friend working in the patent office who says that they actually don't have a test for obviousness. The way he told it, sometime back in the 80s there was a big fuss about the patent office rejecting everything, and they went from a "applicant proves non-obviousness to get patent" model to a "examiner proves obviousness to reject" model.
It is of course nearly impossible to prove that something is obvious, and back up that claim when the indignant raving "inventor" comes in to protest and complain. My impression is that prior art is the only thing used by the patent office to determine whether or not to award the patent, using the (flawed) logic: "it is obvious if someone else thought of it first [and didn't patent it]".
My friend also related (second-hand) some funny stories about applicants who were banned from the office for behavior-type stuff, like attacking the examiner who rejected their patent. You have to keep in mind that these patent folks are working in a public office, and don't really have an incentive to annoy the percentage of nutjobs who file for patents of crazy/obvious stuff.
No, you just get a warlock and two friends, and invite the dolphin to your party.
http://www.markusleonhardt.de/en/oelrechner.html
The idea is to submerge the entire computer in vegetable (or better, mineral) oil. This cools ALL components at a lot less cost than a bunch of watercool components, and at less effort as well.
thanks for linking us to the front page of the university... terribly helpful.
Ok, first part was right- DOS, then Win1-3 on top. Win1-3 used dos's device drivers to operate the comp's hardware. I call that building the OS on top of DOS. DOS was single-threaded. Win1-3 used cooperative multitasking, which means that the OS itself was really just an elaborate extensible single-threaded program. You were running multiple "programs" (more like relocatable code blocks, really), and control would switch from one to the next when they called "GetMessage". If your program went into an infinite loop without calling this function, it was time for CTRL-ALT-DEL.
;-) They could access it just fine.
Win95 brought 2 main things with it- the Win32 API (for windowing, process/thread stuff, etc, all designed for 32-bit), and native device drivers. Win95 had some DOS compatibility in it, and needed to be able to use DOS drivers for backward compatibility. However, many DOS drivers no longer worked (like, network stuff- I seem to remember that the Novell drivers stopped working with Win95 and we had to get new ones) so you can't say that Win95 was built on top of DOS. It just had a lot of backward compatibility. Most notably, Win95 had real multithreading. It could actually divide processor time between jobs, and divide it between threads within a process without any programmer gymnastics.
The difference between Win95 and WinNT4 was that 95 didn't have separate memory spaces. Each program was just using space in the giant pool of memory, and could overwrite other programs' data at will. yada yada performance video games etc. WinNT4 was actually stable, and provided each prog with a separate memory space, and required complicated (for someone who's never dealt with it before) memory mapping in order to share data between apps. In Win95/98/ME, all you had to do to share data was pass a pointer using a window message to the other prog's main window
Win98 was Win95 with more device drivers and more APIs and more GUI features.
WinME was Win98 with more device drivers and more APIs and more GUI features.
None of this line had protected memory regions. This is why WinME sucked so badly- it had a few bugs and they could take down the system since everything was so tightly integrated.
Win2K was WinNT with most of Win98's functionality. WinNT had been gaining functionality over time, with SP1/SP2/SP3/SP4, but when they finally got it so that it could run most Win98 progs, (and a bunch of API calls that were only on Win9X for some reason) they released it as Win2K. Win2K has a DOS emulator in it, and is itself completely incompatible with DOS. It is completely invalid to say that 2K is in any way based on DOS. I still use Win2K. Win2K is solid stable etc, and I've had uptimes as high as 83 days, while using it under very high load, such as running JBuilder 9 and WoW at the same time, along with Trillian, Winamp, Cygwin's X server, and a whole host of other nifty software. (the thing that ended my uptime was, of course, Windows Media Player, haha. I opened it by accident instead of VLC. I have since deleted its exe) Most of my uptimes are ended by power outages.
WinXP was just Win2K with some improved legacy emulation ("pretend to be Win95 for this program") some (improved?) networking like the firewall, and some additional GUI stuff, like styled window borders. Oh and remote desktop features. (which have been possible all along, since Win95 or so, but never implemented. Those curious should investigate the Windows Metafile ".WMF")
Vista seems that its main attraction will be the GUI, again. But we'll see.