>> The original (implicit) claim is that when 97% of scientists agree on something, it must be right.
That was not the original claim. The original claim was that 97% of peer reviewed papers concluded AGW is occurring.
Officials say more than 130 fires, many uncontained, are burning in the heavily populated New South Wales state
Heavily Populated? Say What? NSW might have the highest population of any state in Aus but it is also massive... population density is only 9 people per sq. KM.
In most respects the mobile interface is great, but one thing kills it for me. I simply cannot scroll on the front (story list) page. Every attempt to scroll gets interpreted as a click. Very annoying, almost unusable.
I'm using a Samsung S3, Android 4.1.1.
So you didnt read the part in the summary where it said "already available in Jelly Bean, but also available via downloadable app"
Anyway why would google want to provide an incentive to upgrade to a new phone? They don't even make phones and they give the OS away for free. It is actually in their best interest to have this new function available as widely as possible since they make their money through advertising.
Yeah I used to think like this - constant increases in automation will mean we will all be working less and less and having more leisure time. Reality doesn't stack up I'm afraid.
Go back 30 years and every office had a typing pool. You would write out your work long hand, give it to the typing pool, and someone would type it up on a typewriter. Then they introduced word processors, then PCs, and pretty soon some managers figured out that workers could type their own work, so they sacked the typists. Now those that still have jobs have to work more (not less) because they are effectively doing the work of the typist.
That is how the capitalist system works. The benefits of new technology do not go to the people whose work is done more efficiently - they either get to do more work in the same time, or if they are unlucky they end up out of work altogether. The benefits go to those who own the companies which have introduced the new technology.
I think what iFans hope would happen if Android did not exist is that there would be no other phone manufacturers.
Partly that is what is driving the animosity towards Android. You see, if you think something is so cool, if you really believe in it, you want everyone else to believe too. Android stands in the way of that, because non-believers say "yeah, iphones are pretty cool. Some of those Android phones are pretty cool too."
Hmm... thats weird. Just tried http://www.google.com.au/?q=flights+from+mel+to+syd (ie using google Australia) and it also includes a selection of matching flights at the top of the search results.
Is this new feature something other than this?
You are assuming that the idea is that we would all keep doing things at the same time according to the apparent location of the sun in the sky. How old fashioned! Instead we will ALL be waking up, going to work, having lunch, etc at the same time no matter where we live. Think how much easier it will be organizing meetings with our colleagues overseas - you can be sure that 9:00 am is a good time for a meeting no matter who is invited!
To make it fairer though, and since the rotation of the earth is no longer relevant to the time, we should change the number of hours in a day - maybe if we made it 30 hours instead of 24. Then everyone around the world would get to be awake during daytime hours every few days. Something to really look forward to if that co-incides with a weekend too.
This just looks like a house fire waiting to happen....
Even if it doesn't actually catch fire I give it 2 weeks before the box dries out to the point that it starts falling apart.
Add to that, they are shipping what looks like at least twice as much cardboard as would normally be needed to ship a motherboard on the off chance that someone will need to wire it up the instance it arrives... what maybe 10% of these will actually get used as temporary PC cases.
As someone else here has already noted - 48VDC power supply distribution has been standard in Telco exchanges since.... forever as far as I know.
When I first started working in Telecoms (early 90's) the exchange would have a separate power room with rectifiers and huge battery banks. The resulting 48VDC was distributed through the equipment room using large busbars.
In latter years this approach has mostly been replaced with smaller power supplies installed in each suite of racks, but the principle is still the same.
It has always seemed somewhat ridiculous to me that one powers one's server by passing 240 or 110 VAC into a UPS, convert it to DC, charge a battery with it, invert it back up to 110/240, feed it into the server, which then converts it back to DC.
Very good point. If Apple had wanted it to be possible for third party developers to make software to interact with the iPod then they would have published the interface one should use. The fact that they have not implies that they don't want this to happen. This next step is an obvious extension when they saw that despite the lack of a published interface, others were still making third party software.
When buying such a device, the onus is on the purchaser to decide it's suitability for their intended purpose. The onus on the vendor is only to make sure it does what it is described as doing. Therefore, if you want a media player to use together with Linux, or if you want one to use with Windows or Mac and do not like iTunes, then probably the iPod is not for you.
Having said that, if I only purchased hardware that stated it would work with Linux, I would probably have no hardware at all.... so we really are between a rock and a hard place here.
Actually Ericsson did not sell their mobile phone division to Sony, they formed a joint venture with Sony. The joint venture is 50:50 owned by Sony and Ericsson. See here for some info.
The mobile telephony part of Sony Ericsson phones is supplied by EMP (Ericsson Mobile Platforms, a unit of Ericsson, see here for some info). Other phone manufacturers use the platform from EMP. So maybe EMP has negotiated some deal with these guys in order not to be sued?
2. An interative javascript debugger, that includes the ability to run scripts in a 'step mode', override/block the execution of specific js statements (or force conditional branches), and change the contents of variables.
Have you tried Firebug? The best JS debugger out there in my opinion. There is also Venkman, which I used to use a lot, but it seems a lot more bloated than Firebug.
If you mean that a JS debugger should be part of the base install then I disagree: why bloat the browser with something less than 10% of users would even know how to use, let alone use on a frequent basis.
The problem is that unless & until every single person is using the same proprietary system, you need to have an account on each and every one in order to be able to reach them. To say nothing of all the clients you need to download and install.
Contrast this to (for example) the normal phone system where you can get a service with one provide and be sure to call another subscriber from any other. It all works because they all adhere to open standards.
Do we really want Skype to be one and only Telco left standing when it's all gone IP? That's the way it is heading, and they owe it all to being the first to get off the ground with a reliable easy to use Voip solution, combined with the lock-in they have been able to achieve.
Having said that, almost every one of my friends and co-workers use Skype almost exclusivley. So maybe it's too late and the battle is already won. Most of them are not even interested in the alternatives. And I work in the Telecoms Industry!
Any way to install onto an image file? Preferably one on a Winnt filesystem although I would guess that would be way too much to ask for...
The reason is I want to be able to create a Colinux image. I am using my work laptop so unfortunately hosing it to create some space for a native linux partition is out of the question. There are some existing FC images about the place but I would prefer to create my own - plus I would like to make a Centos image as well. I would like to use anaconda to do it, so I can be sure the image is as close as it's going to get to the real thing - it is being used for testing software, installation procedures, etc.
I have tried booting the FC installer CD's directly in Colinux, using the initrd from the installer CD - it got surprisingly far before bombing out saying it could not find some items in/dev it was expecting. Try as I might I could not get past that one.
XML is a way to represent structured information completely independantly of the reading & writing applications (ie. the reading application should not need to know anything about the writing application). The semantic meaning of the contents of a well-designed XML file is evident from the file itself.
JSON is a way to serialise the data structures that exist within an application so that they can be sent or stored somewhere. Originally devised for Javascript (and therefore oriented towards the data structures available in javascript) implementations have since been developed for lots of other languages. If you recieve some data via JSON you can reconstitute it into an in-memory version applicable to the language you are using, but that does not help with interpreting the contents.
CSV is just what it says - a lot of values separated by commas. There is absolutely no information there that would help you to decide what the values represent, or even to know in advance what type each value was (integer, float, string, composite structures, etc).
Which to use: depends what you want to use it for. If you want to interchange richly structured data, possibly making the data available to a lot of different applications which are independantly developed, go for XML. If you want a simple way to transmit structured data between a small number of homogenous applications, use JSON. If you want an extremely lightweight way to save some relatively unstructured data and you are happy that the reciever of the data will have to know exactly what each field represents then why not use CSV.
Actually, wouldn't the best way to make use of this be for the C library to worry about when the buffer is finished with, making the whole thing transparent to the application programmer.
As I understand it, the problem is that once you have returned from write, the kernel may not yet have written the buffer to disk, merely queued it for writing. If you used the same buffer again, you would immediately have a page fault, then have to copy the page. Even if you use the code sample above and allocate a new buffer each time round the loop, libc may reallocate the same memory (since you free it at the end of the loop). The notification Linus is talking about is primarily aimed at telling the application when it can free() the buffer, as the kernel is now finished with it.
Imagine libc doing this:
When getting a write() call that uses a malloc'd buffer - flags the buffer as being used by the kernel
When getting a free() for a buffer that is flagged as being used by the kernel, just flags it as being free from a user perspective
When getting a notification from the kernel that it is done with the buffer, finally marking the buffer as completely free and available for reallocation
This way, the same code would work regardless of platform, just perform better on platforms that use this kind of notification. Of course the libc implementation would also need to take care of keeping such buffers in separate pages. Also there would be a lot of checking required so that libc new wether a buffer supplied to write() was actually malloced rather than a static buffer. well I did not say any of this would be easy!
That's strange... a country putting it's (and it's citizens) own interests before the ideals of a free market economy. In most western countries we are trying hard to live up to the "ideal" of a completely unregulated free market, where costs & profits dictate all corporate actions, with the predictable result that any possible opportunity to send work to a country with lower labour costs is taken advantage of. In the long run it is draining wealth from the western economies to the developing economies, with the owners of the corporate world skimming a healthy percentage off the top.
China is taking the best of both worlds... they are only taking the parts of the market system that help them (ie. taking on outsourced work) but carefully controlling the reverse direction. Another example: their government has delayed introduction of WCDMA 3G mobile technologies so as to give local companies a chance to develop a competing standard, thus delaying the chance for established European and US equipment manufacturers to gain a foothold.
If it weren't for the lack of personal freedoms afforded by the Chinese government you'd almost feel jealous of a population that has a government looking out for them like that.
It's always interesting to see who slashdot readers back in a fight.
In one corner - huge behemoth telcos
In the other corner - a one-time startup, who have devised a system based on proprietary protocols which they refuse to publish, and is totally inoperable with recognised standards; now owned by a behemoth of net retailing
No contest - proprietary systems & protocols are lower in the slashdot pecking order than the age-old net-head vs. bell-head rivalries and embedded hatred of telco operators (especially if there is a linux implementation available)
No where on the Krugle web page or on the Wired story does it say anything about Krugle being a product of Google. It just says that it will be like "Google for code".
You don't think our paranoia about Google taking over the world could be going a little too far??
Original Post: Whenever the cost of supporting the customers that comes from supporting those customers, exceeds the benefits of satisfying those customers.
Your reply:You don't ever stop supporting your customers. You just switch to paid support after your warranty or contracted support period has expired.
The original post was correct. If the cost of supporting the customers exceeds the benefit then you stop. You have reinforced that yourself by saying you switch to paid support - ie. the benefit of providing the paid support is still greater than the cost. If they don't want to pay and expect free support to continue indefinitely, well that you can't do (at least not in a business setting).
Maybe the SETABORTPROC function was originally intended for printing but was overloaded to handle parse error callbacks?
So: an application calls an operating system function, asking it to load a metafile and render it on the screen. The OS finds that the metafile is corrupted, and it wants to call back to the application to tell it the metafile is not readable. So what it does is spawns a new thread and starts to execute the data in the corrupted metafile itself....
That's where this whole thing does not make sense. Surely when calling this SetAbortProc sub-function, you should be passing a pointer to some code, not actually code itself? This is what happens for the case of a printer, according to the article. Yet for a meta-file it seems to actually try to run the file itself? Bizarre.
Slashdot Mirror
>> The original (implicit) claim is that when 97% of scientists agree on something, it must be right.
That was not the original claim. The original claim was that 97% of peer reviewed papers concluded AGW is occurring.
Heavily Populated? Say What? NSW might have the highest population of any state in Aus but it is also massive ... population density is only 9 people per sq. KM.
In most respects the mobile interface is great, but one thing kills it for me. I simply cannot scroll on the front (story list) page. Every attempt to scroll gets interpreted as a click. Very annoying, almost unusable. I'm using a Samsung S3, Android 4.1.1.
So you didnt read the part in the summary where it said "already available in Jelly Bean, but also available via downloadable app" Anyway why would google want to provide an incentive to upgrade to a new phone? They don't even make phones and they give the OS away for free. It is actually in their best interest to have this new function available as widely as possible since they make their money through advertising.
Yeah I used to think like this - constant increases in automation will mean we will all be working less and less and having more leisure time. Reality doesn't stack up I'm afraid.
Go back 30 years and every office had a typing pool. You would write out your work long hand, give it to the typing pool, and someone would type it up on a typewriter. Then they introduced word processors, then PCs, and pretty soon some managers figured out that workers could type their own work, so they sacked the typists. Now those that still have jobs have to work more (not less) because they are effectively doing the work of the typist.
That is how the capitalist system works. The benefits of new technology do not go to the people whose work is done more efficiently - they either get to do more work in the same time, or if they are unlucky they end up out of work altogether. The benefits go to those who own the companies which have introduced the new technology.
I think what iFans hope would happen if Android did not exist is that there would be no other phone manufacturers. Partly that is what is driving the animosity towards Android. You see, if you think something is so cool, if you really believe in it, you want everyone else to believe too. Android stands in the way of that, because non-believers say "yeah, iphones are pretty cool. Some of those Android phones are pretty cool too."
Hmm... thats weird. Just tried http://www.google.com.au/?q=flights+from+mel+to+syd (ie using google Australia) and it also includes a selection of matching flights at the top of the search results. Is this new feature something other than this?
You guys have gotten it all wrong.
You are assuming that the idea is that we would all keep doing things at the same time according to the apparent location of the sun in the sky. How old fashioned! Instead we will ALL be waking up, going to work, having lunch, etc at the same time no matter where we live. Think how much easier it will be organizing meetings with our colleagues overseas - you can be sure that 9:00 am is a good time for a meeting no matter who is invited!
To make it fairer though, and since the rotation of the earth is no longer relevant to the time, we should change the number of hours in a day - maybe if we made it 30 hours instead of 24. Then everyone around the world would get to be awake during daytime hours every few days. Something to really look forward to if that co-incides with a weekend too.
This just looks like a house fire waiting to happen ....
Even if it doesn't actually catch fire I give it 2 weeks before the box dries out to the point that it starts falling apart.
Add to that, they are shipping what looks like at least twice as much cardboard as would normally be needed to ship a motherboard on the off chance that someone will need to wire it up the instance it arrives ... what maybe 10% of these will actually get used as temporary PC cases.
One of the design objectives of LTE is reduced latency (compared with 3g) - as low as 10ms. See this page for comparisons with various 3g technologies: http://www.radio-electronics.com/info/cellulartelecomms/lte-long-term-evolution/3g-lte-basics.php In fact the 3G technologies have also been improving steadily.
As someone else here has already noted - 48VDC power supply distribution has been standard in Telco exchanges since.... forever as far as I know. When I first started working in Telecoms (early 90's) the exchange would have a separate power room with rectifiers and huge battery banks. The resulting 48VDC was distributed through the equipment room using large busbars. In latter years this approach has mostly been replaced with smaller power supplies installed in each suite of racks, but the principle is still the same. It has always seemed somewhat ridiculous to me that one powers one's server by passing 240 or 110 VAC into a UPS, convert it to DC, charge a battery with it, invert it back up to 110/240, feed it into the server, which then converts it back to DC.
Very good point. If Apple had wanted it to be possible for third party developers to make software to interact with the iPod then they would have published the interface one should use. The fact that they have not implies that they don't want this to happen. This next step is an obvious extension when they saw that despite the lack of a published interface, others were still making third party software.
When buying such a device, the onus is on the purchaser to decide it's suitability for their intended purpose. The onus on the vendor is only to make sure it does what it is described as doing. Therefore, if you want a media player to use together with Linux, or if you want one to use with Windows or Mac and do not like iTunes, then probably the iPod is not for you.
Having said that, if I only purchased hardware that stated it would work with Linux, I would probably have no hardware at all.... so we really are between a rock and a hard place here.
The mobile telephony part of Sony Ericsson phones is supplied by EMP (Ericsson Mobile Platforms, a unit of Ericsson, see here for some info). Other phone manufacturers use the platform from EMP. So maybe EMP has negotiated some deal with these guys in order not to be sued?
Have you tried Firebug? The best JS debugger out there in my opinion. There is also Venkman, which I used to use a lot, but it seems a lot more bloated than Firebug.
If you mean that a JS debugger should be part of the base install then I disagree: why bloat the browser with something less than 10% of users would even know how to use, let alone use on a frequent basis.
Yes, this is the main point!
The problem is that unless & until every single person is using the same proprietary system, you need to have an account on each and every one in order to be able to reach them. To say nothing of all the clients you need to download and install.
Contrast this to (for example) the normal phone system where you can get a service with one provide and be sure to call another subscriber from any other. It all works because they all adhere to open standards.
Do we really want Skype to be one and only Telco left standing when it's all gone IP? That's the way it is heading, and they owe it all to being the first to get off the ground with a reliable easy to use Voip solution, combined with the lock-in they have been able to achieve.
Having said that, almost every one of my friends and co-workers use Skype almost exclusivley. So maybe it's too late and the battle is already won. Most of them are not even interested in the alternatives. And I work in the Telecoms Industry!
As usual, no-one on slashdot reads the article, even if it is a short one.
However some exceptions will apply ... and will not apply to region code controls, according to Minter Ellison.
Excellent Tip!
/dev it was expecting. Try as I might I could not get past that one.
Any way to install onto an image file? Preferably one on a Winnt filesystem although I would guess that would be way too much to ask for...
The reason is I want to be able to create a Colinux image. I am using my work laptop so unfortunately hosing it to create some space for a native linux partition is out of the question. There are some existing FC images about the place but I would prefer to create my own - plus I would like to make a Centos image as well. I would like to use anaconda to do it, so I can be sure the image is as close as it's going to get to the real thing - it is being used for testing software, installation procedures, etc.
I have tried booting the FC installer CD's directly in Colinux, using the initrd from the installer CD - it got surprisingly far before bombing out saying it could not find some items in
XML is a way to represent structured information completely independantly of the reading & writing applications (ie. the reading application should not need to know anything about the writing application). The semantic meaning of the contents of a well-designed XML file is evident from the file itself.
JSON is a way to serialise the data structures that exist within an application so that they can be sent or stored somewhere. Originally devised for Javascript (and therefore oriented towards the data structures available in javascript) implementations have since been developed for lots of other languages. If you recieve some data via JSON you can reconstitute it into an in-memory version applicable to the language you are using, but that does not help with interpreting the contents.
CSV is just what it says - a lot of values separated by commas. There is absolutely no information there that would help you to decide what the values represent, or even to know in advance what type each value was (integer, float, string, composite structures, etc).
Which to use: depends what you want to use it for. If you want to interchange richly structured data, possibly making the data available to a lot of different applications which are independantly developed, go for XML. If you want a simple way to transmit structured data between a small number of homogenous applications, use JSON. If you want an extremely lightweight way to save some relatively unstructured data and you are happy that the reciever of the data will have to know exactly what each field represents then why not use CSV.
Actually, wouldn't the best way to make use of this be for the C library to worry about when the buffer is finished with, making the whole thing transparent to the application programmer.
Using the example given by others below:
As I understand it, the problem is that once you have returned from write, the kernel may not yet have written the buffer to disk, merely queued it for writing. If you used the same buffer again, you would immediately have a page fault, then have to copy the page. Even if you use the code sample above and allocate a new buffer each time round the loop, libc may reallocate the same memory (since you free it at the end of the loop). The notification Linus is talking about is primarily aimed at telling the application when it can free() the buffer, as the kernel is now finished with it.
Imagine libc doing this:
This way, the same code would work regardless of platform, just perform better on platforms that use this kind of notification. Of course the libc implementation would also need to take care of keeping such buffers in separate pages. Also there would be a lot of checking required so that libc new wether a buffer supplied to write() was actually malloced rather than a static buffer. well I did not say any of this would be easy!
That's strange... a country putting it's (and it's citizens) own interests before the ideals of a free market economy. In most western countries we are trying hard to live up to the "ideal" of a completely unregulated free market, where costs & profits dictate all corporate actions, with the predictable result that any possible opportunity to send work to a country with lower labour costs is taken advantage of. In the long run it is draining wealth from the western economies to the developing economies, with the owners of the corporate world skimming a healthy percentage off the top.
China is taking the best of both worlds... they are only taking the parts of the market system that help them (ie. taking on outsourced work) but carefully controlling the reverse direction. Another example: their government has delayed introduction of WCDMA 3G mobile technologies so as to give local companies a chance to develop a competing standard, thus delaying the chance for established European and US equipment manufacturers to gain a foothold.
If it weren't for the lack of personal freedoms afforded by the Chinese government you'd almost feel jealous of a population that has a government looking out for them like that.
It's always interesting to see who slashdot readers back in a fight.
In one corner - huge behemoth telcos
In the other corner - a one-time startup, who have devised a system based on proprietary protocols which they refuse to publish, and is totally inoperable with recognised standards; now owned by a behemoth of net retailing
No contest - proprietary systems & protocols are lower in the slashdot pecking order than the age-old net-head vs. bell-head rivalries and embedded hatred of telco operators (especially if there is a linux implementation available)
You don't think our paranoia about Google taking over the world could be going a little too far??
Original Post: Whenever the cost of supporting the customers that comes from supporting those customers, exceeds the benefits of satisfying those customers.
Your reply:You don't ever stop supporting your customers. You just switch to paid support after your warranty or contracted support period has expired.
The original post was correct. If the cost of supporting the customers exceeds the benefit then you stop. You have reinforced that yourself by saying you switch to paid support - ie. the benefit of providing the paid support is still greater than the cost. If they don't want to pay and expect free support to continue indefinitely, well that you can't do (at least not in a business setting).
So: an application calls an operating system function, asking it to load a metafile and render it on the screen. The OS finds that the metafile is corrupted, and it wants to call back to the application to tell it the metafile is not readable. So what it does is spawns a new thread and starts to execute the data in the corrupted metafile itself....
That's where this whole thing does not make sense. Surely when calling this SetAbortProc sub-function, you should be passing a pointer to some code, not actually code itself? This is what happens for the case of a printer, according to the article. Yet for a meta-file it seems to actually try to run the file itself? Bizarre.
A link to what? This whole beat up is on the basis that some guy named Phil817 saw something on TV, isn't it?