You are right, once you let someone with lots of Linux experience lose on MacOS X, things start to break.
You say that no matter what you did, you couldn't get to mount NFS shares on her Macintosh. Did you try the following steps:
1. Go to the Finder. 2. Select the "Mac Help" item in the "Help" menu. 3. Type in "NFS share" into the search box and hit the return key. 4. Follow the instructions given?
>> Yes. I've been into Dixons (now renamed Currys Digital) a few times for blank media and, without exception, every time I've gone in a sales assistant has tried to sell me more expensive kinds, simply because I'm a teenage girl and they presume I don't know any better. "Yes, the coloured cases are pretty." "No, they will not enhance my DVD burning experience, and are not worth an extra £5".. etc.
As an example of "Currys Digital" pricing, a cable connecting headphones output of an iPod to a car radio Aux input (in other words, two identical 3.5mm plugs on two ends) costs £14.99. Fortunately, they can't force you to buy there. It's the kind of stuff you get cheaper on eBay because someone bought a box of 1000 cables in china for £200.
>> Well, in America you have a right not to testify against yourself. They can't put you on the stand in your own trial. Of course, if you're stupid enough to take the stand voluntarily...
That is for criminal cases. This is not a criminal case. If you are asked things in discovery, and you refuse to answer, the court will assume that the answer would have gone against you. So if I asked you "did you download any of this list of 1000 songs onto your computer, and if so, which ones" and you don't reply, the court will assume that you copied all of them, which is why you didn't answer. That's why disappearing emails are a big problem, because if you are asked to produce emails and they are gone, chances are the court assumes that their contents was against you.
They are required by copyright law not to copy source code without permission of the copyright holder. If BSD code is copied without the BSD license in the source code, then clearly it is copied without permission of the copyright holder.
Now there has been this SCO case running for much too long, and the GPL community has (absolutely correctly) told SCO "tell us which code in Linux is there without required permission by SCO, and we will remove it", with nothing else happening (because firstly for some reason SCO didn't want to tell anyone which SCO code was in Linux without SCO's permission, and secondly there seemed to be no such code in the first place).
But suddenly with BSD code the situation is different. The BSD license doesn't allow you to do anything with the code that you like. It specifically doesn't allow you to distribute the source code withou BSD license. It allows proprietary companies to use the code without distributing the source, but it doesn't allow anyone to distribute the source without BSD license.
>> I'm not from the UK but don't you have a consumer rights protection authority there? If you do I'd say you pay them a visit and tell them about PC World. And why not shout this as loud as you can over the web. This might hurt. As far as I know their the biggest IT retailer in the UK. Maybe they don't want their reputation flawed.
A good start is www.citizensadvice.org.uk . They'll probably help him first writing a letter that PCWorld _will_ react to; if that doesn't help, then the small claims court will. At least if the story happened as it was told; if you install Linux, drop your laptop, and then the screen is broken, the manufacturer may very well be in the clear.
>> 1) The current ridiculousness of the patent system. The patent system is intended to stimulate innovation by protecting useful ideas. If you're right, this is an attempt to stop a certain kind of behavior by a large company. Isn't that what the legislature is for?
Remember that this is about a patent. What does it actually mean if Microsoft gets a patent for this? It means nobody else can do it without paying license fees to Microsoft, and nobody can stop Microsoft by pointing to a patent that they have. And it seems that with the current proliferation of stupid patents, a company with big pockets like Microsoft should patent anything they do to avoid patent litigation.
However, a patent doesn't give Microsoft actually the right to use this in practice. If I invent a laser gun and get a patent for it, that patent doesn't mean I have the right to shoot people with my newly invented laser gun. I'll go to jail if I do that. It means that you also don't have the right to build a laser gun and shoot people, because if you do, you will go to jail for murder _and_ I will sue you for patent infringement. Similar here, if a company thinks they can change their privacy rules by threatening to throw out customers, I see a class action suit coming.
Icaza being a Microsoft shill seams to be the only logical explanation.
Nobody who would create an international standard with the intent that it is actually used by the public would have created a standard covering 6,000 pages. That is just ridiculous.
A "superb" standard would build on existing standards, like using standard XML (which is something you would really expect from something called OpenXML). It wouldn't introduce bugs in its date handling because some application (Excel) not using that standard has the bugs. If you read the comments from the British committee examining that "standard", it is completely riddled with errors big and small.
Now I wouldn't want to decide whether the problems come from some Microsoft evilness, or from this being a complete rush job (if you compare this to how long development of the C standard or C++ standard takes, where every single line is examined again or again), but this "standard" should never, ever have been put on the ISO fast track. Maybe in a few years time, if Microsoft has had time to fix all the problems.
For those who don't know: Usually introducing an ISO standard is a multi-stage process. The standard is suggested, then comments are collected, problems are fixed, again and again, until eventually the whole thing has the quality and the consensus that is required for an international standard and then it goes to the vote. This proposal has gone on the fast track, which should have been reserved for standards that have passed all the early stages. Like if there had been an industry wide consensus where everyone followed the same document, and then someone has the idea to turn this wide consensus into an official standard. It shouldn't be used for something thrown together quickly.
No, I don't think that Icaza could call this a "superb" standard unless he was paid to do it. Not that I blame him; I would do the same thing if you gave me enough money. This post here is my unpaid-for opinion, I'll write another one if anyone comes up with say a five digit number.
I think the reason why they don't want mobile phones in hospitals is quite different. Hospitals are filled with two kinds of people: Patients who can do with as much peace and quiet as possible, and doctors who I would want to concentrate on their jobs and not be distracted by anything.
The last time I was in a hospital, in the emergency department, with lots of signs to keep your mobile shut off, this one idiot gets a call, and when he answers, he SHOUTS into this phone like a complete idiot. Apparently he had never heard of the concept of radio waves transmitting your voice and thought that you have to shout when you talk to anyone out of eyesight. Idiots like that is why you don't want any mobile phones at a hospital.
>> So you would be in the it's better to possibly send an innocent man to jail than to set a dangerous precedent camp?
It would be better not to accept it as evidence and judge without it.
In case you didn't read the article: Anybody charged with a crime can pay his lawyer to arrange for a lie detector test to be taken. There are two possible outcomes: He comes out guilty, or he comes out innocent. If he comes out guilty, the whole affair falls under lawyer-client privilege, and police, judge or jury never hear about it. If he comes out innocent (either because he is innocent, or because the tester was incompetent, or because he knows how to cheat, or because lie detector tests just don't work), it will be presented to the court.
>> Sorry, but you're mistaken. *I* stopped buying ebooks. And I was HOOKED for a long time. When I figured out that Adobe was going to steal the books I'd purchased back from me after I bought my 3rd laptop (they limit the number of devices you can read their books on), and after I spent hours on line with their "tech support" (sorry if milk just squirted out your nose at the notion of Adobe providing tech support), I decided I was done. Cold turkey. This was about 3 years ago. I'd love it if I could go back to ebooks, but I will not until they fix (or eliminate) their horrible DRM scheme.
And I spent about 240 so far on eBooks that come as plain, unprotected PDF files. I don't need any horrible Acrobat stuff to read them, they will work on any computer I buy as long as PDF is supported, and I haven't made any copies for anybody. With copyright protection, I'd likely not have bought anything. That's 240 difference.
>> I'm not sure spell-checking can really be made to work because, by definition spell-checkers flag anything that is not in the allowed list (also called dictionary) as an error.
That's not what a spelling checker does (I think you mean spelling checker, not spell checker. Unless you are Harry Potter or one of his friends, you don't need a spell checker). For example, there is no dictionary in the world containing all German words. It is not possible, because words can be constructed from other words. For example, what you wrote would be a Wörterbuchrechtschreibeprüfungsunbrauchbarkeitshyp othese and is both false and not present in any dictionary.
A spelling checker checks whether a word is written correctly or incorrectly. The rest is implementation detail. A spelling checker for a programming language would obviously have to have some good knowledge of conventions used to determine whether an identifier is written correctly or not; this would be very much algorithmic and not dictionary-based.
An advanced spelling checker would also know about different conventions for different kinds of identifiers (like macro names must be all uppercase, different styles for local, static and global variables, etc. ). A difficult problem, but far from impossible to solve.
Re:Not just that, but many Euro diesels with 80+ m
on
Green Cars You Can't Buy
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
>> Don't forget that diesel is denser, so you can't compare MPG with petrol really. A 50MPG diesel emits more CO2 than a 50MPG petrol car.
Could be true, but there are many more 50mpg diesels than 50mpg petrol cars. And a 125g/km diesel emits less CO2 than a 150g/km petrol car. And at the same time, the Diesel engine gives you much more power at lower speed (that is, everything up to the speed limit:-)
'' It points out spelling mistakes in "strings" but not variable names. ie, it won't point out that the variable lAnsIdx is spelt incorretly, like the submitter is asking for, that would be just stupid. ''
Comments like this make me wonder. Is it so hard to imagine a spelling checker for say the C language that finds words that were not written the way they were intended? Limiting yourself to correct English words for identifiers is stupid. Assuming that a spelling checker for a programming language would do that is about ten times more stupid.
The problem is that the market for such a spelling checker is much smaller than the market for a spelling checker for natural language, so nobody bothered writing one. The other problem is that correction is much, much more difficult.
Actually, it works in XCode like everywhere else. Click at the beginning of the a comment, press cmd-; and it starts checking the spelling. Quite useful when you just typed in a lengthy comment, and found a few mistakes. And not completely useless when you just added things to a header file.
And certainly you are making backups of your music collections, maybe on DVDs. Should your harddisk go belly up, you just import everything back from the DVDs. Well, if your friend puts your backup DVDs in his computer, what happens?
(I'd really like to know how many copies are created that way; the record companies are always afraid of downloads, what about plain copying of DVDs full of music? )
'' Please learn what an operating system is. You don't know what you are talking about. The machine is functional without a GUI. You can do nearly everything without a GUI that you can do with a GUI. Some things are even substantially faster at the command line. ''
I think you have to learn to think a bit further than just to the end of your nose.
If the GUI doesn't work, the computer is broken, as far as the user is concerned. It is very nice if the Linux and CLI part are still working, so an expert^H^H^H^H^H^Hgeek can make it work without even using a screwdriver. Very nice if you are a geek are have one available that works for free. But the computer is at that point still broken.
Maybe you overestimate how clever terrorists are. Just look at the next James Bond film: Terrorists are really clever there, but the law (James Bond) is just a bit more clever. Translated to reality, the police are not the brightest, and terrorists are slightly more stupid (if you look at their motivation, they are actually quite a lot more stupid).
I don't have any doubt that a good hacking attack against terror suspects would succeed.
'' I'm unclear what law Kapersky violated that even allowed them to bring this suit. The closest thing I can find is "[Kapersky] has asked for unspecified monetary damages and an injunction forcing Zone Labs to cease its current classification of the products." but that's not clear enough. ''
Probably interference with business. Wait until drug dealers start suing the police for interfering with their business.
'' The CDA provides protection for "any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, and harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected."
Why do we need a law that says a user can control what is installed on their computer? That's absurd! ''
No, the protection is in case some antivirus or similar filtering software filters out something that it shouldn't. For example, if you want no porn on your computer and install some filtering software, that software might make a mistake and filter out a website that it shouldn't. As long as this was done in good faith, neither you nor the website can sue them successfully. In this case, it also means that Kaspersky is (1) allowed to filter all actual malware and (2) anything that it reasonably believes to be malware, without having to prove it in court.
>> Being thick (and out of coffee) how the hell can any thing be infinitely precise? Or atleast while it can be infinitely precise how do you go about checking it... might take a while to prove it for all possible numbers (of which there is an infinite amount of, and for each one you would have to check it to an infinite number of decimal places).
I'll give you an example. Lets say we are working with four decimal digits instead of 53 binary digits, which is what standard double precision uses. Any operation will behave as if it calculated the infinitely precise result and then rounded it. For example, any result x that is in the range 1233.5 = x = 1234.5 with infinite precision will be rounded 1234.
Now lets say we calculate x * y + z with infinite precision and round. We have x = 2469, y = 0.5, and z happens to be 0.00000000001. So x * y = 1234.5, x *y + z is just a tiny bit larger, so the result has to be rounded up to 1235. To do this right, you need x * y with infinite precision. Knowing twelve decimals wouldn't be enough. If I told you "x * y equals 1234.50000000 with twelve digit precision", you wouldn't know how to round x * y + z. x * y could be 1234.499999996, and adding z would still be less than 1234.5, so it needs to be rounded down. Or x * y could be 1234.500000004, and x * y + z needs to be rounded up.
That is meant by "infinite precision": The processor guarantees to give the same result _as if_ it would use infinite precision for the calculation. In practice, it doesn't use infinite precision. About 110 binary digits precision is enough to get the same result.
"Apple® today announced that it will not be selling NBC television shows for the upcoming television season on its online iTunes® Store (www.itunes.com). The move follows NBC's decision to not renew its agreement with iTunes after Apple declined to pay more than double the wholesale price for each NBC TV episode, which would have resulted in the retail price to consumers increasing to $4.99 per episode from the current $1.99. ABC, CBS, FOX and The CW, along with more than 50 cable networks, are signed up to sell TV shows from their upcoming season on iTunes at $1.99 per episode."
Some important information was lost in TFA: This is based on information coming from an anonymous source at NBS who didn't want to give their name (probably to avoid certain loss of their job). The current contract between NBC and Apple is running until December, and that is how long they have to sort out any problems.
What really is going on is at this moment pure speculation. Best case is, someone from NBC made a phone call to someone at Apple and told them "we want ten percent more money, or we won't renew the contract". Worst case is the lawyers sent a letter officially cancelling the contract with a note "don't call us; we won't call you". But nobody knows which one.
'' I'm not really qualified to make an opinion on this, but my guess is that these instructions will prove increasingly useful as AMD integrates the GPU and CPU. To me, it looks like they plan to make accessing what was traditionally part of the GPU a simple process (relative to accessing a GPU directly through their own pseudo CPU api's). ''
I can't see that at all. Mostly they have been copying stuff that was present on PowerPC CPUs for ages, filled some obvious gaps in the SSE instruction set, and added single instructions for floor (), ceil (), trunc () and round () functions. The only thing that has anything to do with GPUs is an instruction to convert four floating point numbers between 32 bit and 16 bit precision, which is a major pain otherwise if you want to do it in the CPU. And the only reason why this would be useful is that it enables you to send fp values to the GPU using half the bandwidth.
Slashdot Mirror
You are right, once you let someone with lots of Linux experience lose on MacOS X, things start to break.
You say that no matter what you did, you couldn't get to mount NFS shares on her Macintosh. Did you try the following steps:
1. Go to the Finder.
2. Select the "Mac Help" item in the "Help" menu.
3. Type in "NFS share" into the search box and hit the return key.
4. Follow the instructions given?
>> Yes. I've been into Dixons (now renamed Currys Digital) a few times for blank media and, without exception, every time I've gone in a sales assistant has tried to sell me more expensive kinds, simply because I'm a teenage girl and they presume I don't know any better. "Yes, the coloured cases are pretty." "No, they will not enhance my DVD burning experience, and are not worth an extra £5".. etc.
As an example of "Currys Digital" pricing, a cable connecting headphones output of an iPod to a car radio Aux input (in other words, two identical 3.5mm plugs on two ends) costs £14.99. Fortunately, they can't force you to buy there. It's the kind of stuff you get cheaper on eBay because someone bought a box of 1000 cables in china for £200.
>> Well, in America you have a right not to testify against yourself. They can't put you on the stand in your own trial. Of course, if you're stupid enough to take the stand voluntarily...
That is for criminal cases. This is not a criminal case. If you are asked things in discovery, and you refuse to answer, the court will assume that the answer would have gone against you. So if I asked you "did you download any of this list of 1000 songs onto your computer, and if so, which ones" and you don't reply, the court will assume that you copied all of them, which is why you didn't answer. That's why disappearing emails are a big problem, because if you are asked to produce emails and they are gone, chances are the court assumes that their contents was against you.
They are required by copyright law not to copy source code without permission of the copyright holder. If BSD code is copied without the BSD license in the source code, then clearly it is copied without permission of the copyright holder.
Now there has been this SCO case running for much too long, and the GPL community has (absolutely correctly) told SCO "tell us which code in Linux is there without required permission by SCO, and we will remove it", with nothing else happening (because firstly for some reason SCO didn't want to tell anyone which SCO code was in Linux without SCO's permission, and secondly there seemed to be no such code in the first place).
But suddenly with BSD code the situation is different. The BSD license doesn't allow you to do anything with the code that you like. It specifically doesn't allow you to distribute the source code withou BSD license. It allows proprietary companies to use the code without distributing the source, but it doesn't allow anyone to distribute the source without BSD license.
>> I'm not from the UK but don't you have a consumer rights protection authority there? If you do I'd say you pay them a visit and tell them about PC World. And why not shout this as loud as you can over the web. This might hurt. As far as I know their the biggest IT retailer in the UK. Maybe they don't want their reputation flawed.
A good start is www.citizensadvice.org.uk . They'll probably help him first writing a letter that PCWorld _will_ react to; if that doesn't help, then the small claims court will. At least if the story happened as it was told; if you install Linux, drop your laptop, and then the screen is broken, the manufacturer may very well be in the clear.
>> To be honest, it's not that hard to max out an iPod legally without paying $15,000.
I checked www.amazon.co.uk.
Complete Mozart: 170 CDs for £72.34.
Complete Bach: 155 CDs for £99.98.
In lossless encoding that should be about 100GB. Lets say 25GB at decent bitrate, say 192KBit AAC encoding.
>> 1) The current ridiculousness of the patent system. The patent system is intended to stimulate innovation by protecting useful ideas. If you're right, this is an attempt to stop a certain kind of behavior by a large company. Isn't that what the legislature is for?
Remember that this is about a patent. What does it actually mean if Microsoft gets a patent for this? It means nobody else can do it without paying license fees to Microsoft, and nobody can stop Microsoft by pointing to a patent that they have. And it seems that with the current proliferation of stupid patents, a company with big pockets like Microsoft should patent anything they do to avoid patent litigation.
However, a patent doesn't give Microsoft actually the right to use this in practice. If I invent a laser gun and get a patent for it, that patent doesn't mean I have the right to shoot people with my newly invented laser gun. I'll go to jail if I do that. It means that you also don't have the right to build a laser gun and shoot people, because if you do, you will go to jail for murder _and_ I will sue you for patent infringement. Similar here, if a company thinks they can change their privacy rules by threatening to throw out customers, I see a class action suit coming.
Icaza being a Microsoft shill seams to be the only logical explanation.
Nobody who would create an international standard with the intent that it is actually used by the public would have created a standard covering 6,000 pages. That is just ridiculous.
A "superb" standard would build on existing standards, like using standard XML (which is something you would really expect from something called OpenXML). It wouldn't introduce bugs in its date handling because some application (Excel) not using that standard has the bugs. If you read the comments from the British committee examining that "standard", it is completely riddled with errors big and small.
Now I wouldn't want to decide whether the problems come from some Microsoft evilness, or from this being a complete rush job (if you compare this to how long development of the C standard or C++ standard takes, where every single line is examined again or again), but this "standard" should never, ever have been put on the ISO fast track. Maybe in a few years time, if Microsoft has had time to fix all the problems.
For those who don't know: Usually introducing an ISO standard is a multi-stage process. The standard is suggested, then comments are collected, problems are fixed, again and again, until eventually the whole thing has the quality and the consensus that is required for an international standard and then it goes to the vote. This proposal has gone on the fast track, which should have been reserved for standards that have passed all the early stages. Like if there had been an industry wide consensus where everyone followed the same document, and then someone has the idea to turn this wide consensus into an official standard. It shouldn't be used for something thrown together quickly.
No, I don't think that Icaza could call this a "superb" standard unless he was paid to do it. Not that I blame him; I would do the same thing if you gave me enough money. This post here is my unpaid-for opinion, I'll write another one if anyone comes up with say a five digit number.
I think the reason why they don't want mobile phones in hospitals is quite different. Hospitals are filled with two kinds of people: Patients who can do with as much peace and quiet as possible, and doctors who I would want to concentrate on their jobs and not be distracted by anything.
The last time I was in a hospital, in the emergency department, with lots of signs to keep your mobile shut off, this one idiot gets a call, and when he answers, he SHOUTS into this phone like a complete idiot. Apparently he had never heard of the concept of radio waves transmitting your voice and thought that you have to shout when you talk to anyone out of eyesight. Idiots like that is why you don't want any mobile phones at a hospital.
>> So you would be in the it's better to possibly send an innocent man to jail than to set a dangerous precedent camp?
It would be better not to accept it as evidence and judge without it.
In case you didn't read the article: Anybody charged with a crime can pay his lawyer to arrange for a lie detector test to be taken. There are two possible outcomes: He comes out guilty, or he comes out innocent. If he comes out guilty, the whole affair falls under lawyer-client privilege, and police, judge or jury never hear about it. If he comes out innocent (either because he is innocent, or because the tester was incompetent, or because he knows how to cheat, or because lie detector tests just don't work), it will be presented to the court.
Clearly this cannot be right.
>> Sorry, but you're mistaken. *I* stopped buying ebooks. And I was HOOKED for a long time. When I figured out that Adobe was going to steal the books I'd purchased back from me after I bought my 3rd laptop (they limit the number of devices you can read their books on), and after I spent hours on line with their "tech support" (sorry if milk just squirted out your nose at the notion of Adobe providing tech support), I decided I was done. Cold turkey. This was about 3 years ago. I'd love it if I could go back to ebooks, but I will not until they fix (or eliminate) their horrible DRM scheme.
And I spent about 240 so far on eBooks that come as plain, unprotected PDF files. I don't need any horrible Acrobat stuff to read them, they will work on any computer I buy as long as PDF is supported, and I haven't made any copies for anybody. With copyright protection, I'd likely not have bought anything. That's 240 difference.
>> I'm not sure spell-checking can really be made to work because, by definition spell-checkers flag anything that is not in the allowed list (also called dictionary) as an error.
p othese and is both false and not present in any dictionary.
That's not what a spelling checker does (I think you mean spelling checker, not spell checker. Unless you are Harry Potter or one of his friends, you don't need a spell checker). For example, there is no dictionary in the world containing all German words. It is not possible, because words can be constructed from other words. For example, what you wrote would be a Wörterbuchrechtschreibeprüfungsunbrauchbarkeitshy
A spelling checker checks whether a word is written correctly or incorrectly. The rest is implementation detail. A spelling checker for a programming language would obviously have to have some good knowledge of conventions used to determine whether an identifier is written correctly or not; this would be very much algorithmic and not dictionary-based.
An advanced spelling checker would also know about different conventions for different kinds of identifiers (like macro names must be all uppercase, different styles for local, static and global variables, etc. ). A difficult problem, but far from impossible to solve.
>> Don't forget that diesel is denser, so you can't compare MPG with petrol really. A 50MPG diesel emits more CO2 than a 50MPG petrol car.
:-)
Could be true, but there are many more 50mpg diesels than 50mpg petrol cars. And a 125g/km diesel emits less CO2 than a 150g/km petrol car. And at the same time, the Diesel engine gives you much more power at lower speed (that is, everything up to the speed limit
'' It points out spelling mistakes in "strings" but not variable names. ie, it won't point out that the variable lAnsIdx is spelt incorretly, like the submitter is asking for, that would be just stupid. ''
Comments like this make me wonder. Is it so hard to imagine a spelling checker for say the C language that finds words that were not written the way they were intended? Limiting yourself to correct English words for identifiers is stupid. Assuming that a spelling checker for a programming language would do that is about ten times more stupid.
The problem is that the market for such a spelling checker is much smaller than the market for a spelling checker for natural language, so nobody bothered writing one. The other problem is that correction is much, much more difficult.
>> How about the Built-in OS X spell checker?
We're talking about programming, friend.
Actually, it works in XCode like everywhere else. Click at the beginning of the a comment, press cmd-; and it starts checking the spelling. Quite useful when you just typed in a lengthy comment, and found a few mistakes. And not completely useless when you just added things to a header file.
And certainly you are making backups of your music collections, maybe on DVDs. Should your harddisk go belly up, you just import everything back from the DVDs. Well, if your friend puts your backup DVDs in his computer, what happens?
(I'd really like to know how many copies are created that way; the record companies are always afraid of downloads, what about plain copying of DVDs full of music? )
'' Please learn what an operating system is. You don't know what you are talking about. The machine is functional without a GUI. You can do nearly everything without a GUI that you can do with a GUI. Some things are even substantially faster at the command line. ''
I think you have to learn to think a bit further than just to the end of your nose.
If the GUI doesn't work, the computer is broken, as far as the user is concerned. It is very nice if the Linux and CLI part are still working, so an expert^H^H^H^H^H^Hgeek can make it work without even using a screwdriver. Very nice if you are a geek are have one available that works for free. But the computer is at that point still broken.
Maybe you overestimate how clever terrorists are. Just look at the next James Bond film: Terrorists are really clever there, but the law (James Bond) is just a bit more clever. Translated to reality, the police are not the brightest, and terrorists are slightly more stupid (if you look at their motivation, they are actually quite a lot more stupid).
I don't have any doubt that a good hacking attack against terror suspects would succeed.
'' I'm unclear what law Kapersky violated that even allowed them to bring this suit. The closest thing I can find is "[Kapersky] has asked for unspecified monetary damages and an injunction forcing Zone Labs to cease its current classification of the products." but that's not clear enough. ''
Probably interference with business. Wait until drug dealers start suing the police for interfering with their business.
'' The CDA provides protection for "any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, and harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected."
Why do we need a law that says a user can control what is installed on their computer? That's absurd! ''
No, the protection is in case some antivirus or similar filtering software filters out something that it shouldn't. For example, if you want no porn on your computer and install some filtering software, that software might make a mistake and filter out a website that it shouldn't. As long as this was done in good faith, neither you nor the website can sue them successfully. In this case, it also means that Kaspersky is (1) allowed to filter all actual malware and (2) anything that it reasonably believes to be malware, without having to prove it in court.
>> Being thick (and out of coffee) how the hell can any thing be infinitely precise? Or atleast while it can be infinitely precise how do you go about checking it... might take a while to prove it for all possible numbers (of which there is an infinite amount of, and for each one you would have to check it to an infinite number of decimal places).
I'll give you an example. Lets say we are working with four decimal digits instead of 53 binary digits, which is what standard double precision uses. Any operation will behave as if it calculated the infinitely precise result and then rounded it. For example, any result x that is in the range 1233.5 = x = 1234.5 with infinite precision will be rounded 1234.
Now lets say we calculate x * y + z with infinite precision and round. We have x = 2469, y = 0.5, and z happens to be 0.00000000001. So x * y = 1234.5, x *y + z is just a tiny bit larger, so the result has to be rounded up to 1235. To do this right, you need x * y with infinite precision. Knowing twelve decimals wouldn't be enough. If I told you "x * y equals 1234.50000000 with twelve digit precision", you wouldn't know how to round x * y + z. x * y could be 1234.499999996, and adding z would still be less than 1234.5, so it needs to be rounded down. Or x * y could be 1234.500000004, and x * y + z needs to be rounded up.
That is meant by "infinite precision": The processor guarantees to give the same result _as if_ it would use infinite precision for the calculation. In practice, it doesn't use infinite precision. About 110 binary digits precision is enough to get the same result.
"f the greedy fucks at NBC don't want my $2 per episode for Heroes and the Office, etc., "
h tml
According to Apple, they wanted your $4.99 per episode, and Apple said no.
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/08/31itunes.
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/08/31itunes.h tml
"Apple® today announced that it will not be selling NBC television shows for the upcoming television season on its online iTunes® Store (www.itunes.com). The move follows NBC's decision to not renew its agreement with iTunes after Apple declined to pay more than double the wholesale price for each NBC TV episode, which would have resulted in the retail price to consumers increasing to $4.99 per episode from the current $1.99. ABC, CBS, FOX and The CW, along with more than 50 cable networks, are signed up to sell TV shows from their upcoming season on iTunes at $1.99 per episode."
Some important information was lost in TFA: This is based on information coming from an anonymous source at NBS who didn't want to give their name (probably to avoid certain loss of their job). The current contract between NBC and Apple is running until December, and that is how long they have to sort out any problems.
What really is going on is at this moment pure speculation. Best case is, someone from NBC made a phone call to someone at Apple and told them "we want ten percent more money, or we won't renew the contract". Worst case is the lawyers sent a letter officially cancelling the contract with a note "don't call us; we won't call you". But nobody knows which one.
'' I'm not really qualified to make an opinion on this, but my guess is that these instructions will prove increasingly useful as AMD integrates the GPU and CPU. To me, it looks like they plan to make accessing what was traditionally part of the GPU a simple process (relative to accessing a GPU directly through their own pseudo CPU api's). ''
I can't see that at all. Mostly they have been copying stuff that was present on PowerPC CPUs for ages, filled some obvious gaps in the SSE instruction set, and added single instructions for floor (), ceil (), trunc () and round () functions. The only thing that has anything to do with GPUs is an instruction to convert four floating point numbers between 32 bit and 16 bit precision, which is a major pain otherwise if you want to do it in the CPU. And the only reason why this would be useful is that it enables you to send fp values to the GPU using half the bandwidth.
'' The 64-bit designation refers to the width of the address bus*. ''
Please show us any example of a processor with a 64 bit address bus. I don't think there are any in existence.
What you mean is the width of logical addresses, which is something completely different.