During gate's time there was improvement culminating with the release of 2K arround the time gates left the CEO position (the retail release was after gates left but apparently the final version had been released to partners before that) which brought together the stability of the NT core with important features like plug and play.
Since ballmer took over we got
1: ME, a last ditch attempt at a maintinance release to the 9x line which turned out to be even less stable than 98 2:XP which was 2K with a "fisher price" interface, a crippled edition for home users and a 3: a lull of over 5 year with no new desktop OS releases though there was a bigger than usual service pack for XP 4: vista which was widely received as being awful (in microsofts "defence" this was mostly because the hit of creeping bloat was taken all at once) 5: finally we got win7 which was widely viewed as an improvement over vista though they insisted on pissing people off by removing the "classic" option for no obvious reason.
The problem will take care of itself when we have no fossil fuels to burn.
Right but afaict that isn't going to happen for a long time. IMO the likely scenario is that as conventional oil and gas decline they will be replaced with sources that are far nastier environmentally such as tar sands, fracking and fischer tropsch.
it's worth remembering that those whose jobs require creation of QR Codes for insertion in documentation and signage sometimes have to shorten URLs for these Codes. An in-house approach to this is best, IMHO
Agreed
but YMMV.
If they are going to get an outsider to supply shorter URLs they should have a contractual relationship with them specifying service level agreements and penalties for not living up to them. Really though the only reason to farm it out is either that your webteam is incompetant or there is a complete breakdown in cooperation between different parts of your organisation.
IMO anyone who uses (of their own violation) a public URL shortener for anything important and/or orders others to do so is grossly incompetant.
Rather it went from 2.4.x (stable) to 2.5.x (development) to 2.6.x (stable). Meanwhile the 2.4.x releases continued (and went on for a long time even after the release of 2.6.0.
After the release of 2.6.0 linus conidered the code of linux to be stable enough to no longer need a seperate development branch for radical changes preffering to bring in individual changes direct to the stable releases as and when they were ready. The result is 2.6.40 is very different from 2.6.0 but the changes were evoloutionary with all the intermediate steps being "stable" releases.
What online activation could help with is reducing the risk of usable copies being leaked in the time between "going gold" and release. For example if the online activation scheme involved encrypting the copy on the disc with the decryption key released through the activation servers and the activation servers were configured only to accept special test keys before release then the set of people who could leak the game code/data before release could be limited to a far smaller set.
The energy mostly goes not to lifting the craft from one height to another but rather to accelerating air simply to maintain altitude.
Right, afaict jetpack implies small nozzles which implies high exhaust velocities which implies most of the energy ends up accelerating air downwards rather than accelerating the craft upwards (momentum is proportional to MV while kenetic energy is proportional to MV^2).
The bigger problem isn't so much the fact it's surface mount, is that it's so much more complex than it used to be, in an analog or simple digital system on a two layer board you can trace and figure out most things from first principles with enough patience. In modern digital systems with multilayer boards and highly integrated ICs that are either custom or at least programmable if it's anything worse than bad caps your chances of fixing it without proper documentation is very low.
I also get the impression that in the days when electronics was expected to be repaired manufacturers were far more open about providing repair documentation.
mmm, the key problem is that anyone who is doing a serious project will likely want some esoteric parts which they have to order from one of the big prototyping parts suppliers and once you are ordering something from from one of them them you may as well order everything from them both because they are cheaper than the high street and because they often have minimum order values or small order charges.
Therefore all the high street vendors can cater to is
1: newbies who don't know any better 2: emergency purchases where one needs one new value of resistor or so and either needs it very quickly can't justify putting an order out (most of the big prototyping parts vendors have small order charges and/or minimum order values).
Apple's main tactic seems to be capitalising on existing markets where the existing players are doing a poor job and pushing all the existing players straight into catchup mode. The ipod delivered an MP3 player with plenty of storage that wasn't horriblly ugly. The iphone delivered a smartphone with a web browser that people actually considered usable. The ipad delivered a tablet that was light and sleek enough that people actually wanted to use it and so on.
Right, the thing is afaict there are three stages to "getting caught"
1: the police decide it was probablly a given person 2: the police manage to track the person down and arrest them 3: the court confirms the polices determination in 1
If the criminal can break the chain at any of these stages then they don't "get caught"
This criminal spectacually failed to break the chain at stage 1 (he used his work ID). He kept it stopped at stage 2 for a while but ultimately failed (the article doesn't say exactly how but I would guess that the only driving license he had available at the traffic stop was one tied to his old identity) and it seems unlikely he will break the chain at stage 3 either.
Assuming your goal is to support free software in general and not say deliberately choose incompatible licenses for strategic reasons like sun did with opensolaris then IMO there are two main descisions to be made.
1: which matters more to you, the patent protection clauses in newer licenses or the wider compatibility of older licenses. 2: do you want "no copyleft", "library copyleft", or "full copyleft"
Based on the answer to those questions chose between Apache2+, LGPL3+, GPL3+, BSD/MIT, LGPL2+ or GPL2+.
I'd avoid the MPL and similar licenses, they were meant to be somewhere in between BSD and LGPL in terms of copyleft intensity but they are very weak in practice (one can just put all ones new code in new functions in a new file and make the modified version of the existing file useless without the file of new code) and have compatability issues with the GPL (though this can be got arround with multi-licensing arrangements).
Why can't the FSF learn and correct this huge mistake?
I don't think they consider it to be a mistake.
Reading the GFLD it's pretty clear that the FSF belives that while technical documentation and code should be freely modifiable that their propoganda should not be freely modifiable and further that they should be able to force you to include their propoganda if you want to distribution their technical documenation. Debian rightly belives that everything in debian proper should be free regardless of whether it is code or documenataion (though there is an exception for the text of licenses themselves which is another place the FSF likes to put unmodifiable propoganda)..
BTW I don't think there is anything in any of debians core rules that prevents the production of a non-free CD, it's just that noone has stepped up to do the legwork of identifying what packages could be legally included.
Depends how well the VOIP system is designed, you could build a VOIP system to handle high rates of random packet loss. You would just need to
1: keep the buffers relatively big relative to the size of the packets (this means either smaller packets or bigger buffers) 2: use forward error correction techniques and/or information spreading techniques so that a lost packet can be reconstructed from others in the buffer
Probablly you would want to go into this mode in an adaptive manner if the channel was detected as being shit to avoid degrading performance for people on good channels.
What is harder is to deal with is block dumps of packets. If your buffer is 200ms long and something drops half a second worth of packets then the user is going to experiance a dropout whatever you do.
Well "vaporise up" sounds a lot worse to me than "melt down";)
Seriously though the fact that the fuel itself is already molten does nothing to solve the problem that the reactor system has a limited maximum temperature beyond which components will melt or otherwise be damaged allowing the fuel to flow to places it shouldn't and that given the amounf of power concentrated in a reactor that temperature can very likely be reached by decay heat alone..
If we both have a presence on the internet, there's no reason to involve a third party for us to communicate.
If you have medium term stable IPs and your own domain (though you could argue that relying on DNS is relying on a third party) then I would agree with you.
Most client machines don't have that. Many are behind NATs and even those that aren't may not have stable IPs. P2P should be used for the actual call data where possible but servers are needed to keep track of users locations and (if you want to provide a reliable service to those behind NAT*) to provide a fallback path for call data in the event that P2P transmission is not acheivable.
What we should really be doing is a system similar to email. With email you can either rely on a third party or host it yourself if you have an appropriate connection and there is no reason the same can't be done for VOIP.
* SIP doesn't really get on very well with NAT and worse the provider I used liked to pin the blame on NAT for half-calls despite the fact they had worked fine in the past with the same NAT.
The root issue is that fission is a messy process. You smash one reasonablly stable nuclius into multiple peices but these peices are not always stable (i'm not sure if any of them are stable) which have varying half lives. As those decay they produce heat and decay products which themselves have varying half lives. As these elements decay they produce heat.
Stopping fission reactions is relatively easy (just kill off the neutron flux with control rods) but there is no way of stopping the fission products that have already been produced from decaying.
Afaict anyone following the news in the UK would be aware of the existance of the injunction and could have easilly found out who the woman was by looking back in the paper. The only thing that was censored was who the footballer was.
Unfortunately it seems the output is a collection of splines which are then recombined with the original image data to produce a shaded image at arbitary resoloution. Which is a nice result don't get me wrong but it looks like it would still be some further effort to turn the result into a standard vector format.
Also they don't seem to have released the code so to actually use this one would have to try and reimplement the technique from the info in the paper.
Because ebooks often come with horrible DRM and/or onerous restrictions on resale and lending. Any library that considers itself to be a serious store of knowledge (as opposed to merely a resource for current patrons) will want to avoid that and right now for most titles the only way to avoid it is to stock paper copies.
Maybe a compromise could be to allow the library to keep DRM free copies internally but require them to use DRM when lending them out. Having a library lend out DRM free digital copies is pretty clearly a non-starter because many readers would keep their copy when they checked the book back in.
Plus, it's dangerous to be choppng into live 200-400 amp 240V wires.
It is if you don't know what you are doing but afaict the electricity companies round here chop into live 240/415 three phase mains cables all the time to tap off new properties.
Right which brings us to the key difference between bitcoin and regular government money.
Government money has value because you HAVE to use it to deal with the government and dealing with the governement is basically unavoidable. Many private sellers don't take anything other than government money (or bank credits that are effectively equivilent to government money) either.
OTOH bitcoins can only be spent at a relatively small number of places most of which take government currency (or bank credits that are effectively equivilent to government currency) as well. So there is far more chance of it becoming worthless in a relatively short time. Especially if governments start trying to crack down on users.
[quote]What's a horse, I hear you ask? I called my local representative and asked the same question.
It turns out that a horse is a self-replicating semi-autonomous rover optimized for negotiating tough terrain, and it was developed without DARPA assistance. It is powered by biofuels that can be produced using COTS technologies, but which for which no DOE research is required. Its waste stream is biodegradeable, and in the quantities generated by a single horse, facilities for the storage and processing of the waste pending biodegradation do not require EPA approval. [/quote] Well that is one way to describe a horse;)
[quote]No wonder nobody uses the damn things anymore![/quote] Seriously the main issue with horses is that they are high maintenance.
An mechanical can work 24 hours a day and when it is not in use it can simply be turned off and left in a parking space. It needs fuel but only when it is running and it needs occasional cleaning, repairs and recertification. Properly looked after it can last a very long time though newer models usually have more attractive features and lower maintiance costs and so in practice most cars on the road are relatively new. The primary waste from an automobile is gasses that dissapates without further intervention from the owner. Properly cared for they can last many decades and perform pretty much the same throughout their life.
Horses can only work a limited number of hours in a day and only over a limited range of ages. Horses that are too young or too old to usefully work. People tend to get emotionally attatched to them and so resist killing horses that are too old to work. They need to be either fed and mucked out regularly or given a large ammount of land to live on whether they are working or not. The area where they are working may also need to be cleaned of their faeces.
Now there are some jobs which horses do sufficiantly better than mechanical vehicles that it's worth keeping them around but for most jobs mechanical vehicles provide a more economical solution.
Even if the cable modem supports it that doesn't mean the rest of the system will. Most home routers don't support IPv6 and while windows XP supports it it's disabled by default.
The key problem with IPv6 remains that you can't really deploy v6 only nodes until you have eliminated the v4 only nodes and in the meantime deploying a dual stack node offers no real benefit over deploying a v4 only node. Transition mecahnisms can help to an extent but 6to4 requires a public v4 IP on the system implementing the transition mechanism and teredo is rather fragile since it fights NAT.
Slashdot Mirror
During gate's time there was improvement culminating with the release of 2K arround the time gates left the CEO position (the retail release was after gates left but apparently the final version had been released to partners before that) which brought together the stability of the NT core with important features like plug and play.
Since ballmer took over we got
1: ME, a last ditch attempt at a maintinance release to the 9x line which turned out to be even less stable than 98 :XP which was 2K with a "fisher price" interface, a crippled edition for home users and a
2
3: a lull of over 5 year with no new desktop OS releases though there was a bigger than usual service pack for XP
4: vista which was widely received as being awful (in microsofts "defence" this was mostly because the hit of creeping bloat was taken all at once)
5: finally we got win7 which was widely viewed as an improvement over vista though they insisted on pissing people off by removing the "classic" option for no obvious reason.
Haven't we hit peak oil?
Quite possiblly.
The problem will take care of itself when we have no fossil fuels to burn.
Right but afaict that isn't going to happen for a long time. IMO the likely scenario is that as conventional oil and gas decline they will be replaced with sources that are far nastier environmentally such as tar sands, fracking and fischer tropsch.
it's worth remembering that those whose jobs require creation of QR Codes for insertion in documentation and signage sometimes have to shorten URLs for these Codes. An in-house approach to this is best, IMHO
Agreed
but YMMV.
If they are going to get an outsider to supply shorter URLs they should have a contractual relationship with them specifying service level agreements and penalties for not living up to them. Really though the only reason to farm it out is either that your webteam is incompetant or there is a complete breakdown in cooperation between different parts of your organisation.
IMO anyone who uses (of their own violation) a public URL shortener for anything important and/or orders others to do so is grossly incompetant.
The second digit was incremented from 4 to 6
Rather it went from 2.4.x (stable) to 2.5.x (development) to 2.6.x (stable). Meanwhile the 2.4.x releases continued (and went on for a long time even after the release of 2.6.0.
After the release of 2.6.0 linus conidered the code of linux to be stable enough to no longer need a seperate development branch for radical changes preffering to bring in individual changes direct to the stable releases as and when they were ready. The result is 2.6.40 is very different from 2.6.0 but the changes were evoloutionary with all the intermediate steps being "stable" releases.
This clearly wouldn't help against a rogue dev.
What online activation could help with is reducing the risk of usable copies being leaked in the time between "going gold" and release. For example if the online activation scheme involved encrypting the copy on the disc with the decryption key released through the activation servers and the activation servers were configured only to accept special test keys before release then the set of people who could leak the game code/data before release could be limited to a far smaller set.
The energy mostly goes not to lifting the craft from one height to another but rather to accelerating air simply to maintain altitude.
Right, afaict jetpack implies small nozzles which implies high exhaust velocities which implies most of the energy ends up accelerating air downwards rather than accelerating the craft upwards (momentum is proportional to MV while kenetic energy is proportional to MV^2).
The bigger problem isn't so much the fact it's surface mount, is that it's so much more complex than it used to be, in an analog or simple digital system on a two layer board you can trace and figure out most things from first principles with enough patience. In modern digital systems with multilayer boards and highly integrated ICs that are either custom or at least programmable if it's anything worse than bad caps your chances of fixing it without proper documentation is very low.
I also get the impression that in the days when electronics was expected to be repaired manufacturers were far more open about providing repair documentation.
shameless plug: farnell offer free next-day delivery with no minimum order quantity. Yes, even for a 20p pack of LEDs
I thought they only offered that to customers with trade accounts.
mmm, the key problem is that anyone who is doing a serious project will likely want some esoteric parts which they have to order from one of the big prototyping parts suppliers and once you are ordering something from from one of them them you may as well order everything from them both because they are cheaper than the high street and because they often have minimum order values or small order charges.
Therefore all the high street vendors can cater to is
1: newbies who don't know any better
2: emergency purchases where one needs one new value of resistor or so and either needs it very quickly can't justify putting an order out (most of the big prototyping parts vendors have small order charges and/or minimum order values).
Apple's main tactic seems to be capitalising on existing markets where the existing players are doing a poor job and pushing all the existing players straight into catchup mode. The ipod delivered an MP3 player with plenty of storage that wasn't horriblly ugly. The iphone delivered a smartphone with a web browser that people actually considered usable. The ipad delivered a tablet that was light and sleek enough that people actually wanted to use it and so on.
Right, the thing is afaict there are three stages to "getting caught"
1: the police decide it was probablly a given person
2: the police manage to track the person down and arrest them
3: the court confirms the polices determination in 1
If the criminal can break the chain at any of these stages then they don't "get caught"
This criminal spectacually failed to break the chain at stage 1 (he used his work ID). He kept it stopped at stage 2 for a while but ultimately failed (the article doesn't say exactly how but I would guess that the only driving license he had available at the traffic stop was one tied to his old identity) and it seems unlikely he will break the chain at stage 3 either.
Assuming your goal is to support free software in general and not say deliberately choose incompatible licenses for strategic reasons like sun did with opensolaris then IMO there are two main descisions to be made.
1: which matters more to you, the patent protection clauses in newer licenses or the wider compatibility of older licenses.
2: do you want "no copyleft", "library copyleft", or "full copyleft"
Based on the answer to those questions chose between Apache2+, LGPL3+, GPL3+, BSD/MIT, LGPL2+ or GPL2+.
I'd avoid the MPL and similar licenses, they were meant to be somewhere in between BSD and LGPL in terms of copyleft intensity but they are very weak in practice (one can just put all ones new code in new functions in a new file and make the modified version of the existing file useless without the file of new code) and have compatability issues with the GPL (though this can be got arround with multi-licensing arrangements).
Why can't the FSF learn and correct this huge mistake?
I don't think they consider it to be a mistake.
Reading the GFLD it's pretty clear that the FSF belives that while technical documentation and code should be freely modifiable that their propoganda should not be freely modifiable and further that they should be able to force you to include their propoganda if you want to distribution their technical documenation. Debian rightly belives that everything in debian proper should be free regardless of whether it is code or documenataion (though there is an exception for the text of licenses themselves which is another place the FSF likes to put unmodifiable propoganda)..
BTW I don't think there is anything in any of debians core rules that prevents the production of a non-free CD, it's just that noone has stepped up to do the legwork of identifying what packages could be legally included.
Depends how well the VOIP system is designed, you could build a VOIP system to handle high rates of random packet loss. You would just need to
1: keep the buffers relatively big relative to the size of the packets (this means either smaller packets or bigger buffers)
2: use forward error correction techniques and/or information spreading techniques so that a lost packet can be reconstructed from others in the buffer
Probablly you would want to go into this mode in an adaptive manner if the channel was detected as being shit to avoid degrading performance for people on good channels.
What is harder is to deal with is block dumps of packets. If your buffer is 200ms long and something drops half a second worth of packets then the user is going to experiance a dropout whatever you do.
One suggestion to worrying about melt-down
Well "vaporise up" sounds a lot worse to me than "melt down" ;)
Seriously though the fact that the fuel itself is already molten does nothing to solve the problem that the reactor system has a limited maximum temperature beyond which components will melt or otherwise be damaged allowing the fuel to flow to places it shouldn't and that given the amounf of power concentrated in a reactor that temperature can very likely be reached by decay heat alone..
If we both have a presence on the internet, there's no reason to involve a third party for us to communicate.
If you have medium term stable IPs and your own domain (though you could argue that relying on DNS is relying on a third party) then I would agree with you.
Most client machines don't have that. Many are behind NATs and even those that aren't may not have stable IPs. P2P should be used for the actual call data where possible but servers are needed to keep track of users locations and (if you want to provide a reliable service to those behind NAT*) to provide a fallback path for call data in the event that P2P transmission is not acheivable.
What we should really be doing is a system similar to email. With email you can either rely on a third party or host it yourself if you have an appropriate connection and there is no reason the same can't be done for VOIP.
* SIP doesn't really get on very well with NAT and worse the provider I used liked to pin the blame on NAT for half-calls despite the fact they had worked fine in the past with the same NAT.
The root issue is that fission is a messy process. You smash one reasonablly stable nuclius into multiple peices but these peices are not always stable (i'm not sure if any of them are stable) which have varying half lives. As those decay they produce heat and decay products which themselves have varying half lives. As these elements decay they produce heat.
Stopping fission reactions is relatively easy (just kill off the neutron flux with control rods) but there is no way of stopping the fission products that have already been produced from decaying.
Afaict anyone following the news in the UK would be aware of the existance of the injunction and could have easilly found out who the woman was by looking back in the paper. The only thing that was censored was who the footballer was.
Unfortunately it seems the output is a collection of splines which are then recombined with the original image data to produce a shaded image at arbitary resoloution. Which is a nice result don't get me wrong but it looks like it would still be some further effort to turn the result into a standard vector format.
Also they don't seem to have released the code so to actually use this one would have to try and reimplement the technique from the info in the paper.
Because ebooks often come with horrible DRM and/or onerous restrictions on resale and lending. Any library that considers itself to be a serious store of knowledge (as opposed to merely a resource for current patrons) will want to avoid that and right now for most titles the only way to avoid it is to stock paper copies.
Maybe a compromise could be to allow the library to keep DRM free copies internally but require them to use DRM when lending them out. Having a library lend out DRM free digital copies is pretty clearly a non-starter because many readers would keep their copy when they checked the book back in.
PNG is lossless
More specifically it's a lossless representation of a single layer RGB image.
better for photos then JPEG.
For display of photos on the web the huge filesize advantages of JPEG outweigh the minor reduction in quality.
Plus, it's dangerous to be choppng into live 200-400 amp 240V wires.
It is if you don't know what you are doing but afaict the electricity companies round here chop into live 240/415 three phase mains cables all the time to tap off new properties.
Right which brings us to the key difference between bitcoin and regular government money.
Government money has value because you HAVE to use it to deal with the government and dealing with the governement is basically unavoidable. Many private sellers don't take anything other than government money (or bank credits that are effectively equivilent to government money) either.
OTOH bitcoins can only be spent at a relatively small number of places most of which take government currency (or bank credits that are effectively equivilent to government currency) as well. So there is far more chance of it becoming worthless in a relatively short time. Especially if governments start trying to crack down on users.
[quote]What's a horse, I hear you ask? I called my local representative and asked the same question.
It turns out that a horse is a self-replicating semi-autonomous rover optimized for negotiating tough terrain, and it was developed without DARPA assistance. It is powered by biofuels that can be produced using COTS technologies, but which for which no DOE research is required. Its waste stream is biodegradeable, and in the quantities generated by a single horse, facilities for the storage and processing of the waste pending biodegradation do not require EPA approval. [/quote] ;)
Well that is one way to describe a horse
[quote]No wonder nobody uses the damn things anymore![/quote]
Seriously the main issue with horses is that they are high maintenance.
An mechanical can work 24 hours a day and when it is not in use it can simply be turned off and left in a parking space. It needs fuel but only when it is running and it needs occasional cleaning, repairs and recertification. Properly looked after it can last a very long time though newer models usually have more attractive features and lower maintiance costs and so in practice most cars on the road are relatively new. The primary waste from an automobile is gasses that dissapates without further intervention from the owner. Properly cared for they can last many decades and perform pretty much the same throughout their life.
Horses can only work a limited number of hours in a day and only over a limited range of ages. Horses that are too young or too old to usefully work. People tend to get emotionally attatched to them and so resist killing horses that are too old to work. They need to be either fed and mucked out regularly or given a large ammount of land to live on whether they are working or not. The area where they are working may also need to be cleaned of their faeces.
Now there are some jobs which horses do sufficiantly better than mechanical vehicles that it's worth keeping them around but for most jobs mechanical vehicles provide a more economical solution.
Even if the cable modem supports it that doesn't mean the rest of the system will. Most home routers don't support IPv6 and while windows XP supports it it's disabled by default.
The key problem with IPv6 remains that you can't really deploy v6 only nodes until you have eliminated the v4 only nodes and in the meantime deploying a dual stack node offers no real benefit over deploying a v4 only node. Transition mecahnisms can help to an extent but 6to4 requires a public v4 IP on the system implementing the transition mechanism and teredo is rather fragile since it fights NAT.