the electric engine is superior the the ICE in every way.
The engine itself may be but the complete power system including the energy store isn't. With an ICE a cheap and lightweight fuel tank can take you you hundreds of miles. With an electric the batteries are expensive, bulky, heavy and still give a far worse range then a conventional fuel tank.
For example lets compare the lotus elise and the tesla roadster (I think this is a reasonable comparison as the roadster is basically an electric elise).
pros of the roadster: a bit faster in the straight (according to top gear, if you have better sources that contradict this please post them) cheaper to run
pros of the elise: corners a bit better (according to top gear, if you have better sources that contradict this please post them) longer range far lower pricetag (according to wikipedia an elise is arround £30K while a roadster is arround £90K).
There are other cheaper electric cars but I dunno which non-electrics they are most comparable to so it's difficult to see how much more expensive they are. I'm sure I also heared somewhere that they were being sold at a loss to help the manufacturers gain experiance with electric technology for when it does become affordable.
In particular redhat actually delivers (and centos repackages) long term support. Sure ubuntu has releases that they say are long term support but one year of overlap on the desktop and three on the server seems rather low to me for "set and forget" boxes that you don't want to mess with but do want to keep security updates on.
the key is getting the balance, too short and/or simple and it's easilly shoulder surfed (and if someone gets the password hashes or you have a login system that doesn't limit retries too easilly brute forced). Too long and you risk it getting written down on a post-it note that somehow finds it's way into student hands.
aptitude has got a UI for browsing and a "cleverer" (though that cleverness can often backfire...) depsolver but really it's a minor part of the debian package management system.
Debians package management is indeed among the best though I think that is less to do with any particular tool (they are good but afaict they aren't fundamentally different from those in other distros) and more to do with the care and attention that goes into the whole process (both the tools and the packages themselves).
Because assuming you live in a country with an effective goverment when you try to actually go through with your declaration and stop paying taxes to the country that claims your land or declare that a warrant allowing their police to come onto your land is invalid they will come down on you like a ton of bricks and there will be NOTHING you can do about it.
In libya OTOH a sufficiant proportion of the countries population including parts of the military has rebelled to actually stand a change of doing something about the goverment.
For legal purposes it means just as much.
Laws only matter if the organisation that makes them has the ability to enforce them.
According to wikipedia the first fedora release was in 2003 while the first centos release was in 2004.
I remember the various RHEL rebuilds (and centos wasn't the first) being a reaction to the fact that red hat linux (not enterprise) had been dropped and that fedora was an unstable bleeding edge distro (note: I was only watching from the sidelines at the time).
Yes house fires are nasty, lukilly they are rare and uncorrelated enough that insurance against them is affordable.
OTOH i've never heard of anyone insuring a media collection that requires online activation based DRM (as opposed to mere copy protection) against the provider going out of buisness and given that such an event would hit a load of people at once it would be difficult to insure against on a large scale without exposing the insurers to unacceptable risk.
They introduced the DRM free tracks alongside the protected ones and then some time later they stopped offering the DRM protected ones. Music sold with drm will still have it unless the user upgrades it and while the price for upgrading was fairly reasonable (IIRC it was the same as the price difference at the time they were selling both) they made upgrading an all or nothing thing (I can see credit card fees would make them not want to upgrade one track at a time but still all or nothing seems over the top to me). Also IIRC tracks given away in promotions could not be upgraded.
The music industry has pretty much given up on DRM for copies of tracks they sell (as apposed to provide on subscription services etc)..New tracks bought from itunes, amazon etc are drm free and itunes DRM tracks could always be bunt to CD (which are DRM free though the quality loss and/or size increase that results from this method of drm removal is annoying). AAC isn't quite as common as mp3 but there are still loads of decoders and players out there for it.
It's other types of media that are getting locked down to the hilt.
What would worry me would be a local heat/flame source (say a capacitor in a high power circuit failing spectacularly) igniting the case. Most of the system can still be relatively cool while a small area can be extremely hot.
mmm, subscripts and superscripts are a pain because computers generally treat them as "formatting" (which is stripped with no indication if the target doesn't support it unlike unrecognised characters which are usually replaced with a question mark or similar) yet they carry important semantic information.
Even worse was the old symbol font which when accidentaly replaced with a regular font would make some incredibly nasty substitutions (like turning lower case mu into m and therefore making values wrong by a factor of 1000 with no obvious error in the text) or turning capital omega into W which can also be confusing given that resistors typically have both a resistance and a power rating).
Now we need to pack the box in another box to protect it during shipping
In my experiance the "retail boxes" for motherboards are not designed for shipping without further protection. Most customers probablly buy more than just a motherboard anyway. So whether you buy this or a standard motherboard if you buy online you will probablly get a box in a box.
IMO this is a gimmick, a bit wasteful but probably less so than many other gimmicks that are used to sell products.
Oracle may try to monetize java more but I can't see it as being in their interests to outright kill it. Plus the code is out there under the GPL so most likely there will be forks if oracle tries anything too nasty. Oracle may try to kill these forks with patent threats but some of them will simply move to a location where those threats have no teeth and patents only last ~20 years anyway.
I bet in a few decades time java will be like fortran and cobol are today, entrenched in certain niches but no longer popular for new works.
What makes C so great is that it was born the way it is and does not change.
It has had lots of stuff added over the years but generally C itself doesn't change in a way that breaks existing code (not sure if there have been any exceptions to this).
I have been programming in C for about 25 years now and the first programs I wrote still compile and run unchanged today.
Maybe the first ones do but I bet many later ones don't.
If your only interfaces to the outside world are reading and writing stuff to/from the console in the local 8-bit character set (of which you can probablly assume the lower half is ascii but not much beyond that) and read and write files whose names are in the local 8-bit character set and you are prepared to live with worst case assumptions on the size of basic types then sure you can write stuff in a way that is platform and version independent. Want to go beyond that though and things get much less rosy.
* The sizes of the basic datatypes can vary, making it rather hard to make code both portable and efficiant. C99 fixes this by adding a load of new fixed size types but C99 support is not universal. * Networking is reasonablly standardised (though not part of the C standard) but try and do anything else at the same time and you've got problems since the windows implementation of select only works on sockets. Oh and there is also the "fun" of gethostbyname VS getaddrinfo (the former is supported on pretty much all platforms but only supports IPv4, the latter supports multiple protocols but is relatively new). * Want to create a terminal interface that goes beyond a simple stream of text? On windows you have to use special API calls, on *nix you have to use escape codes that are terminal type dependent (which in practice means using a third party library like ncurses). * On windows the legacy 8-bit character set cannot support all valid filenames so afaict if you want to be able to access all files you need to use the platform specific functions that take UTF-16.
Java otoh combines stability (i'm sure there are exceptions but code from java 1.0 is still supposed to run with the latest version of java) and cross platform abstraction (which are a little leaky but less than those of C) with a large standard library. You can write say an IRC client in java without doing anything platform specific. You can't do that in C (and no claiming unix specific code is cross platform because it works under cygwin or similar doesn't count).
Then again - still from a German perspective - ordering physical games abroad can be a lot of hassle. Buying from another EU country usually is acceptable, except most use local, national payment systems I don't have access to.
At least here in the UK pretty much everywhere (with the exception of some very small places) takes visa and mastercard and an increasing number of places also take paypal. All of these are international systems.
AIUI it the real issue is that the company MS bought the tech off sells very similar tech for a MUCH higher pricetag for industrial use. So they are sensitive about what uses the kinect is put to.
It's kind of like when NI and lego collaborate to produced products aimed at kids based on labview they have to make sure they are sufficiantly crippled that they don't threaten labview's market.
Thermal paste even the good stuff is a far worse conductor of heat than pretty much any metal however it is far better than air. The aim therefore is to use just enough to fill the surface imperfections in the surfaces being mated.
To some extent it will squeeze out if it's overdone but it's still likely to result in both an overly thick layer of paste and paste in places where it shouldn't be (which can cause other problems especially with something like arctic silver)
The wikipedia article doesn't cite any sources for that though and the only reference I can find to outsourcing on falcon's website is "We don't outsource our technical support". I would be extremely surprised if what looks like a relatively small botique vendor was doing their own PCB design, fabrication and assembly rather than just buying in boards (possiblly with some customisation requests).
If someone is older and lives in a property they own (with some form of mortgage) it is quite likely that through appreciation in the property market (unless they live in an area where it has collapsed recently) and the gradual repayment of the loan they will have built up a substantial chunk of equity which they can draw against. They probably don't consider it "money to throw around" but if they believe a loved one needs it badly enough they are likely to release it.
Afaict the trick is being able to convince someone you are a loved one even though you consider them as a mere victim to be exploited.
The problem is that there are lawsuits where both parties know that the plaintif is likely to lose if it went all the way to trial but the costs of defending and/or the risk that the judge will make an unexpected descision are greater than the costs of losing a customer.
This is made worse by the fact that afaict trademark law punishes underdefending your trademark but not overdefending it so the rational thing for a trademark holder to do is to defend as harshly as possible.
The advice i've seen when dealing with expenses that must be claimed back later is to use a credit card. Provided the organisation is half way competant you should be able to get your expenses claimed back by the time the credit card bill comed though. Some people have a seperate card just for this so they can more easilly keep it seperate from their other transactions.
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the electric engine is superior the the ICE in every way.
The engine itself may be but the complete power system including the energy store isn't. With an ICE a cheap and lightweight fuel tank can take you you hundreds of miles. With an electric the batteries are expensive, bulky, heavy and still give a far worse range then a conventional fuel tank.
For example lets compare the lotus elise and the tesla roadster (I think this is a reasonable comparison as the roadster is basically an electric elise).
pros of the roadster:
a bit faster in the straight (according to top gear, if you have better sources that contradict this please post them)
cheaper to run
pros of the elise:
corners a bit better (according to top gear, if you have better sources that contradict this please post them)
longer range
far lower pricetag (according to wikipedia an elise is arround £30K while a roadster is arround £90K).
There are other cheaper electric cars but I dunno which non-electrics they are most comparable to so it's difficult to see how much more expensive they are. I'm sure I also heared somewhere that they were being sold at a loss to help the manufacturers gain experiance with electric technology for when it does become affordable.
In particular redhat actually delivers (and centos repackages) long term support. Sure ubuntu has releases that they say are long term support but one year of overlap on the desktop and three on the server seems rather low to me for "set and forget" boxes that you don't want to mess with but do want to keep security updates on.
the key is getting the balance, too short and/or simple and it's easilly shoulder surfed (and if someone gets the password hashes or you have a login system that doesn't limit retries too easilly brute forced). Too long and you risk it getting written down on a post-it note that somehow finds it's way into student hands.
aptitude has got a UI for browsing and a "cleverer" (though that cleverness can often backfire...) depsolver but really it's a minor part of the debian package management system.
Debians package management is indeed among the best though I think that is less to do with any particular tool (they are good but afaict they aren't fundamentally different from those in other distros) and more to do with the care and attention that goes into the whole process (both the tools and the packages themselves).
Why are you laughing at me?
Because assuming you live in a country with an effective goverment when you try to actually go through with your declaration and stop paying taxes to the country that claims your land or declare that a warrant allowing their police to come onto your land is invalid they will come down on you like a ton of bricks and there will be NOTHING you can do about it.
In libya OTOH a sufficiant proportion of the countries population including parts of the military has rebelled to actually stand a change of doing something about the goverment.
For legal purposes it means just as much.
Laws only matter if the organisation that makes them has the ability to enforce them.
According to wikipedia the first fedora release was in 2003 while the first centos release was in 2004.
I remember the various RHEL rebuilds (and centos wasn't the first) being a reaction to the fact that red hat linux (not enterprise) had been dropped and that fedora was an unstable bleeding edge distro (note: I was only watching from the sidelines at the time).
Yes house fires are nasty, lukilly they are rare and uncorrelated enough that insurance against them is affordable.
OTOH i've never heard of anyone insuring a media collection that requires online activation based DRM (as opposed to mere copy protection) against the provider going out of buisness and given that such an event would hit a load of people at once it would be difficult to insure against on a large scale without exposing the insurers to unacceptable risk.
They introduced the DRM free tracks alongside the protected ones and then some time later they stopped offering the DRM protected ones. Music sold with drm will still have it unless the user upgrades it and while the price for upgrading was fairly reasonable (IIRC it was the same as the price difference at the time they were selling both) they made upgrading an all or nothing thing (I can see credit card fees would make them not want to upgrade one track at a time but still all or nothing seems over the top to me). Also IIRC tracks given away in promotions could not be upgraded.
The music industry has pretty much given up on DRM for copies of tracks they sell (as apposed to provide on subscription services etc)..New tracks bought from itunes, amazon etc are drm free and itunes DRM tracks could always be bunt to CD (which are DRM free though the quality loss and/or size increase that results from this method of drm removal is annoying). AAC isn't quite as common as mp3 but there are still loads of decoders and players out there for it.
It's other types of media that are getting locked down to the hilt.
What would worry me would be a local heat/flame source (say a capacitor in a high power circuit failing spectacularly) igniting the case. Most of the system can still be relatively cool while a small area can be extremely hot.
mmm, subscripts and superscripts are a pain because computers generally treat them as "formatting" (which is stripped with no indication if the target doesn't support it unlike unrecognised characters which are usually replaced with a question mark or similar) yet they carry important semantic information.
Even worse was the old symbol font which when accidentaly replaced with a regular font would make some incredibly nasty substitutions (like turning lower case mu into m and therefore making values wrong by a factor of 1000 with no obvious error in the text) or turning capital omega into W which can also be confusing given that resistors typically have both a resistance and a power rating).
Now we need to pack the box in another box to protect it during shipping
In my experiance the "retail boxes" for motherboards are not designed for shipping without further protection. Most customers probablly buy more than just a motherboard anyway. So whether you buy this or a standard motherboard if you buy online you will probablly get a box in a box.
IMO this is a gimmick, a bit wasteful but probably less so than many other gimmicks that are used to sell products.
BTW it seems most if not all of NASA is on that chart under sub-blocks of the general science block.
Oracle may try to monetize java more but I can't see it as being in their interests to outright kill it. Plus the code is out there under the GPL so most likely there will be forks if oracle tries anything too nasty. Oracle may try to kill these forks with patent threats but some of them will simply move to a location where those threats have no teeth and patents only last ~20 years anyway.
I bet in a few decades time java will be like fortran and cobol are today, entrenched in certain niches but no longer popular for new works.
What makes C so great is that it was born the way it is and does not change.
It has had lots of stuff added over the years but generally C itself doesn't change in a way that breaks existing code (not sure if there have been any exceptions to this).
I have been programming in C for about 25 years now and the first programs I wrote still compile and run unchanged today.
Maybe the first ones do but I bet many later ones don't.
If your only interfaces to the outside world are reading and writing stuff to/from the console in the local 8-bit character set (of which you can probablly assume the lower half is ascii but not much beyond that) and read and write files whose names are in the local 8-bit character set and you are prepared to live with worst case assumptions on the size of basic types then sure you can write stuff in a way that is platform and version independent. Want to go beyond that though and things get much less rosy.
* The sizes of the basic datatypes can vary, making it rather hard to make code both portable and efficiant. C99 fixes this by adding a load of new fixed size types but C99 support is not universal.
* Networking is reasonablly standardised (though not part of the C standard) but try and do anything else at the same time and you've got problems since the windows implementation of select only works on sockets. Oh and there is also the "fun" of gethostbyname VS getaddrinfo (the former is supported on pretty much all platforms but only supports IPv4, the latter supports multiple protocols but is relatively new).
* Want to create a terminal interface that goes beyond a simple stream of text? On windows you have to use special API calls, on *nix you have to use escape codes that are terminal type dependent (which in practice means using a third party library like ncurses).
* On windows the legacy 8-bit character set cannot support all valid filenames so afaict if you want to be able to access all files you need to use the platform specific functions that take UTF-16.
Java otoh combines stability (i'm sure there are exceptions but code from java 1.0 is still supposed to run with the latest version of java) and cross platform abstraction (which are a little leaky but less than those of C) with a large standard library. You can write say an IRC client in java without doing anything platform specific. You can't do that in C (and no claiming unix specific code is cross platform because it works under cygwin or similar doesn't count).
Then again - still from a German perspective - ordering physical games abroad can be a lot of hassle. Buying from another EU country usually is acceptable, except most use local, national payment systems I don't have access to.
At least here in the UK pretty much everywhere (with the exception of some very small places) takes visa and mastercard and an increasing number of places also take paypal. All of these are international systems.
I wonder how much difference the starting atmosphere makes, afaict space suits and some spacecraft use low pressure pure oxygen atmospheres.
AIUI it the real issue is that the company MS bought the tech off sells very similar tech for a MUCH higher pricetag for industrial use. So they are sensitive about what uses the kinect is put to.
It's kind of like when NI and lego collaborate to produced products aimed at kids based on labview they have to make sure they are sufficiantly crippled that they don't threaten labview's market.
Thermal paste even the good stuff is a far worse conductor of heat than pretty much any metal however it is far better than air. The aim therefore is to use just enough to fill the surface imperfections in the surfaces being mated.
To some extent it will squeeze out if it's overdone but it's still likely to result in both an overly thick layer of paste and paste in places where it shouldn't be (which can cause other problems especially with something like arctic silver)
The wikipedia article doesn't cite any sources for that though and the only reference I can find to outsourcing on falcon's website is "We don't outsource our technical support". I would be extremely surprised if what looks like a relatively small botique vendor was doing their own PCB design, fabrication and assembly rather than just buying in boards (possiblly with some customisation requests).
If someone is older and lives in a property they own (with some form of mortgage) it is quite likely that through appreciation in the property market (unless they live in an area where it has collapsed recently) and the gradual repayment of the loan they will have built up a substantial chunk of equity which they can draw against. They probably don't consider it "money to throw around" but if they believe a loved one needs it badly enough they are likely to release it.
Afaict the trick is being able to convince someone you are a loved one even though you consider them as a mere victim to be exploited.
Anyone who works in Hollywood should know enough to either ask for a cut of the profits
You mean a cut of the revenue right? profits are too easy to manipulate.
The problem is that there are lawsuits where both parties know that the plaintif is likely to lose if it went all the way to trial but the costs of defending and/or the risk that the judge will make an unexpected descision are greater than the costs of losing a customer.
This is made worse by the fact that afaict trademark law punishes underdefending your trademark but not overdefending it so the rational thing for a trademark holder to do is to defend as harshly as possible.
Though it should be noted that polynomial time doesn't nessacerally mean practical time.
The advice i've seen when dealing with expenses that must be claimed back later is to use a credit card. Provided the organisation is half way competant you should be able to get your expenses claimed back by the time the credit card bill comed though. Some people have a seperate card just for this so they can more easilly keep it seperate from their other transactions.