The fact an X-Box (and most new PC games) seem to have a built in expiry date (as soon as the company gets bored of supporting it) All disc based console games i've seen so far can be played offline without ever connecting to the internet. If firmware updates are needed then they are included on the game disc. Sometimes you get some bonus dlc if you connect to the internet and register but it's usually nothing major.
PC games are actually worse than console games in this regard, most newer ones require online activation and a few of them are even requiring constant internet connection.
Afaict most plastics in thier natural state (no pigments or dyes added) tend to be translucent.
Black plastics are black because they have a pigment in them that absorbs lots of light (carbon black is a common one though not the only one). Once light is absorbed it's not going any further though the plastic.
White plastics are white becase they have a pigment in them that scatters light. As that light is scattered a lot of it comes straight back out but some continues to bounce arround in the plastic potentially making it to the other size.
So white plastics tend to be worse at blocking light than black ones all else being equal.
heh, i'd preffer it to the current model where the only people who can access scientific literature are those in academia (who have access to most journals though bulk agreements with thier university) or those prepared to pay substantial subscriptions or per-paper fees.
In my experiance you don't really know if a paper will be useful/interesting until you have read a fair chunk of it. If you were paying by the paper you could easilly run up a bill of hundreds of pounds in a few hours of checking through papers to see which were relavent. That is a lot of money if you are just reading for interest or other noncommercial purposes.
So the general public is effectively excluded from reading the primary sources of our knowlage.
if the application cares.. then the app is written wrong.. BULLSHIT!
If you were writing on windows in the NT4 era (not sure about on linux but I beleive the situation is similar) there wasn't really any choice. Getaddrinfo didn't exist yet (it was added as part of the IPV6 technology preview for 2K and then moved to a different dll in XP) so to turn a hostname into an address you had to use gethostbyname which returned the IP address as a 32-bit int. The app then had to place that address into a structure and pass it back to sockets implementation to make the connection.
Apps that use gethostbyname (e.g. basically anything written pre-XP and probably quite a few written post-XP due to inertia) are simply not going to work with IPV6 until they are adapted to use the modern equivalents (and if you care about support for older operating systems to fall back to the old functions if the newer equivalents are unavailable).
Plus many application level protocols need to pass around addresses (say to redirect a client to another server) some protocols pass addresses in text form but many use binary for efficiancy or use text forms other than the standard dotted quad. Even little things can cause problems for example some systems (ircd.conf springs to mind) used colons as seperators in the application level format which clashes with IPV6's use of colons to seperate 16-bit blocks of the address.
Assumptions about the size and format of IP addresses permeate though the whole internet protocol stack. Maybe things shouldn't have been designed that way but it's hardly the application developers fault.
We more-or-less reached the limit of human visual acuity at normal viewing distances in normal viewing conditions? I can't agree, I have an ultraportable with a 10 inch 1366x768 display and it's perfectly usable at that resoloution. Even allowing for the facts that desktop screens are for longer term use and that you typically sit a bit further away from them the pixel density on larger desktop screens is FAR lower than I would consider desirable.
Afaict what really happened is that marketing realised the lusers look at screen size rather than pixel count and density. Combine that with a move to a display technology with discrete pixels and manufacturers exploiting synergies with the HDTV market is that most screens availiable today are 19-24 inch with resoloutions of 1920x1080 or lower.
Getting books from libraries is rather inconvenient if you want them on a long term basis. You have to contact the library to renew them every so often (this is not as bad as it used to be thanks to internet based renewals but it's still a pain). Depending on the particular library you may also have to watch out for messages saying the book is recalled (which in turn means if you are going away for a while you have to gather up all your library books and return them).If you fail to renew or return on time (including returning the aforementioned recalled books) you can easilly end up with fines that are way more than the book is worth.
You also generally have to physically go to the library that has the book you want and you can usually only have a fairly small number out at a time.
I see libraries as a compromise. They allow those too poor to buy books themselves to get access and they allow access to books that have gone out of print but they are inconvenient enough that there is still a market for selling books. Also IIRC libraries in some countries pay fees to the publishers.
A system where books can be borrowed from anywhere and where they auto-return rather than fines being levied would be far less inconviniant and threfore far scarier to publishers.
And the average PC user who doesn't need more storage isn't going to buy another drive, period. Not as a standalone item no, but eventually they will decide they want or need a new computer either because their machine is "slow", because it's become unreliable, because it's broken or whatever.
When they buy that new computer they may well buy one with an SSD depending on how much the price difference is and whether something (adverts, salespeople, geek friends etc) can convince them it's worth it.
and most of these buyers are people who need more storage They may be the most numerous buyers but i'd think the vast majority of hard drives sold are sold to OEMs for integration in new computers.
Re:I thought JAVA was supposed to be crossplatform
on
Apple Deprecates Their JVM
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Java is crossplatform in the sense that you should be able to run your java app* on any system with a compliant java implementation but someone still has to provide that implementation of java built on whatever interfaces the OS provides.
Currently on the mac (unlike with windows and linux) apple provides the java implementation based on code licensed from sun (now oracle). If apple stops updating thier java implementation and doesn't either release the code or at least push it upstream to oracle then either java on the mac becomes ever more outdated or someone else redoes the porting.
* provided the app is pure java and written properly.
go to the story as normal click on the title of the first post, it will close up briefly than take you to a new page with that post at the top and comments.pl in the url. edit the url to remove idle. now click the more button as many times as needed to load the rest of the comments and start using the comments system as normal
Afaict the big issue with a pure O2 atmosphere in an earthed launch spacecraft is the launch and reentry.
If you launch and reenter on low pressure pure oxygen then you have to design your cabin to resist pressure in both directions.
If you launch and reenter on atmospheric pressure (afaict this is what apollo did) pure oxygen then you have an atmosphere during launch and reentry that is a massive fire risk.
If you launch and reenter on an oxygen/nitrogen mix then your gas handling just got a whole lot more complicated.
Even if I had Java applets enabled (which I don't) on my Linux desktop then all this would provide would be a remote non-admin/non-root exploit. meh for several reasons
Firstly on most desktop boxes even those running linux most important stuff happens under one user account. Pwn that account and you can do a lot of damage.
Secondly if you pwn a user account it's possible to modify that users menus and command line environment so that next time they do something that requires root privileges they give them to you as well as to the program they intended to give them to.
Finally while they may have been less local root holes on linux than on windows they do still pop up from time to time. Lie low for a while and you can probably get root eventually if you really want it.
The trick to get arround that is proxy arp. So the end systens think they are on (say) a/24 but all addresses that client doesn't own are picked up by the router and sent to their real owner.
In this way you can allocate any number of IPs to each client and you can share one subnet,broadcast and gateway address between many clients.
I currently run a business-class DSL connection with a block of 5 static IPs. I only use two. It's worse than that, your block has five usable IPs but (assuming it's a normal/29) it also has three other IPs in it that are essentially wasted (subnet, broadcast, and gateway).
So, one may ask if there's any way to reclaim the other three. Sure there is, switch you from a dedicated subnet to a bridged or proxy arp based system fronting onto a large subnet.
Another gotcha you missed is that applications and higher level protocols will often have to be upgraded to support IPV6. Virtually anywhere IP addresses are handled in binary form will need changing.
In the near future i'd expect any service of importance to be able to get a public IPv4 ip even if that means recovering it from a less lucrative customer.
So I predict the first affect of the runout will be that you will have to pay extra if you want a public IPV4 IP (rather than a natted one) from your DSL/cable ISP.
The better ISPs will hopefully offer end users IPv6 at no extra cost but I bet many won't bother to offer it and even when they do offer it I bet takeup will be low.
Has one of the roadable aircraft really made it to production? and if so which one?
The two i'm aware of are the terrafugia transition and the parajet skycar and checking their sites it appears neither has made it to production yet though they are both taking pre-orders (with substantial deposits required).
There's a simple explanation to that: In the 90ies it was discovered that the maximum carrier frequency of fiber optics is around 1-2 GHz We have gone a bit higher than that, 10 gigabit over a single optical transciever is perfectly doable these days.
However, it is being researched whether partial waves and multiple colors (wavelengths) can be used to increase fiber bandwith WDM is here and now, we even have optical amplifiers that can amplify the signals without splitting them out. Downside is that WDM gear is expensive so it's only worth it for long links.
East Germany has been equipped with vast amounts of fiber optics, which was being thought of the technology of the future, and now they won't get the higher transmission rates until additional copper cables have been laid. As I understand it the issue there was one of network structure. Copper phone networks had dedicated lines for each subscriber and we have been able to push more and more out of those lines than anyone would previously thought possible. I've never heard of any tech that comes close to modern fiber speeds over anything vaugely resembling a phone pair though.
The problem with these old fiber installs was that they had fiber to a cabinet where there was some hardware that split it out. Upgrading all those cabinets iss extremely expensive and you still have to share the fiber running to the cabinet (which may or may not have been a good quality fiber).
Nowadays we have 50 Gbit over copper wire (VDSL-50) Really?! care to provide a citation for that? All the searches i've done for VDSL-50 seem to reffer to 50 megabit products.
The maximum I can get currently is 16 Gbit over copper wire. Again if true please provide a citation for this, it sounds like you have mixed up megabits and gigabits and written a BS post based on the mixup.
I'd think the best way would be to preheat the board from below to 150 degrees celcius or so and then use hot air from a proper hot air rework station (so you can control temperature and airflow) to finally melt the solder. then lift the chip off. Solder on other components nearby may melt but surface tension should keep them on in place unless you knock or pull them off.
I've removed chips with hot air before when prototypes didn't work but never a BGA and I never even tried to reuse the chips aftwards.
Afaict in most of britan we don't tend to have "pits that all the connections come out of", instead we have a big cable down the street and then houses teed off it. They don't want to cut off whole streets so a lot of live working is done.
They have special connectors that can make connections to live cores without exposing them so only the outer layers need to be stripped off live, still something I wouldn't fancy doing though.
Slashdot Mirror
What are the legalities if someone embeds something in your property without permission? does it become yours? Can you destroy it with impunity?
The fact an X-Box (and most new PC games) seem to have a built in expiry date (as soon as the company gets bored of supporting it)
All disc based console games i've seen so far can be played offline without ever connecting to the internet. If firmware updates are needed then they are included on the game disc. Sometimes you get some bonus dlc if you connect to the internet and register but it's usually nothing major.
PC games are actually worse than console games in this regard, most newer ones require online activation and a few of them are even requiring constant internet connection.
Apparently the "PC" in that message was an abriviation of "Paper cassette".
Afaict most plastics in thier natural state (no pigments or dyes added) tend to be translucent.
Black plastics are black because they have a pigment in them that absorbs lots of light (carbon black is a common one though not the only one). Once light is absorbed it's not going any further though the plastic.
White plastics are white becase they have a pigment in them that scatters light. As that light is scattered a lot of it comes straight back out but some continues to bounce arround in the plastic potentially making it to the other size.
So white plastics tend to be worse at blocking light than black ones all else being equal.
heh, i'd preffer it to the current model where the only people who can access scientific literature are those in academia (who have access to most journals though bulk agreements with thier university) or those prepared to pay substantial subscriptions or per-paper fees.
In my experiance you don't really know if a paper will be useful/interesting until you have read a fair chunk of it. If you were paying by the paper you could easilly run up a bill of hundreds of pounds in a few hours of checking through papers to see which were relavent. That is a lot of money if you are just reading for interest or other noncommercial purposes.
So the general public is effectively excluded from reading the primary sources of our knowlage.
That is really a drawback of richness in general. If a country is rich then producing labour intensive products there will be expensive.
At least with applets provided your users are of the type who just click yes to warning dialogs snakeoil certificates work just fine ;).
if the application cares .. then the app is written wrong ..
BULLSHIT!
If you were writing on windows in the NT4 era (not sure about on linux but I beleive the situation is similar) there wasn't really any choice. Getaddrinfo didn't exist yet (it was added as part of the IPV6 technology preview for 2K and then moved to a different dll in XP) so to turn a hostname into an address you had to use gethostbyname which returned the IP address as a 32-bit int. The app then had to place that address into a structure and pass it back to sockets implementation to make the connection.
Apps that use gethostbyname (e.g. basically anything written pre-XP and probably quite a few written post-XP due to inertia) are simply not going to work with IPV6 until they are adapted to use the modern equivalents (and if you care about support for older operating systems to fall back to the old functions if the newer equivalents are unavailable).
Plus many application level protocols need to pass around addresses (say to redirect a client to another server) some protocols pass addresses in text form but many use binary for efficiancy or use text forms other than the standard dotted quad. Even little things can cause problems for example some systems (ircd.conf springs to mind) used colons as seperators in the application level format which clashes with IPV6's use of colons to seperate 16-bit blocks of the address.
Assumptions about the size and format of IP addresses permeate though the whole internet protocol stack. Maybe things shouldn't have been designed that way but it's hardly the application developers fault.
At our uni library they go further than that, if a book is recalled they want it back within a week whatever the original loan period was!
We more-or-less reached the limit of human visual acuity at normal viewing distances in normal viewing conditions?
I can't agree, I have an ultraportable with a 10 inch 1366x768 display and it's perfectly usable at that resoloution. Even allowing for the facts that desktop screens are for longer term use and that you typically sit a bit further away from them the pixel density on larger desktop screens is FAR lower than I would consider desirable.
Afaict what really happened is that marketing realised the lusers look at screen size rather than pixel count and density. Combine that with a move to a display technology with discrete pixels and manufacturers exploiting synergies with the HDTV market is that most screens availiable today are 19-24 inch with resoloutions of 1920x1080 or lower.
Getting books from libraries is rather inconvenient if you want them on a long term basis. You have to contact the library to renew them every so often (this is not as bad as it used to be thanks to internet based renewals but it's still a pain). Depending on the particular library you may also have to watch out for messages saying the book is recalled (which in turn means if you are going away for a while you have to gather up all your library books and return them) .If you fail to renew or return on time (including returning the aforementioned recalled books) you can easilly end up with fines that are way more than the book is worth.
You also generally have to physically go to the library that has the book you want and you can usually only have a fairly small number out at a time.
I see libraries as a compromise. They allow those too poor to buy books themselves to get access and they allow access to books that have gone out of print but they are inconvenient enough that there is still a market for selling books. Also IIRC libraries in some countries pay fees to the publishers.
A system where books can be borrowed from anywhere and where they auto-return rather than fines being levied would be far less inconviniant and threfore far scarier to publishers.
And the average PC user who doesn't need more storage isn't going to buy another drive, period.
Not as a standalone item no, but eventually they will decide they want or need a new computer either because their machine is "slow", because it's become unreliable, because it's broken or whatever.
When they buy that new computer they may well buy one with an SSD depending on how much the price difference is and whether something (adverts, salespeople, geek friends etc) can convince them it's worth it.
and most of these buyers are people who need more storage
They may be the most numerous buyers but i'd think the vast majority of hard drives sold are sold to OEMs for integration in new computers.
Java is crossplatform in the sense that you should be able to run your java app* on any system with a compliant java implementation but someone still has to provide that implementation of java built on whatever interfaces the OS provides.
Currently on the mac (unlike with windows and linux) apple provides the java implementation based on code licensed from sun (now oracle). If apple stops updating thier java implementation and doesn't either release the code or at least push it upstream to oracle then either java on the mac becomes ever more outdated or someone else redoes the porting.
* provided the app is pure java and written properly.
how to workaround the above issue
go to the story as normal
click on the title of the first post, it will close up briefly than take you to a new page with that post at the top and comments.pl in the url.
edit the url to remove idle.
now click the more button as many times as needed to load the rest of the comments and start using the comments system as normal
Afaict the big issue with a pure O2 atmosphere in an earthed launch spacecraft is the launch and reentry.
If you launch and reenter on low pressure pure oxygen then you have to design your cabin to resist pressure in both directions.
If you launch and reenter on atmospheric pressure (afaict this is what apollo did) pure oxygen then you have an atmosphere during launch and reentry that is a massive fire risk.
If you launch and reenter on an oxygen/nitrogen mix then your gas handling just got a whole lot more complicated.
It depends how they are using them. If they are keeping private copies and only using them to run trusted software I don't see any big problem.
OTOH if they are installing old versions systemwide that is BAD.
Even if I had Java applets enabled (which I don't) on my Linux desktop then all this would provide would be a remote non-admin/non-root exploit.
meh for several reasons
Firstly on most desktop boxes even those running linux most important stuff happens under one user account. Pwn that account and you can do a lot of damage.
Secondly if you pwn a user account it's possible to modify that users menus and command line environment so that next time they do something that requires root privileges they give them to you as well as to the program they intended to give them to.
Finally while they may have been less local root holes on linux than on windows they do still pop up from time to time. Lie low for a while and you can probably get root eventually if you really want it.
The trick to get arround that is proxy arp. So the end systens think they are on (say) a /24 but all addresses that client doesn't own are picked up by the router and sent to their real owner.
In this way you can allocate any number of IPs to each client and you can share one subnet,broadcast and gateway address between many clients.
I currently run a business-class DSL connection with a block of 5 static IPs. I only use two. /29) it also has three other IPs in it that are essentially wasted (subnet, broadcast, and gateway).
It's worse than that, your block has five usable IPs but (assuming it's a normal
So, one may ask if there's any way to reclaim the other three.
Sure there is, switch you from a dedicated subnet to a bridged or proxy arp based system fronting onto a large subnet.
Another gotcha you missed is that applications and higher level protocols will often have to be upgraded to support IPV6. Virtually anywhere IP addresses are handled in binary form will need changing.
In the near future i'd expect any service of importance to be able to get a public IPv4 ip even if that means recovering it from a less lucrative customer.
So I predict the first affect of the runout will be that you will have to pay extra if you want a public IPV4 IP (rather than a natted one) from your DSL/cable ISP.
The better ISPs will hopefully offer end users IPv6 at no extra cost but I bet many won't bother to offer it and even when they do offer it I bet takeup will be low.
Has one of the roadable aircraft really made it to production? and if so which one?
The two i'm aware of are the terrafugia transition and the parajet skycar and checking their sites it appears neither has made it to production yet though they are both taking pre-orders (with substantial deposits required).
There's a simple explanation to that: In the 90ies it was discovered that the maximum carrier frequency of fiber optics is around 1-2 GHz
We have gone a bit higher than that, 10 gigabit over a single optical transciever is perfectly doable these days.
However, it is being researched whether partial waves and multiple colors (wavelengths) can be used to increase fiber bandwith
WDM is here and now, we even have optical amplifiers that can amplify the signals without splitting them out. Downside is that WDM gear is expensive so it's only worth it for long links.
East Germany has been equipped with vast amounts of fiber optics, which was being thought of the technology of the future, and now they won't get the higher transmission rates until additional copper cables have been laid.
As I understand it the issue there was one of network structure. Copper phone networks had dedicated lines for each subscriber and we have been able to push more and more out of those lines than anyone would previously thought possible. I've never heard of any tech that comes close to modern fiber speeds over anything vaugely resembling a phone pair though.
The problem with these old fiber installs was that they had fiber to a cabinet where there was some hardware that split it out. Upgrading all those cabinets iss extremely expensive and you still have to share the fiber running to the cabinet (which may or may not have been a good quality fiber).
Nowadays we have 50 Gbit over copper wire (VDSL-50)
Really?! care to provide a citation for that? All the searches i've done for VDSL-50 seem to reffer to 50 megabit products.
The maximum I can get currently is 16 Gbit over copper wire.
Again if true please provide a citation for this, it sounds like you have mixed up megabits and gigabits and written a BS post based on the mixup.
I'd think the best way would be to preheat the board from below to 150 degrees celcius or so and then use hot air from a proper hot air rework station (so you can control temperature and airflow) to finally melt the solder. then lift the chip off. Solder on other components nearby may melt but surface tension should keep them on in place unless you knock or pull them off.
I've removed chips with hot air before when prototypes didn't work but never a BGA and I never even tried to reuse the chips aftwards.
Afaict in most of britan we don't tend to have "pits that all the connections come out of", instead we have a big cable down the street and then houses teed off it. They don't want to cut off whole streets so a lot of live working is done.
They have special connectors that can make connections to live cores without exposing them so only the outer layers need to be stripped off live, still something I wouldn't fancy doing though.
You can find many oarts of the EON cable jointing manual ( http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-GB%3Aofficial&q=eon+cable+jointing+manual&btnG=Search&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai= picks up some of them, sadly though they don't seem to post up the index anywhere that i've found) on thier website and many of them have mentions of live working on cables.