I always find it odd that most people have a much stronger reaction to crimes that do a lot of damage to one person (rape, kidnapping, murder, arson etc) than to crimes that do a small ammount of damage each to a very large groups of people (like this one) even though the total damage in this case is massive and by some calculations is more significant than a single murder.
lets say the average salary is $30000 that means he stole a THOUSAND YEARs worth of average salery. If we assume a working lifetime is 50 years then that 20 peoples working lifetimes worth of sallery.
There is already a board of directors (though iirc it is stacked in wales favor with of the 5 members two being personal friends of his and one being him). There is also a firm of auditors who supposedly audit the financial statements.
The trouble with expenses is a combination of honesty and where to draw the line. Is eating out while travelling between two venues on buisness a reasonable buisness expense? yes. Is having a very expensive meal while travelling on buisness a reasonable buisness expense. Probablly not IMO but it is also probablly not so outragous that the auditors could do anything about it. And how are the auditors to know whether someone was really travelling on foundation buisness when they incurred the expenses they are claiming for. What about travelling a long distance in a taxi and negotiating a cheaper rate but claiming you paid full fare? how are the auditors going to know about that?
* The 'Maximize' button will only open the app window as large as the content inside of it requires, it will not fill the screen. This was one thing I hated, on the macbook clicking that button on safari would result in a window that didn't fill the screen but was too big to use the rest of the screen for much else.
True enough. Now, what if it's not deterministic that this other class will be loaded, and in some cases, it's never loaded? Then that is even worse, you end up with an application that sometimes performs well and sometimes performs badly based on whether during that session the user has done some action with a totally unrelated part of the app that caused the "other class" to be loaded.
Most notebooks have hot-swappable CardBus or ExpressCard slots, both of which have DMA support and can be used to dump the system's memory. Right, but firewire is much easier because you can use an ordinary computer with no special perhiperals to perform the dump. With expresscard or cardbus you need a custom PCIe or PCI device which is unlikely to come cheap (maybe you could use a firewire card but I suspect the drivers would have to be installed before the controller would be activated).
'm not trying to be a troll, mod me down if you must, but, as somebody who actually works with computers, Firewire is slowly fading away. I'm on a brand new Dell Optiplex 755 - No firewire. My home Optiplex 745 doesn't have firewire either. Yeah low end machines and buisness orientated desktops in general don't have firewire.
I recently built a dual-core Pentium-based MythTV box, and had to buy a PCI firewire card so I could control my cable box - That's what I get for assuming that firewire is still mainstream I would have thought that anyone buying a motherboard to build thier own machine would be sensible enough to check it had the interfaces they needed against what it supported.
I like firewire in theory, but it's getting harder and harder to find a reason to use it other than in MythTV. Afaict there are two main ones
1: external storage, whatever the headline speeds by all accounts firewire 400 is a bit faster than USB 2 and firewire 800 is way faster. Sure there is ESATA which beats both but far more laptops have firewire ports than have esata ports (I have never seen a laptop with a ESATA port) 2: video editing, most decent digital camcorders are designed arround using firewire to get the video out into your PC for editing.
What brands of laptop do you buy and where in the range? Apple machines obviously have it, so it seems to dell lattitudes (at least the one I just looked at on dells site), It seems at least some thinkpads do though lenvos site is really shitty and doesn't seem to want to tell me which. I'm pretty sure the vaios have it as well.
Sure if you are buying bottom of the range craptops or ultraportables you won't get it but afaict a large proportion of better quality laptops have it.
Right but at the moment USians (who are the largest group of rich people in the area) who want to visit cuba have take a detour via a third country and risk getting in legal trouble if the US government finds out they have been there. That must make a lot of people pick one of the other locations arround that area instead.
on the other hand when the governement really wants people to slow down (e.g. arround road works) they have more effective soloutions in thier arseanal. For example here in the UK arround road works they typically use average speed cameras (basically you photograph the plates at two locations and calculate the average speed of each car. If it is too fast you pass that information on to the speeding ticket system).
The issue with many of the runtime optimisations is predictability. For example if there is only one descendent of an abstract base class in use java can and does inline all the method calls when it jits. If another descendent of that abstract class is loaded then java has to stop doing that. If the method is doing something simple and was calld in the middle of a tight loop that could be a huge performance. An example of this issue was "direct" and "non direct" bytebuffers, use only one and things are fast but use both and performance dropped through the floor.
IIRC they "fixed" that issue in 1.6 by adding optimisations for a method with two possibilities but that isn't really what I would call a fix.
It is IMO very bad if a change in one part of an application can drastically affect the performance of another part.
I always wonder why Windows didn't use UTC on the hardwareclock, and then use timezone and related info to decide what to display to the user. Because to do that would royally screw over anyone who dual booted with an older MS operating system that did not do that. I don't think DOS even had any concept of timezones.
Right of course but the luser obviously has thier system set to display local time. When the DST change comes if the OS doesn't get it right the luser will change the clock so that local time is correct. Of course this means that the internal UTC time ends up an hour out.
another thing is if you have a multiboot setup which includes windows you pretty much have to have the bios clock on local time. That means you end up with the system double or more correcting for daylight saving and having to have the clock manually adjusted.
those are quite old stories, any idea what the current situation is now? are they still using the double bridges at denver in double mode? have they rolled them out anywhere else?
The problem at least for planes would be the extra size and weight of the "coach" and it's drive systems, you would have to have most of the existing structure of the plane and then a completely seperate structure inside it. You would also have to decide how you were going to handle the various services (power, light, fresh air etc) that passengers on a plane want or need. Also there would be the space inefficiancy of them not being a perfect fit unless they were specifically designed for one place in one plane (cargo planes also have this problem, a cargo container designed for an edge poisition in a plane of one cross section won't fit efficiantly in a plane of a different cross section.
With water craft short distance ferries already carry road vehircles but for longer distances the time taken is long enough that it wouldn't be worth the extra bulk to take your road vehircle with you and you will probbablly want more space (e.g. a cabin).
The best description I can come up with for how that robot looks to me is that it looks like like micheal jackson did later in life (which some suspected was the result of too much plastic surgury though according to wikipedia he denies such claims).
That is a recipe for demographic disaster. Unfortunately afaict there are only three ways out of that situation:
1: kill seniors like you mentioned, unacceptable to almost everyones codes of ethics. 2: strongly encourage (heavilly subsidise) or even force people to have more kids, expensive and may not be effective enough, also would cause a lot of kids born to parents who don't really want them which is IMO a bad thing. 3: allow lots of immigration, the problem with this approach is that within a few generations most of your population will be immigrant descended. If the immigrants decide to keep thier own culture rather that integrating into yours this means your culture dies out.
I travel a lot, so the lightweight thing is cool. The deficiencies aren't a big deal. what about the
*slow processor (1.6 or 1.8 on the air vs 2.1 or 2.4 on the regular macbook) *choice between a small slow hard drive or a faster but even smaller and very expensive solid state drive? *£500 price difference from the regular macbook *Shortage of USB ports (though admittedly the macbook isn't brilliant in this regard either)
are all theese downsides worth a 1KG weight reduction (about the weight of a 1L bottle of water) to you?
It's a mystery to me why people choose a pirated version of Windows instead an open and free version of a Linux distribution. To me it's damn obvious, in many many categories of software the de-facto standard package (that is the one you want to use if you need to exchange files with other people) or the best package is windows only.
Also linux is quite a paradigm shift from windows, people hate change because it means that much or all of the effort they spent learning thier way arround the old system is wasted. Going from one windows version to the next is often enough of a pain, going to a different OS entirely is far worse.
a couple of examples of major differences: * most people who help with linux give command line based soloutions because that is how they do things themselves, because it is much easier to give a command line soloution than to walk someone through several layers of dialogs and because command line interfaces tend to be more consistant between linux variants than graphical ones. Unfortunately many people are (IMO irrationally) scared of the command line. *There is no concept of drive letters just mountpoints which if you let your extra drives be mounted in the default place often end up with irritatingly long names.
I've seen lots of people run into that "C compiler cannot create executables" message and get confused.
Autoconf (which i'm not a fan of) checks if the C compiler can create executables. When it fails the real error message is burried deep in a log file while what is shown to the screen is completely unhelpfull. The cause is something that would be rather non obvious to someone who is not used to linux (the reason is that the compiler and linker are packaged seperately and without a linker you can't create executables, i'm not sure why the compiler doesn't depend on the linker but I suspect there is some good reason for it).
MS did practically kill the PC divison of IBM (with the exception of the thinkpads which held a nice niche for many years before finally being sold on to lenovo, probablly to reduce IBMs leverage over IBM in preperation for thier linux moves) so in that sense IBM lost to MS and the clone makers they supported.
However you are right IBM has many other divisions and while the destruction of the PC division was almost certainly a major blow the company as a whole doesn't look in any danger.
Firstly IIRC some "STDs" can be transmitted by other means as well, especially mother to child but also in other ways too, sex is just one of the ways they spread.
Secondly in most of the western world we have this thing known of as divorce.
Thirdly I find it highly unlikely anyway that people would avoid sex before marraige simply because none of the official channels were prepared to find details.
in windows 2K/XP it is trivial to set dns servers manually while leaving ip addresses obtained automatically. The option is right there in the TCP/IP settings dialog, the option is between the boxes used to enter the IP address and the boxes used to enter the DNS servers.
it is a bit trickier on linux, you generally have to change the config file for whatever dhcp client you use.
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I always find it odd that most people have a much stronger reaction to crimes that do a lot of damage to one person (rape, kidnapping, murder, arson etc) than to crimes that do a small ammount of damage each to a very large groups of people (like this one) even though the total damage in this case is massive and by some calculations is more significant than a single murder.
lets say the average salary is $30000 that means he stole a THOUSAND YEARs worth of average salery. If we assume a working lifetime is 50 years then that 20 peoples working lifetimes worth of sallery.
There is already a board of directors (though iirc it is stacked in wales favor with of the 5 members two being personal friends of his and one being him). There is also a firm of auditors who supposedly audit the financial statements.
The trouble with expenses is a combination of honesty and where to draw the line. Is eating out while travelling between two venues on buisness a reasonable buisness expense? yes. Is having a very expensive meal while travelling on buisness a reasonable buisness expense. Probablly not IMO but it is also probablly not so outragous that the auditors could do anything about it. And how are the auditors to know whether someone was really travelling on foundation buisness when they incurred the expenses they are claiming for. What about travelling a long distance in a taxi and negotiating a cheaper rate but claiming you paid full fare? how are the auditors going to know about that?
* The 'Maximize' button will only open the app window as large as the content inside of it requires, it will not fill the screen.
This was one thing I hated, on the macbook clicking that button on safari would result in a window that didn't fill the screen but was too big to use the rest of the screen for much else.
True enough. Now, what if it's not deterministic that this other class will be loaded, and in some cases, it's never loaded?
Then that is even worse, you end up with an application that sometimes performs well and sometimes performs badly based on whether during that session the user has done some action with a totally unrelated part of the app that caused the "other class" to be loaded.
Most notebooks have hot-swappable CardBus or ExpressCard slots, both of which have DMA support and can be used to dump the system's memory.
Right, but firewire is much easier because you can use an ordinary computer with no special perhiperals to perform the dump. With expresscard or cardbus you need a custom PCIe or PCI device which is unlikely to come cheap (maybe you could use a firewire card but I suspect the drivers would have to be installed before the controller would be activated).
'm not trying to be a troll, mod me down if you must, but, as somebody who actually works with computers, Firewire is slowly fading away. I'm on a brand new Dell Optiplex 755 - No firewire. My home Optiplex 745 doesn't have firewire either.
Yeah low end machines and buisness orientated desktops in general don't have firewire.
I recently built a dual-core Pentium-based MythTV box, and had to buy a PCI firewire card so I could control my cable box - That's what I get for assuming that firewire is still mainstream
I would have thought that anyone buying a motherboard to build thier own machine would be sensible enough to check it had the interfaces they needed against what it supported.
I like firewire in theory, but it's getting harder and harder to find a reason to use it other than in MythTV.
Afaict there are two main ones
1: external storage, whatever the headline speeds by all accounts firewire 400 is a bit faster than USB 2 and firewire 800 is way faster. Sure there is ESATA which beats both but far more laptops have firewire ports than have esata ports (I have never seen a laptop with a ESATA port)
2: video editing, most decent digital camcorders are designed arround using firewire to get the video out into your PC for editing.
What brands of laptop do you buy and where in the range? Apple machines obviously have it, so it seems to dell lattitudes (at least the one I just looked at on dells site), It seems at least some thinkpads do though lenvos site is really shitty and doesn't seem to want to tell me which. I'm pretty sure the vaios have it as well.
Sure if you are buying bottom of the range craptops or ultraportables you won't get it but afaict a large proportion of better quality laptops have it.
can't the american courts just go the the registry directly and cut out the registrar.
.com/.net/.org domain the US government has the power to take it away.
It seems to me if you want a
Right but at the moment USians (who are the largest group of rich people in the area) who want to visit cuba have take a detour via a third country and risk getting in legal trouble if the US government finds out they have been there. That must make a lot of people pick one of the other locations arround that area instead.
on the other hand when the governement really wants people to slow down (e.g. arround road works) they have more effective soloutions in thier arseanal. For example here in the UK arround road works they typically use average speed cameras (basically you photograph the plates at two locations and calculate the average speed of each car. If it is too fast you pass that information on to the speeding ticket system).
The issue with many of the runtime optimisations is predictability. For example if there is only one descendent of an abstract base class in use java can and does inline all the method calls when it jits. If another descendent of that abstract class is loaded then java has to stop doing that. If the method is doing something simple and was calld in the middle of a tight loop that could be a huge performance. An example of this issue was "direct" and "non direct" bytebuffers, use only one and things are fast but use both and performance dropped through the floor.
IIRC they "fixed" that issue in 1.6 by adding optimisations for a method with two possibilities but that isn't really what I would call a fix.
It is IMO very bad if a change in one part of an application can drastically affect the performance of another part.
nice idea but also totally non standard and therefore likely to confuse people.
I always wonder why Windows didn't use UTC on the hardwareclock, and then use timezone and related info to decide what to display to the user.
Because to do that would royally screw over anyone who dual booted with an older MS operating system that did not do that. I don't think DOS even had any concept of timezones.
Right of course but the luser obviously has thier system set to display local time. When the DST change comes if the OS doesn't get it right the luser will change the clock so that local time is correct. Of course this means that the internal UTC time ends up an hour out.
another thing is if you have a multiboot setup which includes windows you pretty much have to have the bios clock on local time. That means you end up with the system double or more correcting for daylight saving and having to have the clock manually adjusted.
those are quite old stories, any idea what the current situation is now? are they still using the double bridges at denver in double mode? have they rolled them out anywhere else?
The problem at least for planes would be the extra size and weight of the "coach" and it's drive systems, you would have to have most of the existing structure of the plane and then a completely seperate structure inside it. You would also have to decide how you were going to handle the various services (power, light, fresh air etc) that passengers on a plane want or need. Also there would be the space inefficiancy of them not being a perfect fit unless they were specifically designed for one place in one plane (cargo planes also have this problem, a cargo container designed for an edge poisition in a plane of one cross section won't fit efficiantly in a plane of a different cross section.
With water craft short distance ferries already carry road vehircles but for longer distances the time taken is long enough that it wouldn't be worth the extra bulk to take your road vehircle with you and you will probbablly want more space (e.g. a cabin).
The best description I can come up with for how that robot looks to me is that it looks like like micheal jackson did later in life (which some suspected was the result of too much plastic surgury though according to wikipedia he denies such claims).
That is a recipe for demographic disaster.
Unfortunately afaict there are only three ways out of that situation:
1: kill seniors like you mentioned, unacceptable to almost everyones codes of ethics.
2: strongly encourage (heavilly subsidise) or even force people to have more kids, expensive and may not be effective enough, also would cause a lot of kids born to parents who don't really want them which is IMO a bad thing.
3: allow lots of immigration, the problem with this approach is that within a few generations most of your population will be immigrant descended. If the immigrants decide to keep thier own culture rather that integrating into yours this means your culture dies out.
I travel a lot, so the lightweight thing is cool. The deficiencies aren't a big deal.
what about the
*slow processor (1.6 or 1.8 on the air vs 2.1 or 2.4 on the regular macbook)
*choice between a small slow hard drive or a faster but even smaller and very expensive solid state drive?
*£500 price difference from the regular macbook
*Shortage of USB ports (though admittedly the macbook isn't brilliant in this regard either)
are all theese downsides worth a 1KG weight reduction (about the weight of a 1L bottle of water) to you?
according to http://www.macworld.co.uk/mac/news/index.cfm?newsid=20325 it is possible to install XP on a macbook air using an external USB optical drive.
It's a mystery to me why people choose a pirated version of Windows instead an open and free version of a Linux distribution.
To me it's damn obvious, in many many categories of software the de-facto standard package (that is the one you want to use if you need to exchange files with other people) or the best package is windows only.
Also linux is quite a paradigm shift from windows, people hate change because it means that much or all of the effort they spent learning thier way arround the old system is wasted. Going from one windows version to the next is often enough of a pain, going to a different OS entirely is far worse.
a couple of examples of major differences:
* most people who help with linux give command line based soloutions because that is how they do things themselves, because it is much easier to give a command line soloution than to walk someone through several layers of dialogs and because command line interfaces tend to be more consistant between linux variants than graphical ones. Unfortunately many people are (IMO irrationally) scared of the command line.
*There is no concept of drive letters just mountpoints which if you let your extra drives be mounted in the default place often end up with irritatingly long names.
I've seen lots of people run into that "C compiler cannot create executables" message and get confused.
Autoconf (which i'm not a fan of) checks if the C compiler can create executables. When it fails the real error message is burried deep in a log file while what is shown to the screen is completely unhelpfull. The cause is something that would be rather non obvious to someone who is not used to linux (the reason is that the compiler and linker are packaged seperately and without a linker you can't create executables, i'm not sure why the compiler doesn't depend on the linker but I suspect there is some good reason for it).
MS did practically kill the PC divison of IBM (with the exception of the thinkpads which held a nice niche for many years before finally being sold on to lenovo, probablly to reduce IBMs leverage over IBM in preperation for thier linux moves) so in that sense IBM lost to MS and the clone makers they supported.
However you are right IBM has many other divisions and while the destruction of the PC division was almost certainly a major blow the company as a whole doesn't look in any danger.
Unless your invalid address falls into your lying ISP's DNS zone
What a domain owner says about thier own domains is surely by definition the truth.
Firstly IIRC some "STDs" can be transmitted by other means as well, especially mother to child but also in other ways too, sex is just one of the ways they spread.
Secondly in most of the western world we have this thing known of as divorce.
Thirdly I find it highly unlikely anyway that people would avoid sex before marraige simply because none of the official channels were prepared to find details.
in windows 2K/XP it is trivial to set dns servers manually while leaving ip addresses obtained automatically. The option is right there in the TCP/IP settings dialog, the option is between the boxes used to enter the IP address and the boxes used to enter the DNS servers.
it is a bit trickier on linux, you generally have to change the config file for whatever dhcp client you use.