quite right but that doesn't mean drivers who's driving is obviously impaired shouldn't be stopped, checked and if appropriate punished.
The aim is not to catch every infraction the aim is to stop those who are being a danger to others before disaster strikes. It is because it is unreasonable to catch every infraction that the punishment must exceed the crime.
Conceptually, imagine a device that holds three small batteries instead of one large one, and drains them in succession one after the other. The battery life measurement on each battery would be somewhat imprecise, but when you'd exhausted the first battery you'd know that you really had 2/3 of the charge left; when you'd exhausted the second, you'd know that you really had 1/3 left. Indeed but then you have to allow for that fact that higher discharge rates tend to mean lower efficiancies and also allow for the losses in the switchover system.
I strongly suspect that the decrease in efficiancy would not be considered worth the increase in display accuracy.
right, that would work very well for batteries that are charged while in storage and then discharged completely at an almost constant rate then put back into charging/storage.
batteries in your typical portable hardware are not used like that. Users will rarely if ever discharge them completely because they want/need the device to be working at all times. Discharge rates and sometimes charge rates too vary depending on how the device is being used and so on.
colomb counting is a slightly better idea but you still run into the problems of efficiancy depending on discharge rate and lack of complete discharges causing error build up.
Malls are already central locations with lots of small shops... why would your idea be more efficient? The problem is more where things are located. Out of town locations are better for car users (cheap land allows large cheap/free car parks, out of town locations have less traffic congestion etc) but much worse for public transport users (since public transport tends to be arranged roughly radially arround town/city centers).
IMO someone who takes unacceptable levels of reaction impairing drugs and then drives or undertakes other activities that pose similar risks to others should be punished regardless of whether they were lucky enough not to hit anyone. Just as we punish attempted murder and attempted robberies.
I don't think we should punish possetion of the drugs or thier use in a way unlikely to present a danger to others though.
Another part of the directx 10 platform requires the operating system to support certain features that Vista supports, but XP does not. XP cannot do virtual video memory or gpu multitasking. Period. Aren't those things mostly features of the graphics card driver? doesn't the OS just provide a standardised interface to them?
Anyway those are mostly features to support the 3D desktop, I don't see game developers caring about them too much.
Imagine if DirectX required pre-emptive multitasking support. (not hard to do, it actually DOES)
How would you backport that to Windows 3.1? Which only supports cooperative multitasking. There is no real way of doing that short of upgrading the 3.1 kernel to support pre-emptive multitasking, at which point you might as well just give them the NT3 kernel, and NT3 drivers... funnilly enough rather than forcing people onto the NT line MS created windows 95.
And that's where we are now. To give XP virtual video memory and gpu multitasking, we'd pretty much have to upgrade the xp kernel to vista...and require vista drivers. the display driver would have to use a driver model that supported those features and bits of the kernel may need minor changes to support that model but everything else about the system should be able to be left alone.
Don't confusing DirectX10 with OpenGL. There is a part of DirectX that is interchangable with OpenGL and its an important part. But there is a big part of DirectX that is NOT. True, the question is how relavent are those parts to the average game developer?
What licensing issues? some ignorant people here are mentioning the GPL but unless the GPL is included in suns contract with apple (which I very much doubt then it it totally irrelevent.
Sun insists that everyone who contributes back to the main java tree signs a contributor agreement so that sun can offer that code under any license they like.
I was always under the impression that the bytecode was a fairly direct representation of the original source code It is similar enough that there are a number of programs that can turn java bytecode back into reasonablly readable (you lose local variable names and comments but the structure stays pretty much the same) java source code.
IIRC the ammount of optimisation possible at compile time is very limited due to needing to pass the bytecode verifier.
If Amazon go bust (unlikely) and I somehow lose my entire collection of read-and-forget Tom Clancy novels, I think I'll survive. I don't think it is so unlikely for a service to go down for good particularlly one as young as this, look at the DRM encumbered music buisness for examples. Also it doesn't take anything as significant as the parent company going bust just someone deciding its not worth keeping the servers for an old service that isn't making any new revenue or a service that has been deemed unprofitable going just for goodwill.
Hardware breakage is more or less a when not an if with portable devices.
Combine the two and there is IMO a very significant risk that you will lose your entire collection within a couple of decades.
besides the obvious fire or flood Most people are insured against fire and flood and since they tend not to happen to large numbers of people at once getting replacement copies shouldn't be too hard.
there's children & crayons, lending to people who don't return them, etc. This sort of incident will gnerally lose you one book or a small number of books not your entire collection and can generally be avoided if you are carefull.
Why would they be a lesson in what not to do? sure the shareholders got screwed but afaict the bosses and the lawyers (who IIRC have family connections to darl) have done pretty well out of this whole fiasco.
This is IMO a perfect example of how to make lots of personal profit while totally screwing your shareholders.
They will only work on a device registered to you, but if you want to keep the bits instead of depending on Amazon there does not appear to be any impediment to doing that. Sure but that backup isn't going to be much use to you if amazons service is down because you won't be able to register the replacement kindle you bought secondhand to your account.
Nor will your backup help you to use the books if you simply cannot get hold of a kindle anymore.
Once the service goes down the life of your existing devices will give you some level of grace period but once those devices die you are screwed unless you have managed to crack the DRM in the meantime.
one of the big problems with java from a performance perspective is it's object model. You can't have a variable that is an object only a variable that is a reference to an object. This causes several problems especially when dealing with lots of operations on small plain old data objects.
1: designers must make a hard choice between mutable and immutable objects. Mutable objects are error prone but immutable ones mean a lot of load on the memory manager. 2: objects that consist of aggregations of objects increase the load on the memory manager further because instead of one object several must be allocated and deallocated 3: an array of a large number of objects means that every object in the array must be allocated seperately which means an immense increase in memory manager loads.
yes you can try to optimise some of theese cases but it is very difficult to tell at creation time whether an objects lifetime will be tied to the object that contains it.
Oh, and 'it was about the size of a brick' doesn't sound like a phrase I have come across, but then maybe its because I know that there are many different sizes of bricks out there Here in britan when discussing buildings the word brick tends to reffer to a building block made out of clay and they are all approximately the same size (though modern metric ones are slighting different from old imperial ones which causes some fun when trying to build extentions to existing properties. The larger modern blocks made of concrete and other materials are not reffered to as bricks.
It is common over here to reffer to old bulky mobile phones as bricks, there was a time when they were literally the size of bricks but the name continues to be used for phones much smaller than bricks.
would probably go on to say that 'bricked' can only apply to non-user serviceable devices, I can brick my PDA, Routers and Digital Camera, (well if I was an idiot and didn't know what I was doing I could) but not my PC You could certainly "brick" the various modules that make up your PC though.
Generally the term bricked reffers to hardware that is physically/electrically intact but has firmware that is screwed up to an extent that it cannot be recovered without connecting special programming hardware to the board.
I'm going on british prices, not american ones so the ratio may be a bit different over there.
from dabs.com (not the cheapest supplier but fast and reliable) here in the uk an OEM 3 pack of XP home is £155.98, a retail version of XP home is £162.44 . For pro the OEM 3 pack is 242.03 and the retail is £234.98 . (as is customary in the UK theese prices include VAT which is our equivilent of sales tax)
Even if it is only twice the price where you live you still have to make an average of one move per copy for it to be cheaper. If you don't want to lie to MS when activating after the move then you will also have to account for the cost of spare copies to use during the transition (since you will probablly build your new machine before wiping and trashing your old one).
the last machines I have completely written off were running windows 98, all but one of the newer machines in our family are still being used for something (my own old laptop is out of action right now because it needs a new display cable fitting but I do plan to bring it back into service when I get some time).
The other issue is at the lower end of the market it pays to buy from the big OEMs who bundle windows whether you like it or not. Cheap machines from whitebox vendors tend to be really shitty. Using theese firms also means that provided you make/keep the manufacturers windows CDs you don't have to deal with any activation bullshit.
the US government banned export of software supporting strong versions of SSL for some time due to military paranoia about strong encryption. Given that most people were using american browsers this meant those users outside the USA ended up with a crippled version of SSL.
I doubt it, most people I know keep thier old PCs arround for quite a while or pass them down to a friend, add to that the three times difference in price between OEM and retail and it doesn't seem worth it to me.
especially solar, since its going to produce the most power at the same time that most people are going to be running their AC Also bear in mind that there are large parts of the world where the peak load is heating not aircon.
Defragging is/was necessary for primitive/free/cheap partition resizing tools because they either couldn't or couldn't reliably relocate blocks by themselves. Maybe true in the days when 9x ruled the roost. Nowadays the windows defragmenter is useless for this sort of thing anyway and the writers of partitioning tools have had to deal with the issue of moving data out of the way themselves.
The IRS also has a tax informant reward program, which is useful if you know that your employer is cheating on their taxes. What if you don't know that they are cheating but decide to report them anyway on the hope that they made a small slip up somewhere for which you know they will get disproportionate punishmet?
Afaict in any company over a certain size it is virtually impossible to ensure that all software is licensed. People who need to get something done ASAP and are fed up with the beuracracy and/or cost to their budget in getting a legit copy will install pirate software to do it. Sure you can push out managed desktop images but that doesn't work for all types of user and even if you do force them on everyone some users of said image are likely to get themselves local admin somehow.
IIRC Windows XP Home was previously not for multiprocessor systems, but when multicore x86 CPUs came out, Microsoft said they meant socketed CPUs. Sure when ordinary home systems started coming with hyperthreading then multicore MS had to allow the home edition to run on them.
IIRC that was a technically enforced limitation not a license limitation though.
Slashdot Mirror
quite right but that doesn't mean drivers who's driving is obviously impaired shouldn't be stopped, checked and if appropriate punished.
The aim is not to catch every infraction the aim is to stop those who are being a danger to others before disaster strikes. It is because it is unreasonable to catch every infraction that the punishment must exceed the crime.
Conceptually, imagine a device that holds three small batteries instead of one large one, and drains them in succession one after the other. The battery life measurement on each battery would be somewhat imprecise, but when you'd exhausted the first battery you'd know that you really had 2/3 of the charge left; when you'd exhausted the second, you'd know that you really had 1/3 left.
Indeed but then you have to allow for that fact that higher discharge rates tend to mean lower efficiancies and also allow for the losses in the switchover system.
I strongly suspect that the decrease in efficiancy would not be considered worth the increase in display accuracy.
you have two large clusters of light sensing cells each inside an aiming and focusing unit and each backed up by a lot of neurological processing.
Pretty amazing really.
right, that would work very well for batteries that are charged while in storage and then discharged completely at an almost constant rate then put back into charging/storage.
batteries in your typical portable hardware are not used like that. Users will rarely if ever discharge them completely because they want/need the device to be working at all times. Discharge rates and sometimes charge rates too vary depending on how the device is being used and so on.
colomb counting is a slightly better idea but you still run into the problems of efficiancy depending on discharge rate and lack of complete discharges causing error build up.
Malls are already central locations with lots of small shops... why would your idea be more efficient?
The problem is more where things are located. Out of town locations are better for car users (cheap land allows large cheap/free car parks, out of town locations have less traffic congestion etc) but much worse for public transport users (since public transport tends to be arranged roughly radially arround town/city centers).
didn't that death have more to do with the chemical toxicity of polonium than the radioactivity?
IMO someone who takes unacceptable levels of reaction impairing drugs and then drives or undertakes other activities that pose similar risks to others should be punished regardless of whether they were lucky enough not to hit anyone. Just as we punish attempted murder and attempted robberies.
I don't think we should punish possetion of the drugs or thier use in a way unlikely to present a danger to others though.
Another part of the directx 10 platform requires the operating system to support certain features that Vista supports, but XP does not. XP cannot do virtual video memory or gpu multitasking. Period.
Aren't those things mostly features of the graphics card driver? doesn't the OS just provide a standardised interface to them?
Anyway those are mostly features to support the 3D desktop, I don't see game developers caring about them too much.
Imagine if DirectX required pre-emptive multitasking support. (not hard to do, it actually DOES)
How would you backport that to Windows 3.1? Which only supports cooperative multitasking. There is no real way of doing that short of upgrading the 3.1 kernel to support pre-emptive multitasking, at which point you might as well just give them the NT3 kernel, and NT3 drivers...
funnilly enough rather than forcing people onto the NT line MS created windows 95.
And that's where we are now. To give XP virtual video memory and gpu multitasking, we'd pretty much have to upgrade the xp kernel to vista...and require vista drivers.
the display driver would have to use a driver model that supported those features and bits of the kernel may need minor changes to support that model but everything else about the system should be able to be left alone.
Don't confusing DirectX10 with OpenGL. There is a part of DirectX that is interchangable with OpenGL and its an important part. But there is a big part of DirectX that is NOT.
True, the question is how relavent are those parts to the average game developer?
What licensing issues? some ignorant people here are mentioning the GPL but unless the GPL is included in suns contract with apple (which I very much doubt then it it totally irrelevent.
Sun insists that everyone who contributes back to the main java tree signs a contributor agreement so that sun can offer that code under any license they like.
I was always under the impression that the bytecode was a fairly direct representation of the original source code
It is similar enough that there are a number of programs that can turn java bytecode back into reasonablly readable (you lose local variable names and comments but the structure stays pretty much the same) java source code.
IIRC the ammount of optimisation possible at compile time is very limited due to needing to pass the bytecode verifier.
If Amazon go bust (unlikely) and I somehow lose my entire collection of read-and-forget Tom Clancy novels, I think I'll survive.
I don't think it is so unlikely for a service to go down for good particularlly one as young as this, look at the DRM encumbered music buisness for examples. Also it doesn't take anything as significant as the parent company going bust just someone deciding its not worth keeping the servers for an old service that isn't making any new revenue or a service that has been deemed unprofitable going just for goodwill.
Hardware breakage is more or less a when not an if with portable devices.
Combine the two and there is IMO a very significant risk that you will lose your entire collection within a couple of decades.
besides the obvious fire or flood
Most people are insured against fire and flood and since they tend not to happen to large numbers of people at once getting replacement copies shouldn't be too hard.
there's children & crayons, lending to people who don't return them, etc.
This sort of incident will gnerally lose you one book or a small number of books not your entire collection and can generally be avoided if you are carefull.
Why would they be a lesson in what not to do? sure the shareholders got screwed but afaict the bosses and the lawyers (who IIRC have family connections to darl) have done pretty well out of this whole fiasco.
This is IMO a perfect example of how to make lots of personal profit while totally screwing your shareholders.
They will only work on a device registered to you, but if you want to keep the bits instead of depending on Amazon there does not appear to be any impediment to doing that.
Sure but that backup isn't going to be much use to you if amazons service is down because you won't be able to register the replacement kindle you bought secondhand to your account.
Nor will your backup help you to use the books if you simply cannot get hold of a kindle anymore.
Once the service goes down the life of your existing devices will give you some level of grace period but once those devices die you are screwed unless you have managed to crack the DRM in the meantime.
DRM isn't the selling point, availibility of content in a compatible format easilly and legally is.
Ideally I would like to see all the major publishers offering their books as non-drm PDFs but I don't see that happening any time soon.
At least with music players you could rip your CD collection. Scanning a book is far more trouble.
one of the big problems with java from a performance perspective is it's object model. You can't have a variable that is an object only a variable that is a reference to an object. This causes several problems especially when dealing with lots of operations on small plain old data objects.
1: designers must make a hard choice between mutable and immutable objects. Mutable objects are error prone but immutable ones mean a lot of load on the memory manager.
2: objects that consist of aggregations of objects increase the load on the memory manager further because instead of one object several must be allocated and deallocated
3: an array of a large number of objects means that every object in the array must be allocated seperately which means an immense increase in memory manager loads.
yes you can try to optimise some of theese cases but it is very difficult to tell at creation time whether an objects lifetime will be tied to the object that contains it.
Oh, and 'it was about the size of a brick' doesn't sound like a phrase I have come across, but then maybe its because I know that there are many different sizes of bricks out there
Here in britan when discussing buildings the word brick tends to reffer to a building block made out of clay and they are all approximately the same size (though modern metric ones are slighting different from old imperial ones which causes some fun when trying to build extentions to existing properties. The larger modern blocks made of concrete and other materials are not reffered to as bricks.
It is common over here to reffer to old bulky mobile phones as bricks, there was a time when they were literally the size of bricks but the name continues to be used for phones much smaller than bricks.
would probably go on to say that 'bricked' can only apply to non-user serviceable devices, I can brick my PDA, Routers and Digital Camera, (well if I was an idiot and didn't know what I was doing I could) but not my PC
You could certainly "brick" the various modules that make up your PC though.
Generally the term bricked reffers to hardware that is physically/electrically intact but has firmware that is screwed up to an extent that it cannot be recovered without connecting special programming hardware to the board.
I'm going on british prices, not american ones so the ratio may be a bit different over there.
from dabs.com (not the cheapest supplier but fast and reliable) here in the uk an OEM 3 pack of XP home is £155.98, a retail version of XP home is £162.44 . For pro the OEM 3 pack is 242.03 and the retail is £234.98 . (as is customary in the UK theese prices include VAT which is our equivilent of sales tax)
Even if it is only twice the price where you live you still have to make an average of one move per copy for it to be cheaper. If you don't want to lie to MS when activating after the move then you will also have to account for the cost of spare copies to use during the transition (since you will probablly build your new machine before wiping and trashing your old one).
the last machines I have completely written off were running windows 98, all but one of the newer machines in our family are still being used for something (my own old laptop is out of action right now because it needs a new display cable fitting but I do plan to bring it back into service when I get some time).
The other issue is at the lower end of the market it pays to buy from the big OEMs who bundle windows whether you like it or not. Cheap machines from whitebox vendors tend to be really shitty. Using theese firms also means that provided you make/keep the manufacturers windows CDs you don't have to deal with any activation bullshit.
the US government banned export of software supporting strong versions of SSL for some time due to military paranoia about strong encryption. Given that most people were using american browsers this meant those users outside the USA ended up with a crippled version of SSL.
I doubt it, most people I know keep thier old PCs arround for quite a while or pass them down to a friend, add to that the three times difference in price between OEM and retail and it doesn't seem worth it to me.
It probablly depends on the particular model.
especially solar, since its going to produce the most power at the same time that most people are going to be running their AC
Also bear in mind that there are large parts of the world where the peak load is heating not aircon.
Defragging is/was necessary for primitive/free/cheap partition resizing tools because they either couldn't or couldn't reliably relocate blocks by themselves.
Maybe true in the days when 9x ruled the roost. Nowadays the windows defragmenter is useless for this sort of thing anyway and the writers of partitioning tools have had to deal with the issue of moving data out of the way themselves.
volume license buisness and enterprise each have thier own media sets which install just one version.
The IRS also has a tax informant reward program, which is useful if you know that your employer is cheating on their taxes.
What if you don't know that they are cheating but decide to report them anyway on the hope that they made a small slip up somewhere for which you know they will get disproportionate punishmet?
Afaict in any company over a certain size it is virtually impossible to ensure that all software is licensed. People who need to get something done ASAP and are fed up with the beuracracy and/or cost to their budget in getting a legit copy will install pirate software to do it. Sure you can push out managed desktop images but that doesn't work for all types of user and even if you do force them on everyone some users of said image are likely to get themselves local admin somehow.
that is why companies live in fear of the BSA.
IIRC Windows XP Home was previously not for multiprocessor systems, but when multicore x86 CPUs came out, Microsoft said they meant socketed CPUs.
Sure when ordinary home systems started coming with hyperthreading then multicore MS had to allow the home edition to run on them.
IIRC that was a technically enforced limitation not a license limitation though.