"after all, isn't that what this nation was founded on."
Funny, I thought our nation was founded on protest against the Governance of the British Crown?
Go read the declaration of Independence. Now, it obviously is very much informed by Christianity, and Christian values, BUT, there is a long list of grievances in the Declaration, NONE of which have anything whatsoever to do with the exercise of religion (well, it may be possible, I suppose, that some of the laws which he either refused his Assent to, or imposed on the colinies, might have had something to do with religious practice - I leave that possibility open, but the Declaration isn't very concerned with religious matters).
The Constitution likewise, is certainly informed by Christian values, but it clearly defines a secular government.
Was Christianity important in shaping the worldview and beliefs of many of the revolutionaries?
If you want to go back *earlier* than the Revolution, you can look at the first British settlement/colony in the present-day U.S. - Jamestown, VA. That had nothing whatsoever to do with religion - it was all about seeking resources in North America so that investors and colonists could get rich. Good old fashioned greed.
I suppose eventually, this tech has the ability to develop into something competitive, but one could also view this as a tech that can be used along-side of a full-featured music composition program. I mean, I'm sure there's times when musicians would like to put some of their music (whether just excerpts, or full scores) on their website, and this tech opens the possibility that maybe they could take the music from their compo program, and 'export it' so that it can be displayed in any HTML5 compatibile browser.
Even if proprietary programs like Finale don't end up using this software directly, because it shows that it is *possible*, it could have an impact in moving the proprietary programs to include similar functionality.
Well, ok, besides the fact that once the well is closed, they *might* not be allowed to drill again, but it seems like it would be smartest to close/destroy this well, then drill again (this time making sure not to blow up the oil rig). If I were BP, I think I'd rather stop losing the oil into the ocean, because even if they can recover some of it, they certainly can't recover all of it, and the longer the crude leak continues, the more 'damages' (as in lawsuits) rack up. I really think I'd like to stop my liability if I were BP.
That was one of the main points that the linked article bangs on (repeatedly), but I just don't see it.
App store is for 'native apps'. But, lots of apps don't need to be 'native apps'. Apple is actually, I believe, correct that HTML5+JavaScript will allow you to do anything you could do with Flash (well, eventually, at least - the article/. linked to does mention that HTML5 isn't *actually* a final standard yet; also, people have mentioned that there aren't a lot of developer tools yet for HTML5 the way there are with Flash, but in time, there will be).
The linked article author made a big deal about how for Flash, there is an open source compiler you could use to create your Flash 'app', then run it with Flash Player, but the author also made the BOGUS assertion that, somehow, with HTML5+JavaScript, you are locked into using Apple's iTechnology development tools.
That's only true to the extent that, today, iTechnology might be the only dev tools available for HTML5+JavaScript (other than, of course, hand-coding everything yourself in a text editor). But it won't be true a year or two from now.
HTML5+JavaScript are completely open standards that *anyone* can develop tools for. You can then just put those HTML5 apps out on the web, and iPhone/iPad users will be able to access them via Safari, with no Apple App Store approval necessary, no Apple taking a 30% chunk out of your profits, etc.
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't one of the features of HTML5 the ability to even make apps available 'offline' once they've been loaded once? (I remember reading somewhere, probably/., not too long ago, about how Google was discontinuing the Gears platform, because it was obsoleted by HTML5).
How is Apple censoring HTML5 applications delivered over the web? How are users locked into the App Store for such HTML5 applications?
So, I downloaded MTX, installed, launched it. It seemed to take 5 minutes for MTX just to launch, but then the "Available Games" list is just empty (I'm guessing their server is so submarine right now, it can't even send me the list of available games for download)? Any suggestions as to how I can get the file list for MTX(or if someone else is 'mirroring' the.torrent files)?
We're talking about a matter of doctrine here, not a matter of pragmatism. You're right that, from a pragmatic standpoint, it would largely just make more sense to allow priests to marry.
You're also right that the Roman Catholic church didn't always require priests to take the vow of celibacy. But, it became part of doctrine in the past, and now will be forever going forward.
The Church will stand by the position that you don't change doctrine because people don't like it. . . if someone wants to be a priest, then they need to conform to doctrine, not the other way around.
Why use libc for math *at all*, in the first place? Is this a source-portability thing?
If there are so many libc math defects that "attempting to workaround every possible libc math defect would make Octave too bloated to be maintainable", isn't the proper response to either switch to, or design and implement a different portable math library which doesn't have those defects? Or, perhaps, work with the libc maintainers to fix all those defects?
Adobe would lose a LOT of money on lost/delayed sales of Photoshop. They'd anger their customers. Maybe they'd get a lot of people mad at Apple, too, but it would probably hurt Adobe a *lot* more than it would hurt Apple.
You don't hurt your own business a lot just to hurt someone else's business a little bit.
Unfortunately for Adobe, they don't really hold a lot of strong cards in this particular fight.
Personally, I would not be too sad to see Flash and Silverlight both die (although, honestly, I don't expect that to happen), and websites switch to HTML 5. But, the reason I don't really expect Flash or Silverlight to die is because of DRM. This is why some video will never leave flash or silverlight. For example, I've recently been streaming videos from Netflix, which uses a Silverlight player. I'm pretty sure that at least one of the reasons they use Silverlight, is that Silverlight allows them to enforce a DRM system on the video stream. I don't believe HTML5 has anything like that?
I don't really know for sure, but there's this popular idea that oil exec's are 'threatened' by development of alternative energy (whether fusion, solar, wind, etc). The thing is:
A) None of these alternative energy sources really threaten oil in the near-term, because it will take decades of constant building of windmills, solar panels, fusion plants, fission plants, etc to come close to displacing oil.
B) Alternative electricity sources are more of a threat to coal than to oil. Coal is generally used to generate electricity, oil is generally used for fuel for things like planes, trains, automobiles, boats and ships (I hope I'm not saying anything here that everyone doesn't already know - just stating the obvious). While some progress is being made in creating small passenger vehicles powered by electricity, there's no real movement (as far as I know) on R&D for planes, trains, semi-trucks, boats, and ships which are electric. I think trains would be the easiest, because there have been electric trains for years - at least, for light rail; I lived in Chicago for a couple years, and they have a train/subway system which has an electrified 'third-rail' which powers the trains, so it seems that you could also do that for cargo trains). For ships, if someone could create a fusion plant small enough, you could maybe mount one inside the ship (if the ship is large enough - this probably wouldn't work for small private boats, but could work for cruise ships, cargo ships, naval ships, etc).
Bottom line, electricity and oil generally don't compete, and nuclear energy sources are generally more useful for creating electricity than fuel.
C) Fusion power plants, if possible, are going to be expensive to build. Oil and coal companies with deep pockets are, really, ideal candidates to become sources of funding for the development of fusion power plants.
D) Oil will be most likely a declining resource over the coming decades.
Given C & D, If oil exec's were smart, they'd be using a relatively small chunk of their current enourmous profits to help with fusion R&D, so that they can become the largest producers of electricity as oil declines, so that they can supplement their declining oil revenue with fusion energy revenue.
I generally agree with what you are saying. I do think, however, this has all been a very illuminating experience with regards to how, when Google launched the Nexus One and their online phone store, they made loud proclamations about how they were going to change how phones were sold, how they were going to move the market towards a choose-a-phone, choose-a-carrier model where you basically got the phone, then used it on whichever mobile operator you wanted. As far as I know, the Nexus One only ever worked on T-Mobile (I guess you could use it on AT&T but only at Edge speeds, not full 3G, because AT&T use different frequencies, and apparently it's just impossible to make a phone that can tune different frequencies).
In a lot of ways, I consider the Nexus One to be rather a failure, but you might be right, that from Google's perspective, it served it's purpose. However, as far as 'accellerating' other Android deployments, like the Verizon Droid, I don't really think Nexus one had that much impact on that - I mean, the Droid launched very close in time to the Nexus One ( I don't remember, but I thought it launched a few weeks before the N1, didn't it)? Even if it was after, the timing was so close that Verizon had to have already had the Droid designed, tested, manufactured, and developed marketing campaigns for the Droid well before the N1 launched. There's way too much that happens to launch a phone for a company to do all that in a month's time.
The original ask slashdot also mentioned speeding up boot times. I suppose that could be accomplished by copying the contents of/boot to a small filesystem on the SSD, then modifying/etc/fstab to mount/boot from the SSD, then running grub or whatever bootloader you are using to re-write the MBR.
However, that still isn't *quite* what the original poster was asking for. I do think he has a good idea (I've wondered about something along those lines too).
The thing about swap is, the the files will *always* be initially read from the magnetic disk into the swap when you first boot and first access files. Also, if a file has been closed by all processes that had requested it, I don't think it will be considered by the kernel to still be loaded into swap, will it (even if the sectors it was written to still physically have the data)? I think the original poster wanted something where the kernel will look *first* on the SSD to see if it can fulfill the request, and only after that will try to fetch from the magnetic drive - even right after a reboot.
Putting/swap on that won't really do that. Still, putting/swap on the SSD, I suppose, would probably still help quite a bit.
Actually, I'm thinking about this. Doesn't the Linux kernel try to keep most open or recently accessed files in an in-RAM cache (as long as there is enough RAM), and access them directly in RAM instead of from either swap or disk, if it can fulfill the request from cache? If that is the case, doesn't it make the most sense to just get more RAM? 8 or 12 Gigs of RAM would, I should think, provide plenty of space to keep a lot of files in cache (unless you are dealing with some really massive files like full feature-length movies).
I guess my point is, it is my understanding that once loaded from the magnetic disk initially, a lot of file requests can be serviced from RAM, thus negating a lot of the benefits of putting/swap on an SSD (I think), so the main place where the SSD can provide a benefit is during the initial loading, but swap doesn't get hit during the initial loading. So, only doing something like the OP suggested, I believe, would provide any benefit?
You know, one thing we don't see much, but I do kind of wish would happen more, is modernized updates of classic games. For example, take the Elder Scrolls series by Bethesda Softworks. I've spent many hours enjoying ES III: Morrowind, and ES IV: Oblivion.
They released the the first two games in the series as free downloads, which I downloaded, and started to play. The thing is, graphics which looked sort of alright on a 640x480 CRT end up looking eye-meltingly, headache inducingly bad on a 1920x1200 LCD.
I'd pay money, I think, for versions of Elder Scrolls: Arena and ES II: Daggerfall which are native ports to Windows (currently you have to run them in DosBox, and the resolution if fixed at 640x480), and which have the models and textures and things updated to allow for abritrary resolution (that is, on most modern engines, you can run the game at whatever resolution you want, and the engine just scales the graphics, because 3D graphics are basically vector-graphics which can be arbitrarily scaled).
I don't need the best graphics in the world, I really don't. I can still have fun playing a good 2D game, even. But, I still think there could be money to be made updating great classic games to run better and look better on modern hardware and operating systems.
"3) TFA also states "over two copper lines". It sounds like 4 wires are required (1 line=2 wire). If this is indeed the case, might as well bring the fiber into the house instead of a second pair of copper wires;-))"
I thought 'standard' telephone line had two twisted pairs (four wires) in the line? I don't think anyone is suggesting running a second line into premises that only have one line at the moment?
This sounds like it would be used to allow the phone company to maybe run fiber optic to your block, and then have a VDSLAM which connects the fiber to all the existing copper lines which run into customer premises already. I think AT&T has a service called U-Verse which is based around this model (although it doesn't use a DSL version which is as fast as that proposed in this article).
But, the idea is, I think, it's extremely expensive to run fiber into every home/apartment/business, but pretty cheap to run fiber to a local access point, then use existing copper into the premises.
One potential problem I see arising from automated ticketting systems, is the problem of the driver getting a ticket, but no notification that they were in violation, so you could potentially ticket the same driver over and over with the driver not even realising they are being ticketted.
Here in the U.S., my family is from the State of Ohio. Now, in Ohio, there is a 'point system' with regards to drivers licenses. Different infractions are assigned different amounts of points - worse infractions get more points, a very minor infraction might get 1 point. When you hit some threshold amount of points, your driver's license is automatically suspended.
My family was on a trip once, and my father was driving. He flowed along with the other traffic on the road, not going faster than the other drivers, but not slower. We were travelling in another State, Illinois. Someone, later that day or weekend, told my dad how in Illinois, they use automatic cameras to enforce the speed limit and automatically ticket you. My father was worried that there were a few constuction zones we had passed through (maybe 4 or 5 of them as we crossed the State), and he got really worried that he was going to get 5 or 6 tickets for that one trip. Luckily, Illinois apparently either wasn't using cameras in all the zones, or maybe they just set them at a threshold significantly above the speed limit (say > 15mph over the limit), but whatever the case, my dad didn't end up getting a whole bunch of tickets.
My point in all this, though, is that if you have automatic systems that ticket people, but you don't notify them that they are in violation, they aren't probably going to *stop* violating - they'll keep on speeding, and potentially end up getting lots of tickets for what was, sort of, a single violation, and they might end up losing licenses.
If many thousands (millions?) of drivers suddenly started to lose their license because of these automatic ticketting systems, there's gonna be a huge public outcry, I would expect.
I don't think you really want to use any codec on a battery powered device which isn't hardware accelerated by the built-in GPU, do you? Won't that kill battery life? I'm not sure, but it really seems like, for phones, you *really* want a power efficient decoder in silicon?
Actually, thinking about this a little bit - most of the newer generation GPU's have some API's for coding and running special code right on the GPU (CUDA, FireStream,,OpenCL). Are those at all useful for 'adding' accellerated codecs to the GPU after manufacturing?
"Maybe--it will at least require drug gangs to go to the trouble of stealing cell phones that only have useful lives of a few days"
How soon till the Dead start making phone calls? Now, on the one hand, the Mexican government *might* have had the foresight to set things up so that these phone registrations are cross-checked against death records, but *even* if they did, there is going to be a period where the databases haven't been updated (either because the government just doesn't yet know someone is dead, because the death hasn't been reported yet, or simply because there might be some delay between when a person's death is recorded, and the phone operators check and disable the service.
So, seems to me that rather than stealing a phone, you simply steal the identity of someone who won't miss it.
Oh, you might also register phones in the name of children. Etc. I bet they come up with something even more clever. For every type of scheme government's come up with to regulate something, criminals come up with much smarter scheme's to get around it.
Well, this may be one of those ideas which would, in practice, be hellaciously difficult to actually do, I'm not sure, but. . .
Would it be possible for Adobe to build a Flash 'compiler', which, instead of outputting ARM machine-language binary code, instead spit out Objective-C code, which would then get compiled by the Xcode/gcc compiler? Seems like that would allow them to do a bit of an end-run around this restriction, because then, what the app developers would be compiling *would be* native iPhone SDK code?
But the point is that Sony is *removing functionality after a sale*. When you sell a product, and you advertise a feature of the product, and people buy the product, you have *no right* to then remove that functionality from the purchased products.
If you bought a laptop computer from Sony, and they pushed a 'system update' that disabled your sound card, you wouldn't just say 'I can still listen to music on a music player or stereo, and watch movies on a TV', right?
"I have no sympathy for people who render some devices even useless" - apparently you have no sympathy for people who bought a product with a feature, and then the seller unilaterally decides to remove that feature after the sale.
I don't see *how* this can be possibly justified. I mean, if Sony wants to stop selling *new* units with that functionality, fine, that's their business, but you don't go removing functionality from already sold products. If not illegal, that at least goes against any common sense notion of what is permissible for sellers to do after the sale of a product.
Is it morally wrong to prevent premature babies, or infants with congenital birth defects from dieing immediately after birth, like they would 'in nature'? Is it wrong to craft eyewear for the nearsighted? Is it wrong to use anti-biotics to prevent people from dieing of infections?
Honestly, I think whoever posed this question is a *complete dumbass*.
I would go further and say *enhancing* people, if they choose it, would not be wrong. After all, we are, by-and-large completely disabling the Darwinistic mechanisms of natural selection - almost all the things that would have killed people before they could reproduce (which is the fundamental selector in natural selection) *no longer kill people*.
The *only* way we can adapt, moving forward, or to deal with genetic defects, is through our own intervention.
If we foreswear genetic treatments, we are dooming our species to eventual extinction, because over time, so many genetic defects will become so prevelent in the population we will no longer be able to survive (that will take a *very, very* long time, but if we forever ban genetic treatments, it would happen eventually). Well, maybe by that point, we will devolve to the point where natural selection becomes dominant again - e.g. a world where there is a lot of death, early, before the 'weak' can reproduce, selecting for what remains of the 'stronger' genes in the pool.
Slashdot Mirror
"after all, isn't that what this nation was founded on."
Funny, I thought our nation was founded on protest against the Governance of the British Crown?
Go read the declaration of Independence. Now, it obviously is very much informed by Christianity, and Christian values, BUT, there is a long list of grievances in the Declaration, NONE of which have anything whatsoever to do with the exercise of religion (well, it may be possible, I suppose, that some of the laws which he either refused his Assent to, or imposed on the colinies, might have had something to do with religious practice - I leave that possibility open, but the Declaration isn't very concerned with religious matters).
The Constitution likewise, is certainly informed by Christian values, but it clearly defines a secular government.
Was Christianity important in shaping the worldview and beliefs of many of the revolutionaries?
If you want to go back *earlier* than the Revolution, you can look at the first British settlement/colony in the present-day U.S. - Jamestown, VA. That had nothing whatsoever to do with religion - it was all about seeking resources in North America so that investors and colonists could get rich. Good old fashioned greed.
"Actually, I'm Canadian, not American".
I'm not really Canadian, but you know, I'm thinking that could be a *really* useful phrase to remember if I'm ever traveling outside the U.S.
. . . dialog.
I suppose eventually, this tech has the ability to develop into something competitive, but one could also view this as a tech that can be used along-side of a full-featured music composition program. I mean, I'm sure there's times when musicians would like to put some of their music (whether just excerpts, or full scores) on their website, and this tech opens the possibility that maybe they could take the music from their compo program, and 'export it' so that it can be displayed in any HTML5 compatibile browser.
Even if proprietary programs like Finale don't end up using this software directly, because it shows that it is *possible*, it could have an impact in moving the proprietary programs to include similar functionality.
Well, ok, besides the fact that once the well is closed, they *might* not be allowed to drill again, but it seems like it would be smartest to close/destroy this well, then drill again (this time making sure not to blow up the oil rig). If I were BP, I think I'd rather stop losing the oil into the ocean, because even if they can recover some of it, they certainly can't recover all of it, and the longer the crude leak continues, the more 'damages' (as in lawsuits) rack up. I really think I'd like to stop my liability if I were BP.
Logitech has some webcams with a pretty decent sensor. Don't remember the model name right off the bat, but you might check out their product line.
Hey, every growhouse needs a security/monitoring system. Gotta watch that grass grow and make sure no one steals it.
That was one of the main points that the linked article bangs on (repeatedly), but I just don't see it.
App store is for 'native apps'. But, lots of apps don't need to be 'native apps'. Apple is actually, I believe, correct that HTML5+JavaScript will allow you to do anything you could do with Flash (well, eventually, at least - the article /. linked to does mention that HTML5 isn't *actually* a final standard yet; also, people have mentioned that there aren't a lot of developer tools yet for HTML5 the way there are with Flash, but in time, there will be).
The linked article author made a big deal about how for Flash, there is an open source compiler you could use to create your Flash 'app', then run it with Flash Player, but the author also made the BOGUS assertion that, somehow, with HTML5+JavaScript, you are locked into using Apple's iTechnology development tools.
That's only true to the extent that, today, iTechnology might be the only dev tools available for HTML5+JavaScript (other than, of course, hand-coding everything yourself in a text editor). But it won't be true a year or two from now.
HTML5+JavaScript are completely open standards that *anyone* can develop tools for. You can then just put those HTML5 apps out on the web, and iPhone/iPad users will be able to access them via Safari, with no Apple App Store approval necessary, no Apple taking a 30% chunk out of your profits, etc.
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't one of the features of HTML5 the ability to even make apps available 'offline' once they've been loaded once? (I remember reading somewhere, probably /., not too long ago, about how Google was discontinuing the Gears platform, because it was obsoleted by HTML5).
How is Apple censoring HTML5 applications delivered over the web? How are users locked into the App Store for such HTML5 applications?
So, I downloaded MTX, installed, launched it. It seemed to take 5 minutes for MTX just to launch, but then the "Available Games" list is just empty (I'm guessing their server is so submarine right now, it can't even send me the list of available games for download)? Any suggestions as to how I can get the file list for MTX(or if someone else is 'mirroring' the .torrent files)?
We're talking about a matter of doctrine here, not a matter of pragmatism. You're right that, from a pragmatic standpoint, it would largely just make more sense to allow priests to marry.
You're also right that the Roman Catholic church didn't always require priests to take the vow of celibacy. But, it became part of doctrine in the past, and now will be forever going forward.
The Church will stand by the position that you don't change doctrine because people don't like it. . . if someone wants to be a priest, then they need to conform to doctrine, not the other way around.
I have a question:
Why use libc for math *at all*, in the first place? Is this a source-portability thing?
If there are so many libc math defects that "attempting to workaround every possible libc math defect would make Octave too bloated to be maintainable", isn't the proper response to either switch to, or design and implement a different portable math library which doesn't have those defects? Or, perhaps, work with the libc maintainers to fix all those defects?
Here you go.
Welcome to 2004.
There was even a slashdot discussion of the article.
Here's what would happen:
Adobe would lose a LOT of money on lost/delayed sales of Photoshop. They'd anger their customers. Maybe they'd get a lot of people mad at Apple, too, but it would probably hurt Adobe a *lot* more than it would hurt Apple.
You don't hurt your own business a lot just to hurt someone else's business a little bit.
Unfortunately for Adobe, they don't really hold a lot of strong cards in this particular fight.
Personally, I would not be too sad to see Flash and Silverlight both die (although, honestly, I don't expect that to happen), and websites switch to HTML 5. But, the reason I don't really expect Flash or Silverlight to die is because of DRM. This is why some video will never leave flash or silverlight. For example, I've recently been streaming videos from Netflix, which uses a Silverlight player. I'm pretty sure that at least one of the reasons they use Silverlight, is that Silverlight allows them to enforce a DRM system on the video stream. I don't believe HTML5 has anything like that?
I don't really know for sure, but there's this popular idea that oil exec's are 'threatened' by development of alternative energy (whether fusion, solar, wind, etc). The thing is:
A) None of these alternative energy sources really threaten oil in the near-term, because it will take decades of constant building of windmills, solar panels, fusion plants, fission plants, etc to come close to displacing oil.
B) Alternative electricity sources are more of a threat to coal than to oil. Coal is generally used to generate electricity, oil is generally used for fuel for things like planes, trains, automobiles, boats and ships (I hope I'm not saying anything here that everyone doesn't already know - just stating the obvious). While some progress is being made in creating small passenger vehicles powered by electricity, there's no real movement (as far as I know) on R&D for planes, trains, semi-trucks, boats, and ships which are electric. I think trains would be the easiest, because there have been electric trains for years - at least, for light rail; I lived in Chicago for a couple years, and they have a train/subway system which has an electrified 'third-rail' which powers the trains, so it seems that you could also do that for cargo trains). For ships, if someone could create a fusion plant small enough, you could maybe mount one inside the ship (if the ship is large enough - this probably wouldn't work for small private boats, but could work for cruise ships, cargo ships, naval ships, etc).
Bottom line, electricity and oil generally don't compete, and nuclear energy sources are generally more useful for creating electricity than fuel.
C) Fusion power plants, if possible, are going to be expensive to build. Oil and coal companies with deep pockets are, really, ideal candidates to become sources of funding for the development of fusion power plants.
D) Oil will be most likely a declining resource over the coming decades.
Given C & D, If oil exec's were smart, they'd be using a relatively small chunk of their current enourmous profits to help with fusion R&D, so that they can become the largest producers of electricity as oil declines, so that they can supplement their declining oil revenue with fusion energy revenue.
I generally agree with what you are saying. I do think, however, this has all been a very illuminating experience with regards to how, when Google launched the Nexus One and their online phone store, they made loud proclamations about how they were going to change how phones were sold, how they were going to move the market towards a choose-a-phone, choose-a-carrier model where you basically got the phone, then used it on whichever mobile operator you wanted. As far as I know, the Nexus One only ever worked on T-Mobile (I guess you could use it on AT&T but only at Edge speeds, not full 3G, because AT&T use different frequencies, and apparently it's just impossible to make a phone that can tune different frequencies).
In a lot of ways, I consider the Nexus One to be rather a failure, but you might be right, that from Google's perspective, it served it's purpose. However, as far as 'accellerating' other Android deployments, like the Verizon Droid, I don't really think Nexus one had that much impact on that - I mean, the Droid launched very close in time to the Nexus One ( I don't remember, but I thought it launched a few weeks before the N1, didn't it)? Even if it was after, the timing was so close that Verizon had to have already had the Droid designed, tested, manufactured, and developed marketing campaigns for the Droid well before the N1 launched. There's way too much that happens to launch a phone for a company to do all that in a month's time.
The original ask slashdot also mentioned speeding up boot times. I suppose that could be accomplished by copying the contents of /boot to a small filesystem on the SSD, then modifying /etc/fstab to mount /boot from the SSD, then running grub or whatever bootloader you are using to re-write the MBR.
However, that still isn't *quite* what the original poster was asking for. I do think he has a good idea (I've wondered about something along those lines too).
The thing about swap is, the the files will *always* be initially read from the magnetic disk into the swap when you first boot and first access files. Also, if a file has been closed by all processes that had requested it, I don't think it will be considered by the kernel to still be loaded into swap, will it (even if the sectors it was written to still physically have the data)? I think the original poster wanted something where the kernel will look *first* on the SSD to see if it can fulfill the request, and only after that will try to fetch from the magnetic drive - even right after a reboot.
Putting /swap on that won't really do that. Still, putting /swap on the SSD, I suppose, would probably still help quite a bit.
Actually, I'm thinking about this. Doesn't the Linux kernel try to keep most open or recently accessed files in an in-RAM cache (as long as there is enough RAM), and access them directly in RAM instead of from either swap or disk, if it can fulfill the request from cache? If that is the case, doesn't it make the most sense to just get more RAM? 8 or 12 Gigs of RAM would, I should think, provide plenty of space to keep a lot of files in cache (unless you are dealing with some really massive files like full feature-length movies).
I guess my point is, it is my understanding that once loaded from the magnetic disk initially, a lot of file requests can be serviced from RAM, thus negating a lot of the benefits of putting /swap on an SSD (I think), so the main place where the SSD can provide a benefit is during the initial loading, but swap doesn't get hit during the initial loading. So, only doing something like the OP suggested, I believe, would provide any benefit?
You know, one thing we don't see much, but I do kind of wish would happen more, is modernized updates of classic games. For example, take the Elder Scrolls series by Bethesda Softworks. I've spent many hours enjoying ES III: Morrowind, and ES IV: Oblivion.
They released the the first two games in the series as free downloads, which I downloaded, and started to play. The thing is, graphics which looked sort of alright on a 640x480 CRT end up looking eye-meltingly, headache inducingly bad on a 1920x1200 LCD.
I'd pay money, I think, for versions of Elder Scrolls: Arena and ES II: Daggerfall which are native ports to Windows (currently you have to run them in DosBox, and the resolution if fixed at 640x480), and which have the models and textures and things updated to allow for abritrary resolution (that is, on most modern engines, you can run the game at whatever resolution you want, and the engine just scales the graphics, because 3D graphics are basically vector-graphics which can be arbitrarily scaled).
I don't need the best graphics in the world, I really don't. I can still have fun playing a good 2D game, even. But, I still think there could be money to be made updating great classic games to run better and look better on modern hardware and operating systems.
"3) TFA also states "over two copper lines". It sounds like 4 wires are required (1 line=2 wire). If this is indeed the case, might as well bring the fiber into the house instead of a second pair of copper wires ;-))"
I thought 'standard' telephone line had two twisted pairs (four wires) in the line? I don't think anyone is suggesting running a second line into premises that only have one line at the moment?
This sounds like it would be used to allow the phone company to maybe run fiber optic to your block, and then have a VDSLAM which connects the fiber to all the existing copper lines which run into customer premises already. I think AT&T has a service called U-Verse which is based around this model (although it doesn't use a DSL version which is as fast as that proposed in this article).
But, the idea is, I think, it's extremely expensive to run fiber into every home/apartment/business, but pretty cheap to run fiber to a local access point, then use existing copper into the premises.
One potential problem I see arising from automated ticketting systems, is the problem of the driver getting a ticket, but no notification that they were in violation, so you could potentially ticket the same driver over and over with the driver not even realising they are being ticketted.
Here in the U.S., my family is from the State of Ohio. Now, in Ohio, there is a 'point system' with regards to drivers licenses. Different infractions are assigned different amounts of points - worse infractions get more points, a very minor infraction might get 1 point. When you hit some threshold amount of points, your driver's license is automatically suspended.
My family was on a trip once, and my father was driving. He flowed along with the other traffic on the road, not going faster than the other drivers, but not slower. We were travelling in another State, Illinois. Someone, later that day or weekend, told my dad how in Illinois, they use automatic cameras to enforce the speed limit and automatically ticket you. My father was worried that there were a few constuction zones we had passed through (maybe 4 or 5 of them as we crossed the State), and he got really worried that he was going to get 5 or 6 tickets for that one trip. Luckily, Illinois apparently either wasn't using cameras in all the zones, or maybe they just set them at a threshold significantly above the speed limit (say > 15mph over the limit), but whatever the case, my dad didn't end up getting a whole bunch of tickets.
My point in all this, though, is that if you have automatic systems that ticket people, but you don't notify them that they are in violation, they aren't probably going to *stop* violating - they'll keep on speeding, and potentially end up getting lots of tickets for what was, sort of, a single violation, and they might end up losing licenses.
If many thousands (millions?) of drivers suddenly started to lose their license because of these automatic ticketting systems, there's gonna be a huge public outcry, I would expect.
I don't think you really want to use any codec on a battery powered device which isn't hardware accelerated by the built-in GPU, do you? Won't that kill battery life? I'm not sure, but it really seems like, for phones, you *really* want a power efficient decoder in silicon?
Actually, thinking about this a little bit - most of the newer generation GPU's have some API's for coding and running special code right on the GPU (CUDA, FireStream, ,OpenCL). Are those at all useful for 'adding' accellerated codecs to the GPU after manufacturing?
"Maybe--it will at least require drug gangs to go to the trouble of stealing cell phones that only have useful lives of a few days"
How soon till the Dead start making phone calls? Now, on the one hand, the Mexican government *might* have had the foresight to set things up so that these phone registrations are cross-checked against death records, but *even* if they did, there is going to be a period where the databases haven't been updated (either because the government just doesn't yet know someone is dead, because the death hasn't been reported yet, or simply because there might be some delay between when a person's death is recorded, and the phone operators check and disable the service.
So, seems to me that rather than stealing a phone, you simply steal the identity of someone who won't miss it.
Oh, you might also register phones in the name of children. Etc. I bet they come up with something even more clever. For every type of scheme government's come up with to regulate something, criminals come up with much smarter scheme's to get around it.
Well, this may be one of those ideas which would, in practice, be hellaciously difficult to actually do, I'm not sure, but. . .
Would it be possible for Adobe to build a Flash 'compiler', which, instead of outputting ARM machine-language binary code, instead spit out Objective-C code, which would then get compiled by the Xcode/gcc compiler? Seems like that would allow them to do a bit of an end-run around this restriction, because then, what the app developers would be compiling *would be* native iPhone SDK code?
Not sure, but just a thought.
Wow, are we even reading the same article? The article is about superCONDUCTORS not superCOMPUTORS. Nobody said anything at all about transistors.
But the point is that Sony is *removing functionality after a sale*. When you sell a product, and you advertise a feature of the product, and people buy the product, you have *no right* to then remove that functionality from the purchased products.
If you bought a laptop computer from Sony, and they pushed a 'system update' that disabled your sound card, you wouldn't just say 'I can still listen to music on a music player or stereo, and watch movies on a TV', right?
"I have no sympathy for people who render some devices even useless" - apparently you have no sympathy for people who bought a product with a feature, and then the seller unilaterally decides to remove that feature after the sale.
I don't see *how* this can be possibly justified. I mean, if Sony wants to stop selling *new* units with that functionality, fine, that's their business, but you don't go removing functionality from already sold products. If not illegal, that at least goes against any common sense notion of what is permissible for sellers to do after the sale of a product.
Is it morally wrong to prevent premature babies, or infants with congenital birth defects from dieing immediately after birth, like they would 'in nature'? Is it wrong to craft eyewear for the nearsighted? Is it wrong to use anti-biotics to prevent people from dieing of infections?
Honestly, I think whoever posed this question is a *complete dumbass*.
I would go further and say *enhancing* people, if they choose it, would not be wrong. After all, we are, by-and-large completely disabling the Darwinistic mechanisms of natural selection - almost all the things that would have killed people before they could reproduce (which is the fundamental selector in natural selection) *no longer kill people*.
The *only* way we can adapt, moving forward, or to deal with genetic defects, is through our own intervention.
If we foreswear genetic treatments, we are dooming our species to eventual extinction, because over time, so many genetic defects will become so prevelent in the population we will no longer be able to survive (that will take a *very, very* long time, but if we forever ban genetic treatments, it would happen eventually). Well, maybe by that point, we will devolve to the point where natural selection becomes dominant again - e.g. a world where there is a lot of death, early, before the 'weak' can reproduce, selecting for what remains of the 'stronger' genes in the pool.