Jade Empire, Mass Effect 1, Dragon Age, Mass Effect 2 are four that don't seem to suffer from the specific problems cited above at the time I write this.(i.e. bad translation of controls). I don't much like the minigames in ME1, but that's not a console issue.
Fable was fine IIRC. Fahrenheit -- didn't like the control schema, but it was translated properly to PC IIRC.
That's your half dozen right there, and just off the top of my head. (Granted, a lot are from Bioware). The problem isn't universal; some developers and publishers seem to care about doing a decent port and some don't.
The Milestone's based on an ARM Cortex A8 running at 600 MHz. It's probably the slowest-clocked of the "new" superphones. (For Americans, it's a Motorola Droid for Europe and Canada with some small software and SKU differences).
The Dingoo A320, according to the font of all wisdom, Wikipedia, is underclocked to 336MHz.
Last I looked, ARM seemed to have a definite edge in memory bandwidth, and had instructions aimed at handling media-rich applications much better than MIPS. I could, of course, be out of date on that.
So at an educated guess, I wouldn't expect your Dingoo to be able to touch a modern superphone. (Maybe at best a quarter of the processing power assuming Neon optimizations?) Of course if the Dingoo's screen is low enough resolution, then that may not matter as much.
I agree the parent is a troll, but not a very good one. From the very second sentence of the linked post:
I had seen ports of Quake3 to the iphone and the N900 which have similar specifications
When you troll without even bothering to read two sentences of what's linked that's just... sad.
Moreover, the iPhone falls significantly short in one area: the N900 runs at 800x480, and the Milestone/Droid at 854x480. The iPhone is presumably pushing ~37% of the number of pixels. (Assuming the game is running at native resolution on all 3 platforms). If so, fairly impressive pixel-pushing for the other two platforms.
If you read the fine article, you'll see they give a sample image you can test against your applications. I tested Irfanview (4.25) and it appears to suffer from the problem. Haven't tried Picasa yet; don't have it installed.
I'm using Ubuntu as a guest OS on Windows 7. Doesn't work. Going there directly via IE8/Win 7 (Host OS) it doesn't work either. (TFA is fine; it's the post on microsoftontheissues.com that won't load).
It would be pretty amusing if Microsoft designed a website hosting a blog that discusses browser choice to not function properly with Linux-hosted browsers.
The philosophy [of] Starship Troopers is so easy to destroy?
Really?
Two of the tenets of that book were (a) all volunteer armed forces; (b) everyone who volunteered for combat service, and served, got to vote. No exceptions.
You'll note the protagonist of that novel was Hispanic, and the protagonist of Tunnel in the Sky was black. Not exactly common for the 1950's.
He wrote Starship Troopers in 1959, in an age prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, where many black veterans had been routinely deprived of the vote in the south. He wrote some years before the disaster of the Vietnam War where kids were drafted to serve and die in a decidedly non-volunteer force.
It might be easy to look back today and decry Heinlein's work, but I'm not so sure the philosophy his characters articulate is so "easy to destroy" as you think it is.
Unless of course one is all about racism and conscription. In which case, carry on.
First round contestants on American Idol? Like, say the artist that originally attracted me to Magnatune, Lara St. John?
St John is a very talented violinist; her Bach: The Six Sonatas and Partitas for Violin Solo was iTunes' best selling double album in 2007, an interesting achievement for a classical artist. The NY Times thought highly of her, and she currently plays a superb 1779 Guadagnini: arguably one of the most notable in the world. (Previously she played a Stradivarius).
But yeah, that's basically just like a first round contestant on American Idol I guess.
Quality does vary, as with any outlet, but I've generally found it to be quite high on Magnatune.
The parent is correct in pointing out the fascinating Nokia device. However, the Nokia 770 hasn't been manufactured for at least a year; it was replaced by the Nokia N800. The N810 is an N800 with slideout keyboard, GPS, etc. The N800 is probably the best choice for a very small reading device that also browses the web superbly.
That said, the screen is a slight bit smaller than the OP's requirements; it's ~4.1". But at 800x480, it yields 275 dpi which is very, very nice for an LCD-based device to read text from.
The N800/N810, despite coming from Nokia are not phones. They are essentially powerful desktop computers from the late 1990's reduced to palm size (~8 ounces). 400 MHz ARM processor, 256 MB RAM, up to 64 GB of storage (2 SDHC slots), 4.1" 800x480x16bit screen, runs a loosely Debian-based Linux distribution called Maemo.
It plays Youtube videos, and can play back DVD-quality DivX/Xvid (MPEG 4 pt 2 ASP) video without transcoding. It has a built-in PDF reader, and FBReader is an excellent free reader available for a wide variety of other formats.
Battery life is on the order of 4-5 hours, and unlike Apple devices the batteries are user swappable. I have a spare that gives my N800 close to 10 hours of powered-on life. (In sleep mode, the device sips power; I've had mine sleeping for days without running out of power.)
I find it generally excellent for daytime use, though I agree with the parent that e-ink devices are a little better for text in daylight, but all I've tried (Kindle, Sony) are inferior for PDF's and web browsing.
Re:Did they invent C too?
on
Unix Turns 40
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Not exactly. RTFA. Unix was originally written in assembler on a PDP-7 in 1969. Thompson developed B, and some Unix development continued using B on the PDP-7. Ritchie developed a successor, C, finishing in 1972; in 1973 Thompson ported most of the Unix kernel to C on a PDP-11.
So C wasn't developed to "create" Unix; Unix was a precursor. C was indeed designed for implementing system software though.
Brian Kernighan -- the K of K&R got involved in C development later, and was indeed one of the two authors of the seminal K&R.
Well she is one unmarried justice nominated to replace another unmarried justice (Souter). Not that there's anything wrong with that!
Unless she is gay, I'm not entirely certain that's a good thing. Washington can be a lonely place and without a spouse/significant other, it can be draining. That said, she functions fine as a Judge on the second circuit, and it's really not anyone's business.
In Barack Obama's book, The Audacity of Hope, Ronald Reagan is indeed a President he was impressed by -- because Reagan was in Barack Obama's words, "transformative". It's not at all clear, from reading AoH, that he was positively impressed. I wouldn't remotely say that Reagan was his favourite President. True, he didn't trash Reagan, but why would he? He had solid credentials on the left flank of the Democratic party, and wanted to win over right-wing Democrats, wavering Republicans, and independents.
And no, Obama isn't a "corporate centrist" in the mold of George W. Bush. A moderate socialist seems to fit, though Americans seem terrified of that term. So call him a Social Democrat in European terms in his approach to the economy. His Keynesian pump-priming is pretty moderate by 1960's and 1970's standards, though radical by 1980's and 1990's standards. (After Bush's heavy deficit spending, I don't think one can as easily call Obama that radical by 00's standards).
For good or ill, you'll see a lot more redistribution of wealth under Obama, most of it from generations to come via a huge series of "stimulative" deficits.
If you see that as being a corporate centrist in the Bush/Cheney mold, then you might be fairly far left -- or fairly far right.
As others above have noted, one area where I don't see a lot of difference is this: Dick Cheney is the number 1 defender of George W. Bush's foreign and military policy by speeches; Barack Obama is the number 1 defender of that same policy by deeds.
This is not a troll, and should not be modded as such. The poster has an accessible (spam-protected) email address that I assume is valid. S/He's been posting a long time on slashdot, and his/her assertion is credible and interesting, albeit provocative.
Moreover, I'm inclined to agree with my own caveat: while one can write C that is more rapid than LISP, one can also more rapidly write LISP than C (for a given problem).
I also note my earlier statement, that it's easier (though still quite hard) to find a talented C programmer than a talented LISP programmer.
First, his blog is standing up to a slashdotting. That's impressive.
Dunno about you, buddy, but I find LISP a lot easier to read and write
Right, but we're not talking about you. I wish we were. If your skills were more common we'd have a better world.
Second, I can speak up and I'm not even posting as an ac. It's straightforward to find people who can "program" in a language of their choice. It's tougher to find people who can program well in a language of their choice. It's tougher yet to find people who can program well in a language of your choice. It's very tough to find someone who can code well in C and insanely tough to find someone who can code well in LISP.
It's been my observation -- as someone who has managed to convince many others that he deserves the salary of an "uberprogrammer" -- as I've shifted into running large engineering teams, that perhaps one in twenty programmers can code acceptably in C and perhaps one in two hundred in LISP.
Third, I'd note there are behaviours of his software that surprised and annoyed some readers -- e.g. column treatment. I'd argue that these are generally buried deeper in LISP code than in C, but that's something we could heartily debate.
Finally, his code seems typical of what I've seen from good LISP programmers -- including even at times myself. Poor documentation. The code is simple, elegant, and should "speak for itself". Well it doesn't. Not to someone trying to maintain it.
C programmers -- perhaps because of the nature of the language -- seem less prone to this particular trap, though still bad.
Canada similarly has these things, including a 24/7 channel (both French and English versions) that covers Parliament when in session; indeed they go well beyond that and cover major Parliamentary committees. See cpac.ca
That's not the issue; the issue, as the article notes, is that crown copyright pertains to committee meetings. (Unlike in the US where this video is generally public domain). The linked article notes that MPs generally seem to be concerned that people will use their utterances against them for satire, for attack ads, or to promulgate a particular policy viewpoint. They are seeking to be as aggressive as possible in using copyright to takedown material they disagree with.
Too bad for the MPs, in my view. Unfortunately, the way the rules (and law) are at the moment, they've got a lot of tools to back up their perspective.
But again, this has nothing whatsoever to do with a parliamentary channel (Canada's manages to broadcast even outside of just Tuesdays) or giving space for the media to setup to cover parliament.
Also, historically, camera surveillance wasn't quite as omnipresent in Scotland, though that seems to be changing, based on the last time I was in Edinburgh.
I'd have to agree with some of the other comments: the data doesn't seem to add up (even accepting their evaluation criteria at face value), and there do seem to be strange omissions (e.g. the lack of looking at police surveillance cameras as an issue).
That said, this is an issue worth worrying about, and a half-broken metric is at least a start.
I suppose no one "needs" that resolution any more than anyone "needs" any particular resolution. That said, my primary display is 2560x1600, so I suppose, yes, I "need" more than 19x12. Could I get by with less? Sure. I can "get by" with my 1.6 GHz Atom Netbook opening browser windows sllloooowly. That doesn't mean I don't want to use my 3.0 GHz quad-core Penryn desktop when I can.
Hell, what are you going to play on it anyways - all the MMORPG's are still designed to run on 5 year old hardware
Vanguard, Saga of Heroes, a Feb 2007 Sony MMORPG, chokes on anything much less than a bleeding edge video card and PC if you're trying to raid with 24 people and have decent graphics quality. That's not at 19x12, or even 16x12; that's at resolutions like 1280x1024. True, if you just want to play the game and group, you can get by quite happily on a $500 PC. If you want to raid with horrible graphics quality, you can get by on a well under $1000 PC. If you want decent graphics quality, aye, there's the rub.
That's a 2-year-old MMO from a major MMO company that manifestly is not designed to "run well" on 5 year old hardware. There are others like it.
This much is true: cards like this may sharply narrow the need (and hence market) for purchasing (high end) enthusiast cards. Indeed, beyond that, ultimately (2015?) we may well find that integrated graphics are good enough for 95% of the non-casual gaming market. If that happens it will be a startling transformation, especially for NVidia.
I'm not sure if your response is meant to be funny, but if so, the joke escapes me.
Wasn't Cat 6 in any meaningful sense. As I said, I installed this over a decade ago. Stuff like ANSI/TIA-568-B.2-1 dates to ~2001.
I've an old 10baseT tester I can use for basic continuity checks; that works just fine for my personal use and helping out friends. Why would I buy a 10 gig tester? What possible use 99.9999% of the time would I have for such a thing, given that I don't do cable installs for a living? I was curious and wanted to see if my > 10 y.o. cable could handle the next speed jump. Of course I borrowed it.
As for the indoor pool, I swim every day. So does my family. Given that I run the heating system with heat pumps, make extensive use of passive solar energy and live in an area with harsh winters and a generally hydro/nuclear grid, it makes sense for me while remaining as environmentally friendly an option as such a thing can.
I don't test cable runs for 10 gig every day or even every year.
I thought (and think) the peculiar challenges of decade-old cable and terminals in a higher humidity, higher saline/chlorine environment were of relevance to a discussion of cable longevity.
Foresight certainly helps. I wired my home twelve years ago with 622 Mbit/s teflon-coated copper twisted-pair ATM wiring. It was the best I could easily (and cheaply since it was left over from a large commercial project) obtain. Except as noted below, since then, I've detect no material degradation in cable testing, and, needless to say, it handled the leaps from 10 Mbit/s (1997) to 100 Mbit/s (2002) to 1 Gbit/s (2009) with no difficulties.
According to a new (borrowed) cable tester, all the runs look capable of sustained 10 Gbit/s.
At current rate of progress in speed that should take me at least to 2021 before I start noticing that I'm no longer keeping up.
Of course with my luck, in my area, broadband will still probably be 10 Mbit/s and capped at 90 GB/month.
In my (admittedly limited) observations, you can have about four sources for run destruction: 1. Work hardening and breaking due to excessively sharp bending. (Be careful on insulation, and teflon coating = nice -- makes cable much harder to bend sharply)
2. Oxidation problems especially at the terminal. I've had terminal problems with wiring in an indoor pool area (vapour barrier separating it from rest of the home). Salt water + generated chlorine seem not to like metal in general. People unlucky enough to have installed the Chinese contaminated drywall might have similar problems.
3. Tension on cable (especially at terminal). Buildings shift, flex, settle, and twist. And not just in earthquakes. Competent installation helps here, especially if you have to redo a corroded terminal and need more run length.
4. Renovation. Whether it's a nail through the wall, a drill in the wrong place, mistakes can happen.
5. Animals. Squirrels getting into the attic managing to destroy infrastructure in a friend's house.
I've not had problems with (1), (3), (4), (5) but friends have. I would assume (5) is not a big danger in most office environments, but one never knows. As I say, my experience is primarily limited to my home and those of friends who've also wired up. And my sole problems have been at the termination point, not with cabling itself.
My advice is... buy good quality cabling -- better quality than you need. Don't get your installs done by cowboys, and try to think ahead.
Tough advice sometimes to follow when you don't control the budget.
You need to read the article. This has nothing to do with Blu-Ray, and everything to do with video sold by Apple's iTunes store coupled with OS-X and a new mac.
i.e., Apple has deliberately chosen to embrace DRM that at the moment is significantly more draconian than what's running on a typical Windows Vista box. Amazing.
(I run Vista 64 and 64-bit Ubuntu and use legal 1080p content in Vista and have never yet had the issues described in TFA. Blu-Ray doesn't currently mandate HDCP. (One can expect that to change). That said, I don't buy content from iTunes; I do have both a non-HDCP compliant monitor and one that is.)
I'm no fan of MS, but it is bizarrely ironic that Vista, much trashed for DRM, is actually at the moment less restrictive than Apple.
No, I'm taking the benefit of my observations on the matter as I saw some of it unfolding on 4chan, before the 404. Unlike nearly everyone writing here. I have a very good idea of the validity of the cited quote. Moreover, the emails were reprinted fairly widely and I read them on an alternative media site.
So based on what I observed, there is no there there.
There was nothing in them that any sane person would construe as state business. Talking about election plans and partisan coverage is emphatically not state business; it's a party political matter. Sending family photos is, again, not state business.
On the federal level doing the former would be against the law. In the case of Alaska, I've no idea, but it was probably very prudent to have a non-state account for family and partisan matters, and in many states she'd be breaking the law if she didn't do so.
Now, as to your bizarre invocation of the Alaska Public Records Act, you're arguing what, exactly? Alaska has amongst the worst legal status for public records going, legislatively speaking. It's terrible in execution as well. This has nothing particularly to do with Palin; it's been like this for decades. Is it something she could be faulted for not cleaning up faster? Perhaps. I've no brief either way for her as Governor.
But the APRA has nothing to do with family photos of her kids, complaints about media coverage of Republicans, and discussions of election campaigns. Nothing.
To suggest otherwise is to simply live in a fantasy world.
it's hard to miss that there were several emails marked "CONFIDENTIAL" and discussing government matters.
Name them. There were indeed confidential emails. That's not a crime. There were emails that discussed election matters, but not emails that discussed state business. Unless you're going to count the rather silly "OMG I think you're awesome" email. If so, then every single congress member and executive in the country is guilty.
I'm glad we agree the individual should be prosecuted. I think anyone who does that to a Democrat, a Republican, or an ordinary citizens' email should feel the full force and weight of the law. Sadly, this kind of thing goes on all the time and it's only because of the prominence of this case that this is moving that fast.
It's also a lesson on how appallingly bad Yahoo security is.
Interesting. So if I hack Barack Obama's email account that's peachy keen with you? How about if I tap his phone? Break into his computer? Install a keylogger? Spy in his windows at night?
Spend ten or twenty million and I can do that to every major elected representative in the country. George Soros on the left would have no problem doing it to the Republicans, and Richard Mellon Scaife would have no problem doing it to the Democrats. You're fine with that?
Now add in people running for office. Or thinking about running for office.
You're really fine with that?
No one is above the law. No one is beneath it, either, not even politicians.
Except she wasn't conducting business illegally, and I'm puzzled as to why you'd falsely post that as a justification for an immoral and illegal act. As the hacker Rubico apparently said:
Earlier it was just some prank to me, I really wanted to get something incriminating which I was sure there would be, just like all of you anon out there that you think there was some missed opportunity of glory, well there WAS NOTHING, I read everything, every little blackberry confirmation⦠all the pictures, and there was nothing
Personally, I prefer Tina Fey to Sarah Palin, but the emails I saw reprinted, while to political colleagues, were the kind that would be illegal (at least at the federal level) to send using government email accounts. For instance, she talked about her Lt-Governor's election campaign. Doing that kind of business on state accounts is a no-no.
But even if all that were not true, you're saying it's just fine to hack into someone's personal email account because you suspect they are guilty of something. So it's fine for the police to do that to you? You must love the Patriot Act and think it doesn't go remotely far enough.
Call that 1984.
Even if Palin had improperly conducted state business on yahoo (which would be stupid and illegal), hacking her email account is still immoral and illegal. I'm surprised that many people who normally are pro-freedom turn out to have very situational ethics when it comes to people they regard as political enemies. As others have said in this thread, a guy called Richard Nixon seemed to think that way.
There is other software -- DVD Decrypter was one popular piece of software. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_Decrypter ) In the US, it may or may not be illegal under the DMCA to use such programs to back up your own DVDs. The only controlling legal authority I'm aware of said that doing so was legal, provided it was for personal use, but that distributing software to make this possible was illegal.
Well, where do you get 20 AA or AAA lithium ion batteries?
You don't, typically because these operate at 3.7 V per cell instead of the nominal 1.2 (NiMH) or 1.5V (alkaline) per cell of more conventional batteries.
Moreover, putting Lithium Ion batteries in a conventional charger might cause the cell to catch on fire.
So if you want to keep everyone using bog-standard AA/AAA batteries, you're locking yourself out of the best battery technology.
Not, in my view, a great idea.
There's often a sound engineering reason why some things are done in ways that seem peculiar at first glance.
This business of impulse purchasing has a lot of (ironic in the case of this developer) truth to it.
I just bought three of the developer's games (Kudos, Democracy 2, and Rock Legend). And now I want to pirate the games.
Why?
Because his order fulfillment processor tells me I have to wait up to 48 hours to be able to get access to digitally download the games I've purchased.
That's just madness. I'm left with a bitter taste in my mouth and quite annoyed. I've never seen an online order system like that.
I will not only go look for copies of the games I bought to download (technically illegally), but I will probably not purchase games again from him, because I now know he uses an order processor that wishes to play games with customers rather than sell games to customers.
(I won't cancel my order, or download games of his that I haven't purchased, but I certainly won't go through a system where I have to wait days to get access to a digital download).
Petty on my part? Perhaps. But I work hard during the week and have limited gaming time -- and that only on weekends. If I can't play for some hours on a Sunday, that delays things a week or more for me.
Slashdot Mirror
Jade Empire, Mass Effect 1, Dragon Age, Mass Effect 2 are four that don't seem to suffer from the specific problems cited above at the time I write this.(i.e. bad translation of controls). I don't much like the minigames in ME1, but that's not a console issue.
Fable was fine IIRC. Fahrenheit -- didn't like the control schema, but it was translated properly to PC IIRC.
That's your half dozen right there, and just off the top of my head. (Granted, a lot are from Bioware). The problem isn't universal; some developers and publishers seem to care about doing a decent port and some don't.
The Milestone's based on an ARM Cortex A8 running at 600 MHz. It's probably the slowest-clocked of the "new" superphones. (For Americans, it's a Motorola Droid for Europe and Canada with some small software and SKU differences).
The Dingoo A320, according to the font of all wisdom, Wikipedia, is underclocked to 336MHz.
Last I looked, ARM seemed to have a definite edge in memory bandwidth, and had instructions aimed at handling media-rich applications much better than MIPS. I could, of course, be out of date on that.
So at an educated guess, I wouldn't expect your Dingoo to be able to touch a modern superphone. (Maybe at best a quarter of the processing power assuming Neon optimizations?) Of course if the Dingoo's screen is low enough resolution, then that may not matter as much.
I agree the parent is a troll, but not a very good one. From the very second sentence of the linked post:
When you troll without even bothering to read two sentences of what's linked that's just... sad.
Moreover, the iPhone falls significantly short in one area: the N900 runs at 800x480, and the Milestone/Droid at 854x480. The iPhone is presumably pushing ~37% of the number of pixels. (Assuming the game is running at native resolution on all 3 platforms). If so, fairly impressive pixel-pushing for the other two platforms.
If you read the fine article, you'll see they give a sample image you can test against your applications. I tested Irfanview (4.25) and it appears to suffer from the problem. Haven't tried Picasa yet; don't have it installed.
I'm using Ubuntu as a guest OS on Windows 7. Doesn't work. Going there directly via IE8/Win 7 (Host OS) it doesn't work either. (TFA is fine; it's the post on microsoftontheissues.com that won't load).
It would be pretty amusing if Microsoft designed a website hosting a blog that discusses browser choice to not function properly with Linux-hosted browsers.
The philosophy [of] Starship Troopers is so easy to destroy?
Really?
Two of the tenets of that book were (a) all volunteer armed forces; (b) everyone who volunteered for combat service, and served, got to vote. No exceptions.
You'll note the protagonist of that novel was Hispanic, and the protagonist of Tunnel in the Sky was black. Not exactly common for the 1950's.
He wrote Starship Troopers in 1959, in an age prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, where many black veterans had been routinely deprived of the vote in the south. He wrote some years before the disaster of the Vietnam War where kids were drafted to serve and die in a decidedly non-volunteer force.
It might be easy to look back today and decry Heinlein's work, but I'm not so sure the philosophy his characters articulate is so "easy to destroy" as you think it is.
Unless of course one is all about racism and conscription. In which case, carry on.
-Holmwood
First round contestants on American Idol? Like, say the artist that originally attracted me to Magnatune, Lara St. John?
St John is a very talented violinist; her Bach: The Six Sonatas and Partitas for Violin Solo was iTunes' best selling double album in 2007, an interesting achievement for a classical artist. The NY Times thought highly of her, and she currently plays a superb 1779 Guadagnini: arguably one of the most notable in the world. (Previously she played a Stradivarius).
But yeah, that's basically just like a first round contestant on American Idol I guess.
Quality does vary, as with any outlet, but I've generally found it to be quite high on Magnatune.
The parent is correct in pointing out the fascinating Nokia device. However, the Nokia 770 hasn't been manufactured for at least a year; it was replaced by the Nokia N800. The N810 is an N800 with slideout keyboard, GPS, etc. The N800 is probably the best choice for a very small reading device that also browses the web superbly.
That said, the screen is a slight bit smaller than the OP's requirements; it's ~4.1". But at 800x480, it yields 275 dpi which is very, very nice for an LCD-based device to read text from.
The N800/N810, despite coming from Nokia are not phones. They are essentially powerful desktop computers from the late 1990's reduced to palm size (~8 ounces). 400 MHz ARM processor, 256 MB RAM, up to 64 GB of storage (2 SDHC slots), 4.1" 800x480x16bit screen, runs a loosely Debian-based Linux distribution called Maemo.
It plays Youtube videos, and can play back DVD-quality DivX/Xvid (MPEG 4 pt 2 ASP) video without transcoding. It has a built-in PDF reader, and FBReader is an excellent free reader available for a wide variety of other formats.
Battery life is on the order of 4-5 hours, and unlike Apple devices the batteries are user swappable. I have a spare that gives my N800 close to 10 hours of powered-on life. (In sleep mode, the device sips power; I've had mine sleeping for days without running out of power.)
I find it generally excellent for daytime use, though I agree with the parent that e-ink devices are a little better for text in daylight, but all I've tried (Kindle, Sony) are inferior for PDF's and web browsing.
Not exactly. RTFA. Unix was originally written in assembler on a PDP-7 in 1969. Thompson developed B, and some Unix development continued using B on the PDP-7. Ritchie developed a successor, C, finishing in 1972; in 1973 Thompson ported most of the Unix kernel to C on a PDP-11.
So C wasn't developed to "create" Unix; Unix was a precursor. C was indeed designed for implementing system software though.
Brian Kernighan -- the K of K&R got involved in C development later, and was indeed one of the two authors of the seminal K&R.
Well she is one unmarried justice nominated to replace another unmarried justice (Souter). Not that there's anything wrong with that!
Unless she is gay, I'm not entirely certain that's a good thing. Washington can be a lonely place and without a spouse/significant other, it can be draining. That said, she functions fine as a Judge on the second circuit, and it's really not anyone's business.
In Barack Obama's book, The Audacity of Hope, Ronald Reagan is indeed a President he was impressed by -- because Reagan was in Barack Obama's words, "transformative". It's not at all clear, from reading AoH, that he was positively impressed. I wouldn't remotely say that Reagan was his favourite President. True, he didn't trash Reagan, but why would he? He had solid credentials on the left flank of the Democratic party, and wanted to win over right-wing Democrats, wavering Republicans, and independents.
And no, Obama isn't a "corporate centrist" in the mold of George W. Bush. A moderate socialist seems to fit, though Americans seem terrified of that term. So call him a Social Democrat in European terms in his approach to the economy. His Keynesian pump-priming is pretty moderate by 1960's and 1970's standards, though radical by 1980's and 1990's standards. (After Bush's heavy deficit spending, I don't think one can as easily call Obama that radical by 00's standards).
For good or ill, you'll see a lot more redistribution of wealth under Obama, most of it from generations to come via a huge series of "stimulative" deficits.
If you see that as being a corporate centrist in the Bush/Cheney mold, then you might be fairly far left -- or fairly far right.
As others above have noted, one area where I don't see a lot of difference is this: Dick Cheney is the number 1 defender of George W. Bush's foreign and military policy by speeches; Barack Obama is the number 1 defender of that same policy by deeds.
That is not what anyone expected, left or right.
-Holmwood
This is not a troll, and should not be modded as such. The poster has an accessible (spam-protected) email address that I assume is valid. S/He's been posting a long time on slashdot, and his/her assertion is credible and interesting, albeit provocative.
Moreover, I'm inclined to agree with my own caveat: while one can write C that is more rapid than LISP, one can also more rapidly write LISP than C (for a given problem).
I also note my earlier statement, that it's easier (though still quite hard) to find a talented C programmer than a talented LISP programmer.
First, his blog is standing up to a slashdotting. That's impressive.
Dunno about you, buddy, but I find LISP a lot easier to read and write
Right, but we're not talking about you. I wish we were. If your skills were more common we'd have a better world.
Second, I can speak up and I'm not even posting as an ac. It's straightforward to find people who can "program" in a language of their choice. It's tougher to find people who can program well in a language of their choice. It's tougher yet to find people who can program well in a language of your choice. It's very tough to find someone who can code well in C and insanely tough to find someone who can code well in LISP.
It's been my observation -- as someone who has managed to convince many others that he deserves the salary of an "uberprogrammer" -- as I've shifted into running large engineering teams, that perhaps one in twenty programmers can code acceptably in C and perhaps one in two hundred in LISP.
Third, I'd note there are behaviours of his software that surprised and annoyed some readers -- e.g. column treatment. I'd argue that these are generally buried deeper in LISP code than in C, but that's something we could heartily debate.
Finally, his code seems typical of what I've seen from good LISP programmers -- including even at times myself. Poor documentation. The code is simple, elegant, and should "speak for itself". Well it doesn't. Not to someone trying to maintain it.
C programmers -- perhaps because of the nature of the language -- seem less prone to this particular trap, though still bad.
Regards,
-Holmwood
Canada similarly has these things, including a 24/7 channel (both French and English versions) that covers Parliament when in session; indeed they go well beyond that and cover major Parliamentary committees. See cpac.ca
That's not the issue; the issue, as the article notes, is that crown copyright pertains to committee meetings. (Unlike in the US where this video is generally public domain). The linked article notes that MPs generally seem to be concerned that people will use their utterances against them for satire, for attack ads, or to promulgate a particular policy viewpoint. They are seeking to be as aggressive as possible in using copyright to takedown material they disagree with.
Too bad for the MPs, in my view. Unfortunately, the way the rules (and law) are at the moment, they've got a lot of tools to back up their perspective.
But again, this has nothing whatsoever to do with a parliamentary channel (Canada's manages to broadcast even outside of just Tuesdays) or giving space for the media to setup to cover parliament.
Scotland has a different legal system from England and Wales. See here for example. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_law
Also, historically, camera surveillance wasn't quite as omnipresent in Scotland, though that seems to be changing, based on the last time I was in Edinburgh.
I'd have to agree with some of the other comments: the data doesn't seem to add up (even accepting their evaluation criteria at face value), and there do seem to be strange omissions (e.g. the lack of looking at police surveillance cameras as an issue).
That said, this is an issue worth worrying about, and a half-broken metric is at least a start.
I suppose no one "needs" that resolution any more than anyone "needs" any particular resolution. That said, my primary display is 2560x1600, so I suppose, yes, I "need" more than 19x12. Could I get by with less? Sure. I can "get by" with my 1.6 GHz Atom Netbook opening browser windows sllloooowly. That doesn't mean I don't want to use my 3.0 GHz quad-core Penryn desktop when I can.
Vanguard, Saga of Heroes, a Feb 2007 Sony MMORPG, chokes on anything much less than a bleeding edge video card and PC if you're trying to raid with 24 people and have decent graphics quality. That's not at 19x12, or even 16x12; that's at resolutions like 1280x1024. True, if you just want to play the game and group, you can get by quite happily on a $500 PC. If you want to raid with horrible graphics quality, you can get by on a well under $1000 PC. If you want decent graphics quality, aye, there's the rub.
That's a 2-year-old MMO from a major MMO company that manifestly is not designed to "run well" on 5 year old hardware. There are others like it.
This much is true: cards like this may sharply narrow the need (and hence market) for purchasing (high end) enthusiast cards. Indeed, beyond that, ultimately (2015?) we may well find that integrated graphics are good enough for 95% of the non-casual gaming market. If that happens it will be a startling transformation, especially for NVidia.
I'm not sure if your response is meant to be funny, but if so, the joke escapes me.
Wasn't Cat 6 in any meaningful sense. As I said, I installed this over a decade ago. Stuff like ANSI/TIA-568-B.2-1 dates to ~2001.
I've an old 10baseT tester I can use for basic continuity checks; that works just fine for my personal use and helping out friends. Why would I buy a 10 gig tester? What possible use 99.9999% of the time would I have for such a thing, given that I don't do cable installs for a living? I was curious and wanted to see if my > 10 y.o. cable could handle the next speed jump. Of course I borrowed it.
As for the indoor pool, I swim every day. So does my family. Given that I run the heating system with heat pumps, make extensive use of passive solar energy and live in an area with harsh winters and a generally hydro/nuclear grid, it makes sense for me while remaining as environmentally friendly an option as such a thing can.
I don't test cable runs for 10 gig every day or even every year.
I thought (and think) the peculiar challenges of decade-old cable and terminals in a higher humidity, higher saline/chlorine environment were of relevance to a discussion of cable longevity.
Cheers,
-Holmwood
Foresight certainly helps. I wired my home twelve years ago with 622 Mbit/s teflon-coated copper twisted-pair ATM wiring. It was the best I could easily (and cheaply since it was left over from a large commercial project) obtain. Except as noted below, since then, I've detect no material degradation in cable testing, and, needless to say, it handled the leaps from 10 Mbit/s (1997) to 100 Mbit/s (2002) to 1 Gbit/s (2009) with no difficulties.
According to a new (borrowed) cable tester, all the runs look capable of sustained 10 Gbit/s.
At current rate of progress in speed that should take me at least to 2021 before I start noticing that I'm no longer keeping up.
Of course with my luck, in my area, broadband will still probably be 10 Mbit/s and capped at 90 GB/month.
In my (admittedly limited) observations, you can have about four sources for run destruction:
1. Work hardening and breaking due to excessively sharp bending. (Be careful on insulation, and teflon coating = nice -- makes cable much harder to bend sharply)
2. Oxidation problems especially at the terminal. I've had terminal problems with wiring in an indoor pool area (vapour barrier separating it from rest of the home). Salt water + generated chlorine seem not to like metal in general. People unlucky enough to have installed the Chinese contaminated drywall might have similar problems.
3. Tension on cable (especially at terminal). Buildings shift, flex, settle, and twist. And not just in earthquakes. Competent installation helps here, especially if you have to redo a corroded terminal and need more run length.
4. Renovation. Whether it's a nail through the wall, a drill in the wrong place, mistakes can happen.
5. Animals. Squirrels getting into the attic managing to destroy infrastructure in a friend's house.
I've not had problems with (1), (3), (4), (5) but friends have. I would assume (5) is not a big danger in most office environments, but one never knows. As I say, my experience is primarily limited to my home and those of friends who've also wired up. And my sole problems have been at the termination point, not with cabling itself.
My advice is... buy good quality cabling -- better quality than you need. Don't get your installs done by cowboys, and try to think ahead.
Tough advice sometimes to follow when you don't control the budget.
-Holmwood
You need to read the article. This has nothing to do with Blu-Ray, and everything to do with video sold by Apple's iTunes store coupled with OS-X and a new mac.
i.e., Apple has deliberately chosen to embrace DRM that at the moment is significantly more draconian than what's running on a typical Windows Vista box. Amazing.
(I run Vista 64 and 64-bit Ubuntu and use legal 1080p content in Vista and have never yet had the issues described in TFA. Blu-Ray doesn't currently mandate HDCP. (One can expect that to change). That said, I don't buy content from iTunes; I do have both a non-HDCP compliant monitor and one that is.)
I'm no fan of MS, but it is bizarrely ironic that Vista, much trashed for DRM, is actually at the moment less restrictive than Apple.
Go figure.
No, I'm taking the benefit of my observations on the matter as I saw some of it unfolding on 4chan, before the 404. Unlike nearly everyone writing here. I have a very good idea of the validity of the cited quote. Moreover, the emails were reprinted fairly widely and I read them on an alternative media site.
So based on what I observed, there is no there there.
There was nothing in them that any sane person would construe as state business. Talking about election plans and partisan coverage is emphatically not state business; it's a party political matter. Sending family photos is, again, not state business.
On the federal level doing the former would be against the law. In the case of Alaska, I've no idea, but it was probably very prudent to have a non-state account for family and partisan matters, and in many states she'd be breaking the law if she didn't do so.
Now, as to your bizarre invocation of the Alaska Public Records Act, you're arguing what, exactly? Alaska has amongst the worst legal status for public records going, legislatively speaking. It's terrible in execution as well. This has nothing particularly to do with Palin; it's been like this for decades. Is it something she could be faulted for not cleaning up faster? Perhaps. I've no brief either way for her as Governor.
But the APRA has nothing to do with family photos of her kids, complaints about media coverage of Republicans, and discussions of election campaigns. Nothing.
To suggest otherwise is to simply live in a fantasy world.
Name them. There were indeed confidential emails. That's not a crime. There were emails that discussed election matters, but not emails that discussed state business. Unless you're going to count the rather silly "OMG I think you're awesome" email. If so, then every single congress member and executive in the country is guilty.
I'm glad we agree the individual should be prosecuted. I think anyone who does that to a Democrat, a Republican, or an ordinary citizens' email should feel the full force and weight of the law. Sadly, this kind of thing goes on all the time and it's only because of the prominence of this case that this is moving that fast.
It's also a lesson on how appallingly bad Yahoo security is.
Interesting. So if I hack Barack Obama's email account that's peachy keen with you? How about if I tap his phone? Break into his computer? Install a keylogger? Spy in his windows at night?
Spend ten or twenty million and I can do that to every major elected representative in the country. George Soros on the left would have no problem doing it to the Republicans, and Richard Mellon Scaife would have no problem doing it to the Democrats. You're fine with that?
Now add in people running for office. Or thinking about running for office.
You're really fine with that?
No one is above the law. No one is beneath it, either, not even politicians.
Except she wasn't conducting business illegally, and I'm puzzled as to why you'd falsely post that as a justification for an immoral and illegal act. As the hacker Rubico apparently said:
See, for example, here:
http://michellemalkin.com/2008/09/17/the-story-behind-the-palin-e-mail-hacking/
Personally, I prefer Tina Fey to Sarah Palin, but the emails I saw reprinted, while to political colleagues, were the kind that would be illegal (at least at the federal level) to send using government email accounts. For instance, she talked about her Lt-Governor's election campaign. Doing that kind of business on state accounts is a no-no.
But even if all that were not true, you're saying it's just fine to hack into someone's personal email account because you suspect they are guilty of something. So it's fine for the police to do that to you? You must love the Patriot Act and think it doesn't go remotely far enough.
Call that 1984.
Even if Palin had improperly conducted state business on yahoo (which would be stupid and illegal), hacking her email account is still immoral and illegal. I'm surprised that many people who normally are pro-freedom turn out to have very situational ethics when it comes to people they regard as political enemies. As others have said in this thread, a guy called Richard Nixon seemed to think that way.
There is other software -- DVD Decrypter was one popular piece of software. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_Decrypter ) In the US, it may or may not be illegal under the DMCA to use such programs to back up your own DVDs. The only controlling legal authority I'm aware of said that doing so was legal, provided it was for personal use, but that distributing software to make this possible was illegal.
Go figure.
Well, where do you get 20 AA or AAA lithium ion batteries?
You don't, typically because these operate at 3.7 V per cell instead of the nominal 1.2 (NiMH) or 1.5V (alkaline) per cell of more conventional batteries.
Moreover, putting Lithium Ion batteries in a conventional charger might cause the cell to catch on fire.
So if you want to keep everyone using bog-standard AA/AAA batteries, you're locking yourself out of the best battery technology.
Not, in my view, a great idea.
There's often a sound engineering reason why some things are done in ways that seem peculiar at first glance.
This business of impulse purchasing has a lot of (ironic in the case of this developer) truth to it.
I just bought three of the developer's games (Kudos, Democracy 2, and Rock Legend). And now I want to pirate the games.
Why?
Because his order fulfillment processor tells me I have to wait up to 48 hours to be able to get access to digitally download the games I've purchased.
That's just madness. I'm left with a bitter taste in my mouth and quite annoyed. I've never seen an online order system like that.
I will not only go look for copies of the games I bought to download (technically illegally), but I will probably not purchase games again from him, because I now know he uses an order processor that wishes to play games with customers rather than sell games to customers.
(I won't cancel my order, or download games of his that I haven't purchased, but I certainly won't go through a system where I have to wait days to get access to a digital download).
Petty on my part? Perhaps. But I work hard during the week and have limited gaming time -- and that only on weekends. If I can't play for some hours on a Sunday, that delays things a week or more for me.
So much for an 'impulse' purchase.
That's my take.