Why are people so upset about this? As someone who has gone through the UK education system, I have this to say:
A lot of nasty things happened during World War 2. Lets list a small number of the nasty unnecessary civilian casulties during that war in no particular order...
Death of 6 million European Jews by Germany
Death of 20 million Russian Christians by Germany
Death of 90% of European Muslims by Germany
Deaths of unknown millions of Europeans who did not fit "Ayrian" ideals
Death of millions of Japanese civilians by American Nuclear weapons
Deaths of many who surrendered to the Japanese
Deaths of a few million German civilians by British bombings
Nasty stuff happens in wars. Civilians get killed. More civilians are killed every week in Iraq than who died violently on September 11, 2001 in New York.
As long as they don't deny that all sides did do nasty stuff during wars, I don't see why any one group should be put on a pedestal and singled out for special treatment.
. Or the fact that Word looks pretty simlar to that of Wordperfect.
As far as I know, the first commercial Windows wordprocessor was Ami, made by Samna... which was subsequently bought out by Lotus which eventually evolved into Lotus Ami Pro 3.
IMHO, Ami Pro 3 was the best wordprocessor ever available for PCs. Powerful, simple to use, was not attempting to ape anyone else's products.
Somewhere along the way, Lotus lost the plot with WordPro. They attempted to make it feel more like Microsoft Word (which itself was a poor clone of Ami).
It is reasonably well known that atmospheric particulate pollution reduces the amount of the Sun's radiation which reaches the surface and is also able to reflect more radiation back into space. Such effects, called "Nuclear Winter" are theorized but there is very strong evidence that huge volcanic eruptions do chill the whole planet dispite putting out an extremely large volume of greenhouse gases.
So what can we do to reverse Global Warming?
1. Remove particle filters, especially ESD-type filters, from our coal and oil burning power stations. This will help increase the amount of fine particles in the atmosphere and will also help reduce carcenogenic dioxin output from those power stations.
2. Switch to Diesel! Our petrol/gas vehicles just don't put out enough carbon particles. Electric vehicles are ok as long as the electricity is sourced from a coal or oil burning power station which has already had its filters removed.
3. Burn waste in your back yard! Stop filling landfills and burn the junk. This reduces the amount of land wastefully used to store our waste and help put more particles in the atmosphere. Burying waste only leads to greenhouse gas emissions while they decompose.
We have unwittingly been doing well for ourselves - globally, the amount of radiation reaching the Earth's surface has been reduced by more than 10% over the last 50 years due to atmospheric particle pollution. Okay, there are a few downsides, a few impoverished nations will suffer crop failure when the global weather patterns change but we are saving the planet from becoming another Venus!
(I wonder if anyone will take this seriously? Well, there is some valid science. Look up "global dimming". LMAO)
The summary does not mention that the alpha only supports x86 platforms... ie, on Linux, it may be compiled for 80486 and better 32 bit IA32 compatible microprocessors, and Intel EM32T compatible 64bit microprocessors such as the AMD's Athlon 64 family and of course the newer non-Itaniam 64bit Intel microprocessors. Support for other families of microprocessors, such as PowerPC and Sparc will come later.
It is easy to defraud someone who is attempting to "buy your vote"... all you have to do is look up in the database for someone who voted in your district the way the "customer" wants and give them that key... meanwhile, you do not need to tell anyone what your real key was. If you want to improve the security - make it such that the 'key' is issued at the polling station - and the voter may write down a copy of the key on some pen/paper that the voter brings along. That way, there is no "official" piece of paper with your key on it - which will allow you to provide anyone else with someone else's key which you obtained by browsing the database. Everyone is happy - the individual gets to vote however they choose and the moneybags who wants to steer the election can buy "votes".
Don't worry... Tesco will soon be coming to a town near you.
Tesco is building a new large distribution facility somewhere in Long Beach, CA... and plans to open up a few Tesco superstores in at least the Los Angeles area. There is one location I know which is very likely to become a Tesco because Gigante failed to get town planning permission for the site.
Tesco is not the only UK company planning a US invasion: BP is already well established in the US - operating under the Arco brand name. J Sainsburys is examining entering the US market, as is Boots. In fact, Boots is already retailing some of their own branded products through Target stores (IIRC, a French owned company) in a test of the market. Woolworths is examining reentering the US market... W.H.Smiths, Waitrose and Safeway are already in the USA in some capacity.
Now that modern solder does not have any lead in it, we should expect these kinds of failure more often. Pure tin has a nasty habit of extruding tiny tin wiskers which can cause shorting and burnouts similar to what happened to this hard drive.
The solution is simple - add lead to the solder.
But we know that isn't going to happen with the current environmental laws...
A good voting system should allow every individual to check that their vote was recorded correctly, so I propose the following:
Every time there is an election, a computer uses a randon number generator and some cryptographic one way cipher along with a individual's SSID to generate a unique voting 'key' - this key is then sent out to the voter with a computer readable and human readable (OCE) number.
Internet voting and voting at a polling station are no different, except that at a polling station, there is equipment which can read the 'key' automatically.
All the votes are verified cryptographically before they are inserted into a database.
The database is publically readable - some web site - where if you know the 'key;, you can check the vote (date time, candidate).
When the polls close, no more inserts into the database is permitted.
The votes are then counted electronically by ploughing through the database and the results are declared.
Individuals for several months, maybe even a year, after the polls close can check their vote in the database. The database may be compressed and burned onto a DVD for anyone to purchase and is made available at public libraries.
Due to the randon component used in creating the key and the one-way hash, there is no reasonable way to deduce who voted for whom without knowing their voting 'key'.
Voting keys are valid for one election only - and as they are signed, they can be verified as a valid key for a particular election.
Can anyone see any problem with this voting technique?
So what? If you're going to up the sampling rate why not go directly to 44khz stereo (CD quality audio) and be done with it? Jumping from the telephony industry standard 8khz to 16 khz is thoroughly uninspired.
16kHz is pretty similar to analog FM radio transmissions and people have been listening to music on that medium for a long time quite satisfactorily. Besides, if you want to have high fidility transmission of music over the internet, there is already pretty decent solutions with streaming ogg/mp3.
IMO 8kHz was fine for basic one to one voice conversations. 16kHz will be much better and less confusing when having conferences as it will be easier to differentiate between peoples voices.
Personal email at one point was getting so bad that I was concidering telling people to send me a fax instead of an email. I do have a fax machine so if it would come to that crunch, I have it in preparedness. It has an added bonus that people who send junk faxes can be easily prosecuted.
If you took the same tests as I did in the UK.... Yes, you will fail if you roll back on a hill start. You will also fail at a junction if you stop so close to the vehicle in front that you cannot see the tread on the tyres and are unable to gauge if the vehicle in front is rolling backwards.
Even in the UK, if you stop too close and the vehicle in front rolls back into you, you are in fault for being too close.
I remember when Microsoft Windows NT 4 was released with its new in-kernel video drivers. Critics of OS/2 were saying how much better it would be than OS/2 which had the video drivers working in user mode - as DLLs loaded by Presentation Manager.
Sad truth, although it was easily demonstrated that DIVE was faster than DirectX on the same hardware, practically no games were ever written for OS/2 with people citing the critics.
Hopefully with the new driver model, they can address one of DirectX's big shortcomings which has existed since its beginnings - blitting graphics with an obscuring window intersecting it. With DIVE, the fps increases as there is less pixels to blit. DirectX the performance goes down as it makes heavy work with many more kernel-mode/user-mode transitions. Of course, to solve this, Windows games opted for full-screen mode so that there will be no obscuring frames above the window... but it rather limits the multitasking ability of the system turining it into a fancy DOS.
When I used to play games, I rather enjoyed having the game run in a window next to my wordprocessor... Excellent for turn based games like Civilization.
Better to have a Guru Crew where The Bearded One would nochalantly strut near the recalcitrant hardware, lay a hand above it and suddenly, All Is Right within the world.
Of course, for the privilege of the visit, several hundred green ones would flow from one bank account to another.
This accountant predicted the crash which we have witnessed with Enron and has argued for years that Enron is not the only player who have been monkeying around with their accounts.
The 80386 microprocessor never shipped with an in-built maths co-processor in either the SX or DX models. The difference between the SX and the DX was that the SX had a 16bit external data bus and can address a maximum of 16MB of physical memory (much like the 80286). The DX had 32bit external data bus and could address 4GB of physical memory.
In a way, the 80386SX was to a 80386DX in the same way that an 8088 was to an 8086.
The i486 was the first to have an integrated maths co-processor and early i486sx was essentially the same silicon as the i486dx except with the maths coprocessor either both faulty and/or disabled. Some people did manage to enable the co-processor in the early i486sx part only to find it gave bad results. Later i486sx did come of their own production lines and physically lacked the co-processor logic. However, the i487 "maths co-processor" was essentially a full blown i486dx processor and some motherboard manufacturers found ways of enabling a i487 to work independently without requiring a i486sx present.
IBM's serial port drivers were a bit useless. Once you upgraded to a commercial serial driver, all serial port access was just great, in DOS box, VDM or native OS/2. I used the Ray Guinn's Fossil compatible OS/2 drivers (had a paid for license that my brother and I pooled together for). This also allowed us to use DOS BBS software, one modem per dos box, very happily.
As for terminal apps, I was very happy with TE/2.
Ahh... fond memories. But alas, all ancient history.
Right now, i am copying 4GB of files off a usb disk to a network share. The shell file copy stuff has been completely re-worked (shell file operations has always been something that i have hated)
In vista, you get an expand/collapse pane to get details of what it is doing, and it seems to happen in its own thread. The copy dialog window shows up as its own window that you can minimize/restore/whatever, and best of all, it doesn't hang/slow down the shell in any way.
Note that XP and OS X (as of 10.3) get this badly wrong - the file copy dialog in both tends to be slow to repaint itself or to respond to window messages, and if you use a separate explorer/finder window to try and access the destination you're copying to, the window lurches slowly to try and redraw.
Congratulations Microsoft! You have eventually caught up with OS/2 which had this back in 1992.
Only 14 years behind but then again, the Vista codebase is 6 years behind schedule anyways.
But computing the probability of being involved in an accident over a period of time is fiendishly difficult as the number of influencing factors increase expotentially.
You must agree that there is a limit as time increases as to the maximum probability of being involved in an automobile accident over the course of a lifetime (or as time --> infinity) and that probability cannot possibily equal or exceed 100%. On the other end of the scale, there is a minimum probability that in any instant in time that you may be actively involved in an accident, which conversely, must be greater than 0% - but would be a very small figure.
Then the probability of being in an accident generally lies between these two extremes and would depend upon what time of day you drive, what kind of car... and did you have breakfast this morning.
But in no way is it a simple task of adding up the probabilities to reach a number. It is a falsehood to say that "I drive less frequently than my neighbour therefore he will be in an accident before me." as it is omitting a huge number of variables.
And it is perfectly reasonable to do 100 coin flips on a fair coin, each time coming up heads. It is just an extraordinary combination of events, of which each individually has a 50:50 chance of occurring.
Slashdot Mirror
I honestly wasn't aware that there were any newspapers in America.
I thought that they were all tabloids.
A lot of nasty things happened during World War 2. Lets list a small number of the nasty unnecessary civilian casulties during that war in no particular order...
Nasty stuff happens in wars. Civilians get killed. More civilians are killed every week in Iraq than who died violently on September 11, 2001 in New York.
As long as they don't deny that all sides did do nasty stuff during wars, I don't see why any one group should be put on a pedestal and singled out for special treatment.
'nuff said.
(of course, all opinions are my own)
. Or the fact that Word looks pretty simlar to that of Wordperfect.
As far as I know, the first commercial Windows wordprocessor was Ami, made by Samna... which was subsequently bought out by Lotus which eventually evolved into Lotus Ami Pro 3.
IMHO, Ami Pro 3 was the best wordprocessor ever available for PCs. Powerful, simple to use, was not attempting to ape anyone else's products.
Somewhere along the way, Lotus lost the plot with WordPro. They attempted to make it feel more like Microsoft Word (which itself was a poor clone of Ami).
Elite has got to be one of my all-time favorite games. I spent many hours, first on a BBC Model B, then later on the PC version.
For those who loved Elite, check out Oolite http://oolite.aegidian.org/
It's reasonably faithful to the original... with a lot of enhancements.
Here is the solution to Global Warming...
It is reasonably well known that atmospheric particulate pollution reduces the amount of the Sun's radiation which reaches the surface and is also able to reflect more radiation back into space. Such effects, called "Nuclear Winter" are theorized but there is very strong evidence that huge volcanic eruptions do chill the whole planet dispite putting out an extremely large volume of greenhouse gases.
So what can we do to reverse Global Warming?
1. Remove particle filters, especially ESD-type filters, from our coal and oil burning power stations. This will help increase the amount of fine particles in the atmosphere and will also help reduce carcenogenic dioxin output from those power stations.
2. Switch to Diesel! Our petrol/gas vehicles just don't put out enough carbon particles. Electric vehicles are ok as long as the electricity is sourced from a coal or oil burning power station which has already had its filters removed.
3. Burn waste in your back yard! Stop filling landfills and burn the junk. This reduces the amount of land wastefully used to store our waste and help put more particles in the atmosphere. Burying waste only leads to greenhouse gas emissions while they decompose.
We have unwittingly been doing well for ourselves - globally, the amount of radiation reaching the Earth's surface has been reduced by more than 10% over the last 50 years due to atmospheric particle pollution. Okay, there are a few downsides, a few impoverished nations will suffer crop failure when the global weather patterns change but we are saving the planet from becoming another Venus!
(I wonder if anyone will take this seriously? Well, there is some valid science. Look up "global dimming". LMAO)
The summary does not mention that the alpha only supports x86 platforms... ie, on Linux, it may be compiled for 80486 and better 32 bit IA32 compatible microprocessors, and Intel EM32T compatible 64bit microprocessors such as the AMD's Athlon 64 family and of course the newer non-Itaniam 64bit Intel microprocessors.
Support for other families of microprocessors, such as PowerPC and Sparc will come later.
It is easy to defraud someone who is attempting to "buy your vote"... all you have to do is look up in the database for someone who voted in your district the way the "customer" wants and give them that key... meanwhile, you do not need to tell anyone what your real key was.
If you want to improve the security - make it such that the 'key' is issued at the polling station - and the voter may write down a copy of the key on some pen/paper that the voter brings along. That way, there is no "official" piece of paper with your key on it - which will allow you to provide anyone else with someone else's key which you obtained by browsing the database.
Everyone is happy - the individual gets to vote however they choose and the moneybags who wants to steer the election can buy "votes".
I posted this on Slashdot a couple of months ago... How different is the concept?
= 15828335
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=192817&cid
Oops, SNAFU ... Safeway originated from the US
Don't worry... Tesco will soon be coming to a town near you.
Tesco is building a new large distribution facility somewhere in Long Beach, CA... and plans to open up a few Tesco superstores in at least the Los Angeles area. There is one location I know which is very likely to become a Tesco because Gigante failed to get town planning permission for the site.
Tesco is not the only UK company planning a US invasion: BP is already well established in the US - operating under the Arco brand name. J Sainsburys is examining entering the US market, as is Boots. In fact, Boots is already retailing some of their own branded products through Target stores (IIRC, a French owned company) in a test of the market. Woolworths is examining reentering the US market... W.H.Smiths, Waitrose and Safeway are already in the USA in some capacity.
Now that modern solder does not have any lead in it, we should expect these kinds of failure more often. Pure tin has a nasty habit of extruding tiny tin wiskers which can cause shorting and burnouts similar to what happened to this hard drive.
The solution is simple - add lead to the solder.
But we know that isn't going to happen with the current environmental laws...
Darn, I noticed a typo... Instead of "OCE", I meant "OCR" for "Optical Character Recognition".
A good voting system should allow every individual to check that their vote was recorded correctly, so I propose the following:
Every time there is an election, a computer uses a randon number generator and some cryptographic one way cipher along with a individual's SSID to generate a unique voting 'key' - this key is then sent out to the voter with a computer readable and human readable (OCE) number.
Internet voting and voting at a polling station are no different, except that at a polling station, there is equipment which can read the 'key' automatically.
All the votes are verified cryptographically before they are inserted into a database.
The database is publically readable - some web site - where if you know the 'key;, you can check the vote (date time, candidate).
When the polls close, no more inserts into the database is permitted.
The votes are then counted electronically by ploughing through the database and the results are declared.
Individuals for several months, maybe even a year, after the polls close can check their vote in the database. The database may be compressed and burned onto a DVD for anyone to purchase and is made available at public libraries.
Due to the randon component used in creating the key and the one-way hash, there is no reasonable way to deduce who voted for whom without knowing their voting 'key'.
Voting keys are valid for one election only - and as they are signed, they can be verified as a valid key for a particular election.
Can anyone see any problem with this voting technique?
16kHz is pretty similar to analog FM radio transmissions and people have been listening to music on that medium for a long time quite satisfactorily. Besides, if you want to have high fidility transmission of music over the internet, there is already pretty decent solutions with streaming ogg/mp3.
IMO 8kHz was fine for basic one to one voice conversations. 16kHz will be much better and less confusing when having conferences as it will be easier to differentiate between peoples voices.
Personal email at one point was getting so bad that I was concidering telling people to send me a fax instead of an email.
I do have a fax machine so if it would come to that crunch, I have it in preparedness. It has an added bonus that people who send junk faxes can be easily prosecuted.
"How can you tell when a Network exec is lying? His lips move."
Max Headroom.
No surprise that the first series was cancelled soon after that joke was aired... Cancelled mid-season too!
And they still haven't released any on DVD... and the old VHS releases have never been re-released recently.
It was a smart programme aimed at the thinking minority of consumers...
If you took the same tests as I did in the UK.... Yes, you will fail if you roll back on a hill start. You will also fail at a junction if you stop so close to the vehicle in front that you cannot see the tread on the tyres and are unable to gauge if the vehicle in front is rolling backwards.
Even in the UK, if you stop too close and the vehicle in front rolls back into you, you are in fault for being too close.
I remember when Microsoft Windows NT 4 was released with its new in-kernel video drivers. Critics of OS/2 were saying how much better it would be than OS/2 which had the video drivers working in user mode - as DLLs loaded by Presentation Manager.
... but it rather limits the multitasking ability of the system turining it into a fancy DOS.
Sad truth, although it was easily demonstrated that DIVE was faster than DirectX on the same hardware, practically no games were ever written for OS/2 with people citing the critics.
Hopefully with the new driver model, they can address one of DirectX's big shortcomings which has existed since its beginnings - blitting graphics with an obscuring window intersecting it. With DIVE, the fps increases as there is less pixels to blit. DirectX the performance goes down as it makes heavy work with many more kernel-mode/user-mode transitions. Of course, to solve this, Windows games opted for full-screen mode so that there will be no obscuring frames above the window
When I used to play games, I rather enjoyed having the game run in a window next to my wordprocessor... Excellent for turn based games like Civilization.
Better to have a Guru Crew where The Bearded One would nochalantly strut near the recalcitrant hardware, lay a hand above it and suddenly, All Is Right within the world.
Of course, for the privilege of the visit, several hundred green ones would flow from one bank account to another.
Never mind all the banter about the computing requirements - what video card or sound card...
What I really want to know is: What are the fiscal requirements of Microsoft Windows Vista?
Maybe a few years out of date but perhaps you should read the following article before you make any proclaimations about "Microsoft ... are no Enron".
http://www.billparish.com/msftfraudfacts.html
This accountant predicted the crash which we have witnessed with Enron and has argued for years that Enron is not the only player who have been monkeying around with their accounts.
(opinions are my own and not of anyone else)
The 80386 microprocessor never shipped with an in-built maths co-processor in either the SX or DX models. The difference between the SX and the DX was that the SX had a 16bit external data bus and can address a maximum of 16MB of physical memory (much like the 80286). The DX had 32bit external data bus and could address 4GB of physical memory.
In a way, the 80386SX was to a 80386DX in the same way that an 8088 was to an 8086.
The i486 was the first to have an integrated maths co-processor and early i486sx was essentially the same silicon as the i486dx except with the maths coprocessor either both faulty and/or disabled. Some people did manage to enable the co-processor in the early i486sx part only to find it gave bad results. Later i486sx did come of their own production lines and physically lacked the co-processor logic. However, the i487 "maths co-processor" was essentially a full blown i486dx processor and some motherboard manufacturers found ways of enabling a i487 to work independently without requiring a i486sx present.
Ahh, good old days.
IBM's serial port drivers were a bit useless. Once you upgraded to a commercial serial driver, all serial port access was just great, in DOS box, VDM or native OS/2. I used the Ray Guinn's Fossil compatible OS/2 drivers (had a paid for license that my brother and I pooled together for). This also allowed us to use DOS BBS software, one modem per dos box, very happily.
As for terminal apps, I was very happy with TE/2.
Ahh... fond memories. But alas, all ancient history.
Congratulations Microsoft! You have eventually caught up with OS/2 which had this back in 1992.
Only 14 years behind but then again, the Vista codebase is 6 years behind schedule anyways.
But computing the probability of being involved in an accident over a period of time is fiendishly difficult as the number of influencing factors increase expotentially.
You must agree that there is a limit as time increases as to the maximum probability of being involved in an automobile accident over the course of a lifetime (or as time --> infinity) and that probability cannot possibily equal or exceed 100%.
On the other end of the scale, there is a minimum probability that in any instant in time that you may be actively involved in an accident, which conversely, must be greater than 0% - but would be a very small figure.
Then the probability of being in an accident generally lies between these two extremes and would depend upon what time of day you drive, what kind of car... and did you have breakfast this morning.
But in no way is it a simple task of adding up the probabilities to reach a number. It is a falsehood to say that "I drive less frequently than my neighbour therefore he will be in an accident before me." as it is omitting a huge number of variables.
And it is perfectly reasonable to do 100 coin flips on a fair coin, each time coming up heads. It is just an extraordinary combination of events, of which each individually has a 50:50 chance of occurring.