"he/she, him/her, males and females, masculine and feminine"? Not she/he, her/him, females and males, feminine and masculine? So you're saying men should always come first are you?
Why don't you just get off/. and get back to beating your wife?
This is different from the ID crowd, who apparently feel that 'God did it' means you actively refuse to even think about the rules. Don't be stupid, plenty of scientists believe in God, me being one of them - though of course I'm primarily a Computer Scientist, but I find physics highly interesting. My uncle has a PhD in fluid dynamics and he's a Christian, and I know plenty of other Christians who defy your personal stereotype. He said "I.D. crowd", ie Creationists, not "Christians" (which don't really believe the Bible or only believe the nice parts).
As a developer, I'm waiting for an open-source solution, so that I'm not restricted to.NET languages, a single platform to develop on, etc. "As a developer [with nothing to develop], I'm waiting for an open-source solution"
When you actually have to develop an interactive web based app you don't have the luxury of sitting and waiting for something better to come along. It's easy to boycott proprietary technologies when you don't need them.
But the nuclear safety inspectors just sit around all day and ignore big safety problems, the people running the plants are corrupt, and fish will be mutated to have 8 eyes. I saw it in a documentary my kids were watching.
But the wires aren't moving! How can they tangle up if they're not moving?? How can a box of Christmas lights left for a year in a closet get more tangled up than they were when placed in the closet?
Someone should make a time sequence film of Christmas wire tying itself in knots.
You realize something truly analog can't be expressed digitally, right? No codec is completely lossless, so calling one "lossless" is completely arbitrary. Audio that's "lossless" is only lossless with respect to the CD, so lossless means CD quality.
What matters is "how well does this codec which takes up less space compare to this codec which takes up more space?" If you can't tell the difference then the codec which takes up less space might as well be lossless.
Most people who rattle on about lossless codecs, high quality this and that, inductance and fidelity, usually couldn't tell a well encoded 192kbit MP3 from CD quality audio. It's like any other connoisseur who wants to distinguish their own appreciation even above the level they actually experience.
I'd be very interested in a verifiable, peer reviewed, double-blind test demonstrating someone consistently distinguishing between well encoded "lossy" codecs and "lossless" codecs.
To be fair, in the same article he also recommends just installing Ubuntu on a cheap PC. However it does so with strong undertones of "you could always install Linux (but it's complicated and not really good for anything except displaying a few web pages and doing basic stuff) if you're *that* cheap".
Doesn't really qualify as unbiased reporting.:-/ For your average PC Mag viewer you've summed it up pretty well. Everyone is saying "they gave a negative review of a Linux product therefore they are corrupt and puppets of MS", but it's actually probably an accurate review.
Has anyone who's slamming this review actually used the Wal-Mart PC? I can very easily believe that this is a ghetto PC that cuts prices wherever it can. Am I the only one who doesn't see Wal-mart creating a coherent, well-supported system that does Linux justice?
For all non-Australians: At the moment here in Australia has a points system, where you need to provide a certain number of points of identification depending on importance. So you can get, say, 40 points from a passport, 40 points from a birth/citizenship certificate, 20 points from a drivers license, etc, and you need to provide 100 points to apply for a credit card, 50 points to get a Medicare refund, etc.
You need to identify yourself when you get Medicare refunds or pick up licenses, and this verification thing means that when you want to do this you need to carry around a bag of important documents to identify yourself. You don't even want to think about what would happen if you lost the bag with all your most important documents, you just better hold on fucking tight.
An ID card system would basically just clean this mess up. We live in the age of the digital database, we can centralize our data, it's more efficient for everyone, it's just common sense.
And I just don't see how this gives the government extra powers to spy on you. Even if you enter into the make believe world of Enemy of the State where the government will change your stuff around on a whim to destroy your life it's still hard to see how having a centralized ID system would help them. "They" can already track you with video cameras and credit card transaction lists. Why do people have a problem with this but no problem with having an IMEI number on their mobile phone?
This might make it easier for the government to stop you being able to identify yourself.
So looking at a worst-case Enemy of the State scenario; they cancel your credit cards, steal your briefcase, post incriminating pictures of you and get you fired and kicked out of your home, frame you for murder, put bugs all over your body and wire tap your phone, hunt you down and force you into hiding, but now they can also stop you getting Medicare refunds if you didn't bring your passport with you!
I think this is just another of Rudd's cowardly policies of appeasing the loud minority of people who oppose this (the Tin-foil-hat lobby), rather than doing what's right.
Then use your own RSS feed aggregator, with cookies disabled, through tor, through privoxy, using a hacked wireless connection, on an OpenBSD machine, in your faraday cage in your wooden shack.
It's good to err on the side of paranoia when it comes to privacy, but when talking about Google things can get really over the top.
Im more interested in the mathematical errors being discussed than grammatical ones. Anyone got anything to say about these 44 conjectures or the guy who made them?
Well the stunning new themeable Tk look is going to change all that, buddy.. Just look at this sample screenshot of how great a Tcl/Tk GUI can now look.
ffmpeg does the trick, converting flv to avi (or whatever you like) with no problems. You can also get the ActionScript out of a.swf with no problems. It doesn't really protect your IP, but then again nothing does.
It's tricky to convert between watts and kWh, they sound the same but one is a unit of power and one is a unit of energy. Power is energy per second, so it's like comparing the cost of a gallon of water with the cost of a spring.
A kWh is like a glass of water, and a watt is like a trickle of water from a leaky tap. A 1 watt panel would take 1000 hours to make one kWh.
If a panel lasts 1000 hours then you're paying $1/kWh, which doesn't compete with $0.07/kWh. If it lasts forever you're basically paying $0/kWh in the long run, so you might as well buy ~10^12 panels and forget about energy problems.
This is why hydroelectric power is appealing: Once built they stay there generating power for only the cost of maintenance, the problem is there are only so many places where a dam can be built.
In a nutshell more info is needed to know if this even counts as progress. What about the materials? Can you get lots of whatever semiconductor they're using cheaply? Does the $1/Watt panel become $1/ 0.01 Watts when it's not facing directly at the sun on a bright day in California?
I'm not looking for any "revolution" from a small start up energy company.
By the way this is an area where nuclear power could become an even better alternative: The big cost of nuclear power is building the plant and decommissioning it afterwards, the uranium is dirt cheap. The price of a kWh from a nuclear plant is made up mostly of the price of building and decommissioning the plant. If a nuclear plant's design can be made so the life is doubled the cost will halve. If a plant that lasts as long as a hydroelectric plant could be designed we could have power too cheap to meter.
I watched a documentary about the only case I know of where a plane went down due to a short circuit in the fuel tank, and after I tell you how it happened maybe you'll see why this new tech will be a welcome addition to aircraft safety.
I think it happened a few months after 9/11 and happened to a plane leaving JFK airport, so everyone initially assumed it was terrorists. (Just to help jog anyone's memory, not making a point here)
IIRC the power cables that went into the fuel tanks weren't at a high enough voltage to cause sparks, which is what makes sense of course. The problem was that there were two short circuits; one was a short circuit in the instruments in the fuel tank, and the other was a short circuit in the main power cables which run down the plane.
One of the short circuits caused there to be a higher voltage in the fuel tank, and this caused the spark.
By itself even this wouldn't be enough to cause an explosion because liquid jet fuel won't ignite with just a spark, it needs to be in vapor form, but doesn't vaporize until it gets hot.
As it happened the plane was waiting in the airport for a very long time before takeoff and had the air-conditioners running, and the air-conditioning units were underneath the fuel tanks. Staying on the ground for far too long on a hot day with the A/C on caused the fuel to heat up enough to vaporize, so that soon after takeoff when the two short circuits caused a spark there was something to ignite.
Moral of the story; if you think four unlikely things won't happen one after the other to cause a disaster you're dead wrong. Any extra fail-safes are a very welcome addition to an aircraft's design.
I don't think a relative of someone who died in that crash would agree that the people working on this new tech are just making work for themselves. It's hard to think of any other area where a single failure in 20 years and thousands of uses isn't acceptable.
Despite what Linux mags would have you think OpenOffice vs MS Office isn't going in the same direction as Firefox vs IE. Out of everyone I've spoken to the only people I know who didn't much prefer Office 2007 to 2003 was an Access trainer, who was very familiar with Access 2003.
Any time is a good time for a free alternative to shine, but OpenOffice more than ever has something very difficult to compete with. I think the best you can hope for is that OpenOffice was in part a cause of MS putting everything into Office 2007.
Things aren't going to get easier for OpenOffice either, as MS replaces VBA with.NET in Office 2007.
The monopoly thing doesn't really work when talking about web browsers any more. Firefox has shown that a better browser will gain market share quickly whether or not it comes bundled.
That's why it's so absurd that Opera has just launched an anti-competition lawsuit against MS, saying MS is blocking competitors out, while Firefox is still steadily steamrolling ahead.
The other good thing about standards is that you want Microsoft to be involved, whether you think they're evil or not; you want them to be part of creating the standard, to agree on the standard, and to stick to the standard.
But that 3% is the most important group; the 3% containing Einstein and Picasso and Vivaldi, Mac evangelists one and all.
Basically if you see Einstein, Picasso, or Vivaldi, or even Gauss or Heisenberg, using a public computer then Apple will treat this vulnerability as serious.
Last I checked scientists, power-managers and artists don't use computers other than their own, so why should Apple care about this "vulnerability"?
Take a kid of dumb parents and have him raised in a smart parents' home. Take the smart parents' kid and put him in the dumb parents' home.
What do you want to bet that the smart foster parents will raise a smart kid, and the dumb foster parents will raise a dumb kid?
Also modern education systems educate to a higher level at a younger age than ever, and because of industrialization you need more intelligence to make a typical living, not less, because the most mundane jobs are taken by machines.
These days if you want any sort of job you need to know some algebra or be skilled with some power tools, at least have the ability to manage money to some degree and read. Not too long ago even these basic skills weren't needed, so it's pretty crazy to suggest that the baseline intelligence needed to survive has decreased.
I think this is just/. guys saying (probably subconsciously) "I may not have luck with the women, but they'll be sorry! Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but one day humanity will be doomed because they didn't screw me."
Slashdot Mirror
"he/she, him/her, males and females, masculine and feminine"? Not she/he, her/him, females and males, feminine and masculine? So you're saying men should always come first are you?
/. and get back to beating your wife?
Why don't you just get off
When you actually have to develop an interactive web based app you don't have the luxury of sitting and waiting for something better to come along. It's easy to boycott proprietary technologies when you don't need them.
But the nuclear safety inspectors just sit around all day and ignore big safety problems, the people running the plants are corrupt, and fish will be mutated to have 8 eyes. I saw it in a documentary my kids were watching.
This already happened when MS lost a bunch of e-mail relating to the IE case, didn't it?
But the wires aren't moving! How can they tangle up if they're not moving?? How can a box of Christmas lights left for a year in a closet get more tangled up than they were when placed in the closet?
Someone should make a time sequence film of Christmas wire tying itself in knots.
But I don't think that accounts for half of /. trashing MP3s.
You realize something truly analog can't be expressed digitally, right? No codec is completely lossless, so calling one "lossless" is completely arbitrary. Audio that's "lossless" is only lossless with respect to the CD, so lossless means CD quality.
What matters is "how well does this codec which takes up less space compare to this codec which takes up more space?" If you can't tell the difference then the codec which takes up less space might as well be lossless.
Most people who rattle on about lossless codecs, high quality this and that, inductance and fidelity, usually couldn't tell a well encoded 192kbit MP3 from CD quality audio. It's like any other connoisseur who wants to distinguish their own appreciation even above the level they actually experience.
I'd be very interested in a verifiable, peer reviewed, double-blind test demonstrating someone consistently distinguishing between well encoded "lossy" codecs and "lossless" codecs.
Doesn't really qualify as unbiased reporting.
Has anyone who's slamming this review actually used the Wal-Mart PC? I can very easily believe that this is a ghetto PC that cuts prices wherever it can. Am I the only one who doesn't see Wal-mart creating a coherent, well-supported system that does Linux justice?
For all non-Australians: At the moment here in Australia has a points system, where you need to provide a certain number of points of identification depending on importance. So you can get, say, 40 points from a passport, 40 points from a birth/citizenship certificate, 20 points from a drivers license, etc, and you need to provide 100 points to apply for a credit card, 50 points to get a Medicare refund, etc.
You need to identify yourself when you get Medicare refunds or pick up licenses, and this verification thing means that when you want to do this you need to carry around a bag of important documents to identify yourself. You don't even want to think about what would happen if you lost the bag with all your most important documents, you just better hold on fucking tight.
An ID card system would basically just clean this mess up. We live in the age of the digital database, we can centralize our data, it's more efficient for everyone, it's just common sense.
And I just don't see how this gives the government extra powers to spy on you. Even if you enter into the make believe world of Enemy of the State where the government will change your stuff around on a whim to destroy your life it's still hard to see how having a centralized ID system would help them. "They" can already track you with video cameras and credit card transaction lists. Why do people have a problem with this but no problem with having an IMEI number on their mobile phone?
This might make it easier for the government to stop you being able to identify yourself. So looking at a worst-case Enemy of the State scenario; they cancel your credit cards, steal your briefcase, post incriminating pictures of you and get you fired and kicked out of your home, frame you for murder, put bugs all over your body and wire tap your phone, hunt you down and force you into hiding, but now they can also stop you getting Medicare refunds if you didn't bring your passport with you!
I think this is just another of Rudd's cowardly policies of appeasing the loud minority of people who oppose this (the Tin-foil-hat lobby), rather than doing what's right.
Then use your own RSS feed aggregator, with cookies disabled, through tor, through privoxy, using a hacked wireless connection, on an OpenBSD machine, in your faraday cage in your wooden shack.
It's good to err on the side of paranoia when it comes to privacy, but when talking about Google things can get really over the top.
Headline: Only 2 in 500 college students believe in I.P.
In other news: Only 2 in 50000 college students own anything that could be considered I.P.
The absolute heat is Farenheit 10^32; the temperature the universe starts burning.
Im more interested in the mathematical errors being discussed than grammatical ones. Anyone got anything to say about these 44 conjectures or the guy who made them?
Well the stunning new themeable Tk look is going to change all that, buddy.. Just look at this sample screenshot of how great a Tcl/Tk GUI can now look.
ffmpeg does the trick, converting flv to avi (or whatever you like) with no problems. You can also get the ActionScript out of a .swf with no problems. It doesn't really protect your IP, but then again nothing does.
It's tricky to convert between watts and kWh, they sound the same but one is a unit of power and one is a unit of energy. Power is energy per second, so it's like comparing the cost of a gallon of water with the cost of a spring.
A kWh is like a glass of water, and a watt is like a trickle of water from a leaky tap. A 1 watt panel would take 1000 hours to make one kWh.
If a panel lasts 1000 hours then you're paying $1/kWh, which doesn't compete with $0.07/kWh. If it lasts forever you're basically paying $0/kWh in the long run, so you might as well buy ~10^12 panels and forget about energy problems.
This is why hydroelectric power is appealing: Once built they stay there generating power for only the cost of maintenance, the problem is there are only so many places where a dam can be built.
In a nutshell more info is needed to know if this even counts as progress. What about the materials? Can you get lots of whatever semiconductor they're using cheaply? Does the $1/Watt panel become $1/ 0.01 Watts when it's not facing directly at the sun on a bright day in California?
I'm not looking for any "revolution" from a small start up energy company.
By the way this is an area where nuclear power could become an even better alternative: The big cost of nuclear power is building the plant and decommissioning it afterwards, the uranium is dirt cheap. The price of a kWh from a nuclear plant is made up mostly of the price of building and decommissioning the plant. If a nuclear plant's design can be made so the life is doubled the cost will halve. If a plant that lasts as long as a hydroelectric plant could be designed we could have power too cheap to meter.
The cost of decommissioning is actually factored in to the electricity price, as anyone who's not a rabid anti-nuclear fanatic would assume.
I watched a documentary about the only case I know of where a plane went down due to a short circuit in the fuel tank, and after I tell you how it happened maybe you'll see why this new tech will be a welcome addition to aircraft safety.
I think it happened a few months after 9/11 and happened to a plane leaving JFK airport, so everyone initially assumed it was terrorists. (Just to help jog anyone's memory, not making a point here)
IIRC the power cables that went into the fuel tanks weren't at a high enough voltage to cause sparks, which is what makes sense of course. The problem was that there were two short circuits; one was a short circuit in the instruments in the fuel tank, and the other was a short circuit in the main power cables which run down the plane.
One of the short circuits caused there to be a higher voltage in the fuel tank, and this caused the spark.
By itself even this wouldn't be enough to cause an explosion because liquid jet fuel won't ignite with just a spark, it needs to be in vapor form, but doesn't vaporize until it gets hot.
As it happened the plane was waiting in the airport for a very long time before takeoff and had the air-conditioners running, and the air-conditioning units were underneath the fuel tanks. Staying on the ground for far too long on a hot day with the A/C on caused the fuel to heat up enough to vaporize, so that soon after takeoff when the two short circuits caused a spark there was something to ignite.
Moral of the story; if you think four unlikely things won't happen one after the other to cause a disaster you're dead wrong. Any extra fail-safes are a very welcome addition to an aircraft's design.
I don't think a relative of someone who died in that crash would agree that the people working on this new tech are just making work for themselves. It's hard to think of any other area where a single failure in 20 years and thousands of uses isn't acceptable.
Despite what Linux mags would have you think OpenOffice vs MS Office isn't going in the same direction as Firefox vs IE. Out of everyone I've spoken to the only people I know who didn't much prefer Office 2007 to 2003 was an Access trainer, who was very familiar with Access 2003.
.NET in Office 2007.
Any time is a good time for a free alternative to shine, but OpenOffice more than ever has something very difficult to compete with. I think the best you can hope for is that OpenOffice was in part a cause of MS putting everything into Office 2007.
Things aren't going to get easier for OpenOffice either, as MS replaces VBA with
The monopoly thing doesn't really work when talking about web browsers any more. Firefox has shown that a better browser will gain market share quickly whether or not it comes bundled.
That's why it's so absurd that Opera has just launched an anti-competition lawsuit against MS, saying MS is blocking competitors out, while Firefox is still steadily steamrolling ahead.
The other good thing about standards is that you want Microsoft to be involved, whether you think they're evil or not; you want them to be part of creating the standard, to agree on the standard, and to stick to the standard.
Something digital with component transistors? Hmmm
But that 3% is the most important group; the 3% containing Einstein and Picasso and Vivaldi, Mac evangelists one and all.
Basically if you see Einstein, Picasso, or Vivaldi, or even Gauss or Heisenberg, using a public computer then Apple will treat this vulnerability as serious.
Last I checked scientists, power-managers and artists don't use computers other than their own, so why should Apple care about this "vulnerability"?
Take a kid of dumb parents and have him raised in a smart parents' home. Take the smart parents' kid and put him in the dumb parents' home.
/. guys saying (probably subconsciously) "I may not have luck with the women, but they'll be sorry! Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but one day humanity will be doomed because they didn't screw me."
What do you want to bet that the smart foster parents will raise a smart kid, and the dumb foster parents will raise a dumb kid?
Also modern education systems educate to a higher level at a younger age than ever, and because of industrialization you need more intelligence to make a typical living, not less, because the most mundane jobs are taken by machines.
These days if you want any sort of job you need to know some algebra or be skilled with some power tools, at least have the ability to manage money to some degree and read. Not too long ago even these basic skills weren't needed, so it's pretty crazy to suggest that the baseline intelligence needed to survive has decreased.
I think this is just