What the British government did, by covering up and hiding the work these people did, is an affront to the very concept of a free society.
But what's wrong with the people involved that they can't do it for anything more than love of their country? Barring that, why aren't they satisfied with the money they received for it?
When an orange goes bad, it actually rots from the outside in. So when you see a moldy orange at the store, it is possible that the insides are still perfectly fine. But you never get to see the insides of that fruit, much less eat it. What you don't know is, though, just how delicious moldy oranges can be. Like grapes, the oranges get the moisture taken out by the mold, so what's left is an enticingly sweet fruit. But since no one makes wine out of moldy oranges, you'll never know.
But cameras don't rot like that. Why would you write a story about new camera technology and not include the photograph results?
In a mobile culture like America's, we live a significant portion of our lives on the road. On holidays like today, we aren't, like 19th century Europeans, stuck in our hovels waiting for Ebenezer Scrooge to hand deliver a Christmas duck. Rather, we get out and drive, drive, drive all over this great, goddamned country.
So there's only so far 3G networks can take us if the coverage is only within city limits. When our cars are hooked up to cellular networks for data services, what good is it to have exceptional coverage in town when you're 100 miles from the next town? Empty spaces and big skies just prove how big this place really is, and it's all about living and moving and getting out there and getting to the next place that is what it's all about, man.
Get me some coverage in Yosemite. Death Valley. Appalachia. Crater Lake. Yellowstone. Shasta. Mt. McKinley. Grand Canyon. From Blaine, WA to Miami, FL. San Diego, CA to Eastport, ME. Cover it all and let us get on with really living in this great big country of ours.
Not to be glib, but couldn't it just be part of the disease to feel that the medicated state is unnatural? Whereas you feel muted when on the medicine, it is actually the way most people feel all the time?
While it might be the death of "Big Media", it will be the birth of "lite media" which consists of the blogosphere, twitter, and Facebook. When the incentive to compile news is financial, we will only get news that is sensational and designed to be sticky. However, when that incentive is removed, we will be able to see a rapid advance in news gathering for its own sake. Such an evolution in news gathering is a huge breakthrough for the little guy who prior to this would never have had his voice heard.
Old Media is shaking in their boots at the thought of being overrun by so-called "unqualified bloggers". Take the recent election, for example. While many people tuned in to CNN and the NY Times for information, many more relied on Little Green Footballs, the Huffington Post, and the Daily Kos for up to the minute election data. As more little guys enter the market, we will finally see real competition. Since competition leads to improved product, we can only expect to see better news once the corporations like NY Times and CNN wither away.
For all this whining about Diebold, most people don't have a problem using Diebold's ATMs for banking. For something that is a lot closer to affecting you significantly and directly, Diebold seems to be a pretty decent solution. If their machines made as many irregular transactions as electronic voting opponents claim, the machines wouldn't be fit to handle everyday banking.
You'd have to ascribe malice to Diebold's motives to honestly claim that they were trying to throw an election towards a candidate. With their stellar reputation in the banking industry, I am not ready to make that claim. More likely, I would consider 70 year old untrained volunteers who don't understand technology much more prone to make mistakes in machine handling. The problem isn't the machines' inability to count votes. It's the nincompoops who don't have anything better to do than sit around for 10 hours on election day failing to take even the most basic precautions in vote handling.
Besides that, there is also the problem of the greater weight of the camera causing it to fall faster than the lighter grains of sand. Ideally, you'd want to observe the sand in as stationary and synchronized a manner as possible. However, if the camera is moving relative to the sand, it would be difficult to monitor any particular clump of falling sand.
'Compare that with East Germany, in which the Stasi managed to tap, at most, about 100,000 phone lines -- a gargantuan task that required 2,000 full-time technicians to monitor the calls,'
The last time Mozilla added support for a tag that had some automatic animated behavior, the browser was still called Netscape and the tag was universally reviled. I hope they don't blink again.
But that said, does anyone really think video is a good idea? It's hard enough to get users to install the correct codecs to play back movies now. At least with FLV you've got a pretty standard platform which almost everyone already has installed. Adobe, for all their fuckups, has done a good job with Flash. Quicktime, OTOH, is not quite as accepted. And WMV, for whatever reason, is rejected by many users out of hand.
So are we going to require browsers to install with codec packs? What are the distribution formalities required for that kind of thing? It sounds like a giant ball of baling wire stuck in a thresher. I'm tempted to let it alone.
If you told me just 1 year ago that steroids could be used to cure cancer rather than cause it, I would have laughed in your face.
There are so many incidences of steroid users succumbing to cancer that it's not uncommon to see American body builders getting checked out in Mexican hospitals for various cancers. If this therapy really works, it is critical to find the balance point between androgenic steroid therapeutic use and outright abuse.
We really ought to be way past the phase of getting wet in the crotch about putting a man on the moon. We've got the t-shirt already.
What we ought to be looking at is beginning construction of a moon base and the development of the infrastructure to perform longhaul transport back and forth from the Earth to the Moon. That means both reusable capsule technology and low-cost fuel.
If the original space race taught us anything, it's that there is a lot of prestige in doing the impossible. Putting a man into orbit is now not impossible. Putting a man on the moon is now not impossible. It's time to look beyond that towards building habitats elsewhere.
The bloodshed and violence going on in Iran right now is precisely what happens when you pit a corrupt government against a small band of rabble rousers. Let it be clear that I am not saying that the protesters in Iran aren't justified in protesting the elections, or even that the violence against them is in any way justified. The deaths are senseless and tragic. In the current situation, there is no good solution that wouldn't throw the entire country into a bloody civil war.
But the early protests were not violent. It wasn't until a few violent protesters lashed out against government forces, as was also the case in Seattle and Milan, that the true revolt began in earnest.
There are many who believe that an energized, educated citizenry is crucial to a free society. But I'll tell you now that a lethargic, dumb citizenry is the true key to both freedom and affluence. Energy and knowledge lead to discontent, and discontent leads to violence. Lethargy and ignorance preserve the status quo which is typically comfortable for all involved.
When the EFF tries to play gotcha with the Bush Administration, in their minds they are doing the right thing. However pure their motives, their methods are not thought through. Like children on the playground, they only look at today and their own goals.
Whatever is in those documents is useless. We face our current situation as reality, not because someone once wrote something somewhere in confidential documents. Lobby to change the laws, which are public for all to see. Don't foment anger because there is no peace at the end of that road.
If you are trying to explain the mechanism to a layman, you need to steer clear of terms like "processes" and "threads" as part of the explanation.
Imagine the memory in your computer is like a housing development. At first, there is a lot of open space. The open space can be partitioned so that houses can be built. Each of those houses represents a process. As long as you have more space, you can build more houses.
Inside each house, you have rooms. In computer terms, these would be threads. Each room has a specific job - kitchen, bedroom, bathroom. Sometimes you need more rooms, so you have to build them. This may mean that the size of the house needs to grow, and the amount of acreage the house needs must grow with it.
As long as a house exists, it will continue to occupy the space it is on. In computer terms, the process will hold on to the memory it has already claimed. However, the corollary to this is that when the house is torn down, all the land it occupied is returned to the "free acreage".
If a room is remodeled, it will not result in a change to the actual house size. Adding more rooms will always take up more land, but removing those rooms doesn't change the occupied land size at all.
In the same way, a process can grow and grow, but as soon as it completes (you close a tab in the browser), the memory will go back to the operating system so other processes can use it. But if the process does not complete because it uses threads to build those same tabs, then the process will continue to take up that memory.
Also consider that a house may burn down. If a problem happens in one room, a house-wide emergency may erupt. A fire in the kitchen may engulf the entire house and bring it down.
In a perfect world, what happens in one house should not affect other surrounding houses. If one house burns down, the other houses around it should be fine. Same with processes. If a thread in one process crashes, it may bring down the whole process. However, since processes are separated from each other, other processes should not be affected.
Then why use threads at all? Why not use processes all the time, since they are clearly safer. Well, why don't we only have one room in our house? Threads are needed within processes to perform important roles. Also, since they all exist in the same process, they can share information (like using light switches downstairs to control lights in the foyer). So a careful combination of threads and processes are necessary to create any kind of meaningful application. There is no right or wrong answer, but Google seems to think that isolating each browsing experience from another is the right way. Firefox thinks that putting all the rooms in one house and simply growing the house is the right way. Everyone is different.
Unless you are talking about a system with severely limited memory, memory usage is probably not the right criteria for deciding which browser to use.
Something like "it doesn't show weird ass icons and bars when Slashdot decides to change CSS" is probably much more important. Firefox 3 totally screws up Slashdot in Default mode.
Yes. As I said, Sony execs aren't dumb. They leak info that helps them.
Osbourne effect: company: Next generation models are going to be faster, cheaper, and better! consumers: We should definitely wait for the next one.
Reverse Osbourne effect: company: Next generation models are going to slower and less featureful! consumers: Oh shit! We better get while the getting's good.
Slashdot Mirror
What the British government did, by covering up and hiding the work these people did, is an affront to the very concept of a free society.
But what's wrong with the people involved that they can't do it for anything more than love of their country? Barring that, why aren't they satisfied with the money they received for it?
This came to mind when reading your post.
When an orange goes bad, it actually rots from the outside in. So when you see a moldy orange at the store, it is possible that the insides are still perfectly fine. But you never get to see the insides of that fruit, much less eat it. What you don't know is, though, just how delicious moldy oranges can be. Like grapes, the oranges get the moisture taken out by the mold, so what's left is an enticingly sweet fruit. But since no one makes wine out of moldy oranges, you'll never know.
But cameras don't rot like that. Why would you write a story about new camera technology and not include the photograph results?
Is that it?
These days, if all you do is one thing, no matter how well you do it, you're always only going to be known for that one thing.
To borrow a phrase from Michael Jackson.. What have you done for me lately?
Not only that, you also have to live in New York City.
In a mobile culture like America's, we live a significant portion of our lives on the road. On holidays like today, we aren't, like 19th century Europeans, stuck in our hovels waiting for Ebenezer Scrooge to hand deliver a Christmas duck. Rather, we get out and drive, drive, drive all over this great, goddamned country.
So there's only so far 3G networks can take us if the coverage is only within city limits. When our cars are hooked up to cellular networks for data services, what good is it to have exceptional coverage in town when you're 100 miles from the next town? Empty spaces and big skies just prove how big this place really is, and it's all about living and moving and getting out there and getting to the next place that is what it's all about, man.
Get me some coverage in Yosemite. Death Valley. Appalachia. Crater Lake. Yellowstone. Shasta. Mt. McKinley. Grand Canyon. From Blaine, WA to Miami, FL. San Diego, CA to Eastport, ME. Cover it all and let us get on with really living in this great big country of ours.
There was an article about this sort of thing in Raleigh the other day.
Here's the link:
http://news14.com/Default.aspx?ArID=611427
It should be pointed out that tin foil doesn't really prevent the message from infiltrating your brain waves. Aluminum foil works great, though.
Not to be glib, but couldn't it just be part of the disease to feel that the medicated state is unnatural? Whereas you feel muted when on the medicine, it is actually the way most people feel all the time?
You're glib. You don't know the history of psychiatry. I do.
Shut up. Shut up! SHUT UP!
No it isn't, you moron. These people are lying. They're all lying.
While it might be the death of "Big Media", it will be the birth of "lite media" which consists of the blogosphere, twitter, and Facebook. When the incentive to compile news is financial, we will only get news that is sensational and designed to be sticky. However, when that incentive is removed, we will be able to see a rapid advance in news gathering for its own sake. Such an evolution in news gathering is a huge breakthrough for the little guy who prior to this would never have had his voice heard.
Old Media is shaking in their boots at the thought of being overrun by so-called "unqualified bloggers". Take the recent election, for example. While many people tuned in to CNN and the NY Times for information, many more relied on Little Green Footballs, the Huffington Post, and the Daily Kos for up to the minute election data. As more little guys enter the market, we will finally see real competition. Since competition leads to improved product, we can only expect to see better news once the corporations like NY Times and CNN wither away.
For all this whining about Diebold, most people don't have a problem using Diebold's ATMs for banking. For something that is a lot closer to affecting you significantly and directly, Diebold seems to be a pretty decent solution. If their machines made as many irregular transactions as electronic voting opponents claim, the machines wouldn't be fit to handle everyday banking.
You'd have to ascribe malice to Diebold's motives to honestly claim that they were trying to throw an election towards a candidate. With their stellar reputation in the banking industry, I am not ready to make that claim. More likely, I would consider 70 year old untrained volunteers who don't understand technology much more prone to make mistakes in machine handling. The problem isn't the machines' inability to count votes. It's the nincompoops who don't have anything better to do than sit around for 10 hours on election day failing to take even the most basic precautions in vote handling.
Just wait until Finnegan's Wake.
At least Ulysses was English.
Besides that, there is also the problem of the greater weight of the camera causing it to fall faster than the lighter grains of sand. Ideally, you'd want to observe the sand in as stationary and synchronized a manner as possible. However, if the camera is moving relative to the sand, it would be difficult to monitor any particular clump of falling sand.
'Compare that with East Germany, in which the Stasi managed to tap, at most, about 100,000 phone lines -- a gargantuan task that required 2,000 full-time technicians to monitor the calls,'
Comparisons with Nazi Germany be damned.
American much?
Would you like a map and such as?
The last time Mozilla added support for a tag that had some automatic animated behavior, the browser was still called Netscape and the tag was universally reviled. I hope they don't blink again.
But that said, does anyone really think video is a good idea? It's hard enough to get users to install the correct codecs to play back movies now. At least with FLV you've got a pretty standard platform which almost everyone already has installed. Adobe, for all their fuckups, has done a good job with Flash. Quicktime, OTOH, is not quite as accepted. And WMV, for whatever reason, is rejected by many users out of hand.
So are we going to require browsers to install with codec packs? What are the distribution formalities required for that kind of thing? It sounds like a giant ball of baling wire stuck in a thresher. I'm tempted to let it alone.
If you told me just 1 year ago that steroids could be used to cure cancer rather than cause it, I would have laughed in your face.
There are so many incidences of steroid users succumbing to cancer that it's not uncommon to see American body builders getting checked out in Mexican hospitals for various cancers. If this therapy really works, it is critical to find the balance point between androgenic steroid therapeutic use and outright abuse.
We really ought to be way past the phase of getting wet in the crotch about putting a man on the moon. We've got the t-shirt already.
What we ought to be looking at is beginning construction of a moon base and the development of the infrastructure to perform longhaul transport back and forth from the Earth to the Moon. That means both reusable capsule technology and low-cost fuel.
If the original space race taught us anything, it's that there is a lot of prestige in doing the impossible. Putting a man into orbit is now not impossible. Putting a man on the moon is now not impossible. It's time to look beyond that towards building habitats elsewhere.
Energy and knowledge lead to discontent.
A full belly is enough for most people.
The bloodshed and violence going on in Iran right now is precisely what happens when you pit a corrupt government against a small band of rabble rousers. Let it be clear that I am not saying that the protesters in Iran aren't justified in protesting the elections, or even that the violence against them is in any way justified. The deaths are senseless and tragic. In the current situation, there is no good solution that wouldn't throw the entire country into a bloody civil war.
But the early protests were not violent. It wasn't until a few violent protesters lashed out against government forces, as was also the case in Seattle and Milan, that the true revolt began in earnest.
There are many who believe that an energized, educated citizenry is crucial to a free society. But I'll tell you now that a lethargic, dumb citizenry is the true key to both freedom and affluence. Energy and knowledge lead to discontent, and discontent leads to violence. Lethargy and ignorance preserve the status quo which is typically comfortable for all involved.
When the EFF tries to play gotcha with the Bush Administration, in their minds they are doing the right thing. However pure their motives, their methods are not thought through. Like children on the playground, they only look at today and their own goals.
Whatever is in those documents is useless. We face our current situation as reality, not because someone once wrote something somewhere in confidential documents. Lobby to change the laws, which are public for all to see. Don't foment anger because there is no peace at the end of that road.
If you are trying to explain the mechanism to a layman, you need to steer clear of terms like "processes" and "threads" as part of the explanation.
Imagine the memory in your computer is like a housing development. At first, there is a lot of open space. The open space can be partitioned so that houses can be built. Each of those houses represents a process. As long as you have more space, you can build more houses.
Inside each house, you have rooms. In computer terms, these would be threads. Each room has a specific job - kitchen, bedroom, bathroom. Sometimes you need more rooms, so you have to build them. This may mean that the size of the house needs to grow, and the amount of acreage the house needs must grow with it.
As long as a house exists, it will continue to occupy the space it is on. In computer terms, the process will hold on to the memory it has already claimed. However, the corollary to this is that when the house is torn down, all the land it occupied is returned to the "free acreage".
If a room is remodeled, it will not result in a change to the actual house size. Adding more rooms will always take up more land, but removing those rooms doesn't change the occupied land size at all.
In the same way, a process can grow and grow, but as soon as it completes (you close a tab in the browser), the memory will go back to the operating system so other processes can use it. But if the process does not complete because it uses threads to build those same tabs, then the process will continue to take up that memory.
Also consider that a house may burn down. If a problem happens in one room, a house-wide emergency may erupt. A fire in the kitchen may engulf the entire house and bring it down.
In a perfect world, what happens in one house should not affect other surrounding houses. If one house burns down, the other houses around it should be fine. Same with processes. If a thread in one process crashes, it may bring down the whole process. However, since processes are separated from each other, other processes should not be affected.
Then why use threads at all? Why not use processes all the time, since they are clearly safer. Well, why don't we only have one room in our house? Threads are needed within processes to perform important roles. Also, since they all exist in the same process, they can share information (like using light switches downstairs to control lights in the foyer). So a careful combination of threads and processes are necessary to create any kind of meaningful application. There is no right or wrong answer, but Google seems to think that isolating each browsing experience from another is the right way. Firefox thinks that putting all the rooms in one house and simply growing the house is the right way. Everyone is different.
Unless you are talking about a system with severely limited memory, memory usage is probably not the right criteria for deciding which browser to use.
Something like "it doesn't show weird ass icons and bars when Slashdot decides to change CSS" is probably much more important. Firefox 3 totally screws up Slashdot in Default mode.
Yes. As I said, Sony execs aren't dumb. They leak info that helps them.
Osbourne effect:
company: Next generation models are going to be faster, cheaper, and better!
consumers: We should definitely wait for the next one.
Reverse Osbourne effect:
company: Next generation models are going to slower and less featureful!
consumers: Oh shit! We better get while the getting's good.