Yes. The high points of the Integral Fast Reactor are that is will run on just about anything, including "spent" fuel from other reactors. It keeps processing fuel until there is nothing left to get from it. The result is a far smaller amount of radioactive waste than other plants. The radioactive waste produced will decay to the level of natural uranium radiation in only 200 years, which is worlds better than the thousands of years it takes for the "spent" fuel of current systems to decay.
Fuel does not need to be precisely fabricated like in many other reactor designs. It can simply be cast into the correct shape.
The reactor is not a serious proliferation concern, because once the fuel is started in the reactor it remains extremely radioactive until it is completely spent. The completely spent material is worthless is nuclear weapons, and militarily could only be useful for dirty bombs. However that risk exists with conventional reactor designs, and is even worse, because of the larger amount of waste produced by those designs.
That is not to say that everything about this design is ideal. The cost per unit energy produced for this plant is somewhat higher than with conventional plants. That is because other plants are only retrieving the least expensive energy from the fuel, while this plant design wrings pretty much all the energy out of the fuel. This produces a problem for companies interesting in using such a design, since they need to be able to compete on cost per unit energy. If nuclear power plants had to pay for waste disposal in proportion to how long the fuel takes to decay, that would almost certainly offset this. Another small issue is that a few important components of the reactor have never been shown to be commercially viable at a large scale. There are also some safety concerns about the use of molten sodium in the reactor design.
But all things considered it is a real shame the project was canceled just because it might appear at first to be a threat to anti-proliferation efforts, even though an explanation of the design would make it clear that constructing such a plant would reduce proliferation risk.
Re:Media player classic + codec packs VLC
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VLC 1.0.0 Released
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You might be surprised. I who virtually never watch non-English programming, am a native English speaker, without any hearing impairment, often watch shows with subtitles on if they are available. It helps for those times when speach is slightly garbled, and you can't quite make out what was said.
Oddly enough though I've seen subtitles backfire on Content producers. On one television program being aired on a network site, Subtitles were provided. The dubtitles here were produced by the Closed-Captioners of the program, (as evidenced by the caption credit during the title sequence).
In one scene, I noticed two lines of caption that did not correspond the the audio. Upon replaying that scene, I discovered that the dialog was indeed spoken, but due to character positioning it was almost impposible to see. The dialog in question would also only confuse listeners, so at the last minute they apparently scrapped those lines by muting the speech tracks there. This was apparently after they had sent the copy to the captioners, so the result was that the cut dialog was revived by the captions.
I've also seen plenty of poorly done fan made subtitles, and occasionally even professionally produced captions with mistakes that were pretty bad. Bad enough that a single play-through would have caught them. My guess is that they forgot to note these particular issues on their test play-through, and do not have a policy of requiring one play-through with no spotted errors before releasing.
Yes, but Google Apps uses your own domain name. Hence the reason why it was originally named "Google Apps for Your Domain". The name has since been shortened, but that fact still remains.
First of all, It looks like your paragraph breaks may have been eaten. Therefore I will be reformatting your message:
Ehm Theora is not an 'open standard' by any means. H.264 actually is, but it has some serious licensing issues for 'free software' which is not a problem for Apple since they are already paying for the licenses anyway. Implementing Theora is risky for Apple, and I'm pretty surprised that Google is willing to add it to Chrome. No-one can guarantee that Theora is patent-free, having a codebase in a larger project which isn't covered by any patents at all has become almost impossible, certainly if you specialize in areas like video and audio codecs, where commercial labs such as Fraunhofer Institute operate, which live from patent royalties on technologies they researched.
I'm not exactly what you can call an Apple fanboy, I do have an iPhone however, but have no mac, typing this on a HP laptop with winxp, running 3 linux vm's, and developing on a bsd and a linux server remotely. I always get confused when people talk about Apple being "evil". Sure their focus is not on 'standards' - but on user experience. I absolutely don't get the 'lock in'. Apple pushed for DRM-free tunes in the iTunes store - because it's bad for the customers, not because it conflicts with some idealistic bullshit. I don't really get how behavior like this is lock-in? This means anything that can play AAC files - which is quite a lot (AAC is standardized after all and not an Apple propriatry format). This opens the market for competition for their iPod, so explain me exactly where the lock-in is? And that's only one part. Apple clearly supports opensource software. Yes they struggled somewhat with giving back to webkit in the beginning, but now, things are looking fine on that level. They get it that they can benefit from OSS, and they do include a lot of OOS with OS/X ( like Apache etc). Some people say they are exploiting OSS projects, but in the end, Red Hat, Novell & co. are also doing that right?
Now - can someone please explain me how Apple would "lock me in" by refusing to implement a non-standardized video-codec of which the creators claim it is patent-free. They do want to implement a codec that most video-capable devices out-there can already play, and is still the standard to which Theora is being compared.
Please shut up about 'crippling' products, 'vendor lock-in', 'ignoring open standards'. It may look like I'm "pro" H.264 - but I'm actually not really. I don't care what codec will be used to be honest. Just have the video tag support all codecs supported by the main OS. I think the Mozilla foundation is acting like a bunch of morons refusing to go that way. There's no such thing as "forcing freedom" on people, which is exactly what they're trying to do.
Now my reply.
Ehm Theora is not an 'open standard' by any means.
I'm trying to figure out why you claim this.
I suppose it depends on what definition of Open Standard you use. If you require a sufficiently complete specification that is available to anybody who desires it at no fee, and without an NDA, with all patents available under RAND terms, then both H.264 and Theora are Open Standards.
If you require that there be no fee on implementations (besides the cost of obtaining the standard itself), I understand that to exclude H.264.
On the other hand, if you require that the standards be created and maintained by a coalition of industry experts which anybody interested can join and participate in, without one group clearing being the controlling interest, then Theora would not be an open standard, but H.264 would be.
For example, under Bruce Perens's Defintion Theora is an Open Standard, while H.264 is not. On the other hand, H.264 meets the ITU-T's definition, while it is not clear if Theora meets it.
But there is an HTML 5 now. Significant portions of the document will not be changing in any significant manner. Further, the HTML 5 spec explicitly deals with how to handle backwards compatibility with legacy pages, which includes pages made to the draft HTML 5 spec.
The HTML5 committee intends to gradually lock parts of the spec as they are implemented and start being used, such that the final specification will not significantly differ on any features we start seeing in the wild. This is known as standardizing existing practice.
No. I include everything beyong XHTML 1.0 as a waste. The modularity of 1.1 was the only substancial difference. That was inherited by XHTML 2, and was the only true improvement. The vast majority of the rest of XHTML2 was swapping out lartge chunks of the language for other XML based languages that in reality where not used as often. I've never seen anything that actually uses XForms.
XFrames is clearly still a direct syntactic derivative of HTML frames, but with a brand new set of tag and attribute names, that people would need to learn. It does offer a few advantages, but those are moot, since frame based site designs have been dead for what, like 5 years?
XML Events might be a superior design, but would require a fairly major overhaul to browser engines, and may require an overhaul of the style sheet languages to better support event based styling. Since CSS2 is not even full implemented in most browsers, and CSS 3 support can be pretty darn patchy. XHTML 2 would not be completed without scrapping CSS for an improved version of XST, merely because that is more XML-y.
Alternate content being specifiable on any tag is hardly an improvement. It confuses the tag meanings for one thing. A paragraph tag should not really be specifying an image, with only fallback content for ua's not supporting the image as the tags inner content. That would be what the img tag is for. (I'll admit that the replacing of img tags alt attribute with inner content was a good idea, but that was already possible with object or embed.)
XHTML2 conformance checking requires validation against all three major schema languages: DTD, XML Schema, and RELAX NG. That is far from an improvement. It also was focused on replacing chunks of HTML with other XML based technologies, but did not even bother to replace html hyperlinks with XLink.
As an author who is considering what language to use, I would see nothing in XHTML2 that would make my life easier compared to XHTML 1. I stand by my assertion that the only real improvement in XHTML 2 is the modularization that it inherited from XHTML 1.1. I see plenty in XHTML5 that would make my life easier.
Mozilla's video tag support is in no way a propriety extension. It is fully con formant to the current HTML5 draft, excepting perhaps some minor bugs, and perhaps a few attributes not yet supported. Under the current draft, browsers choose what set of codecs/container-formats they support. There are no mandatory codecs or container formats. So for the time being Mozilla's supported video containers are {ogg}, and supported video codecs are {thedora}.
They will almost certainly add additional container formats and codecs in the future.
Mozilla will continue to follow HTML5, making changes as nessisary when the draft changes.
XHTML 2 is being canceled not because it failed, but because the only advantage over XHTML 1 was being more modular, which nobody really cared about. Besides, HTML5 will define XHTML5, which will be a significant improvement on XHTML 1.
It comes in an SGML-inspired format, that is not strictly SGML but matches real word HTML almost exactly. The big difference from HTML4 besides the new tags is that it does not use a DTD, nor does it support the shortag features of SGML, with the exception of the short attribute feature. Thus "<title/</<body/".
(Yes, that has three open brackets, zero close brackets, and 3 slashes) is not valid HTML5, despite being valid HTML4. (At least once you add the DTD).
There is also an XHTML form, which may informally be called XHTML5. Except for the new tags, this is pretty much identical to XHTML 1. In some ways this is the prefered form of HTML5, being that the other form does not support namespaces.
Indeed. The person distributed the ROM online is likely violating the law, but the downloader is probably not. Some theories indicate that the downloading is technically legal even if you do not own the game. If you do have the game, then it is very likely not an issue.
Making the ROM yourself, or having somebody make it for you (pay them to dump you game cart) is virtually indisputably legal. (Although for some systems like the DS, this requires circumventing a copy control mechanism.) Nintendo has some sort of legal theory that games embedded in a rom chip cannot be legally dumped, but that theory is very much unsupported by the law, or relevant caselaw.
The law is 100% clear though that in all cases, if your rom is legal somehow, playing it with an emulator is legal. Even Nintendo does not dispute that, having lost the very court case that made this clear.
The IANA (which is the technical devision of ICANN) assigns ip addresses to ARIN, RIPE NCC, APNIC, LACNIC, and AfriNIC.
Those in turn assign IP addresses wsithin the assigned region. I believe the same system is used for handing out Autonomous System numbers.
Anyway, it is worth noting, that the IANA is the only technical part of ICANN. It publishes the DNS root zone file, as well as other information.
The rest of ICANN (the overwhelming majority of it) does little more than set policy for the domain name system, and in a horribly inefficient fashion.
It should be dissolved (corporate charter revoked), with two new organizations being formed under the umbrella of the Internet Society (ISOC).
ISOC already has the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) and IESG (internet Engineering Steering Group), both under the oversight of the IETF Administrative Oversight Committee (IAOC).
A new organization named "Internet Assigned Numbers Authority" (IANA) (being completely separate from the existing one, but performing the same tasks) should be formed, and be placed under the oversight of the IAOC.
The other new organization under the umbrella of the ISOC, would be the "Internet Naming Policy Commitee" (INPG). This would be a cut down version of the ICANN policy forming components. It is not clear to me if it should be under the oversight of the IAOC, or some other group.
The sad thing is though that while much of the world will use metric numbers, quite a few industries still use items whose actual dimensions are based on an inch.
Consider that the height of a 1 U rack mount server is 1.75 inches. You can write on the engineering doc 44.45 mm, but it is still 1.75 inch. You could even reasonably design the unit as 44 mm and in all likely hood you would have no issues. But if rackmount servers were invented in a metric country, the height of 1U would almost certainly be 40mm or 50mm tall. And the 19 inch rack width (roughly 480 mm) would have been 500mm.
The standard spacing of two banana plug jacks is 3/4 of an inch. (Although interestingly the plugs themselves have a 4mm diameter).
For electronics prototyping (as well as older electronics that tended to use DIP or SIP components) a standard spacing of.1 inch is used. You can call it 2.54mm but it does not change what it is.
Changing standards like some of those is almost impossible, and one of the biggest challenges in having a fully metric world.
Hmm. Mil a unit of Imperial measurement with the more useful alternative name of thou (short for thousandth), being 1/1000 of an inch. While it is not often used in conjunction with fractional indicators, it is still not invalid.
The reason it is recommended to call it the thou is to avoid the confusion will millimeters. Nevertheless, that is almost certainly what the Technician was talking about.
Yes. Especially if a standard emerged, such that you could place multiple devices on a single mat. That was part of the original design of the SplashPower system. A more realistic implementation is the pwrmatt. (http://www.pwrmatt.com) (due in Fall 2009). Unlike the SplashPower proposal, this one starts out assuming devices will not already have the system built-in, so they will be selling what are basically plastic protective covers for devices that have the power receiver built-in. I'd be very surprised if they would not be very willing to negotiate with device manufacturers to incorperate support directly into the product. That is of course the ideal solution. Unfortunately, it appears that for most devices the supported solution will be a small pad with a cable that you connect to the device.
If they are smart, they will also make the receivers in extra thin form available to hobbyists at minimal cost so people like you and me can integrate the technology into existing product. (Pop the case off your cell phone, put the receiver in a spot with a bit of room, and solder the leads to the USB power pins.)
A better solution would have been the splashpower product. The product in it's original incarnation, was a mat that was slightly bigger than a mousepad, and some small inexpensive receiver components. It is based on inductive coupling. The idea is that you could just lay your devices on the mat (a mat could support multiple devices simultaneously if they were small enough to fit.)
Unfortunately, the company ditched that, for a design that is basically a cradle, which more or less completely eliminates any benefit the technology has.
The fact that the federal government has ruled that somebody growing weed for personal use in his own residence, because he might impact the insterstate weed market by not buying from a street dealer, should be all you need to know to understand that the Federal government would consider ISPs interstate commerce.
Is it right that the federal government has abused that clause so badly? No. But what many with a Libertarian view forget that the average person knows almost nothing about his or her state government. When said person feels a law should be passed, they almost always look at the Federal Government. There are some exceptions. For example, I suspect many Califonia residents are more aware of the state government, simply because it is unusually large and active for a state government. Nevertheless people tend to look to the federal government for much of this.
Looking to the federal government is not even that wrong anymore. In this ever more globalized economy, people are wanting ever greater conformity in the laws. Having significant differences between the law in various states can be a real hassle. I mean picture if each state had its own set of regulations on what is legal in a cell phone, such that having your cell phone turned on when you entered the state next to you would be a crime, since your phone does not meet that states regulations.
Sure, pressure from businesses would help keep many state laws pretty uniform. But it is just so much easier to have the federal government pass a law and be done with it.
So that is what happens. Is it good? Perhaps not, but it is how things work in the United States.
Surrounded by what free market? I've never seen any free market. I've seen some markets that resemble a free market, but usually only on the surface. I'll admit that some markets, such as several online markets really resemble a free market very closely, but even they are not free.
Indeed. I am always shocked that people install any software provided by the ISP. They don't need some broken net-nanny software, a half-assed firewall that does not work as well as the Windows firewall it disables, having branding adding to internet explorer and outlook express, yet another worthless IE toolbar, or even worse, some form of stand-alone (screen edge docking) toolbar. The only feature that might be reasonable, is changing the IE homepage, and they can install software to do that.
Then again, I also find it incredibly annoying that home routers come with big warning stickers that you should install the software on the cd, since that software is in no way nessisary thanks to the web interface. Indeed, I honestly have no idea what is even on said CDs, but whatever it is, I don't miss it.
Yes there is a fundamental difference. In DSL you have an individual line to the the phone company owned equipment (the DSLAM). Thus any data on that line is either data from you or data intended for you. On cable, your neighborhood shares a line. That is to say, that on the cable line that comes into your house is not only your data, but the data of the people next door (if they use the same cable internet service.) To prevent you from seeing the neigbors data, and to determine who sent anything in the other direction, the data is encoded (I would not dare call it encrpyted) with a modem specific identifier.
It is a wonderful article. It clearly shows why the cheapest SSDs (jmicron based) don't work very well, and what to look for in a cheap SSD (Indilinx). The biggest thing it tells me though is data on drives as the come from the factory are not worth a thing. One should fill the SSD with more than one pass of random data before running the tests. (More than one pass because the actual drive capacity is usually slightly greater than the reported capacity.)
Running the tests at that point will give effectively worst case data. The real world usage would actually be slightly better than the results shown, thanks to smart controllers tuned for slightly more real word use cases.
For an example of the sorts of optimizations that can be performed, (although this one would not be impacted by the above), a drive could while idle look through its contents, and find any block with many dirty pages. (Dirty pages being those not mapped to logical sectors, but containing data). It could then erase the block, and re-write the clean pages. Since the drives often contain ~10% extra blocks, then doing that would mean that perhaps as much as 5% of the rated storage capacity would always be ready for fast writes (writes without erasing the block). (I say like 5% because it would be too hard on the drive if the idle block cleaner always cleaned all sectors with dirty pages.)
The trim command mentioned on the article would take that one step further. The OS would issue the trim command on any logical sector that was in use, but is no longer in use. This would be telling the drive that the OS no longer cares about the content of that sector, and can lose it if it wants to. The drive would then mark the pages as dirty, and mark the logical sector as not being mapped to any physical page. This would break things like undelete programs, but those were never guaranteed to work in the first place. That would mean that except in drives near 100% used, there would be far more than 10% of the pages not actively mapped to a logical sector. Combined with a idle block cleaner as described above, and the current method of measuring drive performance would stop being misleading.
So for now, we should test drives that have already been heavily used (such as by filling with random data), since that would at worst slightly underestimate the real world performance). Once the trim command is in common use, reverting to our current rating system would be reasonable.
"The contents of all storage media associated with OIT facilities" == "all the network disk-space we provide". So just don't use the network disk space. Use thumb drives instead.
Mine does not even require antivirus software, although they deliberately design the system into tricking students into installing it, and some other crap. However, if you machine is rooted, and begins disrupting the network, they reserve the right to ban your computer from the network.
indeed. _Exit(int) is a system call. exit() is part of the standard library. I quote from ISO/IEC 14882:2003:
A return statement in main has the effect of leaving the main function (destroying any objects with automatic storage duration) and calling exit with the return value as the argument. If control reaches the end of main without encountering a return statement, the effect is that of executing return 0;
Now, exit(int) does not clean up remaining automatics in the current scope (i.e. variables on the stack will not be cleaned up), but otherwise exit(int) and returning from main are identical.
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Yes. The high points of the Integral Fast Reactor are that is will run on just about anything, including "spent" fuel from other reactors. It keeps processing fuel until there is nothing left to get from it. The result is a far smaller amount of radioactive waste than other plants. The radioactive waste produced will decay to the level of natural uranium radiation in only 200 years, which is worlds better than the thousands of years it takes for the "spent" fuel of current systems to decay.
Fuel does not need to be precisely fabricated like in many other reactor designs. It can simply be cast into the correct shape.
The reactor is not a serious proliferation concern, because once the fuel is started in the reactor it remains extremely radioactive until it is completely spent. The completely spent material is worthless is nuclear weapons, and militarily could only be useful for dirty bombs. However that risk exists with conventional reactor designs, and is even worse, because of the larger amount of waste produced by those designs.
That is not to say that everything about this design is ideal. The cost per unit energy produced for this plant is somewhat higher than with conventional plants. That is because other plants are only retrieving the least expensive energy from the fuel, while this plant design wrings pretty much all the energy out of the fuel. This produces a problem for companies interesting in using such a design, since they need to be able to compete on cost per unit energy. If nuclear power plants had to pay for waste disposal in proportion to how long the fuel takes to decay, that would almost certainly offset this. Another small issue is that a few important components of the reactor have never been shown to be commercially viable at a large scale. There are also some safety concerns about the use of molten sodium in the reactor design.
But all things considered it is a real shame the project was canceled just because it might appear at first to be a threat to anti-proliferation efforts, even though an explanation of the design would make it clear that constructing such a plant would reduce proliferation risk.
You might be surprised. I who virtually never watch non-English programming, am a native English speaker, without any hearing impairment, often watch shows with subtitles on if they are available. It helps for those times when speach is slightly garbled, and you can't quite make out what was said.
Oddly enough though I've seen subtitles backfire on Content producers. On one television program being aired on a network site, Subtitles were provided. The dubtitles here were produced by the Closed-Captioners of the program, (as evidenced by the caption credit during the title sequence).
In one scene, I noticed two lines of caption that did not correspond the the audio. Upon replaying that scene, I discovered that the dialog was indeed spoken, but due to character positioning it was almost impposible to see. The dialog in question would also only confuse listeners, so at the last minute they apparently scrapped those lines by muting the speech tracks there. This was apparently after they had sent the copy to the captioners, so the result was that the cut dialog was revived by the captions.
I've also seen plenty of poorly done fan made subtitles, and occasionally even professionally produced captions with mistakes that were pretty bad. Bad enough that a single play-through would have caught them. My guess is that they forgot to note these particular issues on their test play-through, and do not have a policy of requiring one play-through with no spotted errors before releasing.
There I just fixed that for you. I just had browser shots visit your page with everything they have.
Yes, but Google Apps uses your own domain name. Hence the reason why it was originally named "Google Apps for Your Domain". The name has since been shortened, but that fact still remains.
First of all, It looks like your paragraph breaks may have been eaten. Therefore I will be reformatting your message:
Ehm Theora is not an 'open standard' by any means. H.264 actually is, but it has some serious licensing issues for 'free software' which is not a problem for Apple since they are already paying for the licenses anyway. Implementing Theora is risky for Apple, and I'm pretty surprised that Google is willing to add it to Chrome. No-one can guarantee that Theora is patent-free, having a codebase in a larger project which isn't covered by any patents at all has become almost impossible, certainly if you specialize in areas like video and audio codecs, where commercial labs such as Fraunhofer Institute operate, which live from patent royalties on technologies they researched.
I'm not exactly what you can call an Apple fanboy, I do have an iPhone however, but have no mac, typing this on a HP laptop with winxp, running 3 linux vm's, and developing on a bsd and a linux server remotely. I always get confused when people talk about Apple being "evil". Sure their focus is not on 'standards' - but on user experience. I absolutely don't get the 'lock in'. Apple pushed for DRM-free tunes in the iTunes store - because it's bad for the customers, not because it conflicts with some idealistic bullshit. I don't really get how behavior like this is lock-in? This means anything that can play AAC files - which is quite a lot (AAC is standardized after all and not an Apple propriatry format). This opens the market for competition for their iPod, so explain me exactly where the lock-in is? And that's only one part. Apple clearly supports opensource software. Yes they struggled somewhat with giving back to webkit in the beginning, but now, things are looking fine on that level. They get it that they can benefit from OSS, and they do include a lot of OOS with OS/X ( like Apache etc). Some people say they are exploiting OSS projects, but in the end, Red Hat, Novell & co. are also doing that right?
Now - can someone please explain me how Apple would "lock me in" by refusing to implement a non-standardized video-codec of which the creators claim it is patent-free. They do want to implement a codec that most video-capable devices out-there can already play, and is still the standard to which Theora is being compared.
Please shut up about 'crippling' products, 'vendor lock-in', 'ignoring open standards'. It may look like I'm "pro" H.264 - but I'm actually not really. I don't care what codec will be used to be honest. Just have the video tag support all codecs supported by the main OS. I think the Mozilla foundation is acting like a bunch of morons refusing to go that way. There's no such thing as "forcing freedom" on people, which is exactly what they're trying to do.
Now my reply.
Ehm Theora is not an 'open standard' by any means.
I'm trying to figure out why you claim this.
I suppose it depends on what definition of Open Standard you use.
If you require a sufficiently complete specification that is available to anybody who desires it at no fee, and without an NDA, with all patents available under RAND terms, then both H.264 and Theora are Open Standards.
If you require that there be no fee on implementations (besides the cost of obtaining the standard itself), I understand that to exclude H.264.
On the other hand, if you require that the standards be created and maintained by a coalition of industry experts which anybody interested can join and participate in, without one group clearing being the controlling interest, then Theora would not be an open standard, but H.264 would be.
For example, under Bruce Perens's Defintion Theora is an Open Standard, while H.264 is not.
On the other hand, H.264 meets the ITU-T's definition, while it is not clear if Theora meets it.
No-one can guarantee that Theora is patent-free
But nobody can prove that H.264 is not also cove
Did it change in any significant way that would invalidate real world documents? I tend to doubt it.
But there is an HTML 5 now. Significant portions of the document will not be changing in any significant manner. Further, the HTML 5 spec explicitly deals with how to handle backwards compatibility with legacy pages, which includes pages made to the draft HTML 5 spec.
The HTML5 committee intends to gradually lock parts of the spec as they are implemented and start being used, such that the final specification will not significantly differ on any features we start seeing in the wild. This is known as standardizing existing practice.
No. I include everything beyong XHTML 1.0 as a waste. The modularity of 1.1 was the only substancial difference. That was inherited by XHTML 2, and was the only true improvement. The vast majority of the rest of XHTML2 was swapping out lartge chunks of the language for other XML based languages that in reality where not used as often. I've never seen anything that actually uses XForms.
XFrames is clearly still a direct syntactic derivative of HTML frames, but with a brand new set of tag and attribute names, that people would need to learn. It does offer a few advantages, but those are moot, since frame based site designs have been dead for what, like 5 years?
XML Events might be a superior design, but would require a fairly major overhaul to browser engines, and may require an overhaul of the style sheet languages to better support event based styling. Since CSS2 is not even full implemented in most browsers, and CSS 3 support can be pretty darn patchy. XHTML 2 would not be completed without scrapping CSS for an improved version of XST, merely because that is more XML-y.
Alternate content being specifiable on any tag is hardly an improvement. It confuses the tag meanings for one thing. A paragraph tag should not really be specifying an image, with only fallback content for ua's not supporting the image as the tags inner content. That would be what the img tag is for. (I'll admit that the replacing of img tags alt attribute with inner content was a good idea, but that was already possible with object or embed.)
XHTML2 conformance checking requires validation against all three major schema languages: DTD, XML Schema, and RELAX NG. That is far from an improvement. It also was focused on replacing chunks of HTML with other XML based technologies, but did not even bother to replace html hyperlinks with XLink.
As an author who is considering what language to use, I would see nothing in XHTML2 that would make my life easier compared to XHTML 1. I stand by my assertion that the only real improvement in XHTML 2 is the modularization that it inherited from XHTML 1.1. I see plenty in XHTML5 that would make my life easier.
Mozilla's video tag support is in no way a propriety extension. It is fully con formant to the current HTML5 draft, excepting perhaps some minor bugs, and perhaps a few attributes not yet supported. Under the current draft, browsers choose what set of codecs/container-formats they support. There are no mandatory codecs or container formats. So for the time being Mozilla's supported video containers are {ogg}, and supported video codecs are {thedora}.
They will almost certainly add additional container formats and codecs in the future.
Mozilla will continue to follow HTML5, making changes as nessisary when the draft changes.
XHTML 2 is being canceled not because it failed, but because the only advantage over XHTML 1 was being more modular, which nobody really cared about. Besides, HTML5 will define XHTML5, which will be a significant improvement on XHTML 1.
HTML5 comes in two forms.
It comes in an SGML-inspired format, that is not strictly SGML but matches real word HTML almost exactly. The big difference from HTML4 besides the new tags is that it does not use a DTD, nor does it support the shortag features of SGML, with the exception of the short attribute feature. Thus "<title/</<body/".
(Yes, that has three open brackets, zero close brackets, and 3 slashes) is not valid HTML5, despite being valid HTML4. (At least once you add the DTD).
There is also an XHTML form, which may informally be called XHTML5. Except for the new tags, this is pretty much identical to XHTML 1. In some ways this is the prefered form of HTML5, being that the other form does not support namespaces.
Indeed. The person distributed the ROM online is likely violating the law, but the downloader is probably not. Some theories indicate that the downloading is technically legal even if you do not own the game. If you do have the game, then it is very likely not an issue.
Making the ROM yourself, or having somebody make it for you (pay them to dump you game cart) is virtually indisputably legal. (Although for some systems like the DS, this requires circumventing a copy control mechanism.) Nintendo has some sort of legal theory that games embedded in a rom chip cannot be legally dumped, but that theory is very much unsupported by the law, or relevant caselaw.
The law is 100% clear though that in all cases, if your rom is legal somehow, playing it with an emulator is legal. Even Nintendo does not dispute that, having lost the very court case that made this clear.
The IANA (which is the technical devision of ICANN) assigns ip addresses to ARIN, RIPE NCC, APNIC, LACNIC, and AfriNIC.
Those in turn assign IP addresses wsithin the assigned region. I believe the same system is used for handing out Autonomous System numbers.
Anyway, it is worth noting, that the IANA is the only technical part of ICANN. It publishes the DNS root zone file, as well as other information.
The rest of ICANN (the overwhelming majority of it) does little more than set policy for the domain name system, and in a horribly inefficient fashion.
It should be dissolved (corporate charter revoked), with two new organizations being formed under the umbrella of the Internet Society (ISOC).
ISOC already has the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) and IESG (internet Engineering Steering Group), both under the oversight of the IETF Administrative Oversight Committee (IAOC).
A new organization named "Internet Assigned Numbers Authority" (IANA) (being completely separate from the existing one, but performing the same tasks) should be formed, and be placed under the oversight of the IAOC.
The other new organization under the umbrella of the ISOC, would be the "Internet Naming Policy Commitee" (INPG). This would be a cut down version of the ICANN policy forming components. It is not clear to me if it should be under the oversight of the IAOC, or some other group.
The sad thing is though that while much of the world will use metric numbers, quite a few industries still use items whose actual dimensions are based on an inch.
Consider that the height of a 1 U rack mount server is 1.75 inches. You can write on the engineering doc 44.45 mm, but it is still 1.75 inch. You could even reasonably design the unit as 44 mm and in all likely hood you would have no issues. But if rackmount servers were invented in a metric country, the height of 1U would almost certainly be 40mm or 50mm tall. And the 19 inch rack width (roughly 480 mm) would have been 500mm.
The standard spacing of two banana plug jacks is 3/4 of an inch. (Although interestingly the plugs themselves have a 4mm diameter).
For electronics prototyping (as well as older electronics that tended to use DIP or SIP components) a standard spacing of .1 inch is used. You can call it 2.54mm but it does not change what it is.
Changing standards like some of those is almost impossible, and one of the biggest challenges in having a fully metric world.
Hmm. Mil a unit of Imperial measurement with the more useful alternative name of thou (short for thousandth), being 1/1000 of an inch. While it is not often used in conjunction with fractional indicators, it is still not invalid.
The reason it is recommended to call it the thou is to avoid the confusion will millimeters. Nevertheless, that is almost certainly what the Technician was talking about.
Yes. Especially if a standard emerged, such that you could place multiple devices on a single mat. That was part of the original design of the SplashPower system. A more realistic implementation is the pwrmatt. (http://www.pwrmatt.com) (due in Fall 2009). Unlike the SplashPower proposal, this one starts out assuming devices will not already have the system built-in, so they will be selling what are basically plastic protective covers for devices that have the power receiver built-in. I'd be very surprised if they would not be very willing to negotiate with device manufacturers to incorperate support directly into the product. That is of course the ideal solution. Unfortunately, it appears that for most devices the supported solution will be a small pad with a cable that you connect to the device.
If they are smart, they will also make the receivers in extra thin form available to hobbyists at minimal cost so people like you and me can integrate the technology into existing product. (Pop the case off your cell phone, put the receiver in a spot with a bit of room, and solder the leads to the USB power pins.)
A better solution would have been the splashpower product. The product in it's original incarnation, was a mat that was slightly bigger than a mousepad, and some small inexpensive receiver components. It is based on inductive coupling. The idea is that you could just lay your devices on the mat (a mat could support multiple devices simultaneously if they were small enough to fit.)
Here is a concept image: http://web.archive.org/web/20050308101803/http://www.splashpower.com/_cms_images/sp_small.jpg
Unfortunately, the company ditched that, for a design that is basically a cradle, which more or less completely eliminates any benefit the technology has.
The fact that the federal government has ruled that somebody growing weed for personal use in his own residence, because he might impact the insterstate weed market by not buying from a street dealer, should be all you need to know to understand that the Federal government would consider ISPs interstate commerce.
Is it right that the federal government has abused that clause so badly? No. But what many with a Libertarian view forget that the average person knows almost nothing about his or her state government. When said person feels a law should be passed, they almost always look at the Federal Government. There are some exceptions. For example, I suspect many Califonia residents are more aware of the state government, simply because it is unusually large and active for a state government. Nevertheless people tend to look to the federal government for much of this.
Looking to the federal government is not even that wrong anymore. In this ever more globalized economy, people are wanting ever greater conformity in the laws. Having significant differences between the law in various states can be a real hassle. I mean picture if each state had its own set of regulations on what is legal in a cell phone, such that having your cell phone turned on when you entered the state next to you would be a crime, since your phone does not meet that states regulations.
Sure, pressure from businesses would help keep many state laws pretty uniform. But it is just so much easier to have the federal government pass a law and be done with it.
So that is what happens. Is it good? Perhaps not, but it is how things work in the United States.
Surrounded by what free market? I've never seen any free market. I've seen some markets that resemble a free market, but usually only on the surface. I'll admit that some markets, such as several online markets really resemble a free market very closely, but even they are not free.
Indeed. I am always shocked that people install any software provided by the ISP. They don't need some broken net-nanny software, a half-assed firewall that does not work as well as the Windows firewall it disables, having branding adding to internet explorer and outlook express, yet another worthless IE toolbar, or even worse, some form of stand-alone (screen edge docking) toolbar. The only feature that might be reasonable, is changing the IE homepage, and they can install software to do that.
Then again, I also find it incredibly annoying that home routers come with big warning stickers that you should install the software on the cd, since that software is in no way nessisary thanks to the web interface. Indeed, I honestly have no idea what is even on said CDs, but whatever it is, I don't miss it.
Yes there is a fundamental difference. In DSL you have an individual line to the the phone company owned equipment (the DSLAM). Thus any data on that line is either data from you or data intended for you. On cable, your neighborhood shares a line. That is to say, that on the cable line that comes into your house is not only your data, but the data of the people next door (if they use the same cable internet service.) To prevent you from seeing the neigbors data, and to determine who sent anything in the other direction, the data is encoded (I would not dare call it encrpyted) with a modem specific identifier.
It is a wonderful article. It clearly shows why the cheapest SSDs (jmicron based) don't work very well, and what to look for in a cheap SSD (Indilinx). The biggest thing it tells me though is data on drives as the come from the factory are not worth a thing. One should fill the SSD with more than one pass of random data before running the tests. (More than one pass because the actual drive capacity is usually slightly greater than the reported capacity.)
Running the tests at that point will give effectively worst case data. The real world usage would actually be slightly better than the results shown, thanks to smart controllers tuned for slightly more real word use cases.
For an example of the sorts of optimizations that can be performed, (although this one would not be impacted by the above), a drive could while idle look through its contents, and find any block with many dirty pages. (Dirty pages being those not mapped to logical sectors, but containing data). It could then erase the block, and re-write the clean pages. Since the drives often contain ~10% extra blocks, then doing that would mean that perhaps as much as 5% of the rated storage capacity would always be ready for fast writes (writes without erasing the block). (I say like 5% because it would be too hard on the drive if the idle block cleaner always cleaned all sectors with dirty pages.)
The trim command mentioned on the article would take that one step further. The OS would issue the trim command on any logical sector that was in use, but is no longer in use. This would be telling the drive that the OS no longer cares about the content of that sector, and can lose it if it wants to. The drive would then mark the pages as dirty, and mark the logical sector as not being mapped to any physical page. This would break things like undelete programs, but those were never guaranteed to work in the first place. That would mean that except in drives near 100% used, there would be far more than 10% of the pages not actively mapped to a logical sector. Combined with a idle block cleaner as described above, and the current method of measuring drive performance would stop being misleading.
So for now, we should test drives that have already been heavily used (such as by filling with random data), since that would at worst slightly underestimate the real world performance). Once the trim command is in common use, reverting to our current rating system would be reasonable.
"The contents of all storage media associated with OIT facilities" == "all the network disk-space we provide". So just don't use the network disk space. Use thumb drives instead.
Mine does not even require antivirus software, although they deliberately design the system into tricking students into installing it, and some other crap. However, if you machine is rooted, and begins disrupting the network, they reserve the right to ban your computer from the network.
indeed. _Exit(int) is a system call. exit() is part of the standard library. I quote from ISO/IEC 14882:2003:
A return statement in main has the effect of leaving the main function (destroying any objects with automatic
storage duration) and calling exit with the return value as the argument. If control reaches the end
of main without encountering a return statement, the effect is that of executing
return 0;
Now, exit(int) does not clean up remaining automatics in the current scope (i.e. variables on the stack will not be cleaned up), but otherwise exit(int) and returning from main are identical.