And putting cooking oil on you engine will thrash it too.
Its not a problem with your engine or the fuel, your engine is not ready for ethanol, thats it.
Brazil have been using ethanol for more the 30 years now, and the main problem is with market regulation and prices, as ethanol competes with sugar. That was solved with bi-fuel engines (gasoline and ethanol), you CAN mix them up freely and use whatever is cheaper.
From a envinonmental point of view, ethanol IS better than solar, etc. Solar cars need to use toxic components on the batteries, whereas ethanol is just a matter of ajusting the engine parts that come into contact with the fuel. Ethanol is mixed with water and its more corrosive than gasoline. But engines CAN be converted to run on ethanol only.
And ethanol has been used as a anti-detonant for gasoline for years in Brazil. It actually simplifies the supply chain, because ethanol-only parts can run on gasoline, the opposite is not true.
I think Linux already succeeded at every market you can think of. Servers ? Check. Appliances ? Check. Smartphones ? Check. Tablets ? Check. Supercomputers ? Check.
Oh, the desktop. It doesn't have to succeed, it already has. Why ? You don't need to have 99% of the market, you need to threaten the dominant player in a market. Think about what hapenned with Mozilla and IE. M$ was sitting on its hands with IE6 for almost three years. Then came FF and that made them release IE7 in less then a year. FF doesn't need 90%+ of market share, I sure hope they don't ever achieve it, it just has to set a new quality standard. If M$ stays still, FF or Chrome will steamroll IE.
The very same thing can be said about Linux in the desktop. It doesn't need a big market share, it needs to stay a viable alternative to Windows. So we consumers get the best of both worlds: a good closed source non-free (as in beer) SO and a good free (as in freedom) OS, pick the one that best suits you!
I'm the husband of an Engineering teacher and that's something we already discussed at home. I'm an Engineer myself, so I'm familiar with the requirements of a hard-science course.
My advice to you is simply this: do what you think is appropriate and make sure your students understand those rules on the very first class. If you think they shouldn't use an iPod, then say so. If one student drops the course, it's their decision.
What isn't fair is to tell a student they can't use their dictionary on the exam. That korean student could have bought a regular dictionary of told in advance she couldn't use the electronic one.
Well, as a Electrial Engineer who designs equipment that have a serial console, I think I give you several reasons that the serial console will be round for some years yet.
First, legacy. Most professional routers have come with a serial management console since ever. So anyone who's been trained to manage these devices use serial consoles for that. Of course, by being an IP equipment, you can manage them by accessing the same console using telnet, and you can upgrade their firmware using that console too. A USB to serial converter is a basic tool for anyone managing these type of routers
Second, design. In a microcontroller, one of the simplest devices you can use is the serial port. A lot of bootloaders for embedded devices (U-Boot, Redboot, CFE) usually start with a banner on the serial console even before configuring the RAM controller on the CPU, so you know your board is running and you can output valuable error messages very early on the boot processes. Other devices, even a true USB console, need much more complex drivers that are loaded later on the boot process or need more configuration options than a simple "115,8n1" somewhere on the manual.
Most domestic routers don't have a serial port. Well, they have, but you can't access them unless you open the case, the bottom line is that domestic users aren't even aware their wifi router have a serial port, much less that they have to use it. How often you need to unbrick your wifi router if you don't load custom firmware on it ? My guess is never.
Third is that it doesn't make a difference, as others have pointed out, if the equipment uses a USB to serial conververter, as the serial device will usually be limited to 115 kbps, even if your serial interface can transmit up to 12 mbps. Only CPUs with USB devices on them will benefit from a faster interface. The iMX line of processors from Freescale is one of them.
Maybe it was Hans Reiser? Sure the guy is locked up in San Quentin, but nobody knows how to hack a filesystem to bits better than Reiser. Bada ba ching! Thank you, thank you... I'll be here all night.
Thinking about it, the FOSS community could make a petition so Hans Reiser could continue collaborating with reiserfs4. It's not like he doesn't have the time to do it.
Funny thing is, if one uses the styles in Word correctly, you get a WYSIWYM editor, just never, EVER touch the bold, italic, underscore button. And the sad thing is it's much, much easier to do this in word 2000 then in newer versions.
Warning: Microsoft bashing below
Micro$oft is so bad, that when its software works, they break it on the next version!;-)
One thing I think people overlook is that piracy is a personal choice. It's SO easy to download a game these days, if you want to pirate, you will, DRM or not. If you decide to purchase the game, it's almost a moral decision, you buy it to support the publisher, not to play the game.
Yes, I do think making a nuclear bomb is ALL ABOUT the fuel cycle. Little Boy wasn't even tested before being dropped in Hiroshima.
Trinity was a implosion-type plutonion bomb, just like Fat Man, while Little Boy was a gun-type uranium bomb. So the gun assembly was not tested before being deployed.
For example, where I live, I have signed for an electrical plan that entitles me to use a certain amount of electrical power at a given time (=bandwidth). If everyone in my neighborhood used the power they're entitled to, the power lines would melt.
That's half-true. The power company MUST meet peak demand, as well the rest of the electrical system. You can't say to people "sorry, you won electricity tonight because your neighbor is consuming too much power". That's absurd and ridiculous.
What ISPs did was to HEAVILY oversell capacity. Too much greed is the problem, not heavy usage.
As a father of a three-year boy and a toddler girl, I can say that that are curious about EVERYTHING. From the ant to the airplane. What you should be considering is how to keep them that way, curious and unafraid to ask questions.
Specifically about exposing children to technology, I'm against it. We don't really know how it affects their development, so I'll wait until they're 7, 8 or older to get them a computer. Right now I think it's more important for them to use their imagination than a computer, that's why I like so much to tell them oral stories.
Yes, they are available to any person who asks for the ballot. After the machies are totalled at the end of the election day, you can go in ask and for the totals ballot.
Here is a place to explain something about elections in Brazil: it's amazingly organized. You can't vote anywhere, you have to go to your DESIGNATED electoral section to vote. It's always at the same place and it's usually in a school. So I have to go to district 111, section 231 to vote. That's a specific room in a specific place. I just can't vote someplace else.
So each machine has a list of the allowed voters. It knows beforehand how many people can vote there. After the election ends they print a report of how many voters in teach section, how many votes were cast, and how many votes each candidate had, plus blank and null votes.
So if you want to greate a GNO and go over each electoral section of your city and ask fot that report, you can compare those numbers with the Electoral Justice's ones.
And riggin an election is not that easy. First of all, a section can't have more votes than voters. you have a mean absence rate (people who didn't vote) and that's pretty much the same on similar conditions, you can have a machine with 100% valid votes and expect that's OK. Electoral Justice is smarter than that.
The system is far from perfect. Ok, there's code auditing, how there's no way to know that the code running on a election machine is the one that was audited. After the machines are brought back to the warehouses and the votes are count, you don't know how they sum the votes. But given Brazillian history, that's pretty much the best system we ever had.
One test they do is actually pretty simple: they do a lottery and take some machines from the voting places on the day before the election day. These machines are replaced and a simulated election is held on them. As you don know beforehand which machines will de audited, you risk being exposed if anything is not ok.
That is just half-true. While you can concentrate on one market or product, that's not a very viable survival strategy. Sure, when you're a small business, you need some leverage so people buy your product instead of the dominant player's. But when you reach no 1, there's just one place to go...
If you specialize, all your eggs are on just one basket. If that market fails ? What if another company makes a better product ? What if another technology makes your market obsolete ? Yes, by specializing you can be VERY good at one thing. But you don't have to very good, just good enough on the eyes of your market. By being good enough on two markets, you have extra security for your company.
NVidia saw an opportunity, to make chipsets. And they're great at it. It complimentary market to GPU because it lets NVidia do things like SLI for their cards. If they don't, who will ?
Another thing is that competition is always good. Sure, Intel has the CPU crown again, but a while ago AMD had some GREAT CPUs, better than Intel's. See what that did for us ? It forcet Intel to make a better CPU line, bottom line is, we customers always get some good options to buy from. I personally think is bad for the market to have several companies concentrating all parts (CPU, chipset, GPU).
Well, the spectrum IS limited. Yes, you can mitigate the problem by using spread spectrum (SS), which gives you a larger SNR ( around +10db ), but that's not infinite ( you can have infinite keys without any correlation between them ).
I don't know what you mean by UWB, I assume that you mean using higher frequencies. That's possible to some extend: you need commercial technology in the 10GHz arena, and that takes time to develop.
Let's not forget all the current transmitters that don't use SS, you can't just scrap them all.
And different frequencies have different propagation characteristics, the nearer to light, the more light-like the propagation, meaning you need line of sight. That's possible to some services and you can have reflection-based propagation models ( like cellphones in a urban environments ), but some long range communications need characteristics like ionosphere reflection and earth diffraction.
And today's hand held devices are fast enough to play music and movies, but sure aren't powerful enough to do real-time DSP of RF signals on the GHz range. I doubt that a PC can, even if it's a 3 GHz processor, a IIR filter takes some taps and you need to spend some processing time there, so I'd guess that a PC could process RF signals around 200MHz, but that's it.
So no, you NEED government regulation. And see that even 2.4 GHz isn't deregulated, it's regulated all right, you just don't need a license to transmit at this frequency, but you have a maximum allowed TX power. This about yous acesss point dieing because your neighbor just turned his 200W AP on.
And you could "s/Wikipedia/Encyclopedia Brittanica" on that statement and it would still be 100% accurate. Encyclopedias are summaries of available knowledge and nothing more. Wikipedia is just one example of an encyclopedia. Nope. Imagine this scenario: I'm a teacher, and I ask for an assignment about, let's say, Abraham Lincoln. Then I go to Wikipedia's entry on him and edit it, subtlely. How will students know that AL date of birth is wrong ? They can tell unless they use another source.
Ok, eventually someone will spot the error and will correct it, but between the edit and the correction, the information is wrong. Ad I can edit it again. And again. Point is: There's a chance that Wikipedia's information is not correct, at any given time, and if you don't cross check it with other sources, you might not be able to tell whether the entry is correct or not.
On Brittanica, after an entry is corrected, it stays corrected, because Britannica's editors don't keep editing the entries over and over again. Any coder knows that editing working code is poison, same thing here.
So, Wikipedia is nice for fun articles, and a great reference for a lot of things. But you CAN'T trust it and SHOULD cross-reference it with other works. As you should do with any other reference, even Brittanica.
People have to understand that, no matter how many times Jimbo Whales says it, wikipedia is not reliable. As a whole, the information found on the internet is not reliable. It's nice for facebook and blogging, and yes, blogging can be a powerful tool when it gives voice to people that otherwise would be silent. But who guarantees that the information you're reading right now is correct ? Oh, sure, someone will find out that an article was vandalized, but how many people read that article between the time it was altered and the time it was restored ? How do I know that a blog article is correct ? Would you trust a doctor that uses wikipedia as a source ? I'm sorry but I wouldn't.
But as a engineer, I tell you I couldn't graduate without a library. Yes, I DID walk in a library, check out some books and study by them. If you want to study seriously, you will use more than one book, just because some authors explain some parts better the others, so you can learn the best from each book. Libraries are a necessary tool for education. I'm not saying that the electronic version of books isn't useful, but I use them as a reference, as I can search much faster for some specific topic. Good books are invaluable.
Besides the obvious point in education, what about ALL the good literature books out there ? Will you buy them all ? J. R. R. Tokien, George Orwell, William Golding, Aldous Huxley, J.P. Lovecraft, Shakespeare, Joseph Conrad ? Ok, I di want to own Lord of the Rings and some other works, but why not just check them out from a library ? It's free, and it's much better to read a book on paper than on a computer screen. Go for a stroll on a sunny day, take out a good book.
Call me old fashioned, but I think that libraries shouldn't be turned in to shopping malls. We should encourage people to go there and discover what they keep as a matter of culture, not because you can drink a coffee while you get to surf with free internet access.
Or my view is biased because my mom is a librarian;-)
To understand why Pakistan took Youtube out, you have to first read the SourceOfAllHumanKnoledge(tm)(c) Wikipedia articles mentioned above. For the lazy ( like me ) here goest a shorter explanation.
BGP is the core routing protocol of the Internet. It's used to connect really big blocks of IP address to the net, telling the rest of the Internet how to reach them. For BGP to work, all BGPs routers have to be connected to one another in a mesh network ( TCP connections ) and must have a unique number in this mesh. This number is unique in the world and is assigned by IANA. ISPs that have such number have the "power" to change global routes, and this nutball Pakistani ISP is one of them. What they did was to tell the internet, by updating a global route, that the route to Youtube is now through some router they had.
What they expected is obvious, they wanted toi redirect all request to Youtube to another site. But instead of propagating a new route to the INSIDE of their network, they updated a global route and screwed everything. Ok, they could have just changed an DNS entry and redirected all DNS queries to their DNS server, thus negating the workaround of using OpenDNS.
If they knew the consequences of changing the route is only relevant on the lawsuite Youtube should put on them. They should loose they AS number immediately. And someone should redraft RFC 4271 to give routes an "owner", so If you receive a update on your router from someone not the owner you just discard it. In this way, an router can only update their give block.
Usually, it gets settled out of court for a fine; I don't know Brazilian courts, but I still suspect that'll happen here. Not happening. These are criminal charges, not a civil suite. They might get an agreement with the Federal Prosecution, but that's very unlikely. But Brazilian law is very lax, if condemned, they go to jail only after losing the last possible appeal.
Ok, let me see it I got this straight:
1) World does down the drain because some people decided to play a nice game of thermonuclear war,
2) The ones that didn't die in the war return to a savage state, fighting to the last bastions of civilization,
3) Gangs of highwayman terrorize the roads and people defend themselves in a refinery...
4) The one thing you want to have with you is a slide rule ?!
I bet the BEST thing would be to KNOW to PLANT something, because I bet if society destroyed itself, there wouldn't be any fast-food chains around...
Hydroelectric power is a viable option, but not a solution. Flooding large areas means that they should clear the area for most of it's forest, otherwise the wood will rot and produce copious amount of CO2.
You might say "oh, sure, who in their right mind wouldn't clear the land first ?" Well, here in Brazil we did just that. And as the wood rot, it makes the water of the dam's lake more acid, which corrodes the turbines' blades.
Even if the dam and the lake are managed properly, hydroelectric dams usually aren't near the consumer centers, which means long transmissions lines, lesser efficiency and more maintenance costs.
Nuclear, on the other side, is both cleaner and can be placed near the consumers. Of course, they're a *lot* more dangerous and proper management is a must ( see Chernobyl and Three Mile Island ), but cases like France attest that with responsible management it's possible to have safe, clean energy from nuclear plants.
They have nothing to do with the kernel ( besides that they're CPU intensive ), and that's exactly my point. Linux's problems aren't in the kernel, they're in whole other areas ( Office suite, media playing, gaming ) and that's usually lack of alternative software from the ones in M$ platform.
I find it amazing that people that can't understand the different between source and compiled code come talking about the linux kernel and how it should be split, forked, etc. Maybe we should lock Linus an Kolivas in a dark room, each one armed with a knife, and let them decide in the good old fashioned way what's best for the kernel. This is a slightly better solution then forking the kernel.
First, Kolivas is free to create a kernel for him, just setup his GIT server and he's done. That's what *free* software means. And *ANY* distro is free to use his kernel.
Second, what's all the fuss about the scheduler ? Damm, it works FINE, Linux's problem is NOT the scheduler. It's the lack of some basic features, like MP3 playing, AVI playing, etc. Yeah, I KNOW that this is because of commercial rights and such, but the average user doesn't and doesn't care. Computers are supposed to work out-of-the-box, if it doesn't then it's broken.
Third, what's the point of forking the kernel ? Just compile it with the right options and you're set. The source code can contain dozens of different schedulers, you use the one best for you. Discutions like this **ARE ** FUD and I think Linus must find all this very amusing, because it's a buch of people wasting energy in a non-issue.
This seems credible to me. Id has been one of the *very* few companies that support Linux gaming, and they do it by principle. But you can't swim against the current forever.
Linux gaming might never happen. Games don't get Linux versions because there aren't many gamers and there aren't many gamers because there aren't many games.
And no, as long as i heard, there's no OpenGL in Vista, it used DirectX to emulate it ( with a 99999999% performance penalty obviously ), so they can't build their graphic engine on OpenGL ( as they did since Quake 1 I guess ) to has cross-platform compatibility. One can argue that most effort for making a game goes to building its models and textures, but the game engine is no small feat either and after all, they're a commercial company that have bills to pay. What they COULD do is to license the content, so someone else could build a Linux engine based on OpenGL/SDL. That could be a better business model than Loki's.
And I expect people respect Id's decision and not rant about it. After all at least they did it for some time, developers like Valve and Blizzard didn't even try.
Totally agree! I think they should have the death penalty to people who die ( real worldly ) playing online! Oh, NVM.. I'll just go back to TB...
Re:Good binoculars, star charts, and a red flashli
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Entry-Level Astronomy?
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· Score: 3, Informative
I'm an amateur astronomer myself and Mike's advice is perfect. Astrophotography is addicitive, but needs planning and patience. As I assume you don't own an telescope yet, my advice is to buy a good binocular.
If you still want to buy an telescope, buy a cheap ( not cheapo ) one, around US$ 250, with EQUATORIAL mount, that's VERY important. Get used to it, learn what you like the most to observe ( deep-sky objects, planets, moon, variable stars, nebula ), learn how to align your telescope so it can track the sky movement's.
Then borrow from someone an old SLR camera, with film. Yes, that's right, not a digital one. Couple in your telescope ( you'll need an adapter ) and read some FAQs, ask help from your astronomy club and play with the settings, see how they change the result. You can use a webcam for that too, and some software like Registrax to stack the pictures, the result is amazing!
After you get to know the dirty details, you'll know what's the best equipment to buy, the best DSLR camera.
One tip: it's not about the camera or the telescope. I've seen AMAZING pictures taken with an old SLR with a home-made refractor telescope, mounted on a US$ 500 mount. It's about the MOUNT, spare no expense here. Spend 1000 on a mount and 200 on a telescope, you'll get GREAT pictures.
Dark skies for you!
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And putting cooking oil on you engine will thrash it too.
Its not a problem with your engine or the fuel, your engine is not ready for ethanol, thats it.
Brazil have been using ethanol for more the 30 years now, and the main problem is with market regulation and prices, as ethanol competes with sugar. That was solved with bi-fuel engines (gasoline and ethanol), you CAN mix them up freely and use whatever is cheaper.
From a envinonmental point of view, ethanol IS better than solar, etc. Solar cars need to use toxic components on the batteries, whereas ethanol is just a matter of ajusting the engine parts that come into contact with the fuel. Ethanol is mixed with water and its more corrosive than gasoline. But engines CAN be converted to run on ethanol only.
And ethanol has been used as a anti-detonant for gasoline for years in Brazil. It actually simplifies the supply chain, because ethanol-only parts can run on gasoline, the opposite is not true.
I think Linux already succeeded at every market you can think of. Servers ? Check. Appliances ? Check. Smartphones ? Check. Tablets ? Check. Supercomputers ? Check.
Oh, the desktop. It doesn't have to succeed, it already has. Why ? You don't need to have 99% of the market, you need to threaten the dominant player in a market. Think about what hapenned with Mozilla and IE. M$ was sitting on its hands with IE6 for almost three years. Then came FF and that made them release IE7 in less then a year. FF doesn't need 90%+ of market share, I sure hope they don't ever achieve it, it just has to set a new quality standard. If M$ stays still, FF or Chrome will steamroll IE.
The very same thing can be said about Linux in the desktop. It doesn't need a big market share, it needs to stay a viable alternative to Windows. So we consumers get the best of both worlds: a good closed source non-free (as in beer) SO and a good free (as in freedom) OS, pick the one that best suits you!
I'm the husband of an Engineering teacher and that's something we already discussed at home. I'm an Engineer myself, so I'm familiar with the requirements of a hard-science course. My advice to you is simply this: do what you think is appropriate and make sure your students understand those rules on the very first class. If you think they shouldn't use an iPod, then say so. If one student drops the course, it's their decision. What isn't fair is to tell a student they can't use their dictionary on the exam. That korean student could have bought a regular dictionary of told in advance she couldn't use the electronic one.
Well, as a Electrial Engineer who designs equipment that have a serial console, I think I give you several reasons that the serial console will be round for some years yet.
First, legacy. Most professional routers have come with a serial management console since ever. So anyone who's been trained to manage these devices use serial consoles for that. Of course, by being an IP equipment, you can manage them by accessing the same console using telnet, and you can upgrade their firmware using that console too. A USB to serial converter is a basic tool for anyone managing these type of routers
Second, design. In a microcontroller, one of the simplest devices you can use is the serial port. A lot of bootloaders for embedded devices (U-Boot, Redboot, CFE) usually start with a banner on the serial console even before configuring the RAM controller on the CPU, so you know your board is running and you can output valuable error messages very early on the boot processes. Other devices, even a true USB console, need much more complex drivers that are loaded later on the boot process or need more configuration options than a simple "115,8n1" somewhere on the manual.
Most domestic routers don't have a serial port. Well, they have, but you can't access them unless you open the case, the bottom line is that domestic users aren't even aware their wifi router have a serial port, much less that they have to use it. How often you need to unbrick your wifi router if you don't load custom firmware on it ? My guess is never.
Third is that it doesn't make a difference, as others have pointed out, if the equipment uses a USB to serial conververter, as the serial device will usually be limited to 115 kbps, even if your serial interface can transmit up to 12 mbps. Only CPUs with USB devices on them will benefit from a faster interface. The iMX line of processors from Freescale is one of them.
Maybe it was Hans Reiser? Sure the guy is locked up in San Quentin, but nobody knows how to hack a filesystem to bits better than Reiser. Bada ba ching! Thank you, thank you... I'll be here all night.
Thinking about it, the FOSS community could make a petition so Hans Reiser could continue collaborating with reiserfs4. It's not like he doesn't have the time to do it.
Funny thing is, if one uses the styles in Word correctly, you get a WYSIWYM editor, just never, EVER touch the bold, italic, underscore button. And the sad thing is it's much, much easier to do this in word 2000 then in newer versions.
;-)
Warning: Microsoft bashing below
Micro$oft is so bad, that when its software works, they break it on the next version!
One thing I think people overlook is that piracy is a personal choice. It's SO easy to download a game these days, if you want to pirate, you will, DRM or not. If you decide to purchase the game, it's almost a moral decision, you buy it to support the publisher, not to play the game.
Yes, I do think making a nuclear bomb is ALL ABOUT the fuel cycle. Little Boy wasn't even tested before being dropped in Hiroshima.
Trinity was a implosion-type plutonion bomb, just like Fat Man, while Little Boy was a gun-type uranium bomb. So the gun assembly was not tested before being deployed.
For example, where I live, I have signed for an electrical plan that entitles me to use a certain amount of electrical power at a given time (=bandwidth). If everyone in my neighborhood used the power they're entitled to, the power lines would melt.
That's half-true. The power company MUST meet peak demand, as well the rest of the electrical system. You can't say to people "sorry, you won electricity tonight because your neighbor is consuming too much power". That's absurd and ridiculous. What ISPs did was to HEAVILY oversell capacity. Too much greed is the problem, not heavy usage.
As a father of a three-year boy and a toddler girl, I can say that that are curious about EVERYTHING. From the ant to the airplane. What you should be considering is how to keep them that way, curious and unafraid to ask questions.
Specifically about exposing children to technology, I'm against it. We don't really know how it affects their development, so I'll wait until they're 7, 8 or older to get them a computer. Right now I think it's more important for them to use their imagination than a computer, that's why I like so much to tell them oral stories.
Yes, they are available to any person who asks for the ballot. After the machies are totalled at the end of the election day, you can go in ask and for the totals ballot.
Here is a place to explain something about elections in Brazil: it's amazingly organized. You can't vote anywhere, you have to go to your DESIGNATED electoral section to vote. It's always at the same place and it's usually in a school. So I have to go to district 111, section 231 to vote. That's a specific room in a specific place. I just can't vote someplace else.
So each machine has a list of the allowed voters. It knows beforehand how many people can vote there. After the election ends they print a report of how many voters in teach section, how many votes were cast, and how many votes each candidate had, plus blank and null votes.
So if you want to greate a GNO and go over each electoral section of your city and ask fot that report, you can compare those numbers with the Electoral Justice's ones.
And riggin an election is not that easy. First of all, a section can't have more votes than voters. you have a mean absence rate (people who didn't vote) and that's pretty much the same on similar conditions, you can have a machine with 100% valid votes and expect that's OK. Electoral Justice is smarter than that.
The system is far from perfect. Ok, there's code auditing, how there's no way to know that the code running on a election machine is the one that was audited. After the machines are brought back to the warehouses and the votes are count, you don't know how they sum the votes. But given Brazillian history, that's pretty much the best system we ever had.
One test they do is actually pretty simple: they do a lottery and take some machines from the voting places on the day before the election day. These machines are replaced and a simulated election is held on them. As you don know beforehand which machines will de audited, you risk being exposed if anything is not ok.
That is just half-true. While you can concentrate on one market or product, that's not a very viable survival strategy. Sure, when you're a small business, you need some leverage so people buy your product instead of the dominant player's. But when you reach no 1, there's just one place to go...
If you specialize, all your eggs are on just one basket. If that market fails ? What if another company makes a better product ? What if another technology makes your market obsolete ? Yes, by specializing you can be VERY good at one thing. But you don't have to very good, just good enough on the eyes of your market. By being good enough on two markets, you have extra security for your company.
NVidia saw an opportunity, to make chipsets. And they're great at it. It complimentary market to GPU because it lets NVidia do things like SLI for their cards. If they don't, who will ?
Another thing is that competition is always good. Sure, Intel has the CPU crown again, but a while ago AMD had some GREAT CPUs, better than Intel's. See what that did for us ? It forcet Intel to make a better CPU line, bottom line is, we customers always get some good options to buy from. I personally think is bad for the market to have several companies concentrating all parts (CPU, chipset, GPU).
Well, the spectrum IS limited. Yes, you can mitigate the problem by using spread spectrum (SS), which gives you a larger SNR ( around +10db ), but that's not infinite ( you can have infinite keys without any correlation between them ).
I don't know what you mean by UWB, I assume that you mean using higher frequencies. That's possible to some extend: you need commercial technology in the 10GHz arena, and that takes time to develop.
Let's not forget all the current transmitters that don't use SS, you can't just scrap them all.
And different frequencies have different propagation characteristics, the nearer to light, the more light-like the propagation, meaning you need line of sight. That's possible to some services and you can have reflection-based propagation models ( like cellphones in a urban environments ), but some long range communications need characteristics like ionosphere reflection and earth diffraction.
And today's hand held devices are fast enough to play music and movies, but sure aren't powerful enough to do real-time DSP of RF signals on the GHz range. I doubt that a PC can, even if it's a 3 GHz processor, a IIR filter takes some taps and you need to spend some processing time there, so I'd guess that a PC could process RF signals around 200MHz, but that's it.
So no, you NEED government regulation. And see that even 2.4 GHz isn't deregulated, it's regulated all right, you just don't need a license to transmit at this frequency, but you have a maximum allowed TX power. This about yous acesss point dieing because your neighbor just turned his 200W AP on.
Cheers!
Ok, eventually someone will spot the error and will correct it, but between the edit and the correction, the information is wrong. Ad I can edit it again. And again. Point is: There's a chance that Wikipedia's information is not correct, at any given time, and if you don't cross check it with other sources, you might not be able to tell whether the entry is correct or not.
On Brittanica, after an entry is corrected, it stays corrected, because Britannica's editors don't keep editing the entries over and over again. Any coder knows that editing working code is poison, same thing here.
So, Wikipedia is nice for fun articles, and a great reference for a lot of things. But you CAN'T trust it and SHOULD cross-reference it with other works. As you should do with any other reference, even Brittanica.
People have to understand that, no matter how many times Jimbo Whales says it, wikipedia is not reliable. As a whole, the information found on the internet is not reliable. It's nice for facebook and blogging, and yes, blogging can be a powerful tool when it gives voice to people that otherwise would be silent. But who guarantees that the information you're reading right now is correct ? Oh, sure, someone will find out that an article was vandalized, but how many people read that article between the time it was altered and the time it was restored ? How do I know that a blog article is correct ? Would you trust a doctor that uses wikipedia as a source ? I'm sorry but I wouldn't.
;-)
But as a engineer, I tell you I couldn't graduate without a library. Yes, I DID walk in a library, check out some books and study by them. If you want to study seriously, you will use more than one book, just because some authors explain some parts better the others, so you can learn the best from each book. Libraries are a necessary tool for education. I'm not saying that the electronic version of books isn't useful, but I use them as a reference, as I can search much faster for some specific topic. Good books are invaluable.
Besides the obvious point in education, what about ALL the good literature books out there ? Will you buy them all ? J. R. R. Tokien, George Orwell, William Golding, Aldous Huxley, J.P. Lovecraft, Shakespeare, Joseph Conrad ? Ok, I di want to own Lord of the Rings and some other works, but why not just check them out from a library ? It's free, and it's much better to read a book on paper than on a computer screen. Go for a stroll on a sunny day, take out a good book.
Call me old fashioned, but I think that libraries shouldn't be turned in to shopping malls. We should encourage people to go there and discover what they keep as a matter of culture, not because you can drink a coffee while you get to surf with free internet access.
Or my view is biased because my mom is a librarian
Cheers!
To understand why Pakistan took Youtube out, you have to first read the SourceOfAllHumanKnoledge(tm)(c) Wikipedia articles mentioned above. For the lazy ( like me ) here goest a shorter explanation.
BGP is the core routing protocol of the Internet. It's used to connect really big blocks of IP address to the net, telling the rest of the Internet how to reach them. For BGP to work, all BGPs routers have to be connected to one another in a mesh network ( TCP connections ) and must have a unique number in this mesh. This number is unique in the world and is assigned by IANA. ISPs that have such number have the "power" to change global routes, and this nutball Pakistani ISP is one of them. What they did was to tell the internet, by updating a global route, that the route to Youtube is now through some router they had.
What they expected is obvious, they wanted toi redirect all request to Youtube to another site. But instead of propagating a new route to the INSIDE of their network, they updated a global route and screwed everything. Ok, they could have just changed an DNS entry and redirected all DNS queries to their DNS server, thus negating the workaround of using OpenDNS.
If they knew the consequences of changing the route is only relevant on the lawsuite Youtube should put on them. They should loose they AS number immediately. And someone should redraft RFC 4271 to give routes an "owner", so If you receive a update on your router from someone not the owner you just discard it. In this way, an router can only update their give block.
Ok, let me see it I got this straight:
1) World does down the drain because some people decided to play a nice game of thermonuclear war,
2) The ones that didn't die in the war return to a savage state, fighting to the last bastions of civilization,
3) Gangs of highwayman terrorize the roads and people defend themselves in a refinery...
4) The one thing you want to have with you is a slide rule ?!
I bet the BEST thing would be to KNOW to PLANT something, because I bet if society destroyed itself, there wouldn't be any fast-food chains around...
Hydroelectric power is a viable option, but not a solution. Flooding large areas means that they should clear the area for most of it's forest, otherwise the wood will rot and produce copious amount of CO2.
You might say "oh, sure, who in their right mind wouldn't clear the land first ?" Well, here in Brazil we did just that. And as the wood rot, it makes the water of the dam's lake more acid, which corrodes the turbines' blades.
Even if the dam and the lake are managed properly, hydroelectric dams usually aren't near the consumer centers, which means long transmissions lines, lesser efficiency and more maintenance costs.
Nuclear, on the other side, is both cleaner and can be placed near the consumers. Of course, they're a *lot* more dangerous and proper management is a must ( see Chernobyl and Three Mile Island ), but cases like France attest that with responsible management it's possible to have safe, clean energy from nuclear plants.
Which in turns shows how knowledgeable people in decision positions are. I bet some guy will buy Suse thinking it's a cheaper version of Windows.
They have nothing to do with the kernel ( besides that they're CPU intensive ), and that's exactly my point. Linux's problems aren't in the kernel, they're in whole other areas ( Office suite, media playing, gaming ) and that's usually lack of alternative software from the ones in M$ platform.
I find it amazing that people that can't understand the different between source and compiled code come talking about the linux kernel and how it should be split, forked, etc. Maybe we should lock Linus an Kolivas in a dark room, each one armed with a knife, and let them decide in the good old fashioned way what's best for the kernel. This is a slightly better solution then forking the kernel.
First, Kolivas is free to create a kernel for him, just setup his GIT server and he's done. That's what *free* software means. And *ANY* distro is free to use his kernel.
Second, what's all the fuss about the scheduler ? Damm, it works FINE, Linux's problem is NOT the scheduler. It's the lack of some basic features, like MP3 playing, AVI playing, etc. Yeah, I KNOW that this is because of commercial rights and such, but the average user doesn't and doesn't care. Computers are supposed to work out-of-the-box, if it doesn't then it's broken.
Third, what's the point of forking the kernel ? Just compile it with the right options and you're set. The source code can contain dozens of different schedulers, you use the one best for you. Discutions like this **ARE ** FUD and I think Linus must find all this very amusing, because it's a buch of people wasting energy in a non-issue.
This seems credible to me. Id has been one of the *very* few companies that support Linux gaming, and they do it by principle. But you can't swim against the current forever. Linux gaming might never happen. Games don't get Linux versions because there aren't many gamers and there aren't many gamers because there aren't many games. And no, as long as i heard, there's no OpenGL in Vista, it used DirectX to emulate it ( with a 99999999% performance penalty obviously ), so they can't build their graphic engine on OpenGL ( as they did since Quake 1 I guess ) to has cross-platform compatibility. One can argue that most effort for making a game goes to building its models and textures, but the game engine is no small feat either and after all, they're a commercial company that have bills to pay. What they COULD do is to license the content, so someone else could build a Linux engine based on OpenGL/SDL. That could be a better business model than Loki's. And I expect people respect Id's decision and not rant about it. After all at least they did it for some time, developers like Valve and Blizzard didn't even try.
Totally agree! I think they should have the death penalty to people who die ( real worldly ) playing online! Oh, NVM.. I'll just go back to TB...
I'm an amateur astronomer myself and Mike's advice is perfect. Astrophotography is addicitive, but needs planning and patience. As I assume you don't own an telescope yet, my advice is to buy a good binocular. If you still want to buy an telescope, buy a cheap ( not cheapo ) one, around US$ 250, with EQUATORIAL mount, that's VERY important. Get used to it, learn what you like the most to observe ( deep-sky objects, planets, moon, variable stars, nebula ), learn how to align your telescope so it can track the sky movement's. Then borrow from someone an old SLR camera, with film. Yes, that's right, not a digital one. Couple in your telescope ( you'll need an adapter ) and read some FAQs, ask help from your astronomy club and play with the settings, see how they change the result. You can use a webcam for that too, and some software like Registrax to stack the pictures, the result is amazing! After you get to know the dirty details, you'll know what's the best equipment to buy, the best DSLR camera. One tip: it's not about the camera or the telescope. I've seen AMAZING pictures taken with an old SLR with a home-made refractor telescope, mounted on a US$ 500 mount. It's about the MOUNT, spare no expense here. Spend 1000 on a mount and 200 on a telescope, you'll get GREAT pictures. Dark skies for you!