Re:Opera Supports BIG Pages better with less RAM
on
A Talk With Opera CEO
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· Score: 1
This is going way offtopic, but I can't help but ask why you've got a system that generates a HTML document of that size. HTML isn't designed for that sort of thing, you should either be splitting it into multiple pages (can be done using some basic arithmetic) or, better still, using a dedicated reports system from a decent database (i.e. not Access). If you're going to print it out at all you'd need to do something like this anyway.
the economics of implementing country-specific code don't work out. not enough people won't buy vista because of this in outside of america (if any at all), and there is practically no benefit. also, any "looser" software released in, say, england would be pirated instantly back to the states.
They also need to follow the laws native to anywhere they wish to directly sell to. Some other countries might have legal restrictions that Americans would find oppresive. Would you approve Microsoft enforcing them on you, for the sake of complying with those laws? Of course not, for exactly the same reasons the rest of the world doesn't like having US laws enforced on us.
As you pointed out, having country-specific versions is more trouble than it's worth, therefore it follows that no country-specific laws should be hard coded since otherwise you will sooner or later end up with violating one nation's laws in an attempt to comply with another's.
Add random ports and encryption, and P2P means random IP-s... And shaping it is suddenly not very easy.
Packet-shaping/sniffing - when done correctly - does not depend upon ports. It's true that you can get around it by encryption, but most P2P apps have very high TCP/UDP flows per minute. That in itself can be spotted with a half-decent software firewall. For there, they can probably use some "terms of service violation" argument if they really want you off the network.
There are a huge number of OSS projects, doing all sorts of things. Have you actually checked if any of them already do what you want to do? If so, consider helping them instead of starting your own - there are far too many dead/abandoned OSS projects in existence. Of course, there might be perfectly valid reasons for starting a new project instead, but you haven't given us much to go on.
This is almost the complete opposite of Europe. In most European countries after you have been employed after a brief probationary period you pretty much cannot be fired for any reason. They can make your life hell, but they can't fire you.
That's an oversimplification. Here, in order to fire someone you need a real reason - saying you don't like someone's haircut isn't enough, but gross misconduct (etc) is.
Also, making someone's life hell can get you a lawsuit for constructive dismissal.
I find laws on drinking age and (certain) recreational drugs as unjust as current copyright laws
Such substances are controlled because they are toxic to the human body, to various degrees. In sufficient quantities - which are easily reachable - they can cause permanent damage to your various organs or even death. Notwithstanding jokes about the quality of popular media, you cannot make the same claim about copyright infringement.
Re:This is actually my HOPE for the future
on
Censoring a Number
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· Score: 4, Insightful
That is no more social than someone alone in their car on a highway surrounded by thousands of other people alone in their cars. They are all doing the same thing, and they are technically doing it together and cooperatively, but it is by no means social.
Yet another inept car analogy I see.
When you drive down the motorway, in general everyone is going to a different place and doesn't care about where anyone else is going to. You have to take into consideration what they're doing on the motorway, however.
When people work to crack something like this, they are all working to the same end, and do not necessarily know what each other is doing to that end, although sometimes people discuss their ideas to get feedback etc.
Maybe we need a new moderation: (-1, Car Analogy).
You'll be amazed what you can get LaTeX to do with the right packages installed. It is about as complex as HTML, and of course free. I have seen perfectly good presentations made using it, as well.
I've seen a couple of people mention problems with getting directories to line up correctly, but there are complete distributions which have decent documentation on this sort of thing.
The key question here is, how many people will be unable to make that distinction? As I understand it, if all the eye candy is disabled then Vista will run satisfactorily on any XP-capable machine.
In summary, I worry that Americans are extremely susceptible to distraction by highly irrelevant issues and that exploitation of this weakness gravely impacts the quality of their government. I think that we are seeing the results of this poor governance right now in lost jobs and expertise.
It's not just Americans, it's people in general. It happens shortly before elections here in the UK as well. The BNP (British National Party, a modern-day fascist group) are notorious for it, although they're certainly not the only ones.
With all that, it's not really a phone anymore. It's a shrunk-down portable computer with built-in camera and the ability to make phone calls.
And please explain how you'd get all the hardware required into the average phone size. 1GB of SDRAM, with a sufficiently fast processor AND a large enough storage volume would take up quite a bit of space on it's own. You might say that, in order to be able to interact with it effectively, you'd make it bigger - but then why not just carry a laptop around?
In all honesty I don't believe that there would be as large a market for this as you claim, and without figures to back it up I certainly don't believe your claims about the hardware price.
The only thing that I'm annoyed with is the "Documents and Settings" directory that is allocated on the OS partition, and I really would like to have the option of reallocating that beast to a different partition.
There's a registry setting somewhere that allows you to change this. It's hidden well, but it does exist. A quick google reveals an even simpler method here.
Interesting you say it's slashdotted because I can read it fine.
It's very light on details, however. There is a screenshot from wordpad of the data sent; it's an XML-type document
which appears to have pulled a couple of id/hash numbers out of the system registry, e.g. OS version, but no personal info. They can't really get any personal info anyway, since data protection laws here in the UK and other countries would land them in shite, and also I suspect that they have more important things to do than snoop random people's names.
Personally, I think that they're just trying to get an idea of the number of people who won't install it. These people either have pirate copies and know they'll fail validation, or simply are opposed to the idea of their OS phoning home. From a cynical viewpoint, it's important for MS to gauge the reaction to this early so they know how far they can push these sorts of thing without there being a massive backlash.
I was going to mod this thread, but I feel I have to answer you here.
Firstly, your argument could be extended thousands of years back in time to when there were very few humans (we originally evolved in the plains of Africa, IIRC). Why explore/expand? Ditto for many other human civilisations recorded (to be fair, some of them did claim to have deity-assigned missions).
Secondly, population growth. There is a physical limit to the number of people any village, country or even planet can sustain - and barring wars/natural disasters, human population naturally grows quite rapidly (as does most, if not all, living beings). If we are to sustain our species, we need to find new space.
The mention of wars/natural disasters is another point - geology shows there have been several mass extinctions, and we don't know when the next one will occur. Moving to other planets will allow us to, as the cliche goes, prevent us from having all our eggs in one basket.
Finally - and for us humans I believe this to be the most important point - curiosity. We just have to know what's out there.
Sounds all well and good, until some jackass decides to start muting everybody else just for the fun of bringing their points down.
That kind of behaviour would, presumably, be easy to notice. More problematic would be those using it against specific people they don't like, regardless of whether or not they actually deserve it.
Steam-based games such as Counter-Strike have the option of muting in-game voice. Doing it on a player-by-player basis seems a natural progression of this. In fact from the first moment I heard someone yell down a microphone mid-game I have wanted this kind of feature.
What if you were to directly output the binary contents of the kernel to the display/sound? It might not fit everyone's definition of 'music', but I'm sure it would give some pretty colours...
This technique is known as packet-sniffing or packet-shaping.
My university uses one to block all filesharing apps. It's done because there are about 15k people living in halls and these things eat up all the bandwidth. In fact, a number of people have recently been disconnected for using p2p software when they shouldn't be (it's against T&C, besides we're on an academic network).
I may be wrong in this, since I haven't studied thermodynamics since I was doing my A-Levels, but I believe that the light coming in and powering it directly violates the setup for Maxwell's Demon. Can someone confirm or deny this?
I don't think that is a good comparison. It seems to me that the people who made the video knew it was a female player - would they have made it if they didn't explicitly know that? If the description is correct, it could easily be viewed as sexist both ways (aside, too many people forget discrimination works both ways).
Secondly, if you play Counter-Strike, you know there's a fair chance of getting 'pwned'. There's not a fair chance of someone making a sexually explicit video that has no relevance to the game, because most people would view it as, well, pointless, and probably in bad taste. As TFS points out, that's probably the real reason this guy acted.
I'm not saying you can't make fun of people - but, unless it's a public figure, it's unfair to do it so explicitly to someone you don't know. (If this guy knew whoever made the video, he could have simply asked them to remove it directly.)
I personally did buy it from Steam, for $19.99 US + tax, which just highlights how much we Brits get screwed over price-wise.
However, downloading an entire game requires a decent connection speed, and not everyone has that here.
I personally have problems with Ep1 being as short as it was because, here in the UK, it was £19.99 (nearly $40 US) At the increased price, Ep2 had better be longer, especially as not everyone will want to play TF2 (TF classic was MP only, I assume TF2 will be as well).
I don't mind the game being short, as long as the price reflects the fact that it's much shorter. Otherwise it just seems, at least to me, a money grabbing exercise.
...for the PC version. The view appears to be that the game was forced out the door by the publishers before it was ready, and as a result it's full of bugs - but if it weren't for that, it would be a good game. Unfortunately a lot of games seem suffer this fate. I would assume the 360 version is in a similar position.
That logic is fallacious, even if the observable universe is a "simulation", then this simulation runs inside a real universe, and we're at the start again figuring out what the universe is
Why is it a fallacy?
If we live inside a simulation, then, to us, that simulation *is* the universe. What lies "outside" of it can only be determined if the creators of such a simulation wanted us to do so. Is it possible for a video game character to leave a computer game and enter the real world (or at least what we consider to be the real world)? Only through the intervention of it's creators (i.e. us). The same would occur if we ourselves are constructs of a simulation.
Slashdot Mirror
This is going way offtopic, but I can't help but ask why you've got a system that generates a HTML document of that size. HTML isn't designed for that sort of thing, you should either be splitting it into multiple pages (can be done using some basic arithmetic) or, better still, using a dedicated reports system from a decent database (i.e. not Access). If you're going to print it out at all you'd need to do something like this anyway.
They also need to follow the laws native to anywhere they wish to directly sell to. Some other countries might have legal restrictions that Americans would find oppresive. Would you approve Microsoft enforcing them on you, for the sake of complying with those laws? Of course not, for exactly the same reasons the rest of the world doesn't like having US laws enforced on us.
As you pointed out, having country-specific versions is more trouble than it's worth, therefore it follows that no country-specific laws should be hard coded since otherwise you will sooner or later end up with violating one nation's laws in an attempt to comply with another's.
There are a huge number of OSS projects, doing all sorts of things. Have you actually checked if any of them already do what you want to do? If so, consider helping them instead of starting your own - there are far too many dead/abandoned OSS projects in existence. Of course, there might be perfectly valid reasons for starting a new project instead, but you haven't given us much to go on.
Also, making someone's life hell can get you a lawsuit for constructive dismissal.
When you drive down the motorway, in general everyone is going to a different place and doesn't care about where anyone else is going to. You have to take into consideration what they're doing on the motorway, however.
When people work to crack something like this, they are all working to the same end, and do not necessarily know what each other is doing to that end, although sometimes people discuss their ideas to get feedback etc.
Maybe we need a new moderation: (-1, Car Analogy).
This is exactly what I was going to say. A LOT of crime could be prevented if people were just a bit more careful what they do and display in public.
You'll be amazed what you can get LaTeX to do with the right packages installed. It is about as complex as HTML, and of course free. I have seen perfectly good presentations made using it, as well.
I've seen a couple of people mention problems with getting directories to line up correctly, but there are complete distributions which have decent documentation on this sort of thing.
With all that, it's not really a phone anymore. It's a shrunk-down portable computer with built-in camera and the ability to make phone calls.
And please explain how you'd get all the hardware required into the average phone size. 1GB of SDRAM, with a sufficiently fast processor AND a large enough storage volume would take up quite a bit of space on it's own. You might say that, in order to be able to interact with it effectively, you'd make it bigger - but then why not just carry a laptop around?
In all honesty I don't believe that there would be as large a market for this as you claim, and without figures to back it up I certainly don't believe your claims about the hardware price.
Interesting you say it's slashdotted because I can read it fine.
It's very light on details, however. There is a screenshot from wordpad of the data sent; it's an XML-type document which appears to have pulled a couple of id/hash numbers out of the system registry, e.g. OS version, but no personal info. They can't really get any personal info anyway, since data protection laws here in the UK and other countries would land them in shite, and also I suspect that they have more important things to do than snoop random people's names.
Personally, I think that they're just trying to get an idea of the number of people who won't install it. These people either have pirate copies and know they'll fail validation, or simply are opposed to the idea of their OS phoning home. From a cynical viewpoint, it's important for MS to gauge the reaction to this early so they know how far they can push these sorts of thing without there being a massive backlash.
I was going to mod this thread, but I feel I have to answer you here.
Firstly, your argument could be extended thousands of years back in time to when there were very few humans (we originally evolved in the plains of Africa, IIRC). Why explore/expand? Ditto for many other human civilisations recorded (to be fair, some of them did claim to have deity-assigned missions).
Secondly, population growth. There is a physical limit to the number of people any village, country or even planet can sustain - and barring wars/natural disasters, human population naturally grows quite rapidly (as does most, if not all, living beings). If we are to sustain our species, we need to find new space.
The mention of wars/natural disasters is another point - geology shows there have been several mass extinctions, and we don't know when the next one will occur. Moving to other planets will allow us to, as the cliche goes, prevent us from having all our eggs in one basket.
Finally - and for us humans I believe this to be the most important point - curiosity. We just have to know what's out there.
Steam-based games such as Counter-Strike have the option of muting in-game voice. Doing it on a player-by-player basis seems a natural progression of this. In fact from the first moment I heard someone yell down a microphone mid-game I have wanted this kind of feature.
What if you were to directly output the binary contents of the kernel to the display/sound? It might not fit everyone's definition of 'music', but I'm sure it would give some pretty colours...
This technique is known as packet-sniffing or packet-shaping.
My university uses one to block all filesharing apps. It's done because there are about 15k people living in halls and these things eat up all the bandwidth. In fact, a number of people have recently been disconnected for using p2p software when they shouldn't be (it's against T&C, besides we're on an academic network).
I may be wrong in this, since I haven't studied thermodynamics since I was doing my A-Levels, but I believe that the light coming in and powering it directly violates the setup for Maxwell's Demon. Can someone confirm or deny this?
I don't think that is a good comparison. It seems to me that the people who made the video knew it was a female player - would they have made it if they didn't explicitly know that? If the description is correct, it could easily be viewed as sexist both ways (aside, too many people forget discrimination works both ways).
Secondly, if you play Counter-Strike, you know there's a fair chance of getting 'pwned'. There's not a fair chance of someone making a sexually explicit video that has no relevance to the game, because most people would view it as, well, pointless, and probably in bad taste. As TFS points out, that's probably the real reason this guy acted.
I'm not saying you can't make fun of people - but, unless it's a public figure, it's unfair to do it so explicitly to someone you don't know. (If this guy knew whoever made the video, he could have simply asked them to remove it directly.)
I personally did buy it from Steam, for $19.99 US + tax, which just highlights how much we Brits get screwed over price-wise.
However, downloading an entire game requires a decent connection speed, and not everyone has that here.
I personally have problems with Ep1 being as short as it was because, here in the UK, it was £19.99 (nearly $40 US) At the increased price, Ep2 had better be longer, especially as not everyone will want to play TF2 (TF classic was MP only, I assume TF2 will be as well).
I don't mind the game being short, as long as the price reflects the fact that it's much shorter. Otherwise it just seems, at least to me, a money grabbing exercise.
...for the PC version. The view appears to be that the game was forced out the door by the publishers before it was ready, and as a result it's full of bugs - but if it weren't for that, it would be a good game. Unfortunately a lot of games seem suffer this fate. I would assume the 360 version is in a similar position.
If we live inside a simulation, then, to us, that simulation *is* the universe. What lies "outside" of it can only be determined if the creators of such a simulation wanted us to do so. Is it possible for a video game character to leave a computer game and enter the real world (or at least what we consider to be the real world)? Only through the intervention of it's creators (i.e. us). The same would occur if we ourselves are constructs of a simulation.