Considering XNA and Silverlight are still being pushed pretty hard with Windows Phone, I don't see them dropping support for XNA any time soon.
Actually, the whole discussion got started about Silverlight, and has snowballed from "unlikely gloomy speculation" straight through "baseless improbable rumors" to arrive at "absurd cries of the sky falling" and will probably go on from there. All because MS *added* support for a development technology in their new OS.
Are you hitting the 2GB limit? A 32-bit program will typically only allocate up to 2GB at a time, since that's all it can map in userspace. (It can allocate more, and change the mapping window, but not many programs do that). A 64-bit program has (by the standards of modern PCs) an infinite space to map memory into. There are 64-bit versions of Firefox, but you have to go find them; the default, especially on Windows, is 32-bit even with a 64-bit OS.
One simple way to increase the prioritization of the process. Task Manager -> Processes -> Right Click -> Priority. Bump it slightly ("Above Normal") so it gets more priority than other stuff, but less than critical things (which run at "High") and Windows should be less likely to page out its memory.
Just be glad you're not using XP, which tends to assume your computer has about 256 MB of RAM and will page out aggressively as soon as you switch to another program, even if the other one is still running and you're about to switch back.
WP7 isn't doing amazingly, but it is gaining market share already. In fact, relative to the same point after release, it's growing faster than Android. Nobody who committed to Android seems to have been brought down by doing so, and it's quite premature to expect the same will happen with WP7.
In terms of SDK capability, WinMo and Android are the most similar, but that certainly doesn't mean that WinMo apps (developed against Windows APIs) are going to port even slightly well to Android (Java and POSIX APIs). Then there's the WinMo apps that were already written in managed code, where everything except the UI will move across directly.
Why is developing in C easier than in C#? The majority of Android apps use Java/Dalvik, not C/C++. Application development is faster in managed code, and development speed is where the money is these days (especially in the mobile space). I've heard lots of complaints about WP7, but nobody has said its development tools are too hard to use.
Claiming that Angry Birds "needs a C physics library" is such complete BS that it pretty much invalidates your whole post. Angry Birds has been written in Javascript as a web app - you don't get much further from C in syntactically similar languages than that! There are already Angry Birds clones on WP7 - have been for months, actually - and they get by just fine without C. The problem with Angry Birds on WP7 is purely political; claiming the existence of a technical problem is proof that you have no understanding of the technical issues at all.
For the record, there are already "alternative" browsers on WP7's marketplace, Xbox supports native code in much the same way that WP7 does (native SDK exists for big-name partners but the public SDK is all managed), and WP7's market share is growing (Windows Mobile's is shrinking, but so is XP's, that doesn't mean Win7 is doomed).
Every 5 minutes? WTF are you talking about? WP7 and Kin are the only mobile products MS has released since starting WinMo. Kin had its own issues, but software-wise they seemed a reasonable successor / re-implementation of the Sidekick feature phones that have done reasonably well for years (of course, Sidekicks don't have smartphone data prices on them, but that's Verizon's problem).
Aside from a truly terrible decision to not use a more clearly distinct brand from the defunct Windows Mobile line, Microsoft could hardly make WP7 more different if they tried. Yes, Kin muddies the water a little, but if you can't tell the difference between three product lines, of which only two are smartphones and one of them is discontinued, you've got a much bigger problem than confusion over phones.
The problem is that these clowns (directed at the salespeople but also including a lot of people who've commented on this story) can't be bothered to do even a minimal amount of research. WP7 bears no resemblance to WinMo, and the existence or not of Kin doesn't change that in the leastm so I'm pretty sure that their confusion is completely independent of Kin. Without Kin, this is the first change MS has made to their mobile strategy in 10 years. Even truly excessive hyperbole doesn't excuse calling that "every 5 minutes".
Not the same. Not at all. That's like saying that Windows [1-3] sucked, so you're not going to try 95, or the various versions of Mac OS sucked so you're not going to try OS X, or some other similarly ludicrous complaint. You certainly don't have to have high expectations, and I'm not saying you need to go buy one right now, but maybe you should at least try it before badmouthing it? The software is really quite nice to use, and if it's missing some features now, the stuff that has been demonstrated with Mango resolves almost all of that. It's not even vaporware; you can download the SDK and emulator today.
To be fair, the Office capabilities sound more Enterprise-oriented than Consumer-oriented. I wouldn't say so much that WP7 abandons the enterprise, as that it doesn't include some enterprise features. It's still probably a better enterprise phone than anything except WinMo and Blackberry, at least if you use MS products internally (Exchange/Sharepoint/Office).
I've never understood why Zune Pass isn't advertised harder. It's honestly good enough that I now use Zune over Amarok, crazy though that may sound. All-you-can-eat on a reasonably priced subscription with the ability to download 10 DRM-free high-quality MP3s every month (which brings the effective cost of the subscription down to $5 or less per month).
Not at all. Nobody is suggesting that Verizon needs to advertise for Microsoft (in any case, it's actually advertising for Verizon, since they're the one selling the things). What Verizon needs to do is either offer their products for sale, or not carry them. Claiming that they carry a product, but then not offering it to customers and blaming the poor sales on the manufacturer, is completely dishonest.
Pretty sure the "web presentation language" you're asking for is called CSS. You may have heard of this language? One of those little features that helped IE4-6 win the browser war of the 90s? The preferred way to format and lay out content, and even do neat tricks like show and hide things dynamically, for over 10 years now? The language that allows you to explicitly define presentation in a way that all browsers on all computers are supposed to show identically, and if they don't, allows you to define a fallback?
OK, so the ideal of a universal implementation doesn't actually exist. This is too bad, though hardly surprising. The vast majority of the finalized spec, and much of the unfinalized stuff, is handled correctly by all modern browsers, though.
Wow, irrational much? Here's an equivalent for you (the scale is lesser, but the validity is equal), complete with your whacky grammar left intact:
Microsoft is all that anyone needs to say these days to show what is wrong with PC. I'm sure all sorts of amazing and magical things can come of PC software development. But when it is used as a weapon to destroy competition in the marketplace and to control something as vital as global information technology for profit, I have to say NO MORE PERSONAL COMPUTER SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT.
The last part of your post actually gets close to making sense, but you're still completely backward about it. The problem isn't GM crops, it's Monsanto and its behavior. The solution isn't to shut down the research, it's to enforce ethical behavior upon the corporation. It's easy to target Monsanto because they're big and in the news, but there's lots of smaller-scale efforts going on (just as there was with PC software). Slap down the giants when they get out of hand, but don't condemn an entire industry because of what the biggest player in that industry is doing.
On the hope that your writing skills are simply lack of English language knowledge rather than intentionally trolling, please answer this question:
What is the difference?
No, seriously, what is the real-world difference between waiting until random mutation produces a trait you want, cross-pollinating that plant with another that has a different trait you want, selecting only the resulting strain that has both desirable traits (and no crippling undesirable ones), and then repeating forever... and manipulating the traits directly?
There are only two differences: one of them takes much, much longer (how long would it take to produce a disease-resistant potato strain with otherwise desirable traits by random mutation and selection? Well, it hasn't happened yet, in thousands of years), and one of them involves "scientists" in a lab, while the other involves "farmers" in a barn (in quotes because the practical difference is less than you might think; it's mostly a matter or emotional investment in the term).
If you want natural crops, go find them where the seeds were dropped by birds, and scatter some of the seeds around as you eat. Otherwise, please get out of the way of human advancement. I would applaud you if you were taking a stand against unethical corporate behavior, but you're not. Genetic research and unethical behavior are not inextricably linked, and people like you actually promote the latter (indirectly): you get people scared about things they shouldn't be scared about, which makes progress more difficult, which rises costs for those trying to make progress, which makes it harder to make a profit ethically.
Out of curiosity, would you have also opposed the concept of selective horse breeding back when everybody else just let the horses work it out among themselves? I mean, sure, it felt like the selective breeders were "cheating" and it reduced genetic diversity somewhat when some lines wouldn't be allowed to breed, but it could also give you faster, stronger, sturdier, and/or healthier horses at a rate far above that of simple evolution. I'm sure it seemed "unnatural" to some people at the time, though.
So, solve the waste problem. Breeder reactors can reprocess "spent" nuclear fuel (which still has about 97% of its energy) into something that is much cooler to begin with, and also has a much shorter half-life (hundreds of years isn't trivial, but is manageable). In addition, you're using the Uranium that is already mined in a much more efficient manner, which will both drastically extend the lifetime of our uranium deposits (like fossil fuels, they aren't really renewable; unlike fossil fuels, we easily have enough for hudreds of years even with massively increasing energy demand, but only if reprocessed).
There are of course a few problems with this idea:
On a technical level, we know how to make breeder reactors but until now they've all been small-scale research stations, not commercial power plants. There's going to be some issues of scale (including, of course, ensuring sufficient safety) to work out. That's totally practical, though. We already spend tons of money on new or improved non-nuclear power sources, and it's not like the basic idea hasn't been tested.
On an economic level, building new plants is expensive, and so is handling the current "spent" fuel (putting it in a form that the new reactor can use). On the other hand, you don't have to pay people to mine more uranium for you (which has to be processed from ore into usable fuel anyhow), and heck, you might be able to get people to pay *you* to dispose of the waste from existing reactors.
On a political level, breeder reactors can produce weapons-grade fissionables (indeed it's difficult to refine raw ore enough to build nuclear weapons otherwise). This raises scares either that the country is developing nuclear weapons (because the countries that could afford a project like this totally don't have any of those yet...) or that terrorists will get their hands on the material and then use it to build their own bombs (which is an unrealistic fear in several ways). There are plant designs that don't actually produce "dangerous" isotopes at usable purity for weapons, but since this is a political problem, I expect it will be the hardest to overcome nonetheless.
You guys do know that Microsoft had a mobile phone OS a *LONG* time before WP7, right? As in, before iOS, much less Android, even existed? I'm sure they've filed far more more patents in this space than you realize.
The validity of those patents is something for the courts to decide, but with the laws as they are now, I'd actually be shocked if MS didn't have a ton of patents they can wave at Android.
Better yet: install a new version of sudo (and su, and whatever programs are used for elevation). The new version *looks* like the real one, but doesn't actually do any elevation itself. Instead, it logs the password you enter, then passes that password to the real program. As soon as the real program accepts it, the malicious version calls `sudo install-root-malware-and-hide-infection` and passes in the password it just captured (actually, the last step might not even be needed since sudo probably cached your credentials for a few minutes).
Your window of opportunity to find the malware is only from the initial install of the (user-only) malware, to the next time you have to do anything as root. After that, you're completely pwned.
Um, no. They don't cut you off when you hit the 2GB, 5GB, or 10GB caps, and they don't charge you extra. It's a soft cap, they just throttle the bandwidth.
Also, they've been doing this for years now. I don't know why there's suddenly an uproar over it...
Yeah... the way this story is beling blown out of proprtion is ridiculous. The $30/month "unlimited" plan has been soft-capped at 5GB for years now. They explain this to you, but also explain that A) You won't get charged more for going over. B) You won't get disconnected for going over. C) The speed they limit you to is still somewhere around 200kbps - a lot less than 3G but easily sufficient for web browsing and email, and usable for low-res video.
Under the new plan structure: 1) The $10 (200MB, hard cap) and $30 (5GB, soft cap) plans are COMPLETELY UNCHANGED. 2) By adding a new $20 2GB soft cap plan, they are allowing people who want technically unlimited data but don't need a huge amount every month to pay less. 3) By adding a new $60 10GB soft cap plan, they are allowing people who regularly hit the throttling to choose the option of paying more for a higher cap.
This is a win for cutomers. It's more choices without removing any existing ones. You don't pay more unless you get more. You don't lose anything unless you decide you'd like to pay less. Why is T-Mobile being painted as the bad guy here?
Apparently, there are stupid people on the Internet. Who would ever have guessed?
Do you even know what "VoIP" stands for? There is no such thing as "The standard [Voice over Internet Protocol]" and Skype is just one of a great many mutually incompatible options. Microsoft has sold some form of VoIP, either integrated in the OS or otherwise, for over 15 years. The Unix-like world may have had it even before that. I don't know about Macs, but it's nothing new there either.
The important thing, though, is that all of these are different. Microsoft's meeting telepresence, software phone, and IM products don't even connect to one another (Actually, Lync may connect to Live Messenger now, I don't know). Apple's Facetime doesn't connect to anything but Apple Facetime. The various Linux programs will sometimes connect to other Linux programs, sometimes to Mac or Windows programs, and sometimes only to themselves.
The long-standing winner in this space has been Skype, which won't connect to anything else, but that's OK becaue it runs on everything. As for your irrational fear of "M$... push[ing] MSN on people" the barest shred of common sense would refute that. Which of the following makes more money:
Dismantle Skype, people go to a bunch of different servers, Live Messenger picks up some more users, and a market that MS just spent $8.5 billion to capture is now open for another competitor to rise.
Integrate the Messenger network into Skype and stop supporting it as a stand-alone product, so now every Messenger user suddenly has a much larger network, every Skype user has a somewhat larger network, and almost everybody is using Microsoft software for their VoIP/video chat/IM/whatever.
In case you're hurting yourself trying to figure it out, option B makes MS, including MS shareholders, a lot happier. I'm pretty sure they're going to take that route, not the one you're expecting.
Segfault on untrusted data input? Sounds like a security vulnerability to me. Better patch that - you wouldn't want somebody to exploit your brain and take control. What privilege level do you run your grammar parser at? Also, what instruction set does it use? Is there already a shellcode available for it?
Exploit code will be more difficult, though. The differences in both instruction set and CPU architecture (alignment, for example) will make writing working exploits for ARM a very different process. The vulnerabilities may get ported, but the malware will need to be re-written.
If you aren't already filtering out queries to Facebook from your browser, then everything and its pig know you you use Facebook, how many friends you have, and more. The facebook integration with Bing isn't a matter of "Hey, revolutionary new idea: let's check whether you have a Facebook account whenever you use Bing!" but more of "since you never sign out of Facebook anyhow, we might as well use that info you're handing out to every site that queries Facebook to improve your search results."
Personally, I use IE9's Tracking Protection feature to block all third party requests to Facebook. If I'm on Facebook.com (as in, URL of the active tab), my browser will talk to Facebook.com. If I'm not, as far as any script running in my browser is concerned, I don't even have a Facebook profile. It also makes a pretty good ad-blocker; unless I for some reason see a need to actually visit doubleclick directly, I never see any content from them (or any of a number of other sources). It automatically adds content to filter if it finds it on multiple third-party sites (the original idea being to block tracking scripts).
On Firefox, I can get the same effect, if through slightly different mechanics, using AdBlock Plus and NoScript.
Don't forget that the planet itself can have an impact on its surface temperature. This is a heavy world, and could theoretically hold a substantial atmosphere. If that atmosphere contained enough CO2 or other greenhouse gases, it might trap a lot of heat closer to the surface.
On the other hand, if it's a cold and icy world, it might have a high albedo that reflects sunlight (well, Gliese-581-light) well and soesnt' absorb much of it, which would lead to it being colder than the distance alone would account for.
Then there's factors like geological activity - even if *most* of the planet is very cold, there are quite possibly regions of reasonable temperature for life as we know it (not even the extreme lives-in-antarctic-ice kind).
Now I either have to figure out how to live longer or advance space exploration fast enough that we can somehow get a probe out there before I die. What an incredible thing it would be, even if there's no life there, to study such a truly alien world...
That's a pretty reasonable salary for somebody with a bachelor's degree in Computer Science or Computer Engineering and ~5 years of solid industry experience. Some of my friends are making more (a friend was offered something like $125k when he started at Amazon.com, with 4 years of experience after graduating in 06). I make less, but I graduated less than a year ago. It's a high-paying field, at least around these parts.
They haven't sold it in something well over a decade, but for a while, Microsoft Xenix (sold through SCO, before it got bought by Caldera) was the preferred form of Unix for most purposes, as it was low-cost and could run on commodity hardware (i.e. not just mainframes or "mini"computers).
There was some partnering with Novell to sell Suse Linux Enterprise licenses a while ago, although I don't really know the details.
In any case, that's irrelevant. They aren't selling CentOS (which would be silly anyhow). They're selling Windows Server hosting Hyper-V (hypervisor on which you can run pretty much any OS) and are selling and supporting additions that you can install in CentOS to get the best performance and interoperability for CentOS guests on a Hyper-V system. They've done the same for a few other OSes, including one or two Linux distros, for a while now.
At times, there are organizations (the EFF come to mind, although they seem to cover governemnt-related cases more) that have the money and lawyers to not only win the case, but win legal fees for frivolous suits. If you can hire a lawyer that can give you a good reason why you *should* win, it may be worth finding the support to ensure you can stick to the fight long enough.
Then again, it might not, too. These things should be evaluated on a case-by-base basis.
Finestra Virtual Desktops (http://vdm.codeplex.com/) is about as good as the stock virtual desktop implementation on most Linux distros that I've used, is nicely configurable, graphically attractive without being overbearing, stable, free, open source, and compatible XP (although you lose the live preview, since that needs WDM) in addition to Vista and Win7.
I have no relationship with the project aside from having used it for ~3 years. It's one of the first things I install on any computer I get at work; the productivity difference is significant.
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Considering XNA and Silverlight are still being pushed pretty hard with Windows Phone, I don't see them dropping support for XNA any time soon.
Actually, the whole discussion got started about Silverlight, and has snowballed from "unlikely gloomy speculation" straight through "baseless improbable rumors" to arrive at "absurd cries of the sky falling" and will probably go on from there. All because MS *added* support for a development technology in their new OS.
Some people...
Are you hitting the 2GB limit? A 32-bit program will typically only allocate up to 2GB at a time, since that's all it can map in userspace. (It can allocate more, and change the mapping window, but not many programs do that). A 64-bit program has (by the standards of modern PCs) an infinite space to map memory into. There are 64-bit versions of Firefox, but you have to go find them; the default, especially on Windows, is 32-bit even with a 64-bit OS.
One simple way to increase the prioritization of the process. Task Manager -> Processes -> Right Click -> Priority. Bump it slightly ("Above Normal") so it gets more priority than other stuff, but less than critical things (which run at "High") and Windows should be less likely to page out its memory.
Just be glad you're not using XP, which tends to assume your computer has about 256 MB of RAM and will page out aggressively as soon as you switch to another program, even if the other one is still running and you're about to switch back.
WP7 isn't doing amazingly, but it is gaining market share already. In fact, relative to the same point after release, it's growing faster than Android. Nobody who committed to Android seems to have been brought down by doing so, and it's quite premature to expect the same will happen with WP7.
Wow, that's a steaming pile of...
In terms of SDK capability, WinMo and Android are the most similar, but that certainly doesn't mean that WinMo apps (developed against Windows APIs) are going to port even slightly well to Android (Java and POSIX APIs). Then there's the WinMo apps that were already written in managed code, where everything except the UI will move across directly.
Why is developing in C easier than in C#? The majority of Android apps use Java/Dalvik, not C/C++. Application development is faster in managed code, and development speed is where the money is these days (especially in the mobile space). I've heard lots of complaints about WP7, but nobody has said its development tools are too hard to use.
Claiming that Angry Birds "needs a C physics library" is such complete BS that it pretty much invalidates your whole post. Angry Birds has been written in Javascript as a web app - you don't get much further from C in syntactically similar languages than that! There are already Angry Birds clones on WP7 - have been for months, actually - and they get by just fine without C. The problem with Angry Birds on WP7 is purely political; claiming the existence of a technical problem is proof that you have no understanding of the technical issues at all.
For the record, there are already "alternative" browsers on WP7's marketplace, Xbox supports native code in much the same way that WP7 does (native SDK exists for big-name partners but the public SDK is all managed), and WP7's market share is growing (Windows Mobile's is shrinking, but so is XP's, that doesn't mean Win7 is doomed).
Every 5 minutes? WTF are you talking about? WP7 and Kin are the only mobile products MS has released since starting WinMo. Kin had its own issues, but software-wise they seemed a reasonable successor / re-implementation of the Sidekick feature phones that have done reasonably well for years (of course, Sidekicks don't have smartphone data prices on them, but that's Verizon's problem).
Aside from a truly terrible decision to not use a more clearly distinct brand from the defunct Windows Mobile line, Microsoft could hardly make WP7 more different if they tried. Yes, Kin muddies the water a little, but if you can't tell the difference between three product lines, of which only two are smartphones and one of them is discontinued, you've got a much bigger problem than confusion over phones.
The problem is that these clowns (directed at the salespeople but also including a lot of people who've commented on this story) can't be bothered to do even a minimal amount of research. WP7 bears no resemblance to WinMo, and the existence or not of Kin doesn't change that in the leastm so I'm pretty sure that their confusion is completely independent of Kin. Without Kin, this is the first change MS has made to their mobile strategy in 10 years. Even truly excessive hyperbole doesn't excuse calling that "every 5 minutes".
Not the same. Not at all. That's like saying that Windows [1-3] sucked, so you're not going to try 95, or the various versions of Mac OS sucked so you're not going to try OS X, or some other similarly ludicrous complaint. You certainly don't have to have high expectations, and I'm not saying you need to go buy one right now, but maybe you should at least try it before badmouthing it? The software is really quite nice to use, and if it's missing some features now, the stuff that has been demonstrated with Mango resolves almost all of that. It's not even vaporware; you can download the SDK and emulator today.
To be fair, the Office capabilities sound more Enterprise-oriented than Consumer-oriented. I wouldn't say so much that WP7 abandons the enterprise, as that it doesn't include some enterprise features. It's still probably a better enterprise phone than anything except WinMo and Blackberry, at least if you use MS products internally (Exchange/Sharepoint/Office).
I've never understood why Zune Pass isn't advertised harder. It's honestly good enough that I now use Zune over Amarok, crazy though that may sound. All-you-can-eat on a reasonably priced subscription with the ability to download 10 DRM-free high-quality MP3s every month (which brings the effective cost of the subscription down to $5 or less per month).
Not at all. Nobody is suggesting that Verizon needs to advertise for Microsoft (in any case, it's actually advertising for Verizon, since they're the one selling the things). What Verizon needs to do is either offer their products for sale, or not carry them. Claiming that they carry a product, but then not offering it to customers and blaming the poor sales on the manufacturer, is completely dishonest.
Pretty sure the "web presentation language" you're asking for is called CSS. You may have heard of this language? One of those little features that helped IE4-6 win the browser war of the 90s? The preferred way to format and lay out content, and even do neat tricks like show and hide things dynamically, for over 10 years now? The language that allows you to explicitly define presentation in a way that all browsers on all computers are supposed to show identically, and if they don't, allows you to define a fallback?
OK, so the ideal of a universal implementation doesn't actually exist. This is too bad, though hardly surprising. The vast majority of the finalized spec, and much of the unfinalized stuff, is handled correctly by all modern browsers, though.
Wow, irrational much? Here's an equivalent for you (the scale is lesser, but the validity is equal), complete with your whacky grammar left intact:
The last part of your post actually gets close to making sense, but you're still completely backward about it. The problem isn't GM crops, it's Monsanto and its behavior. The solution isn't to shut down the research, it's to enforce ethical behavior upon the corporation. It's easy to target Monsanto because they're big and in the news, but there's lots of smaller-scale efforts going on (just as there was with PC software). Slap down the giants when they get out of hand, but don't condemn an entire industry because of what the biggest player in that industry is doing.
On the hope that your writing skills are simply lack of English language knowledge rather than intentionally trolling, please answer this question:
What is the difference?
No, seriously, what is the real-world difference between waiting until random mutation produces a trait you want, cross-pollinating that plant with another that has a different trait you want, selecting only the resulting strain that has both desirable traits (and no crippling undesirable ones), and then repeating forever... and manipulating the traits directly?
There are only two differences: one of them takes much, much longer (how long would it take to produce a disease-resistant potato strain with otherwise desirable traits by random mutation and selection? Well, it hasn't happened yet, in thousands of years), and one of them involves "scientists" in a lab, while the other involves "farmers" in a barn (in quotes because the practical difference is less than you might think; it's mostly a matter or emotional investment in the term).
If you want natural crops, go find them where the seeds were dropped by birds, and scatter some of the seeds around as you eat. Otherwise, please get out of the way of human advancement. I would applaud you if you were taking a stand against unethical corporate behavior, but you're not. Genetic research and unethical behavior are not inextricably linked, and people like you actually promote the latter (indirectly): you get people scared about things they shouldn't be scared about, which makes progress more difficult, which rises costs for those trying to make progress, which makes it harder to make a profit ethically.
Out of curiosity, would you have also opposed the concept of selective horse breeding back when everybody else just let the horses work it out among themselves? I mean, sure, it felt like the selective breeders were "cheating" and it reduced genetic diversity somewhat when some lines wouldn't be allowed to breed, but it could also give you faster, stronger, sturdier, and/or healthier horses at a rate far above that of simple evolution. I'm sure it seemed "unnatural" to some people at the time, though.
So, I ask you again: what is the difference?
So, solve the waste problem. Breeder reactors can reprocess "spent" nuclear fuel (which still has about 97% of its energy) into something that is much cooler to begin with, and also has a much shorter half-life (hundreds of years isn't trivial, but is manageable). In addition, you're using the Uranium that is already mined in a much more efficient manner, which will both drastically extend the lifetime of our uranium deposits (like fossil fuels, they aren't really renewable; unlike fossil fuels, we easily have enough for hudreds of years even with massively increasing energy demand, but only if reprocessed).
There are of course a few problems with this idea:
On a technical level, we know how to make breeder reactors but until now they've all been small-scale research stations, not commercial power plants. There's going to be some issues of scale (including, of course, ensuring sufficient safety) to work out. That's totally practical, though. We already spend tons of money on new or improved non-nuclear power sources, and it's not like the basic idea hasn't been tested.
On an economic level, building new plants is expensive, and so is handling the current "spent" fuel (putting it in a form that the new reactor can use). On the other hand, you don't have to pay people to mine more uranium for you (which has to be processed from ore into usable fuel anyhow), and heck, you might be able to get people to pay *you* to dispose of the waste from existing reactors.
On a political level, breeder reactors can produce weapons-grade fissionables (indeed it's difficult to refine raw ore enough to build nuclear weapons otherwise). This raises scares either that the country is developing nuclear weapons (because the countries that could afford a project like this totally don't have any of those yet...) or that terrorists will get their hands on the material and then use it to build their own bombs (which is an unrealistic fear in several ways). There are plant designs that don't actually produce "dangerous" isotopes at usable purity for weapons, but since this is a political problem, I expect it will be the hardest to overcome nonetheless.
You guys do know that Microsoft had a mobile phone OS a *LONG* time before WP7, right? As in, before iOS, much less Android, even existed? I'm sure they've filed far more more patents in this space than you realize.
The validity of those patents is something for the courts to decide, but with the laws as they are now, I'd actually be shocked if MS didn't have a ton of patents they can wave at Android.
Better yet: install a new version of sudo (and su, and whatever programs are used for elevation). The new version *looks* like the real one, but doesn't actually do any elevation itself. Instead, it logs the password you enter, then passes that password to the real program. As soon as the real program accepts it, the malicious version calls `sudo install-root-malware-and-hide-infection` and passes in the password it just captured (actually, the last step might not even be needed since sudo probably cached your credentials for a few minutes).
Your window of opportunity to find the malware is only from the initial install of the (user-only) malware, to the next time you have to do anything as root. After that, you're completely pwned.
Um, no. They don't cut you off when you hit the 2GB, 5GB, or 10GB caps, and they don't charge you extra. It's a soft cap, they just throttle the bandwidth.
Also, they've been doing this for years now. I don't know why there's suddenly an uproar over it...
Yeah... the way this story is beling blown out of proprtion is ridiculous. The $30/month "unlimited" plan has been soft-capped at 5GB for years now. They explain this to you, but also explain that
A) You won't get charged more for going over.
B) You won't get disconnected for going over.
C) The speed they limit you to is still somewhere around 200kbps - a lot less than 3G but easily sufficient for web browsing and email, and usable for low-res video.
Under the new plan structure:
1) The $10 (200MB, hard cap) and $30 (5GB, soft cap) plans are COMPLETELY UNCHANGED .
2) By adding a new $20 2GB soft cap plan, they are allowing people who want technically unlimited data but don't need a huge amount every month to pay less.
3) By adding a new $60 10GB soft cap plan, they are allowing people who regularly hit the throttling to choose the option of paying more for a higher cap.
This is a win for cutomers. It's more choices without removing any existing ones. You don't pay more unless you get more. You don't lose anything unless you decide you'd like to pay less. Why is T-Mobile being painted as the bad guy here?
Apparently, there are stupid people on the Internet. Who would ever have guessed?
Do you even know what "VoIP" stands for? There is no such thing as "The standard [Voice over Internet Protocol]" and Skype is just one of a great many mutually incompatible options. Microsoft has sold some form of VoIP, either integrated in the OS or otherwise, for over 15 years. The Unix-like world may have had it even before that. I don't know about Macs, but it's nothing new there either.
The important thing, though, is that all of these are different. Microsoft's meeting telepresence, software phone, and IM products don't even connect to one another (Actually, Lync may connect to Live Messenger now, I don't know). Apple's Facetime doesn't connect to anything but Apple Facetime. The various Linux programs will sometimes connect to other Linux programs, sometimes to Mac or Windows programs, and sometimes only to themselves.
The long-standing winner in this space has been Skype, which won't connect to anything else, but that's OK becaue it runs on everything. As for your irrational fear of "M$ ... push[ing] MSN on people" the barest shred of common sense would refute that. Which of the following makes more money:
In case you're hurting yourself trying to figure it out, option B makes MS, including MS shareholders, a lot happier. I'm pretty sure they're going to take that route, not the one you're expecting.
Segfault on untrusted data input? Sounds like a security vulnerability to me. Better patch that - you wouldn't want somebody to exploit your brain and take control. What privilege level do you run your grammar parser at? Also, what instruction set does it use? Is there already a shellcode available for it?
Exploit code will be more difficult, though. The differences in both instruction set and CPU architecture (alignment, for example) will make writing working exploits for ARM a very different process. The vulnerabilities may get ported, but the malware will need to be re-written.
If you aren't already filtering out queries to Facebook from your browser, then everything and its pig know you you use Facebook, how many friends you have, and more. The facebook integration with Bing isn't a matter of "Hey, revolutionary new idea: let's check whether you have a Facebook account whenever you use Bing!" but more of "since you never sign out of Facebook anyhow, we might as well use that info you're handing out to every site that queries Facebook to improve your search results."
Personally, I use IE9's Tracking Protection feature to block all third party requests to Facebook. If I'm on Facebook.com (as in, URL of the active tab), my browser will talk to Facebook.com. If I'm not, as far as any script running in my browser is concerned, I don't even have a Facebook profile. It also makes a pretty good ad-blocker; unless I for some reason see a need to actually visit doubleclick directly, I never see any content from them (or any of a number of other sources). It automatically adds content to filter if it finds it on multiple third-party sites (the original idea being to block tracking scripts).
On Firefox, I can get the same effect, if through slightly different mechanics, using AdBlock Plus and NoScript.
Don't forget that the planet itself can have an impact on its surface temperature. This is a heavy world, and could theoretically hold a substantial atmosphere. If that atmosphere contained enough CO2 or other greenhouse gases, it might trap a lot of heat closer to the surface.
On the other hand, if it's a cold and icy world, it might have a high albedo that reflects sunlight (well, Gliese-581-light) well and soesnt' absorb much of it, which would lead to it being colder than the distance alone would account for.
Then there's factors like geological activity - even if *most* of the planet is very cold, there are quite possibly regions of reasonable temperature for life as we know it (not even the extreme lives-in-antarctic-ice kind).
Now I either have to figure out how to live longer or advance space exploration fast enough that we can somehow get a probe out there before I die. What an incredible thing it would be, even if there's no life there, to study such a truly alien world...
That's a pretty reasonable salary for somebody with a bachelor's degree in Computer Science or Computer Engineering and ~5 years of solid industry experience. Some of my friends are making more (a friend was offered something like $125k when he started at Amazon.com, with 4 years of experience after graduating in 06). I make less, but I graduated less than a year ago. It's a high-paying field, at least around these parts.
They haven't sold it in something well over a decade, but for a while, Microsoft Xenix (sold through SCO, before it got bought by Caldera) was the preferred form of Unix for most purposes, as it was low-cost and could run on commodity hardware (i.e. not just mainframes or "mini"computers).
There was some partnering with Novell to sell Suse Linux Enterprise licenses a while ago, although I don't really know the details.
In any case, that's irrelevant. They aren't selling CentOS (which would be silly anyhow). They're selling Windows Server hosting Hyper-V (hypervisor on which you can run pretty much any OS) and are selling and supporting additions that you can install in CentOS to get the best performance and interoperability for CentOS guests on a Hyper-V system. They've done the same for a few other OSes, including one or two Linux distros, for a while now.
At times, there are organizations (the EFF come to mind, although they seem to cover governemnt-related cases more) that have the money and lawyers to not only win the case, but win legal fees for frivolous suits. If you can hire a lawyer that can give you a good reason why you *should* win, it may be worth finding the support to ensure you can stick to the fight long enough.
Then again, it might not, too. These things should be evaluated on a case-by-base basis.
Finestra Virtual Desktops (http://vdm.codeplex.com/) is about as good as the stock virtual desktop implementation on most Linux distros that I've used, is nicely configurable, graphically attractive without being overbearing, stable, free, open source, and compatible XP (although you lose the live preview, since that needs WDM) in addition to Vista and Win7.
I have no relationship with the project aside from having used it for ~3 years. It's one of the first things I install on any computer I get at work; the productivity difference is significant.