if they are deriving code from gpl'd software they have to offer the ENTIRE code, not just the modifications, although i think possibly they could offer diffs from a given version but idk why they'd waste their diffing it when they could just comply with gpl and offer it as is.
cisco better not sit on their hands about this or they'll have apple fanboys AND gpl fanboys slagging them off at the same time!
It all really depends on where this enzyme attacks the virus. Being that this is obviously some kind of digestive enzyme for the fish, one would assume it is a more generalised protease enzyme but specifically targets a type of protein common to the cod's food and the bird flu virus. If the protein it attacks is not something that can vary without impeding the essential functions of the virus then it is a cure.
In the end, the best cure for any virus would be a nanomachine (be it protein or not) which carries an active oxygen atom into the location to destroy the most critical components of the virus' reproductive mechanism. That's basically how the human immune system defends against virii and bacteria, by remembering which enzyme sequence is required to lob a bomb (O-) into the soft bits of the enemy's generative system (testicles/ovaries). Of course sometimes one can aim a bit wider than that, for example disrupting metabolism but that does not apply in the case of virii whose only function is to replicate their code within the cells of another organism.
I'm having trouble conceiving of this enzyme as being dangerous when it is from inside the guts of a common (albeit in this case from an uncommon region) fish (remember, cats and seagulls aren't particularly fussy about which parts of a fish they eat). The only thing I can think of that might be an issue is that intestines often are clogged up with somewhat unappealing organisms substances in states of decay. I seriously doubt it's toxic, but I also doubt it will be useful injected or eaten, but perhaps it might help knock the virus back in the place where it is most active, in the sinus, by putting it into a nasal spray.
ah yes, also, snow will be stable fairly soon, it certainly played ok a year ago, and wipes the floor with every codec i've seen bits/pixel-wise (and my hardware can't play h264 but it plays snow smooth as). who needs a stupid proprietary codec, there's open ones for most files one wants to play and within a year or two every DRM yet invented gets pwned.
i fell for paying for a driver for linux once, cos i needed to use a dialup modem with a connexant chip. i'm quite happy to say that my modem is now a dsl modem inside a little dedicated box running embedded linux and giving me access with ethernet, and not some stupid proprietary modem which eats cpu cycles instead of providing silicon.
nvidia will eventually suffer the ignominy of being the wide open backdoor into linux systems and the reasons for the complaints of the 'purists' will become manifest in the form of a lot of irritated customers who paid real money for nvidia chips. i am already annoyed that they've dropped support for gforce4 video cards, why is it still supported in the windows version?
eventually gpu acceleration will be sold with an open interface by someone with an open driver and it will do polygon for polygon as good as someone else's. or maybe ati will decide to do a netscape on nvidia and open up their hardware. gpu's are incredible accelerators for more than just 3d vectors, there is several other uses for that type of processing and a closed spec prevents their use except by a select number of developers, the rest of the devs being too numerous to be 'manageable' (a-la microsoft's prohibitive development licenses for hardware utilising their DRM) meaning the incentive arises for developers to target the less popular but accessible platform. doom 3 anyone?
So they are trying to deprecate the litre because it does not conveniently fit into a volume to weight conversion on an arbitrary fluid? I'm sure if you are that desperate for accuracy of this conversion put a few spoonfuls of salt into the water.
Being that humans have 10 fingers, counting systems and measurement all being decimal makes a lot more sense, because of the fact many conversions involve simply moving decimal places back and forward.
Also, my bloody spellchecker is reminding me that I'm apparently using an american dictionary - it's LITRE not LITER. Perhaps someone should change the spelling to leeter so americans get it.
My understanding of learning systems is it's just a matter of practise. I can't believe you could spend 6 months struggling with 24 hour time unless you only had to use it in one place. And I can't believe that you had no power to change that time display.
I chat on irc to americans a lot and every time they start talking about the weather I get annoyed because they all talk in farenheit.
Sadly, the common use of imperial in the USA and Malaysia is unlikely to change anytime soon. But we need to purge the world of these retards anyway, or at least surgically remove them from their precious automatic weapons. Nucular power anyone?
The scenario Stallman talks about is altogether too obviously possible. Patents are evil and should be eradicated.
The only way for the little guy to really fight the big guys is to release inventions into the public domain where they will be produced by whoever sees a market for them rather than whoever wants to pay the outrageous license fee and royalties. The only incentive for this is purely ethical, although one must consider the fame for this will most likely result in a R&D job somewhere. But who funds R&D departments that don't churn out patents?
One has to ask the question: if Transmeta had not sued Intel, would Intel have sued Transmeta?
A perfect opportunity for a partnership comes to mind when I look at that little gizmo, something I've been wishing for - a mobile phone which automatically switches to wifi voip when configured to access a wifi net.
I have a number of major gripes with the iPhone business - why did they prematurely announce the release when it's not ready for production yet, when if they are serious about living up to their reputation as a market-savvy tech company and doing what roughlydrafted.com suggested (a site which although it is a little iFanBoy does do good analysis) which is become a provider of the network service via wholesale onselling, and providing deeper functionality between the phone and the computers, forcing a change in the practises of mobile phone networks to try and put a charge on every little bit of data they can force people to put through their base stations.
Personally, I don't really care what happens, because the market wants more integrated personal communications/media player devices. The schtick of the fancy interface front panel, while it is interesting, is hardly going to be without cloners and the rise of prepaid mobile services means that hobbled wireless functionality will not last for long, one should remember that a lot of young people don't have access to credit and therefore cannot use 'plan' phones anyway. A phone with a decent sized display, touch screen interface and the capability to play mp4/mp3 and wifi/bluetooth was always going to appear very soon, and Apple has made a big mistake, if you ask me, by prematurely announcing an incomplete product. The rate at which chinese companies whip out new gear is pretty amazing and it's not inconceivable that by the time apple finally starts to ship piddling quantities of iPhones (or whatever they end up having to call it) that china will flood the market with cheaper versions running linux.
I for one am all for the innovation. I think it reeks of smug complacence that Apple made this announcement before they really had the product ready. Or maybe is forgetting that brand loyalty requires consistent quality product (anyone want an ipod with a screen that scratches when you look at it the wrong way?). If they are so confident the iPhone is ready for the market why didn't they let anyone actually put one in their hands at the announcement?
I could be totally barking up the wrong tree here but why do kernels even have branches for non-critical hardware like usb gadgets and I'm sure anyone who looks over a kernel feature list when building could easily strip virtually everything.
Since people have the option of building monolithic or modular kernels, there is this idea floating around that if it's not in the kernel tree it's gonna be a pain to put in there. Rubbish. I'm barely able to string together a hello world program in c but I can put a new driver into a monolithic kernel manually, and I'm sure it could be completely automated.
Which is a round about way of saying, everything critical should be in the kernel core, and driver makers for non-essential parts should provide the drivers seperately with scripts to integrate it and a general architecture for external modules. If the kernel was not so chock-full of non-essential drivers maybe it would be better maintained.
A little idea also: one of the reasons for even needing monolithic kernels is having the risk of attackers inserting kernel modules for example keyloggers. Why couldn't it be set up so the kernel can have the module loading ripped out after booting so once the machine is on the network it is pretty much monolithic?
To put it succintly, the problem comes from the fact that managers are basically generalists, and programmers are usually as specialised as you can possibly be.
If there could possibly be any other argument for the augmentation of the human brain I could not think of a better one than software project management. Comparing neural augmentation to taking drugs to do better at high level sports is a dumb comparison but sadly one which washes well with the majority of the voting public who are by definition 50% below average.
Hardware support is generally related to the kernel. Being that generally the fedora linux system is distributed as binaries why isn't the whole gamut of kernel modules present?
I personally have found more problems with RPM than anything else with fedora. Anyone who's used FC6 would agree with me that the system is definitely starting to mature, I almost switched to ubuntu (this is for a granny pc) but, and I can't remember exactly what happened or what I did but it's fine now so I'm shying away from the debian based system for now.
If it were not for the fact I am a committed Half Life 2 addict I'd be using linux but I just can't live without my daily fix of hurling toilets around the place. If xen or vmware esx server properly supported my SiS SATA and allowed me to run source engine-based games I'd switch back. I need to look into the state of xen and esx server, maybe I am suffering this idiotic operating system for no good reason!
i don't think christians started out being murderous evil bastards that early, the books of the new testament hardly even got written in 100 ad. 400ad was when christianity started to become the implement of the roman empire, starting in 300something with constantine. it was some years later before the co-opted and modified versions of christianity were used to ethically justify unethical behavior. the crusades and the inquisition and all that.
it was only a matter of time before someone nabbed that evil radio station. i doubt this will start a cascade of revelations though. i am kinda despondent about it. despite the otherwise good work done, even the neutral organisations relaying news are now co-opted by media manipulation engines trying to justify things like iraq and deflecting attention away from any valid investigation into the events of 9/11. even the 'citizen press' in the blogosphere is really in no position to do much about the social flux we see. average joe worships the tv, average joe votes, average joe does not boycott evil people and their businesses.
i despair of the state of affairs in the world, but eventually something radical will come down the pipeline and blow the house of cards apart. something always does.
Air gap induction would be EXTREMELY inefficient with an 1/8th inch gap.
i might be mistaken but those induction charger couplers used in toothbrushes and such have gaps around 3-4mm between the coils.
regarding efficiency, the power is not lost, it simply does not travel across. power is lost through resistance in the wire and from loading. it would be very simple to simply crank up the voltage to get a longer gap transfer by using proper coil ratios and a step-up transformer in the control circuit. this may increase the thickness of wire and therefore thickness of matting to do it
also i think the whole idea of having it sense before delivering current is to reduce losses from resistance. in the possible scenario i envision the entire floor of a room has coils spaced across the entire floor, but power doesn't flow through any of the coils unless the device sends a 'gimme' signal through which switches the circuit on. then you could get power anywhere in the room simply by either placing it on the floor or connecting an induction unit on the floor. wiring a larger area would introduce complexity in the wiring if one wanted to stick with the on-demand activation of the coils. the switching mechanism would be annoying too, i picture solenoids but maybe some kind of resonance system can be used so that regions can be powered simply by summing the proper set of ac frequencies at the proper amplitudes.
something else that I think is being forgotten here is these induction units operate via ac and on the receiving end there must be an ac-dc converter if the device requires dc power, which does add to the bulk of the device receiving this power.
it just struck me also that there does need to be a normally off state to these devices because it would fuse rfid devices that come into contact with it, and other devices with coils could be affected adversely also.
in any case this sort of technology will be expensive until it is clear the market is there. i know, personally i would love to be able to dispense with potentially life-threatening open contact junctions as much as possible, and to be able to power devices simply by placing them on a surface.
micro induction surfaces is a very cool idea. it does need a fairly close point of contact though i'd say.
here's something nobody's even thought to mention - the device could communicate directly through the contact point as well! have this on your floor and anywhere you set your wirelessly powered speakers the signal can also be sent to it so no need for a wireless link. the obvious uses on a workstation are obvious in this respect. quite possibly one could put video signals through the wires as well and no more cable for the monitor either. just a nice little mat and you put it on your desk and nothing needs wires or extra radio transmitters unless they frequently are parted. integrated into a house power line network these sheets of power plastic would be very cool. no more new wires for anything and no problems with radio shadows if the object is going to mostly just sit on the ground.
the only issue would be how resilient the wiring in it is, would suck if it couldn't be installed and work glitch free for a decade. making a version one can put laminating or vinyl flooring over top would be preferable so effective operation with about an 1/8th inch gap. i don't see why it shouldn't be possible especially if this material were laminated and on a rigid surface with hard covering.
I personally was agnostic about the inside job stuff until I saw the clip of wtc7 collapsing. If you haven't seen it, you should: youtube video of the clip plus some physics modelling analysis I hadn't seen this clip before but it's even more damning than the subjective 'that looks like it's being demolished' feeling I got when I first saw it. It actually demonstrates that the building clearly fell faster than freefall from a stationary start.
i refuse to read your post sir. ever heard of a html break? it's a less than, followed by B and R then a space and a forward slash and then a greater than symbol. if you don't know this, you are new here. congrats. but please learn that html is required in/. posts.
i never throw my coffee cups randomly. i don't throw anything randomly. i prefer to put it in the bin. are you antisurveillance people gonna say we should be able to litter public spaces? how about i go find your house and litter it with cheap wine bottles. how would you feel about that?
i personally got sick of f**kwits throwing rubbish randomly about 20 years ago (and i'm 30yo). if this stops b**tards from throwing their stinking cigarettes everywhere instead of taking the time to stub them out and putting them in the bin without causing a fire, good. i never throw garbage in public space.
i wonder whether the commons in ye olde england got littered with rubbish like they do now. or what about the idiotic tagging? do you really want this shit in your neighbourhood?. this has nothing to do with freedom to be a good citizen. i personally have wished i could say to every c**t that i saw flicking cigarettes into heavy use public spaces 'uh, you coulda stubbed that and put it in a bin' but then again did the council give much thought to making that reasonably easy to do? but they never thought about it either.
man, what a hassle. the cameras speak. at least now when i am threatened physically on camera someone is gonna say 'oi'.
maybe all you people who think that universal surveillance haven't suffered chronic harrasment. it's quite interesting that this aspect of the surveillance scenario is the strongest justification. i'm all for it.
go on fucker, trash the public space, harrass the weak ones. you are on camera. SUCKIT.
not sure where to reply here but i thought it should be mentioned that hud displays for helmets have to be focussed at a usably distant viewing focal point. ever noticed it takes nearly a second to switch between rear view and forward view? there already exists huds for cars which put the speedometer about 2 metres forward of the driver. i've always wondered why this isn't standard but i bet there is a reason why, something to do with reliability of the device. making a rear view display on the same sort of basis would be quite useful too, it'd cut focus switching in half.
i'm pretty sure there's very practical reasons why this does not yet exist.
i'm also pretty sure there's a limited practical market for transparent displays. an attractive novelty to be relegated to pseudo computer geekiness on movies and sold at novelty toy shops like those plasma lamps are. the main problem is that black text on white is much more readable. text with textures and other text behind it is nearly unreadable. if it's blurred so as to be unreadable it might be useful but even then... perhaps useful for something like a pop-out display for a mobile phone... i'm really having trouble thinking of practical uses for a display which you can see through.
from the perspective of logical deduction and inference one would have to conclude that there is in fact no free will. if the processes of nature can be discovered and exploited millions of times over and over again, one has to conclude that indeed the universe operates by strict laws of cause and effect. the human brain is a large machine which implements a subset of those laws to effect this thing called 'cognition'. it follows strict laws. just as you can't make a television calculate the square root of 1023452 a human brain is set up for a specific set of capabilities and propensities.
i don't think locking people up is going to help anything, but a recognition that a person has a certain neurological profile would be very helpful to society, giving more options for improving the social environment, eg, people with the propensity to drive like maniacs and make a lot of noise on the road deserve to have frequent police attention and/or no option to buy noisemaker devices and performance enhanced vehicles for use on the road. also, to those who recognise they have a certain propensity but are blocked by the medical profession from finding an effective measure to reduce the impact of their particular brain configuration. people with psychopathic tendencies should be outed, because in general they have hurt a string of people in the past and this could never happen if these people knew this and were thus able to avoid contact with them.
freedom is the freedom to say 1 + 1 = 2. freedom is not the freedom to say 1 + 1 = 3. the law should reflect the law of nature. this is an example of a move in that direction imho. the problem here is that it will be abused by psychopaths who have tenure in government organisations.
it is possible for a finite object to have no boundaries, for example, the surface of a sphere is a two dimensional surface but there is no edge to it.
i have a model of the universe i dreamed up which sounds dreadfully similar to this concept of the universe starting as a tiny and simple polyhedra, it's following a power of two pattern but somewhere as it divides perturbations form in the pattern and eventually these unfold into what we see here now around us. the key concept is of the process of endless division of a continuous 3 dimensional (and finite) surface that is undergoing an endless second harmonic reverberation that keeps on doubling the number of wave fronts while halving their amplitude.
the key concept this model is aimed towards solving is the question of the source of gravitational force. in my model it is basically equalibriation, the reason why water forms spherical droplets is because this allows the most optimal geometry for releasing the pressure of the endless dividing of matter within it without losing the integrity of the matter. it is this equilibriation which causes the centre of gravity and when two objects are close together, if they get closer together and then share surfaces they are at optimal minimisation of resistance from the expanding force that is uniformly distributed throughout all space.
i still haven't figured out quite how to exploit it, my current concept for a gravitational manipulation device is developing a semiconductive material, some sandwich of specific kinds of matter that shields gravity flowing in one direction but lets it flow in the other direction. creating such a device, preferably one which is switchable so it is operating only when some other controllable force is applied (eg, magnetism). it should also be possible to create the opposite configuration, where it operates unless it is manipulated, such a configuration would be well suited to creating a 'perpetual motion' machine by nullifying or reversing gravity on one side of a rotational cycle, or even better, mounting the gravitic semiconductors on the arms of a rotating device and tapping the energy of gravity to create electricity.
anyways that's a nutshell version of my hypothesis. i have a whole set of concepts for how matter particles (radiative and inert) are formed and what causes them to behave the way they do, and ideas about how to implement teleportation and matter holography (think replicator). i should really get off my butt and do something about it the problem is describing my ideas is all i can do at this point. maybe some/. person will read this post and lightbulbs will magically appear in thought bubbles above their heads and something really interesting happens subsequently.
just don't try to patent it if it's possible to see how my idea was prior art... this idea is licenced under a GPL v2, and when v3 is released, it will be gplv3 licensed. i don't want to be paying through the nose for a device that i helped invent.
microsoft only got to the top of the pile by doing exclusive deals with all the hardware and software vendors. microsoft is a cabal of lawyers and bureaucrats, not programmers and industry leaders. they won't be number one for much longer, the market is having more and more options and despite their best efforts to prevent it, legally, since they are cloners, cloners are cloning their clones and a lot of the clones are being given away free.
i don't hate microsoft, i pity them
Finally, I think it is the fact that environmentalists understand that the environment isn't static is the problem. Because they understand that the environment isn't static, they understand that global warming is a real, and dangerous, threat to future generations. What Earth had 10,000 years ago was a relatively stable environment that lasted in an equilibrium state for most of the last 9000 years. Mars, Venus, and all the other planets in our solar system exist in equilibrium climates, and what environmentalists are seeking to avoid is for Earth to enter into a similar inhospitable equilibrium.
On what basis do you support your assertion that the environment has been stable for that long? I have heard of two major global warming incidents, one in the middle ages and one about 5000 years ago. 10000 years ago was the last ice age. The crux of the issue now is that the climate naturally fluctuates due to solar and orbital fluctuations. Lets not forget that comets and asteroids occasionally hit planets too.
It still seems very obvious to me that the solution is to plant more trees and grow more non-grass crops for our food (hemp anyone?) and increase vegetation in urban environments. Trees, especially in large groups, are naturally more resistant to fluctuations in the direction of more heat and in fact modify their climate by slowing the movement of water on the ground and increasing the humidity directly above them. Transitioning from dry climate is possible too, there is many trees which do well in dryer conditions yet also do well in wetter conditions. The sheer mass of advantages to an immediate and intensive period of forest planting is less than a 20 year lead time for returns on investment.
Plus trees are pretty, and bring birdies which make pretty noises, and little critters which are cute and best of all increase the possibilities for privacy in an increasingly populous human society. All we have to do is take this seriously and stop relying on grasses and grazers for food. I know one thing for sure, a major aim for me in the next 20 years is to get myself some serious acreage and plant intensively so when my children are my age they'll have a beautiful and vibrant living environment to live in. Trees are not intrinsically counter to our modern technologically based society. With our new technologies we could be burning them for energy without the concomitant increase in particulates, we could make plastics from them, and they are excellent building materials to boot. *sigh*
oh, china would have to *buy* the technology eh? interesting... do we really need any more arguments to support the abolition of patents? china disregards them anyway and i'm sure they have a humongous industrial espionage operation going on too.
Global warming will not help anything. I am now starting to become much more agnostic towards the 'save the planet' ideology but if the overall temperature of the ocean rises, that lowers the amount of gas dissolved in it, specifically, in the part that is warmest (the surface) which will lead to a reduction in the most vigorous ecosystem on the planet, which will have repercussions specifically to the human race being that one of the major sources of food is the ocean. on the other hand, we can farm fish, the only limitation is crop production of food sources for the fish and energy to maintain the fish environment optimally.
Global warming will lead to greater efficiency of non-combustion based energy generation methods - a hotter atmosphere is more turbulent, so winds will get stronger, there will be more energy for heat-absorbing methods of energy generation (solar steam turbines and possible future low boiling point liquids that could be used).
There will be a reduction in available water on the planet, which is something that is not talked about. In chemistry I remember learning about dissolution behaviors of gases and liquids and hotter liquids dissolve less gas, but hotter gases dissolve more liquids.
I think the obvious solution to global warming no matter what the cause is planting more forests. Forests will slow down the movement of water from watercourses by creating a buffer zone of shade, they will sequester excess carbon, and they will produce ample sources of carbon for us to make the next years widgets from. Turning away from grazing animals as food and focusing on animals which prefer forest environments and waterways will help foster this too. Forests also produce strong localised humidity regions that attract more rain near elevated regions near the coastline as well, so these areas are the most important ones to focus on.
I'm no whinging hippy but it seems very obvious to me that planting plants is the best way to buffer ourselves against this climate change. Not because I love forests, because forests produce many benefits that a hotter atmosphere would otherwise cause suffering. Also, more forests will lower levels of carbon dioxide which will help reduce the greenhouse effect. I think that it's not the last 200 years of forest clearing that is leaving us vulnerable, it's the last 5000 or so years of agriculture based on grasses and grazers for food.
The biggest issue that we have to face with global warming is the movement of water from the ground to the atmosphere. If we don't manage to find some way to slow this down we are going to end up with massive problems from water shortages.
i used to have an amiga 1200 back in the day and i got boot time down to about 15 seconds. this was in the days of sub-megabyte per second hard drives, even my old 500 i had before that was up in 30 seconds from a floppy disk. now, i know that modern hardware is more complex but beyond the time it takes for the actual devices to start up there should be no more wait than that. it only takes 10 seconds to populate the memory with enough data for a boot (about 100mb) and if the hardware automatically started its startup then there'd be no problem. I think it is the hardware that makes booting a 1-2 minute affair (apart from ridiculous amounts of startup extensions). Hardware should not need to be told how to start up. If video cards took as long as usb controllers, ide controllers and soundcards to to start up then we'd be looking at a blank, probably off, screen for 10-20 seconds before the video card turns on.
Some things obviously take some time to start, like spin-up on a hard drive, but couldn't there be a little chunk of flash memory used to kick on the boot process while that is waiting?
People just don't complain enough I guess. And yes, increasingly common domestic devices are taking forever to boot - my mp3 player takes about 20 seconds before I can press play, and my dvd player takes about 20 seconds too. Instant (or sub 10 second) on would be a major selling point, it puzzles me that it is not more of a priority.
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if they are deriving code from gpl'd software they have to offer the ENTIRE code, not just the modifications, although i think possibly they could offer diffs from a given version but idk why they'd waste their diffing it when they could just comply with gpl and offer it as is.
cisco better not sit on their hands about this or they'll have apple fanboys AND gpl fanboys slagging them off at the same time!
It all really depends on where this enzyme attacks the virus. Being that this is obviously some kind of digestive enzyme for the fish, one would assume it is a more generalised protease enzyme but specifically targets a type of protein common to the cod's food and the bird flu virus. If the protein it attacks is not something that can vary without impeding the essential functions of the virus then it is a cure.
In the end, the best cure for any virus would be a nanomachine (be it protein or not) which carries an active oxygen atom into the location to destroy the most critical components of the virus' reproductive mechanism. That's basically how the human immune system defends against virii and bacteria, by remembering which enzyme sequence is required to lob a bomb (O-) into the soft bits of the enemy's generative system (testicles/ovaries). Of course sometimes one can aim a bit wider than that, for example disrupting metabolism but that does not apply in the case of virii whose only function is to replicate their code within the cells of another organism.
I'm having trouble conceiving of this enzyme as being dangerous when it is from inside the guts of a common (albeit in this case from an uncommon region) fish (remember, cats and seagulls aren't particularly fussy about which parts of a fish they eat). The only thing I can think of that might be an issue is that intestines often are clogged up with somewhat unappealing organisms substances in states of decay. I seriously doubt it's toxic, but I also doubt it will be useful injected or eaten, but perhaps it might help knock the virus back in the place where it is most active, in the sinus, by putting it into a nasal spray.
ah yes, also, snow will be stable fairly soon, it certainly played ok a year ago, and wipes the floor with every codec i've seen bits/pixel-wise (and my hardware can't play h264 but it plays snow smooth as). who needs a stupid proprietary codec, there's open ones for most files one wants to play and within a year or two every DRM yet invented gets pwned.
i fell for paying for a driver for linux once, cos i needed to use a dialup modem with a connexant chip. i'm quite happy to say that my modem is now a dsl modem inside a little dedicated box running embedded linux and giving me access with ethernet, and not some stupid proprietary modem which eats cpu cycles instead of providing silicon.
nvidia will eventually suffer the ignominy of being the wide open backdoor into linux systems and the reasons for the complaints of the 'purists' will become manifest in the form of a lot of irritated customers who paid real money for nvidia chips. i am already annoyed that they've dropped support for gforce4 video cards, why is it still supported in the windows version?
eventually gpu acceleration will be sold with an open interface by someone with an open driver and it will do polygon for polygon as good as someone else's. or maybe ati will decide to do a netscape on nvidia and open up their hardware. gpu's are incredible accelerators for more than just 3d vectors, there is several other uses for that type of processing and a closed spec prevents their use except by a select number of developers, the rest of the devs being too numerous to be 'manageable' (a-la microsoft's prohibitive development licenses for hardware utilising their DRM) meaning the incentive arises for developers to target the less popular but accessible platform. doom 3 anyone?
So they are trying to deprecate the litre because it does not conveniently fit into a volume to weight conversion on an arbitrary fluid? I'm sure if you are that desperate for accuracy of this conversion put a few spoonfuls of salt into the water.
Being that humans have 10 fingers, counting systems and measurement all being decimal makes a lot more sense, because of the fact many conversions involve simply moving decimal places back and forward.
Also, my bloody spellchecker is reminding me that I'm apparently using an american dictionary - it's LITRE not LITER. Perhaps someone should change the spelling to leeter so americans get it.
ahem.
My understanding of learning systems is it's just a matter of practise. I can't believe you could spend 6 months struggling with 24 hour time unless you only had to use it in one place. And I can't believe that you had no power to change that time display.
I chat on irc to americans a lot and every time they start talking about the weather I get annoyed because they all talk in farenheit.
Sadly, the common use of imperial in the USA and Malaysia is unlikely to change anytime soon. But we need to purge the world of these retards anyway, or at least surgically remove them from their precious automatic weapons. Nucular power anyone?
The scenario Stallman talks about is altogether too obviously possible. Patents are evil and should be eradicated.
The only way for the little guy to really fight the big guys is to release inventions into the public domain where they will be produced by whoever sees a market for them rather than whoever wants to pay the outrageous license fee and royalties. The only incentive for this is purely ethical, although one must consider the fame for this will most likely result in a R&D job somewhere. But who funds R&D departments that don't churn out patents?
One has to ask the question: if Transmeta had not sued Intel, would Intel have sued Transmeta?
A perfect opportunity for a partnership comes to mind when I look at that little gizmo, something I've been wishing for - a mobile phone which automatically switches to wifi voip when configured to access a wifi net.
I have a number of major gripes with the iPhone business - why did they prematurely announce the release when it's not ready for production yet, when if they are serious about living up to their reputation as a market-savvy tech company and doing what roughlydrafted.com suggested (a site which although it is a little iFanBoy does do good analysis) which is become a provider of the network service via wholesale onselling, and providing deeper functionality between the phone and the computers, forcing a change in the practises of mobile phone networks to try and put a charge on every little bit of data they can force people to put through their base stations.
Personally, I don't really care what happens, because the market wants more integrated personal communications/media player devices. The schtick of the fancy interface front panel, while it is interesting, is hardly going to be without cloners and the rise of prepaid mobile services means that hobbled wireless functionality will not last for long, one should remember that a lot of young people don't have access to credit and therefore cannot use 'plan' phones anyway. A phone with a decent sized display, touch screen interface and the capability to play mp4/mp3 and wifi/bluetooth was always going to appear very soon, and Apple has made a big mistake, if you ask me, by prematurely announcing an incomplete product. The rate at which chinese companies whip out new gear is pretty amazing and it's not inconceivable that by the time apple finally starts to ship piddling quantities of iPhones (or whatever they end up having to call it) that china will flood the market with cheaper versions running linux.
I for one am all for the innovation. I think it reeks of smug complacence that Apple made this announcement before they really had the product ready. Or maybe is forgetting that brand loyalty requires consistent quality product (anyone want an ipod with a screen that scratches when you look at it the wrong way?). If they are so confident the iPhone is ready for the market why didn't they let anyone actually put one in their hands at the announcement?
I could be totally barking up the wrong tree here but why do kernels even have branches for non-critical hardware like usb gadgets and I'm sure anyone who looks over a kernel feature list when building could easily strip virtually everything.
Since people have the option of building monolithic or modular kernels, there is this idea floating around that if it's not in the kernel tree it's gonna be a pain to put in there. Rubbish. I'm barely able to string together a hello world program in c but I can put a new driver into a monolithic kernel manually, and I'm sure it could be completely automated.
Which is a round about way of saying, everything critical should be in the kernel core, and driver makers for non-essential parts should provide the drivers seperately with scripts to integrate it and a general architecture for external modules. If the kernel was not so chock-full of non-essential drivers maybe it would be better maintained.
A little idea also: one of the reasons for even needing monolithic kernels is having the risk of attackers inserting kernel modules for example keyloggers. Why couldn't it be set up so the kernel can have the module loading ripped out after booting so once the machine is on the network it is pretty much monolithic?
To put it succintly, the problem comes from the fact that managers are basically generalists, and programmers are usually as specialised as you can possibly be.
If there could possibly be any other argument for the augmentation of the human brain I could not think of a better one than software project management. Comparing neural augmentation to taking drugs to do better at high level sports is a dumb comparison but sadly one which washes well with the majority of the voting public who are by definition 50% below average.
Hardware support is generally related to the kernel. Being that generally the fedora linux system is distributed as binaries why isn't the whole gamut of kernel modules present?
I personally have found more problems with RPM than anything else with fedora. Anyone who's used FC6 would agree with me that the system is definitely starting to mature, I almost switched to ubuntu (this is for a granny pc) but, and I can't remember exactly what happened or what I did but it's fine now so I'm shying away from the debian based system for now.
If it were not for the fact I am a committed Half Life 2 addict I'd be using linux but I just can't live without my daily fix of hurling toilets around the place. If xen or vmware esx server properly supported my SiS SATA and allowed me to run source engine-based games I'd switch back. I need to look into the state of xen and esx server, maybe I am suffering this idiotic operating system for no good reason!
i don't think christians started out being murderous evil bastards that early, the books of the new testament hardly even got written in 100 ad. 400ad was when christianity started to become the implement of the roman empire, starting in 300something with constantine. it was some years later before the co-opted and modified versions of christianity were used to ethically justify unethical behavior. the crusades and the inquisition and all that.
it was only a matter of time before someone nabbed that evil radio station. i doubt this will start a cascade of revelations though. i am kinda despondent about it. despite the otherwise good work done, even the neutral organisations relaying news are now co-opted by media manipulation engines trying to justify things like iraq and deflecting attention away from any valid investigation into the events of 9/11. even the 'citizen press' in the blogosphere is really in no position to do much about the social flux we see. average joe worships the tv, average joe votes, average joe does not boycott evil people and their businesses.
i despair of the state of affairs in the world, but eventually something radical will come down the pipeline and blow the house of cards apart. something always does.
regarding efficiency, the power is not lost, it simply does not travel across. power is lost through resistance in the wire and from loading. it would be very simple to simply crank up the voltage to get a longer gap transfer by using proper coil ratios and a step-up transformer in the control circuit. this may increase the thickness of wire and therefore thickness of matting to do it
also i think the whole idea of having it sense before delivering current is to reduce losses from resistance. in the possible scenario i envision the entire floor of a room has coils spaced across the entire floor, but power doesn't flow through any of the coils unless the device sends a 'gimme' signal through which switches the circuit on. then you could get power anywhere in the room simply by either placing it on the floor or connecting an induction unit on the floor. wiring a larger area would introduce complexity in the wiring if one wanted to stick with the on-demand activation of the coils. the switching mechanism would be annoying too, i picture solenoids but maybe some kind of resonance system can be used so that regions can be powered simply by summing the proper set of ac frequencies at the proper amplitudes.
something else that I think is being forgotten here is these induction units operate via ac and on the receiving end there must be an ac-dc converter if the device requires dc power, which does add to the bulk of the device receiving this power.
it just struck me also that there does need to be a normally off state to these devices because it would fuse rfid devices that come into contact with it, and other devices with coils could be affected adversely also.
in any case this sort of technology will be expensive until it is clear the market is there. i know, personally i would love to be able to dispense with potentially life-threatening open contact junctions as much as possible, and to be able to power devices simply by placing them on a surface.
micro induction surfaces is a very cool idea. it does need a fairly close point of contact though i'd say.
here's something nobody's even thought to mention - the device could communicate directly through the contact point as well! have this on your floor and anywhere you set your wirelessly powered speakers the signal can also be sent to it so no need for a wireless link. the obvious uses on a workstation are obvious in this respect. quite possibly one could put video signals through the wires as well and no more cable for the monitor either. just a nice little mat and you put it on your desk and nothing needs wires or extra radio transmitters unless they frequently are parted. integrated into a house power line network these sheets of power plastic would be very cool. no more new wires for anything and no problems with radio shadows if the object is going to mostly just sit on the ground.
the only issue would be how resilient the wiring in it is, would suck if it couldn't be installed and work glitch free for a decade. making a version one can put laminating or vinyl flooring over top would be preferable so effective operation with about an 1/8th inch gap. i don't see why it shouldn't be possible especially if this material were laminated and on a rigid surface with hard covering.
I personally was agnostic about the inside job stuff until I saw the clip of wtc7 collapsing. If you haven't seen it, you should: youtube video of the clip plus some physics modelling analysis I hadn't seen this clip before but it's even more damning than the subjective 'that looks like it's being demolished' feeling I got when I first saw it. It actually demonstrates that the building clearly fell faster than freefall from a stationary start.
one of the clips showing the collapse, note the oddly familiar appearance of this event to a controlled demolition.
i refuse to read your post sir. ever heard of a html break? it's a less than, followed by B and R then a space and a forward slash and then a greater than symbol. if you don't know this, you are new here. congrats. but please learn that html is required in /. posts.
i never throw my coffee cups randomly. i don't throw anything randomly. i prefer to put it in the bin. are you antisurveillance people gonna say we should be able to litter public spaces? how about i go find your house and litter it with cheap wine bottles. how would you feel about that?
i personally got sick of f**kwits throwing rubbish randomly about 20 years ago (and i'm 30yo). if this stops b**tards from throwing their stinking cigarettes everywhere instead of taking the time to stub them out and putting them in the bin without causing a fire, good. i never throw garbage in public space.
i wonder whether the commons in ye olde england got littered with rubbish like they do now. or what about the idiotic tagging? do you really want this shit in your neighbourhood?. this has nothing to do with freedom to be a good citizen. i personally have wished i could say to every c**t that i saw flicking cigarettes into heavy use public spaces 'uh, you coulda stubbed that and put it in a bin' but then again did the council give much thought to making that reasonably easy to do? but they never thought about it either.
man, what a hassle. the cameras speak. at least now when i am threatened physically on camera someone is gonna say 'oi'.
maybe all you people who think that universal surveillance haven't suffered chronic harrasment. it's quite interesting that this aspect of the surveillance scenario is the strongest justification. i'm all for it.
go on fucker, trash the public space, harrass the weak ones. you are on camera. SUCKIT.
not sure where to reply here but i thought it should be mentioned that hud displays for helmets have to be focussed at a usably distant viewing focal point. ever noticed it takes nearly a second to switch between rear view and forward view? there already exists huds for cars which put the speedometer about 2 metres forward of the driver. i've always wondered why this isn't standard but i bet there is a reason why, something to do with reliability of the device. making a rear view display on the same sort of basis would be quite useful too, it'd cut focus switching in half.
i'm pretty sure there's very practical reasons why this does not yet exist.
i'm also pretty sure there's a limited practical market for transparent displays. an attractive novelty to be relegated to pseudo computer geekiness on movies and sold at novelty toy shops like those plasma lamps are. the main problem is that black text on white is much more readable. text with textures and other text behind it is nearly unreadable. if it's blurred so as to be unreadable it might be useful but even then... perhaps useful for something like a pop-out display for a mobile phone... i'm really having trouble thinking of practical uses for a display which you can see through.
from the perspective of logical deduction and inference one would have to conclude that there is in fact no free will. if the processes of nature can be discovered and exploited millions of times over and over again, one has to conclude that indeed the universe operates by strict laws of cause and effect. the human brain is a large machine which implements a subset of those laws to effect this thing called 'cognition'. it follows strict laws. just as you can't make a television calculate the square root of 1023452 a human brain is set up for a specific set of capabilities and propensities.
i don't think locking people up is going to help anything, but a recognition that a person has a certain neurological profile would be very helpful to society, giving more options for improving the social environment, eg, people with the propensity to drive like maniacs and make a lot of noise on the road deserve to have frequent police attention and/or no option to buy noisemaker devices and performance enhanced vehicles for use on the road. also, to those who recognise they have a certain propensity but are blocked by the medical profession from finding an effective measure to reduce the impact of their particular brain configuration. people with psychopathic tendencies should be outed, because in general they have hurt a string of people in the past and this could never happen if these people knew this and were thus able to avoid contact with them.
freedom is the freedom to say 1 + 1 = 2. freedom is not the freedom to say 1 + 1 = 3. the law should reflect the law of nature. this is an example of a move in that direction imho. the problem here is that it will be abused by psychopaths who have tenure in government organisations.
it is possible for a finite object to have no boundaries, for example, the surface of a sphere is a two dimensional surface but there is no edge to it. i have a model of the universe i dreamed up which sounds dreadfully similar to this concept of the universe starting as a tiny and simple polyhedra, it's following a power of two pattern but somewhere as it divides perturbations form in the pattern and eventually these unfold into what we see here now around us. the key concept is of the process of endless division of a continuous 3 dimensional (and finite) surface that is undergoing an endless second harmonic reverberation that keeps on doubling the number of wave fronts while halving their amplitude. the key concept this model is aimed towards solving is the question of the source of gravitational force. in my model it is basically equalibriation, the reason why water forms spherical droplets is because this allows the most optimal geometry for releasing the pressure of the endless dividing of matter within it without losing the integrity of the matter. it is this equilibriation which causes the centre of gravity and when two objects are close together, if they get closer together and then share surfaces they are at optimal minimisation of resistance from the expanding force that is uniformly distributed throughout all space. i still haven't figured out quite how to exploit it, my current concept for a gravitational manipulation device is developing a semiconductive material, some sandwich of specific kinds of matter that shields gravity flowing in one direction but lets it flow in the other direction. creating such a device, preferably one which is switchable so it is operating only when some other controllable force is applied (eg, magnetism). it should also be possible to create the opposite configuration, where it operates unless it is manipulated, such a configuration would be well suited to creating a 'perpetual motion' machine by nullifying or reversing gravity on one side of a rotational cycle, or even better, mounting the gravitic semiconductors on the arms of a rotating device and tapping the energy of gravity to create electricity. anyways that's a nutshell version of my hypothesis. i have a whole set of concepts for how matter particles (radiative and inert) are formed and what causes them to behave the way they do, and ideas about how to implement teleportation and matter holography (think replicator). i should really get off my butt and do something about it the problem is describing my ideas is all i can do at this point. maybe some /. person will read this post and lightbulbs will magically appear in thought bubbles above their heads and something really interesting happens subsequently.
just don't try to patent it if it's possible to see how my idea was prior art... this idea is licenced under a GPL v2, and when v3 is released, it will be gplv3 licensed. i don't want to be paying through the nose for a device that i helped invent.
microsoft only got to the top of the pile by doing exclusive deals with all the hardware and software vendors. microsoft is a cabal of lawyers and bureaucrats, not programmers and industry leaders. they won't be number one for much longer, the market is having more and more options and despite their best efforts to prevent it, legally, since they are cloners, cloners are cloning their clones and a lot of the clones are being given away free. i don't hate microsoft, i pity them
On what basis do you support your assertion that the environment has been stable for that long? I have heard of two major global warming incidents, one in the middle ages and one about 5000 years ago. 10000 years ago was the last ice age. The crux of the issue now is that the climate naturally fluctuates due to solar and orbital fluctuations. Lets not forget that comets and asteroids occasionally hit planets too.
It still seems very obvious to me that the solution is to plant more trees and grow more non-grass crops for our food (hemp anyone?) and increase vegetation in urban environments. Trees, especially in large groups, are naturally more resistant to fluctuations in the direction of more heat and in fact modify their climate by slowing the movement of water on the ground and increasing the humidity directly above them. Transitioning from dry climate is possible too, there is many trees which do well in dryer conditions yet also do well in wetter conditions. The sheer mass of advantages to an immediate and intensive period of forest planting is less than a 20 year lead time for returns on investment.
Plus trees are pretty, and bring birdies which make pretty noises, and little critters which are cute and best of all increase the possibilities for privacy in an increasingly populous human society. All we have to do is take this seriously and stop relying on grasses and grazers for food. I know one thing for sure, a major aim for me in the next 20 years is to get myself some serious acreage and plant intensively so when my children are my age they'll have a beautiful and vibrant living environment to live in. Trees are not intrinsically counter to our modern technologically based society. With our new technologies we could be burning them for energy without the concomitant increase in particulates, we could make plastics from them, and they are excellent building materials to boot. *sigh*
oh, china would have to *buy* the technology eh? interesting... do we really need any more arguments to support the abolition of patents? china disregards them anyway and i'm sure they have a humongous industrial espionage operation going on too.
Global warming will not help anything. I am now starting to become much more agnostic towards the 'save the planet' ideology but if the overall temperature of the ocean rises, that lowers the amount of gas dissolved in it, specifically, in the part that is warmest (the surface) which will lead to a reduction in the most vigorous ecosystem on the planet, which will have repercussions specifically to the human race being that one of the major sources of food is the ocean. on the other hand, we can farm fish, the only limitation is crop production of food sources for the fish and energy to maintain the fish environment optimally.
Global warming will lead to greater efficiency of non-combustion based energy generation methods - a hotter atmosphere is more turbulent, so winds will get stronger, there will be more energy for heat-absorbing methods of energy generation (solar steam turbines and possible future low boiling point liquids that could be used).
There will be a reduction in available water on the planet, which is something that is not talked about. In chemistry I remember learning about dissolution behaviors of gases and liquids and hotter liquids dissolve less gas, but hotter gases dissolve more liquids.
I think the obvious solution to global warming no matter what the cause is planting more forests. Forests will slow down the movement of water from watercourses by creating a buffer zone of shade, they will sequester excess carbon, and they will produce ample sources of carbon for us to make the next years widgets from. Turning away from grazing animals as food and focusing on animals which prefer forest environments and waterways will help foster this too. Forests also produce strong localised humidity regions that attract more rain near elevated regions near the coastline as well, so these areas are the most important ones to focus on.
I'm no whinging hippy but it seems very obvious to me that planting plants is the best way to buffer ourselves against this climate change. Not because I love forests, because forests produce many benefits that a hotter atmosphere would otherwise cause suffering. Also, more forests will lower levels of carbon dioxide which will help reduce the greenhouse effect. I think that it's not the last 200 years of forest clearing that is leaving us vulnerable, it's the last 5000 or so years of agriculture based on grasses and grazers for food.
The biggest issue that we have to face with global warming is the movement of water from the ground to the atmosphere. If we don't manage to find some way to slow this down we are going to end up with massive problems from water shortages.
i used to have an amiga 1200 back in the day and i got boot time down to about 15 seconds. this was in the days of sub-megabyte per second hard drives, even my old 500 i had before that was up in 30 seconds from a floppy disk. now, i know that modern hardware is more complex but beyond the time it takes for the actual devices to start up there should be no more wait than that. it only takes 10 seconds to populate the memory with enough data for a boot (about 100mb) and if the hardware automatically started its startup then there'd be no problem. I think it is the hardware that makes booting a 1-2 minute affair (apart from ridiculous amounts of startup extensions). Hardware should not need to be told how to start up. If video cards took as long as usb controllers, ide controllers and soundcards to to start up then we'd be looking at a blank, probably off, screen for 10-20 seconds before the video card turns on. Some things obviously take some time to start, like spin-up on a hard drive, but couldn't there be a little chunk of flash memory used to kick on the boot process while that is waiting? People just don't complain enough I guess. And yes, increasingly common domestic devices are taking forever to boot - my mp3 player takes about 20 seconds before I can press play, and my dvd player takes about 20 seconds too. Instant (or sub 10 second) on would be a major selling point, it puzzles me that it is not more of a priority.