Another proof that anything obvious can be patented these days, not to mention plenty of prior art as noted by others above. I recall I have been using a feature like this since forever on Nokia phones, but I guess it has a patent truce after going to bed with Microsoft, and does not have to worry about it.
Agreed! As long as you fill your balloon outdoors (and don't smoke while doing it), using hydrogen is quite safe. It is harder to make a hydrogen balloon explode than people think. During my compulsory military service in Finland I was a "weatherman", which sometimes involved sending hydrogen-filled pilot balloons (about one meter in diameter when filled at ground level), and following them with a theodolite to determine winds at various heights. The balloon rises at a known constant rate, so measuring the direction to it periodically allows computing the wind speed and direction (done with a kind of nomogram, instead of a computer - this was 30 years ago, and even today the nomogram might be more reliable under field conditions). The relevant bit here is that in some exercises this was done at night, and to make the balloon visible, we attached a paper bag with a lit candle in it (yes, really!). The balloon never exploded because of this. During one exercise, being a bit bored, we went further and hung a large firecracker (of the type used to simulate enemy fire in exercises) under one balloon, expecting a very spectacular bang. No such luck, it just popped rather mildly. I'm not sure if the hydrogen actually even ignited.
(Ob. disclaimer for kids: Don't try this at home. Maybe we were just lucky...)
> I don't know what I'd replace it with, though. Ideas, anyone?
As far as software is concerned, it should go back to the way it was before the early 1990's or thereabouts: just copyright and trade secrets. Worked quite well. Practically all real software innovations predate the "benefits" of applying the patent system to software.
(Yes I know there were some software patents before the time I mention, but they were comparatively few and mostly ignored, until an unfortunate supreme court decision gave software patenting teeth).
In fact, shows a very US perspective. For the world outside the US, mobile phones were almost synonymous with Nokia for the 1990's and most of the 2000's. This includes also smartphones. Nokia is not an also-ran but a former giant. A lot like IBM. Like IBM, it was caught by nimbler competitors.
Time will tell if it keeps fading or reinvigorates itself.
The trouble here is what one justification for the switch to WP offered by Elop was building a new "ecosystem" as an alternative to Android and iOS. Can Nokia do it on its own, with no other HW vendors? if yes (after all, Apple manages it), Nokia could just as well have gone with Meego, without paying the MS tax. But if he though of an Android-like multivendor ecosystem is needed, things are going very badly, if other HW makers than Nokia stop being interested in WP. In this case it would be a replay of Symbian (it too started as a multivendor platform, but actually wound up being proprietary to Nokia). In some ways it would be worse than Symbian, because Nokia has much less control over it, hampering innovation. (It is telling that Nokia's first "PureView" cameraphone is not a WP device).
A year back, Elop justified going with Windows Phone by saying it allows Nokia differentiate its products from the competition better than what the Android choice. A year later this seems to be coming perfectly true: Nokia is well on its way to becoming the only WP shop...
ORIC-1 did not have renumber either (I think it was one of the improvements in the 1.1 Basic you got in Atmos). The Oric User magazine published a very short BASIC code to do renumbering, too bad it only treated the line numbers and did not change the GOTOs and GOSUBs that referred to the lines.
On the other hand, one nice thing about ORIC BASIC was that you could jump to line numbers stored in variables, allowing making GOTO and GOSUB more mnemonic. Not all microcomputer BASICs allowed this. It also had REPEAT...UNTIL loops, which reduced the need for GOTO.
> Basic Computer Games by David Ahl, probably the source (ahem) of the Star Trek game,
it is older, and had been circulated in various forms among mainframe and minicomputer BASIC users. My earliest feat of porting software was making a Honeywell GCOS version of the Star Trek run on my ORIC-1 around 1983. I typed it in from a fanfold listing, which I had printed when working the summer at the computing centre of a power company, helping operate the Honeywell mainframe. After getting in the logic and many evenings of debugging, I made it display the battle status more nicely, updating the screen instead of scrolling. It barely fit into the ORIC-1 (48k version), and I recall I had to work around various quirks and bugs in the ORIC BASIC. Like having to explicitly pop the loop stack if the code jumps out of a FOR loop prematurely.
I still feel the old microcomputer BASICs were great for learning the basics of programming. For one thing you got immediate response (no compiling, just enter your program and type RUN), no need for separate editor, and the way the numbered lines of code directly corresponded to what the program does drove home the fact that computers just blindly obey you commands, in the order you specify, and do no real thinking on their own.
That's interesting. I recently found my real Oric-1 had given up the ghost, when I tried to power it up after many years. Can your emulator read in programs from cassettes, for example after they have been sampled into WAV files?
> Seeing the shambolic way the WWW turned out I would have expected scientists to devise a more logical and structured organisation.
The very lack of rigid structure made WWW a success. Done "right," it would either never have left the labs, or we would have several small proprietary networks, costing $$$ to use. In the 1980's hypertext was a hot topic, the next big thing, but it was always envisioned to be controlled centrally with links traced properly both ways, and of course with proper access control and accounting so that the vendors and authors would get paid. Sir Tim dispensed with all that, creating something that could grow organically in a decentralized fashion. The result was a jungle, but an interesting and fertile one.
Picasa for Linux has really been dead for years already: Only old version available, problems running on up-to-date distros. There also are as good or better native Linux applications for the same thing, so few people will miss it.
Now that they expect people to pay, one would expect Microsoft to finally fix the glaring flaw in their photo gallery view in Skydrive: it ignores the orientation field in the EXIF data, where all modern cameras indicate if the photo is in landscape or portrait orientation. It does not even allow setting this information manually. So all my portrait shots are still shown sideways. One reason I have not been so keen using it, except as a kind of backup location.
It would be just great if no new Linux client would even be needed. If they used DAV, Linux and other OS'es could connect to it out of the box. Even offering it as a normal Windows share would be usable, especially if Google offered it with the Unix extensions (like Samba does), so that all normal Linux file system features would work seamlessly on it. That's actually a service I would be willing to pay for, a true cloud drive for Linux.
Lego is old enough to have its patents expired, at least for the classic system of bricks. I don't know if they are covered by copyright but I doubt it, except for the bricks with some kind of distinct design (like the faces of the Lego men). in any case an adaptor brick would be quite different from any bricks produced by Lego themselves.
Re: I still fail to see what Office Software is supposed to be useful for
> Well, the main reason is probably to be able to read the odd document.
Funnily, for some "odd documents" OpenOffice (or LibreOffice) actually works better than MS Office. I have encountered several old Word files (and even one new one) that MS Office 2007 refused to read, but OpenOffice did. Maybe not with exactly the same layout as the original Word would have used, but at least I got the text out, intact.
The 68000 had a nice 32-bit architecture inside, but the bus width was 16 bits. For this reason it was usually called a 16-bit processor at the time.
If this seems unfair, recall that the Z80 was considered a 8-bit processor, even though it had 16-bit registers and could do 16-bit arithmetic in one instruction. Its main competitor 6502 (used in the PET and Apple II) was completely 8-bit: All registers were 8 bits only, except the instruction pointer.
Heh, brings back my very first lesson in interoperability problems, back when I was 6 years or so. I had some genuine Legos, but someone gave me a packet of near-clones as a Christmas present. These parts worked well enough on their own, but their dimensions differed by a fraction of a millimeter from real Legos. There were also some other small differences. I could almost but not quite combine them.
I still have some of the clones and the contemporary real Legos left in a box my son sometimes get to play with. Both having got worn down over the years, the different kinds of parts now fit together better.
>While these kinds of heads-up displays are popular in films and fiction ...
Exactly. This case seems to be similar to video telephones: Just about every sci-fi film set in the future shows them in use all the time, but now that the technology is finally both available and affordable, not many people care to make video calls.
> but confusing science with religion is not helping...
I did not mean any kind of religious reference. I probably should have used the word "opinion" instead. I am not a native speaker of English, and was under the impression that "belief" is more or less interchangeable with "firm opinion", but apparently the religious overtones are too strong. Must remember this in the future.
What's really worrying that the observations match best the projected "fast growth" curve, and are in fact warmer than it is!
Confirms my long-held belief that: (a) Human-caused climate change is real, and (b) due to human nature, no significant mitigation is going to be done. So we have to live (or die) with the consequences.
> Go on, name some birds, and tell me its main character traits...
A funny coincidence: Yesterday I asked my 6-year old son something like this after he had been playing Angry birds in space with his cousin (she had just got the Space version on her iPad), and he had no trouble talking about the characters of various birds and pigs. In fact, the discussion started after he asked me what is my favourite angry bird, and I was like what, aren't they all the same?
I think the trouble is you and I see the phenomenon from an adult perspective, without realizing that the real target audience of this kind of entertainment doesn't need such subtleties. Comparison with Disney is appropriate. Go look at some early Disney cartoons, and the characters in them really are more or less at the same level as the angry birds. All action.
If the article about the number of potentially habitable worlds is right, it puts several terms in the Drake equation to high values. So the remainder, like development of life, followed by the development of sentient beings, followed by them developing technology, IS very, very improbable.
We ARE special. Probably the only technically advanced civilization currently alive in the galaxy.
Yes, and this is probably the main reason vinyl refuses to die (it's even having a renaissance). When you play it you see the sound reproduction method directly in action, instead of being hidden inside a black box, and the sleeve has more space for artwork and notes. Covers from vinyl re-releases on CD:s generally look pathetic, if they have been done by just downscaling the original.
Er, isn't the major advantage of the laser-ignited fusion that you don't have to confine the plasma? You shoot the lasers at a fuel pellet to ignite a miniature fusion explosion, harvest the energy from the short-lived fireball, then inject the next pellet for the lasers to ignite. So the reactor operates in a pulsed fashion, like an internal combustion engine.
Not Moore's law, but doing something regularly should build up experience and equipment that reduces costs.
About reuse, I'm guessing the main strategy here is to build a durable "bus" that would regularly cycle between Earth and Mars. This would have the engines, living quarters and radiation protection for the bulk of the travel time. Once you have launched this, it could be used for decades, thus amortizing the costs. I believe this is what Mr. Musk means with the 1/2 million figure. After all, even taking a train from Paris to Berlin would cost billions$ if the train and tracks would have to be build separately for each trip...
Microsatellite technology has brought them almost within the means of a well-funded hobbyist. Of course you would need several of them in low-earth orbit, one satellite would not stay long in the range of a ground station, but a full-coverage "PirateSat" network could be built gradually.
OpenStreetMap is pretty good in places with lots of active users, and USELESS elsewhere. I used to file bugs in it in my neighbourhood (with www.openstreetbugs.org - makes it painless and fun), but then realized that it's a too small drop in the bucket. My neighbourhood in OSM is now as good as the official city maps (even has a common bug in other maps fixed: they have a fictional road that was planned at one time but never really built, which confuses satnav users), but go 20km north and you cannot rely on OSM at all. The official mappers at least make an effort to have a consistent level of detail all over the country.
This of course is the rationale of the raging mobile technology patent wars: Both Apple and Microsoft try to ensure Android is not gratis for vendors. Microsoft being more subtle and succesful with it by managing to tax many Android device vendors without big lawsuits.
Reminds me of some old microfiches at my alma mater...
The library of the Physics department of the Helsinki university of Technology used to have (or still has, haven't visited the place for decades) a collection of documents on microfiches about the NERVA. I came across them as a student while looking for something else, and wondered what they were doing there, as Finland certainly did not have a nuclear rocket programme going on. Maybe when the project was terminated, NASA wanted to ensure its results are not lost and sent copies of all unclassified documents to university libraries around the world?
Which means that if a country with no scruples about reactors in space (the Chinese, say) wanted to send a nuclear-powered ship to Mars, they wouldn't have to start the research from scratch. I for one would really like to see such true spaceship to be be built in my lifetime, no matter who does it.
I recall Helsinki was full to cellphone-toting teenagers already in late 1990's when they still were mostly made in "high-cost" countries like Finland and Sweden and cost something like 4x present prices. Higher prices for consumer electronics would just mean people would pay more attention to their purchases, and not throw the device away every few months. It is not like we would go back to writing letters on paper and reading books in candlelight.
"when somebody comes up with an A4 printout and says"
Will not happen. The officials would never use such un-American paper sizes. It will be on a Letter or a Legal.
But these guys really have no flexibility. The only time I visited the US, I had my fingerprints scanned along with other foreigners. On the next queue, there was a guy who had a hand that was very seriously disfigured by some accident or disease. They still tried to fingerprint the hand, although figuring out which of the knobs on it were fingers, and trying to press them against the scanner was holding up the queue...
if implemented as proposed, this would eventually make it impossible to look for any mp3, wma etc... file whatsoever, since album names famously can contain just about anything. Throw in artists' names and other languages besides English, and they could just as well ban any search involving media files and be done with it.
Wikipedia notes that "Suomi was born in Eveleth, Minnesota to John and Anna Suomi. His parents arrived in the US in 1902 from Finland.". Many of the Finns that emigrated to US went to Minnesota.
“Ruby on Rails decided it wasn’t interested in Windows and that’s hurt Ruby in the long run,”
How, exactly? Last I heard Ruby on Rails is quite popular. Since most web sites run Linux, FreeBSD or some other unix-style operating system, not supporting Windows is hardly a big impediment in this area.
"tutting over mankind's sluggishness in this oft-predicted area."
Just tut them back! A few months ago I reread the A C Clarke story "Earthlight" from 1955 where at one point an astronomer on a moon-based observatory (about 150 years from now) watches a colleague developing photographic plates, and muses that photography will always involve such chemical magic. Later in the story we visit the observatory's computer, which is room-sized and still gets its data via punched cards....
Yes, you should have one or more telescopes far from Earth, but wouldn't it be better to have them floating free (like in one of the Lagrange points), so they can be aimed in any direction? I also wonder if having any astronomical instruments on the surface of the Moon is a good idea because of the dust. Although there is no wind, there is evidence some of the dust floats because of electrostatic charge. (http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2005/30mar_moonfountains/) .
That video is worthless, basically some guy telling how great it would be to have a machine in your home that can output energy cleanly. Oh it tells shooting neutrons at a nucleus transmutes it to something else and generates energy. Great, I did that at a 2. year physics labs at my university 30 years ago... the trouble is making enough of those neutrons without running a conventional nuclear reactor (and having neutrons flying around is not exactly harmless anyway). Hard to believe NASA hosting such crap. Is there more substance somewhere?
Long ago as Internet time goes, fairly recently as human history.
I recall watching the first landing as a 7-year old, on the black-and-white vacuum-tube TV set at my granny's farm, now lost. Somehow I feel it is old history even for me...
Actually, Linus himself thought to name it "Freax". The name "Linux" was coined by a guy called Ari Lemke who first put the nascent sources online at the nic.funet.fi FTP site. I wonder if the history of computing would have been different without this name change. Who would have dared to run enterprise systems on something called "Freax"?
(Google for "freax linux" to get links to the story).
Re: "So many ideas in modern UNIX come from Microsoft - the use of dynamic linked libraries, device driver interfaces, asynchronous file I/O, journaling file system, etc."
All those ideas predate Windows and some even Unix. Dynamic linking came from the MULTICS project, like almost every other idea in "modern" operating systems.
Solaris had dynamic linking very early on (not sure if before or after NT), but in any case the Solaris implementation, which is what Linux copies, is superior to Windows DLL:s in that creating and using dynamic libraries is practically identical to static libraries. In Windows you had to jump through hoops. (Export modules? Strange nonstandard C extensions? what's actually the sharing semantics of global variables in DLL:s in different Windows versions?)
I agree that older Unix like that 1980's BSD was inflexible in that recompiling or at least relinking the kernel was often needed for minor changes. It was simply showing its age. NT could avoid much of this as a new design, and so could Linux. It does not mean that Linux copied Microsoft, they were both just taking advantage of "new" (actually by that time well-known) techniques.
I have been dipping into the web version (which also works on non-IE browsers on Linux, mirabile dictu) as a part of my cunning plan of archiving my pics on multiple free services for redundancy. I find it is quite typical of what happens when Microsoft make its own implementation of someone else's idea. The basics work but there are strange holes. Eg. it seems t ignore JPEG orientation, and cannot automatically order pics by date. On the positive side, Skydrive allows you to download an entire folder as a standard zip archive, so it does not hold your data hostage (mirabile dictu again; other MS programs love to practice hostage-taking).
... on conversations.nokia.com. It's now mostly about video games and infantile "music". It used to be somewhat interesting for corporate site, but now anyone over 18 years can safely skip it, you wont miss anything worthwhile.
Uhm, incompetence of *any* large organization, in details like these. Everyone working in big companies can tell stories about how the corporate IT function makes acquiring little widgets you could buy from your neighbourhood supermarket twice as expensive.
This would be very clearly illegal in my country (Finland), and I am pretty sure in most other EU countries as well. This is after all a place where even web tracking cookies are illegal in principle. But I wonder if the software even appears in Europe? I got the impression from some articles that this is something some carriers put on phones they supply in contracts, and would not be in handsets not from carriers. If so, it is the carriers that would take the heat.
Re: "N97 - This phone was just broken by design in every respect. Even setting ring tones didn't work."
I have the N97 mini, the slightly modified version (bough second-hand), and guess what? I'm very happy with it. One of the most useful items I own. Software updates have solved the earlier bugs and stability problems, at least I have not encountered many (sometimes there is "out of memory", but then the phone has usually been continuously on for over a week).
As I see it, the REAL problem is that Nokia (and all other manufacturers as well) are pushed by market pressures to release the phones long before they are ready!
To work out the final kinks so that the phone performs exactly as it should would require months of massive beta use and fixing, then more testing, and they cannot afford that. The battery problems are a brilliant example: something that a too short testing period does not necessarily detect.
So if you want a smartphone that actually works, buy it second-hand about a year after it was released (like I did), then apply all available software fixes. Does not matter if it was initially labeled a turkey, it isn't necessarily so after the fixes, and when you buy second-hand, you avoid those individuals with gross manufacturing errors.
But the phone makers really, really would not like people to behave like this...
Sustainable oil just fine (but what about phosphate?)
Re: "Buzzwords such as "sustainability", founded on a resource-constrained view, will no longer be credible. People will simply laugh at them."
Bah, oil just becomes a renevable resource, so using it is sustainable. As a green-minded guy, I see nothing wrong with that. Assuming it works as advertised, a big if. Besides the algae will compete with the same space, water and sun-light to grow as foods. Might cause a replay of the bioethanol from corn debacle. I hope a solution can be found to that (maybe farming the "oil algae" in tanks floating on the sea?).
Oil by the way is not the only non-renewable resource that can cause problems. Look up "phosphate scarcity" in Google. Don't expect end-of-timers going away, ever.
I wonder why it never is discussed that even a neutrino going at exactly the speed of light should be impossible. They are thought to have mass, therefore Einstein says (if I remember my high-school physics correctly) that at light-speed the mass should be infinite. Of course it can go at so close to the speed of light that the difference is very difficult to measure.
If a faster-than-light speed is fed to the same relativistic equation, the mass is no longer infinite, but is imaginary. Not sure if that makes it more or less plausible.
Re: "You do realise its not beyond our current technology to build a fondleslab that would charge from Solar and last long enough to rebuild a basic technology base."
I don't think so. At least not one that you (or even a team of survivalists) could afford. A sophisticated device like that contains a number of components with limited lifetime, when you think in terms of decades instead of internet time...
Some time ago, I tried to fire up my Oric 1 home computer (bough in 1983). Power came up but it did not boot. My guess is that its EPROMs had become corrupted simply because the charge had leaked out of some of its memory cells in the 30 years since they had been written. And that was a memory device of several orders of magnitude less density than current devices.
If I were allowed to pick only one book, the one I would take into my survival bunker would the "Taitokirja" ("Book of Skills") compiled by Vilho Setälä. It is a thick tome from the 1950's full of short entries on building or fixing almost every item you would need in a 1950's -level household. The copy I have is still perfectly readable, unlike the Oric 1 EPROM.
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So much for obviousness
Another proof that anything obvious can be patented these days, not to mention plenty of prior art as noted by others above. I recall I have been using a feature like this since forever on Nokia phones, but I guess it has a patent truce after going to bed with Microsoft, and does not have to worry about it.
Some actual hydrogen ballooning experience...
Agreed! As long as you fill your balloon outdoors (and don't smoke while doing it), using hydrogen is quite safe. It is harder to make a hydrogen balloon explode than people think. During my compulsory military service in Finland I was a "weatherman", which sometimes involved sending hydrogen-filled pilot balloons (about one meter in diameter when filled at ground level), and following them with a theodolite to determine winds at various heights. The balloon rises at a known constant rate, so measuring the direction to it periodically allows computing the wind speed and direction (done with a kind of nomogram, instead of a computer - this was 30 years ago, and even today the nomogram might be more reliable under field conditions). The relevant bit here is that in some exercises this was done at night, and to make the balloon visible, we attached a paper bag with a lit candle in it (yes, really!). The balloon never exploded because of this. During one exercise, being a bit bored, we went further and hung a large firecracker (of the type used to simulate enemy fire in exercises) under one balloon, expecting a very spectacular bang. No such luck, it just popped rather mildly. I'm not sure if the hydrogen actually even ignited.
(Ob. disclaimer for kids: Don't try this at home. Maybe we were just lucky...)
Re: Partly, it's the patent sytem.
> I don't know what I'd replace it with, though. Ideas, anyone?
As far as software is concerned, it should go back to the way it was before the early 1990's or thereabouts: just copyright and trade secrets. Worked quite well. Practically all real software innovations predate the "benefits" of applying the patent system to software.
(Yes I know there were some software patents before the time I mention, but they were comparatively few and mostly ignored, until an unfortunate supreme court decision gave software patenting teeth).
Nokia an also-ran? Of course not!
In fact, shows a very US perspective. For the world outside the US, mobile phones were almost synonymous with Nokia for the 1990's and most of the 2000's. This includes also smartphones. Nokia is not an also-ran but a former giant. A lot like IBM. Like IBM, it was caught by nimbler competitors.
Time will tell if it keeps fading or reinvigorates itself.
Re: Ah, this is how Nokia differentiates
The trouble here is what one justification for the switch to WP offered by Elop was building a new "ecosystem" as an alternative to Android and iOS. Can Nokia do it on its own, with no other HW vendors? if yes (after all, Apple manages it), Nokia could just as well have gone with Meego, without paying the MS tax. But if he though of an Android-like multivendor ecosystem is needed, things are going very badly, if other HW makers than Nokia stop being interested in WP. In this case it would be a replay of Symbian (it too started as a multivendor platform, but actually wound up being proprietary to Nokia). In some ways it would be worse than Symbian, because Nokia has much less control over it, hampering innovation. (It is telling that Nokia's first "PureView" cameraphone is not a WP device).
Ah, this is how Nokia differentiates
A year back, Elop justified going with Windows Phone by saying it allows Nokia differentiate its products from the competition better than what the Android choice. A year later this seems to be coming perfectly true: Nokia is well on its way to becoming the only WP shop...
Re: No RENUMBER command for the Spectrum
ORIC-1 did not have renumber either (I think it was one of the improvements in the 1.1 Basic you got in Atmos). The Oric User magazine published a very short BASIC code to do renumbering, too bad it only treated the line numbers and did not change the GOTOs and GOSUBs that referred to the lines.
On the other hand, one nice thing about ORIC BASIC was that you could jump to line numbers stored in variables, allowing making GOTO and GOSUB more mnemonic. Not all microcomputer BASICs allowed this. It also had REPEAT...UNTIL loops, which reduced the need for GOTO.
The star trek game
> Basic Computer Games by David Ahl, probably the source (ahem) of the Star Trek game,
it is older, and had been circulated in various forms among mainframe and minicomputer BASIC users. My earliest feat of porting software was making a Honeywell GCOS version of the Star Trek run on my ORIC-1 around 1983. I typed it in from a fanfold listing, which I had printed when working the summer at the computing centre of a power company, helping operate the Honeywell mainframe. After getting in the logic and many evenings of debugging, I made it display the battle status more nicely, updating the screen instead of scrolling. It barely fit into the ORIC-1 (48k version), and I recall I had to work around various quirks and bugs in the ORIC BASIC. Like having to explicitly pop the loop stack if the code jumps out of a FOR loop prematurely.
I still feel the old microcomputer BASICs were great for learning the basics of programming. For one thing you got immediate response (no compiling, just enter your program and type RUN), no need for separate editor, and the way the numbered lines of code directly corresponded to what the program does drove home the fact that computers just blindly obey you commands, in the order you specify, and do no real thinking on their own.
Re: woohoo!
That's interesting. I recently found my real Oric-1 had given up the ghost, when I tried to power it up after many years. Can your emulator read in programs from cassettes, for example after they have been sampled into WAV files?
The power of Shambolic
> Seeing the shambolic way the WWW turned out I would have expected scientists to devise a more logical and structured organisation.
The very lack of rigid structure made WWW a success. Done "right," it would either never have left the labs, or we would have several small proprietary networks, costing $$$ to use. In the 1980's hypertext was a hot topic, the next big thing, but it was always envisioned to be controlled centrally with links traced properly both ways, and of course with proper access control and accounting so that the vendors and authors would get paid. Sir Tim dispensed with all that, creating something that could grow organically in a decentralized fashion. The result was a jungle, but an interesting and fertile one.
Re: idiot alert
Picasa for Linux has really been dead for years already: Only old version available, problems running on up-to-date distros. There also are as good or better native Linux applications for the same thing, so few people will miss it.
Hope they fix their photo gallery view!
Now that they expect people to pay, one would expect Microsoft to finally fix the glaring flaw in their photo gallery view in Skydrive: it ignores the orientation field in the EXIF data, where all modern cameras indicate if the photo is in landscape or portrait orientation. It does not even allow setting this information manually. So all my portrait shots are still shown sideways. One reason I have not been so keen using it, except as a kind of backup location.
Re: Existing subscribers all get 25GB
Thanks for the heads-up! I don't visit the skydrive very often, so I might have missed this.
Re: No Linux support again, eh?
It would be just great if no new Linux client would even be needed. If they used DAV, Linux and other OS'es could connect to it out of the box. Even offering it as a normal Windows share would be usable, especially if Google offered it with the Unix extensions (like Samba does), so that all normal Linux file system features would work seamlessly on it. That's actually a service I would be willing to pay for, a true cloud drive for Linux.
Re: Nokia and the Osbourne effect
This is something shareholders should be asking sharp questions about in the upcoming AGM.
Re: Impressive, if...
> This must violate several patents somewhere.
Lego is old enough to have its patents expired, at least for the classic system of bricks. I don't know if they are covered by copyright but I doubt it, except for the bricks with some kind of distinct design (like the faces of the Lego men). in any case an adaptor brick would be quite different from any bricks produced by Lego themselves.
Re: I still fail to see what Office Software is supposed to be useful for
> Well, the main reason is probably to be able to read the odd document.
Funnily, for some "odd documents" OpenOffice (or LibreOffice) actually works better than MS Office. I have encountered several old Word files (and even one new one) that MS Office 2007 refused to read, but OpenOffice did. Maybe not with exactly the same layout as the original Word would have used, but at least I got the text out, intact.
Re: The ST was 32 bits
The 68000 had a nice 32-bit architecture inside, but the bus width was 16 bits. For this reason it was usually called a 16-bit processor at the time.
If this seems unfair, recall that the Z80 was considered a 8-bit processor, even though it had 16-bit registers and could do 16-bit arithmetic in one instruction. Its main competitor 6502 (used in the PET and Apple II) was completely 8-bit: All registers were 8 bits only, except the instruction pointer.
Re: Impressive, if...
Heh, brings back my very first lesson in interoperability problems, back when I was 6 years or so. I had some genuine Legos, but someone gave me a packet of near-clones as a Christmas present. These parts worked well enough on their own, but their dimensions differed by a fraction of a millimeter from real Legos. There were also some other small differences. I could almost but not quite combine them.
I still have some of the clones and the contemporary real Legos left in a box my son sometimes get to play with. Both having got worn down over the years, the different kinds of parts now fit together better.
impractical like video calls
>While these kinds of heads-up displays are popular in films and fiction ...
Exactly. This case seems to be similar to video telephones: Just about every sci-fi film set in the future shows them in use all the time, but now that the technology is finally both available and affordable, not many people care to make video calls.
Re: And the bad news is
> but confusing science with religion is not helping...
I did not mean any kind of religious reference. I probably should have used the word "opinion" instead. I am not a native speaker of English, and was under the impression that "belief" is more or less interchangeable with "firm opinion", but apparently the religious overtones are too strong. Must remember this in the future.
I'll get my coat.
And the bad news is
What's really worrying that the observations match best the projected "fast growth" curve, and are in fact warmer than it is!
Confirms my long-held belief that: (a) Human-caused climate change is real, and (b) due to human nature, no significant mitigation is going to be done. So we have to live (or die) with the consequences.
Re: One Trick Pony?
> Go on, name some birds, and tell me its main character traits...
A funny coincidence: Yesterday I asked my 6-year old son something like this after he had been playing Angry birds in space with his cousin (she had just got the Space version on her iPad), and he had no trouble talking about the characters of various birds and pigs. In fact, the discussion started after he asked me what is my favourite angry bird, and I was like what, aren't they all the same?
I think the trouble is you and I see the phenomenon from an adult perspective, without realizing that the real target audience of this kind of entertainment doesn't need such subtleties. Comparison with Disney is appropriate. Go look at some early Disney cartoons, and the characters in them really are more or less at the same level as the angry birds. All action.
A) it is
If the article about the number of potentially habitable worlds is right, it puts several terms in the Drake equation to high values. So the remainder, like development of life, followed by the development of sentient beings, followed by them developing technology, IS very, very improbable.
We ARE special. Probably the only technically advanced civilization currently alive in the galaxy.
Re: The tangible object
Yes, and this is probably the main reason vinyl refuses to die (it's even having a renaissance). When you play it you see the sound reproduction method directly in action, instead of being hidden inside a black box, and the sleeve has more space for artwork and notes. Covers from vinyl re-releases on CD:s generally look pathetic, if they have been done by just downscaling the original.
Re: ...and they're containing it in, ....?
> They use magnetic fields to hold it in place.
Er, isn't the major advantage of the laser-ignited fusion that you don't have to confine the plasma? You shoot the lasers at a fuel pellet to ignite a miniature fusion explosion, harvest the energy from the short-lived fireball, then inject the next pellet for the lasers to ignite. So the reactor operates in a pulsed fashion, like an internal combustion engine.
Re: Hmmm.....
Not Moore's law, but doing something regularly should build up experience and equipment that reduces costs.
About reuse, I'm guessing the main strategy here is to build a durable "bus" that would regularly cycle between Earth and Mars. This would have the engines, living quarters and radiation protection for the bulk of the travel time. Once you have launched this, it could be used for decades, thus amortizing the costs. I believe this is what Mr. Musk means with the 1/2 million figure. After all, even taking a train from Paris to Berlin would cost billions$ if the train and tracks would have to be build separately for each trip...
Why not actual satellites?
Microsatellite technology has brought them almost within the means of a well-funded hobbyist. Of course you would need several of them in low-earth orbit, one satellite would not stay long in the range of a ground station, but a full-coverage "PirateSat" network could be built gradually.
Re: To be fair
OpenStreetMap is pretty good in places with lots of active users, and USELESS elsewhere. I used to file bugs in it in my neighbourhood (with www.openstreetbugs.org - makes it painless and fun), but then realized that it's a too small drop in the bucket. My neighbourhood in OSM is now as good as the official city maps (even has a common bug in other maps fixed: they have a fictional road that was planned at one time but never really built, which confuses satnav users), but go 20km north and you cannot rely on OSM at all. The official mappers at least make an effort to have a consistent level of detail all over the country.
Casus belli
This of course is the rationale of the raging mobile technology patent wars: Both Apple and Microsoft try to ensure Android is not gratis for vendors. Microsoft being more subtle and succesful with it by managing to tax many Android device vendors without big lawsuits.
Reminds me of some old microfiches at my alma mater...
The library of the Physics department of the Helsinki university of Technology used to have (or still has, haven't visited the place for decades) a collection of documents on microfiches about the NERVA. I came across them as a student while looking for something else, and wondered what they were doing there, as Finland certainly did not have a nuclear rocket programme going on. Maybe when the project was terminated, NASA wanted to ensure its results are not lost and sent copies of all unclassified documents to university libraries around the world?
Which means that if a country with no scruples about reactors in space (the Chinese, say) wanted to send a nuclear-powered ship to Mars, they wouldn't have to start the research from scratch. I for one would really like to see such true spaceship to be be built in my lifetime, no matter who does it.
Price not real impediment
I recall Helsinki was full to cellphone-toting teenagers already in late 1990's when they still were mostly made in "high-cost" countries like Finland and Sweden and cost something like 4x present prices. Higher prices for consumer electronics would just mean people would pay more attention to their purchases, and not throw the device away every few months. It is not like we would go back to writing letters on paper and reading books in candlelight.
@AC 30th January 2012 15:03 GMT
"when somebody comes up with an A4 printout and says"
Will not happen. The officials would never use such un-American paper sizes. It will be on a Letter or a Legal.
But these guys really have no flexibility. The only time I visited the US, I had my fingerprints scanned along with other foreigners. On the next queue, there was a guy who had a hand that was very seriously disfigured by some accident or disease. They still tried to fingerprint the hand, although figuring out which of the knobs on it were fingers, and trying to press them against the scanner was holding up the queue...
... and the washtub, soap and towel.
if implemented as proposed, this would eventually make it impossible to look for any mp3, wma etc... file whatsoever, since album names famously can contain just about anything. Throw in artists' names and other languages besides English, and they could just as well ban any search involving media files and be done with it.
He had Finnish roots
Wikipedia notes that "Suomi was born in Eveleth, Minnesota to John and Anna Suomi. His parents arrived in the US in 1902 from Finland.". Many of the Finns that emigrated to US went to Minnesota.
Hurting?
“Ruby on Rails decided it wasn’t interested in Windows and that’s hurt Ruby in the long run,”
How, exactly? Last I heard Ruby on Rails is quite popular. Since most web sites run Linux, FreeBSD or some other unix-style operating system, not supporting Windows is hardly a big impediment in this area.
Tut tut
"tutting over mankind's sluggishness in this oft-predicted area."
Just tut them back! A few months ago I reread the A C Clarke story "Earthlight" from 1955 where at one point an astronomer on a moon-based observatory (about 150 years from now) watches a colleague developing photographic plates, and muses that photography will always involve such chemical magic. Later in the story we visit the observatory's computer, which is room-sized and still gets its data via punched cards....
Better floating in space
Yes, you should have one or more telescopes far from Earth, but wouldn't it be better to have them floating free (like in one of the Lagrange points), so they can be aimed in any direction? I also wonder if having any astronomical instruments on the surface of the Moon is a good idea because of the dust. Although there is no wind, there is evidence some of the dust floats because of electrostatic charge. (http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2005/30mar_moonfountains/) .
Worthless
That video is worthless, basically some guy telling how great it would be to have a machine in your home that can output energy cleanly. Oh it tells shooting neutrons at a nucleus transmutes it to something else and generates energy. Great, I did that at a 2. year physics labs at my university 30 years ago... the trouble is making enough of those neutrons without running a conventional nuclear reactor (and having neutrons flying around is not exactly harmless anyway). Hard to believe NASA hosting such crap. Is there more substance somewhere?
Re: Long ago?
Long ago as Internet time goes, fairly recently as human history.
I recall watching the first landing as a 7-year old, on the black-and-white vacuum-tube TV set at my granny's farm, now lost. Somehow I feel it is old history even for me...
Not Linus' ego
Re: "The term Hacker far predates linus' ego."
Actually, Linus himself thought to name it "Freax". The name "Linux" was coined by a guy called Ari Lemke who first put the nascent sources online at the nic.funet.fi FTP site. I wonder if the history of computing would have been different without this name change. Who would have dared to run enterprise systems on something called "Freax"?
(Google for "freax linux" to get links to the story).
no, Microsoft did not invent them
Re: "So many ideas in modern UNIX come from Microsoft - the use of dynamic linked libraries, device driver interfaces, asynchronous file I/O, journaling file system, etc."
All those ideas predate Windows and some even Unix. Dynamic linking came from the MULTICS project, like almost every other idea in "modern" operating systems.
Solaris had dynamic linking very early on (not sure if before or after NT), but in any case the Solaris implementation, which is what Linux copies, is superior to Windows DLL:s in that creating and using dynamic libraries is practically identical to static libraries. In Windows you had to jump through hoops. (Export modules? Strange nonstandard C extensions? what's actually the sharing semantics of global variables in DLL:s in different Windows versions?)
I agree that older Unix like that 1980's BSD was inflexible in that recompiling or at least relinking the kernel was often needed for minor changes. It was simply showing its age. NT could avoid much of this as a new design, and so could Linux. It does not mean that Linux copied Microsoft, they were both just taking advantage of "new" (actually by that time well-known) techniques.
a "me too" Microsoft product, but not totally bad
I have been dipping into the web version (which also works on non-IE browsers on Linux, mirabile dictu) as a part of my cunning plan of archiving my pics on multiple free services for redundancy. I find it is quite typical of what happens when Microsoft make its own implementation of someone else's idea. The basics work but there are strange holes. Eg. it seems t ignore JPEG orientation, and cannot automatically order pics by date. On the positive side, Skydrive allows you to download an entire folder as a standard zip archive, so it does not hold your data hostage (mirabile dictu again; other MS programs love to practice hostage-taking).
The new emphasis shows
... on conversations.nokia.com. It's now mostly about video games and infantile "music". It used to be somewhat interesting for corporate site, but now anyone over 18 years can safely skip it, you wont miss anything worthwhile.
Corporate incompetence
"...incompetence of government ..."
Uhm, incompetence of *any* large organization, in details like these. Everyone working in big companies can tell stories about how the corporate IT function makes acquiring little widgets you could buy from your neighbourhood supermarket twice as expensive.
Is it used in EU?
This would be very clearly illegal in my country (Finland), and I am pretty sure in most other EU countries as well. This is after all a place where even web tracking cookies are illegal in principle. But I wonder if the software even appears in Europe? I got the impression from some articles that this is something some carriers put on phones they supply in contracts, and would not be in handsets not from carriers. If so, it is the carriers that would take the heat.
But the Nokia:s stabilize eventually
Re: "N97 - This phone was just broken by design in every respect. Even setting ring tones didn't work."
I have the N97 mini, the slightly modified version (bough second-hand), and guess what? I'm very happy with it. One of the most useful items I own. Software updates have solved the earlier bugs and stability problems, at least I have not encountered many (sometimes there is "out of memory", but then the phone has usually been continuously on for over a week).
As I see it, the REAL problem is that Nokia (and all other manufacturers as well) are pushed by market pressures to release the phones long before they are ready!
To work out the final kinks so that the phone performs exactly as it should would require months of massive beta use and fixing, then more testing, and they cannot afford that. The battery problems are a brilliant example: something that a too short testing period does not necessarily detect.
So if you want a smartphone that actually works, buy it second-hand about a year after it was released (like I did), then apply all available software fixes. Does not matter if it was initially labeled a turkey, it isn't necessarily so after the fixes, and when you buy second-hand, you avoid those individuals with gross manufacturing errors.
But the phone makers really, really would not like people to behave like this...
Sustainable oil just fine (but what about phosphate?)
Re: "Buzzwords such as "sustainability", founded on a resource-constrained view, will no longer be credible. People will simply laugh at them."
Bah, oil just becomes a renevable resource, so using it is sustainable. As a green-minded guy, I see nothing wrong with that. Assuming it works as advertised, a big if. Besides the algae will compete with the same space, water and sun-light to grow as foods. Might cause a replay of the bioethanol from corn debacle. I hope a solution can be found to that (maybe farming the "oil algae" in tanks floating on the sea?).
Oil by the way is not the only non-renewable resource that can cause problems. Look up "phosphate scarcity" in Google. Don't expect end-of-timers going away, ever.
They shouldn't go even at c!
I wonder why it never is discussed that even a neutrino going at exactly the speed of light should be impossible. They are thought to have mass, therefore Einstein says (if I remember my high-school physics correctly) that at light-speed the mass should be infinite. Of course it can go at so close to the speed of light that the difference is very difficult to measure.
If a faster-than-light speed is fed to the same relativistic equation, the mass is no longer infinite, but is imaginary. Not sure if that makes it more or less plausible.
No eternal Kindle.
Re: "You do realise its not beyond our current technology to build a fondleslab that would charge from Solar and last long enough to rebuild a basic technology base."
I don't think so. At least not one that you (or even a team of survivalists) could afford. A sophisticated device like that contains a number of components with limited lifetime, when you think in terms of decades instead of internet time...
Some time ago, I tried to fire up my Oric 1 home computer (bough in 1983). Power came up but it did not boot. My guess is that its EPROMs had become corrupted simply because the charge had leaked out of some of its memory cells in the 30 years since they had been written. And that was a memory device of several orders of magnitude less density than current devices.
If I were allowed to pick only one book, the one I would take into my survival bunker would the "Taitokirja" ("Book of Skills") compiled by Vilho Setälä. It is a thick tome from the 1950's full of short entries on building or fixing almost every item you would need in a 1950's -level household. The copy I have is still perfectly readable, unlike the Oric 1 EPROM.
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