Re: "even if "six-tenths of a kilometre" still has a ring of old school about it."
The amazing thing is that you can, if needed, still describe a third of a metre as a third of a metre.
Or you can give it as a decimal, then convert to metres / kilometres / centimetres / millimetres / ... by shifting the decimal point around.
By the way, for those in yankeeland fishing for a short way to say "kilometre", everybody I know measures both distance and speed in "kay" (so 60k can be 60km or 60kph, depending on context) and weight in "kilos" or "grams".
I don't have an iPhone but I have an iPod which has basically the same form factor. It fits around 150 words on a screen of text and is readable indoors or out. Battery life is somewhat lacking but portable chargers are not hard to find. Only real problem is display of pictures, but I mostly read novels anyway.
Key think is that it fits in my breast pocket and is light enough that I really don't notice that it's there. (Also plays games, movies and music if I don't feel like reading.)
Over the years I've worked my way through several Palm PDAs and a couple of generations of iPods reading books. If you find it hard to read text on such devices , the lack is not in the device.
Baen books has a very large collection of DRM-free ebooks purchasable at quite decent prices on their web site.
The corpse count over the last year or so has been getting a bit silly. It is funny in a way, but the IT angle seems to be getting increasingly ignored.
Why is the BOFH busy killing off the committee when he could be looking for a way to eliminate the cloud proposal in a clever, IT related fashion?
Why isn't he installing a hidden agent on all the test group's PCs to slow them down or grab random pieces of child porn? Why isn't he finding a way into the cloud backend to mysteriously modify the files created? Why didn't he hack the company proxy to redirect references to the cloud to a private store somewhere else? Or have the testers' PCs mysteriously leak key files to each other?
Aside from which defenestration seems altogether too unreliable a method of eliminating one person. People DO survive falling out of windows.
What do Atilla the Hun, Alexander the Great, and Oscar the Ground have in common?
THE SAME MIDDLE NAME.
Clearly there is a pattern here. All three are known for acts of senseless violence. Ban the definite article!
If we banned anything that ever made people feel somewhat more violent we'd quickly run out of things to do. For a start, people who run around banning things that make people violent, probably make people feel violent...
I generally avoid first person shooters. Killing virtual people with a gory virtual sword or burning them to death with virtually painful magic fire is much more appealing.
Or I suppose I could go out and hurt real people, but that would be silly.
Discounting the PSP Go (about which the less said the better) the PSP was only a failure when compared with the DS, having managed about a third of the sales of the DS, and just slightly less than the XBox 360, which is generally regarded as a successful platform. Over 50 million PSPs were sold (as of mid 2009).
The PSP's main direct competition will be the 3DS, which has had a rocky start due to a few factors: poor battery life, a poor launch lineup, and not being rated for children under seven or so due to the 3D effect.
I've more or less given up on playing games of any depth on the iPod Touch. This is because, firstly, a dollar a game will not fund games of the level we expect in the "home" platforms; and secondly, touch controls lack flexibility and have lousy feedback. I do NOT want to have to repeatedly check the position of my thumbs to figure out which direction I'm going.
Basically I agree that the market for devices such as the PSP Vita and the 3DS is not the same as for smartphone gaming (although there is a large overlap). There are quite a few people around who will buy a dedicated mobile gaming device. The only question at this point is whether there are enough such people to fund the platform, and development of games for the platform, in the long term. That remains to be seen.
Rotating Cylinders and the possibility of Global Causality Violation
There are a number of perfectly serviceable time machine designs that do not involve a photon exceeding a velocity of c. Larry Niven wrote a story based on an actual scientific paper awesomely titled "Rotating cylinders and the possibility of global causality violation" about one such design. The late Robert Forward also wrote about a few designs. However most such require certain types of exotic matter - either negative matter. or large quantities of neutronium or similar.
A friend had his 40th birthday not long ago and all the invites & details were coordinated via Facebook.
Eventually I set up a FB account, but I ignore it as much as possible. I think I have exactly one picture posted.
If anything interesting happens, they send me an email.
There's about a half-dozen "Friend" invites from people whose names I don't recognise, that I'm ignoring at the moment. Probably one or two of them are from people that I actually know.
The $180/month plan includes a terybyte of data transfer and is at the maximum available transfer speed. The pricing as quoted is pretty similar to the current pricing plans of the "premium" ADSL providers. The way some treat it, you would thing everybody with a $50/month plan will have their price quadrupled. Not so.
Currently the company I work for has two plans with Internode, for 5GB and 20GB (they're backup links). We are billed $49.95 and $59.95 for these, in addition to the phone line (which is about $30/month). The NBN pricing is uniformly better - $59.95/month for a 30GB commercial service. (Internode now have commercial prixing up on their web site; it's about $10/month over the noncommercial rates.
(Maybe they're ripping us off in comparison to current pricing, in which case it can't hurt to know that Internode are not against ripping their customers off.)
I persist in thinking of the Orion spacecraft as the concept design driven by nukes and a BIG pusher-plate. It appeared, amongst other places, in the Niven/Pournell SF collaboration "Footfall".
I only know of one instance in fiction where an Orion design spacecraft takes off from Earth (that being Footfall, again) for fairly obvious reasons. Apparently it was a serious proposal in the late 50s however.
I had an account with SOE 4 years ago and while my card had expired in that interval, it had been reissued with a new expiry date. That card was probably one of the 12,700 cards they had listed as not being of interest because they were no longer "active".
I did receive a personal notification concerning the SOE hack, although it didn't say my card WAS compromised, just that it MAY have been.
The PSN hack didn't worry me much because the numbers were allegedly hashed, but I have found no mention anywhere that the SOE card numbers were hashed.
I've cancelled my old card and gotten a new one, as the bank in question was setting card expiries on an anniversary basis (i.e. they would always expire in April, every 3 years or so) - a stupid tactic that they have thankfully now forgone.
I read somewhere that PSN was hacked through a buggy old Apache release.
Piracy-as-theft is very, very rare - it means you don't have your copyrights any more. That's not to say that piracy is right, it's just not theft. The analogy I usually use is a bus or train fare - you are consuming a service (use of the train / software) without paying for it. When you buy software you are *not* buying a good, you are buying a *service*. "Intellectual property" is the right to be paid for services rendered.
IP generally can't be "stolen" as the original owner does not lose anything except the possible revenue stream from the IP. (To "steal" is to "take... property wrongfully" according to Mirriam-Webster; if the original still exists it has not been taken, just copied.)
"Possible" is a key word here however - anybody who thinks every pirated item is a lost sale needs a serious reality check.
Protection from piracy is really only practical at a limited level - you can stop Bob from giving Anne a copy of your software by copying the CD, but you can't stop the professional pirates who reverse-engineer your code and remove the copy protection code. The only practical way around this is to have your program require - not just for the copy protection check but actually REQUIRE - an online connection to a server thant can check the legitimacy of your software.
This model works for network-based applications (and games) but not for a lot of other software, although software can be written to run an initial check when it starts up. Many games use this model.
The flipside to this is that if your software will only work when it can connect to a particular server, and you then turn off that server, you are depriving the purchaser of a service that they have paid for, and YOU are the one who is "stealing". You can supply a patch to "fix" this when you are turning your servers off, and I know of at least one company that actually went ahead and did so.
The thing about copy protection is, you have three categories of people using your software. There are the professional pirates, whi will remove the copy protection. There are the people who would pirate your software if they had the technical nous, but buying it is cheaper than the associated hassle. And there are the people who are willing and able to pay you, and don't want to pirate your software. This third category is your core customer base, the people who actually pay your bills, and your copy protection is punishing those customers (as well as the category two people who don't want to pay you).
Suffice to say that there are bastards on both sides of this particular divide.
There may (Apple is good) be other things (Steve Jobs is God) to talk about (Buy an iPhone). But noe of them (you need an iPad) are nearly as (... and a Mac) interesting or useful (Apple Apple Apple Apple...).
Anyway, these days (Apple makes the best hardware) Apple is the flavour (Apple makes the best operating system) of the month. (Steve Wozniak is the Betrayer.) There's even a fruit named after them! (Apple Apple Apple Apple...)
A supermassive black hole will eventually lose all its mass due to Hawking radiation. However "eventually" is a very, VERY long time. The black hole will not shrink until losses from Hawking radiation exceed gains from miscellaneous matter (interstellar dust , cosmic rays etc) and incoming energy (light from other galaxies and assorted stars, the cosmic microwave background radiation). Even with no incoming energy and matter, evaporation would take so long that the numbers would be meaningless to us. We're talking at least high double digits of powers of ten - I don't have the math to figure it out.
As long as the universe is expanding and the mass per cubic meter is failling we'll hit that point eventually. Don't let it worry your grandchildren though.
There's no other explanation for the consistency with which he seems determined to oppose the wishes of the Australian public.
Surveys consistently show that most Australians do not want the firewall. Sadly it seems Conroy is immune to such niceties. Perhaps he's one of those pollies who thinks that the public should shut up between elections.
Hear hear! Truncation of graphs is a statistical evil we can live without.
There's the FPS graph, where a 2% difference winds up looking like a 50% difference, and the registry size, where 150 bytes out of 49000 or so (0.3% change!) *also* looks like a 50% difference. A 2% change in framerate is statistically significant, but I challenge anyone to notice it by eye. The changes are displayed entirely disproportionately.
@AC 12:18 GMT: Some of us deal with systems used by people who, y'know, actually WORK for a living, and pay our princely salaries in part to keep them working efficiently. Some of those people are stunningly ignorant outside of their areas of expertise and can be relied upon to open every piece of junk that hits their mailbox.
As such, antivirus and other protection measures have their place, and system cleanup is an ocasional necessity, although we find the best way to do this is to keep work files on a network drive and reimage each PC from a fresh image when it gets screwed up.
I was interested to see that the system tuners pretty much matched my expectations, i.e. they were all fundamentally useless. Defrag regularly and keep your startup clean (HijackThis! does a decent job and is free, but requires a clue to use) and you'll do as well as most of the packages reviewed here.
Odd that nobody else has mentioned browser objects here, which HijackThis! can also clean up.
I have heard that as AV scanners go NOD32 is superior; effective with a small CPU & memory footprint. Not having used it myself, this is merely rumour to me at this time. I can state that the system overheads from Mcafee are ridiculous - resident memory usage frequently exceeds 150MB even when idle and CPU exceed 50% when actively scanning.
70MB/sec isn't bad over gigabit ethernet, although isn't all that great compared to theoretical max. The benchmarks say that the equivalent products are slower, though, which probably explains the reviewer's enthusiasm.
I'd be more interested in seeing the ESATA performance, personally.
Pack this thing with 4 x SSDs and you have a very nice external disk array for a box limited by internal space. But very pricey if all you want is an external drive array - you would probably be better off using a 3.5" array with brackets to mount 2.5" disks if all you wanted was a 2.5" array.
The pricing quoted as being in Euros is actually in dollars (presumably US dollars), at least if the Amiga Forever web page is to be believed.
So the cheap option is $9.95, not 9.95 euros. Given current exchange rates, the difference matters...
The Amiga failed because the PC hardware overtook it technologically - the gap between the original Amiga and a 1994 Amiga is much smaller than the gap between the 1985 PC and a 1994 PC. HAM in all its incarnations was a nightmare to render dynamically; at the time of the AGA amigas 24-bit colour was becoming common on PCs. In the same time CPUs moved from the 80186 to the early Pentiums, with on-chip FPU becoming standard. The Motorola CPUs did not improve at the pace of the Intel chips.
Allegedly a new chipset was designed after the OCS which was considerably better, but the blueprints were lost and put the Amiga back a couple of years.
Anyway, all this resulted in a situation where it moved from being better in all categories (except for productivity software availability) to where the same money would buy a PC which was faster, more capable graphically and sonically, and had a GUI (Windows 3.1) which while lacking the flexibility of AmigaOS got the job done for single-tasking - at a time when most people didn't really understand the advantages of multitasking.
Of course much of the reason *why* the Amiga fell behind is that they put stuffall money into R&D; the Amiga could only have remained a contender if it had *retained* its original edge, but for the first 5 years of its history about the only improvements were EHB mode on colour and expansion of chip RAM to 1MB...
“Although virtual environment toolkits are available, they usually only provide a subset of the tools needed to build complete virtual worlds,” he said.
Although my guess would be that price is more of a differentiating factor. Grad student time is cheap, commercial VR sims are not - and you don't get a publication credit for using a tool for the purpose for which it was written...
Did they find some people escaped faster by running while strafing?
ShadowProtect from StorageCraft http://www.storagecraft.com/ can snapshot your disk image every 15 minutes and you can roll back to any snapshot (mounting the backup as a drive letter or under an existing directory).
Very nice to use, although I've only used the server flavours.
Its main problem is that it always backs up the entirety of any disk, so if you have a lot of applications installed it can be fairly inefficient.
I don't work for StorageCraft or any of their resellers, have just used their product.
It's copyrighted. No licence = no right to use = pirated software.
There needs to be an EULA of *some* sort. It's just a pity that it's not more permissive. The only way around that is to make it Public Domain (i.e. uncopyrighted).
Even free / open source software has a licence. It's just that the GPL and other open licences allow you to do more with the software. The L in GPL stands for *Licence*. (Which makes it an EULA, as well as a licence agreement for non-end-users).
Trademarks can be withdrawn if they come into generic use (ergo you don't need to put a (TM) after asprin). I'd say cloud computing is already well past that stage. If Dell plan to preserve their trademark I wouldn't expect it to last past the first challenge.
The exception is if they're using it in a field where is *isn't* a generic term - eg. if they tied it to storage solutions.
I think the phrase we need is "locking the barn door after the horse has bolted."
The PS3 is made at a loss, supposedly; this is common in the industry - the console manufacturers make their profits initially by taking a cut on game sales. If you pay $100 for a game, the console manufacturer gets $10-20.
In the later lifetime of the console the hardware price has gone down and game volumes are higher, so that's when the real money is made.
Do you know that the main idea behind vaccination is to protect the population, so that there's no pool of people to *infect* those too young for vaccination? An immunisation rate above a certain level restricts the spread of a disease. In a population that is otherwise 100% vaccinated, you are probably better off *not* vaccinating your child. However if enough people do this the disease (in this case whooping cough) has the opportunity to spead and the number of children killed vastly exceeds the number affected by side effects from vaccination.
You may also be interested to know that rats != people. I can't speak for whether the antigen also induces fits in humans; personally I would guess not, in the quantities used in the vaccine. But enough of *anything* is a poison. Try drinking a hundred litres of water. Make sure to change your will so we know what happens.
Contariwise, there are very few substances that are poisonous in arbitrarily small quantities. Enough chlorine *will* kill you, and it's not very much, relatively speaking. But the fatal quantities are much higher than is used in drinking water.
Personally I'm perfectly happy with chlorinated, flourinated water.
"I use both sets for work (work in the aviation industry) and though I was tought in SI units I have a better understanding of what I am dealing with when I think in Imperial. Odd but it works for me..."
I was taught in metric and have a better understanding of units when the units are metric. Go figure.
I know how big a hectare is. It's the distance I had to run for a 100m sprint in school, squared. A meter is roughly hip-height, or the distance from my outstretched finger to the opposite side of my neck, or a longish stride. A Kilo is a weight heavy enough that I start to notice it - or about the weight of a litre of milk.
A 1m cube of water weighs a ton. A hundred litres of water weighs 100kg.
Zero degrees centrigrade is freezing. 100C is boiling. About 30C is moderately warm, 40C uncomfortably so.
I can convert between most of these units very easily. I am *so* glad I never had to deal with imperial units save at their most basic level - I know roughly what an inch is, what a foot is, what a yard is, but dealing with these for actual measurements and calculations is thankfully never necessary. You tell me a distance in square meters, I'll drop four zeroes and give you hectares in a fraction of a second. How many metres in 1.4 kilometres? 1400. How many feet in that many miles? Let me get out my calculator. Heck, how many feet in *one* mile? I usually have to look that one up.
You could argue that the actual base units chosen for metric might have been better chosen, but the convenience of calculating in metric makes up for any of the system's other sins. In any case, familiarity breeds ease of use.
""2.8bn million, and they're not happy". 'Bringing in' implies turnover, not profit. Big difference."
Yah, but 2.8Bn million = 2.8 quadrillion, where did the money GO? That's something like 100 times the gross *world* product. Maybe they sold a bunch of stock back to themselves a few thousand times?
In which case maybe rounding the cents in the VAT calculations is what killed them...
"Absolutely no prospect of seeing any textual information. You can just, possibly, get by with a PDA - but the fuss of scrolling side-to-side and up-and-down rapidly turns into a chore."
I'll tell you a secret. You don't HAVE to read ebooks or magazines in a fixed format such as PDF. Many formats lay out quite handily on a small screen, so you only need to scroll down (and rarely up) except for pictures - which are rare in things like novels. The number of words per line is close to what you find in the average newspaper.
My PDA is a cheap model, screen roughly 5cm x 5cm. I can read a screenful of text (around a hundred words) quite comfortably and page down, reading at a speed comparable to a paperback. Except the PDA fits over a dozen novels into an item smaller than my wallet.
It's unlikely that I'll ever buy something like the Eee PC, simply because there's no way it will fit comfortably in my pocket. Paperback size is just too big to carry around when you want to keep your hands free. It's the same core reason why the iPod was such a success: small enough to fit in your pocket, large enough to be useful.
> Remember Bill is primarily a lawyer, from legal stock, rather than a software engineer
Bill is (or at least was) a *programmer*, with little or no formal training in software engineering practices. The breed was very common at the time, and probably explains a lot of the bugginess in later projects. Many software engineers start as programmers (without a firm eye on the specification & design process) but most eventually learn better.
The fact that his father was a lawyer does not make Bill primarily a lawyer, although I'm sure it gave him some useful insights. My father was a truck driver, but that doesn't make me "primaily" a truck driver - I don't even have a licence. (Although I do have some idea of how tough life can be for truckie owner/drivers.)
Most professing Christians with whom I have discussed this in the past counted atheists as those who affirmatively state that there is no God (or deity of any sort). Agnosticism was regarded as the "I dunno" position.
Most people who regard themselves as atheists would put their position more as "In the absence of evidence to positively confirm the existence of a deity, I work on the assumption that no divinity exists." Agnosticism is less positive - "I dunno, and you dunno either."
If you are ever arguing with a theist on the existence of God, keep the distinction in mind. You may think (s)he's missing a brick or two because there's no evidence affirming their position. They think that *you* are missing a brick or two because they think there is a *lot* of evidence (most notably the Bible) and there's no evidence proving that they're wrong.
The Bible is taken (assumed) to be true because it *says* it is. "All scripture is inspired by God..." and if you can't trust the Bible in such things, who CAN you trust? The circular logic is missed by a lot of people.
Personally I gave up on the literal truth of the Bible about six pages into a book that professed to explain every single noted inconsistency, then used such a lot of sophistry and weasel-wording that I couldn't stand to side with the author.
If arguing this stuff with a theist, keep in mind that they may just be working on a different set of base assumptions. Automatically assuming that any theist is stupid is likely to be a mistake. There are a lot of stupid theists, but there are also a lot of stupid atheists - intelligence and atheism are correlated, but the causal relationship hasn't been demonstrated. You'll never convince anyone by making step one an assumption that your axioms are true and theirs are false.
I bought a laptop a few months ago. Dual core, Nvidia GPU, 2GB RAM, with Vista pre-installed.
I will say that after installing Vista SP1 it did *mostly* stop freezing up at random. I turned off Aero as while it's pretty I'd rather my system spent its time on what I want it to rather than on eye candy. The security "features" really do get in the way sometimes.
There's one program that requires Administrator privileges so I set it to have them. Every time I run it via its desktop shortcut Vista complains that the program needs Administrator access to run. Fortunately when I tell it to continue (by hitting "Cancel") it still works. Yah. Cancel to continue, OK to quit.Thanks Microsoft.
Then there's the Office 2007 preinstall, which as others have pointed out is a definite trap for the unwary.
Overall the performance is probably now on par with what my old P3 laptop (64MB RAM) was doing back in 2000.
So after several years we have an OS with the same performance, but only on vastly superior hardware. I do *not* want to buy new hardware every few years just to feed the Microsoft monopoly.
"...and can also open files created with Microsoft’s Office 2007 and Office 2008 for Mac OS X."
Apparently so. Although the degree to which the loaded documents resemble those from Office 2007 remains to be seen.
If you've looked at retail prices for MS Office lately you may get some idea of why people are using OpenOffice.The price of Office does not reflect the amount of work put into it - otherwise MS's Applications division would not be making 60% profits.
Penguins are native to Antarctica (and some other places in the southern hemisphere). The only ones living north of the equator are in zoos and the odd Linux enthusiast.
Odd being the word if they want to be called a penguin.
Those who believe that information wants to be free are invited to publish their credit card numbers. Don't forget the expiry date and CSV.
While I agree that current copyright laws are ridiculously out of proportion the verdict is in no way surprising. The judge's job is the enforce the law as it is, not the law as we would like it to be. Ragging on the judge for doing his job is a bit low.
The magnetic heads modify the magnetic patterns to within certain tolerances, but there will be traces of the old patterns left behind.
If you're just writing zeroes repeatedly, the pattern left on a "1" bit will be a bit stronger than that left on a "0" bit. There's also likely to be a bit of leakage around the edges due to imprecision in seeking the drive heads. The weakened pattern will likely be there even after multiple passes.
If you want to keep a drive in working order (but otherwise erased), you will want to write randomised data repeatedly over the entire drive, in such a fashion that the degree of "fading" will not be predictable.
So while writing zeroes is good enough for attempts to read data using the shipped drive electronics, it will not protect against a determined attacker with the right specialised tools.
(1) MS advertise Vista as having features X, Y and Z.
(2) You buy a new PC that's Vista Capable; it says so on the box.
(3) Vista finally comes out and you find that the version of Vista that can actually run on your PC supports feature Z but not X and Y.
Can't blame them for being ticked off personally.
Saying that a PC runs Vista fine if you bump up the RAM doesn't cut it. Any PC is capable of running pretty much anything if you upgrade some subset of RAM, CPU, motherboard, memory, PSU, hard drives, optical drive... but the PC you wind up with isn't the same PC with which you started.
At around the same time Jurassic Park was released partial remains of a dinosaur were found which were much bigger than previous specimens. It was dubbed the Utahraptor.
Obviously this couldn't have been used as a basis for the animals in the film but it was used as a partial justification afterwards as I recall. I think New Scientist had an article about it.
If you check the Wikipedia entry the Utahraptor is, if anything, bigger than the "Velociraptors" (sic) in Jurassic Park.
"...including the many layers of middle management and the extravagant contracts given to artists..."
Most artists get peanuts, basically. You need to be consistently in the top 40 to have a chance at any decent money.
This is because the payment to the artists usually has a boatload of expenses deducted from it. So a million dollar advance will have recording studio fees, touring expenses, and so on deducted. In the end the artists are lucky to break even while the distributor makes a mint.
Where it gets murky is that MySQL AB are not the only contributors of code to the MySQL database.
If every contributor of code was required to assign copyright to MySQL AB then that's not a problem. However I suspect that an many cases there was no assignment, and so strictly speaking they need to get permission from the patch authors to sell that code.
On another note, what Standish (and indeed most people who decry Open Source as being the death of the software industry) seem to forget is that for businesses software is a *cost*. As such any revenue lost by the software industry is an expense forgone by the businesses (or home users!) who would otherwise be subject to that cost.
As a result, use of O.S. software boosts overall productivity; the $6B of "lost revenues" is $6B of "lost expenses" for everyone else. The only people I can see unhappy about this are the software companies; Microsoft's margin on MS Office, for example, is ridiculously high (in excess of 70% before taxes).
Home users get the software for free, boosting effective real income (because they get a gain in utility with a very low opportunity cost.)
This won't be the end of the software industry as there are many niche products which don't suit an open source model. But it will get rid of the big drains where a lot of money is spent on products where the real cost of development is greatly exceeded by what is charged.
First, when a selection is made, print a receipt and show it to the voter. They then press another button to confirm or reject the printout. The receipt is then dropped in a bin for later reprocessing if needed.
Alternatively, have an "approve" button to show the vote and screenshot+print the vote screen when a vote is approved. Have the voting electronics made by a separate company to the snapshot software electronics, if possible.
Perhaps the lesson we should be taking from this is that third parties have less interest in the security of the OS than the OS vendors.
The fault was in Macromedia Flash. You know, Macromedia, who dominate the copy protection market. The ones who sell Dreamweaver, which is cused for coding a lot of the web scripts running on the 'Net.
I'm left wondering if there's a way I can pwn a system by subverting the Macrovision copy protection checks.
There are good and rational reasons for *not* pointing the A record for the base domain at the company's web site. The main one is that a domain hosts many services, and the web site doesn't really have any better claim than any other service. The Internet hosts many different services, of which HTTP is only one.
In fact given the default logic (and importance) of mail delivery the email servers arguably have first dibs on the A record. However, given that many web browsers will try a leading www if the base domain fails to resolve, simply omitting the A record is logical.
If you don't type the www then yes, you are just being lazy.
It's a very common form of laziness so from a marketing point of view pointing the A record at the web site makes a certain amount of sense. Making allowance for somebody else's laziness doesn't make it any less a matter of laziness however.
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Re: "even if "six-tenths of a kilometre" still has a ring of old school about it."
The amazing thing is that you can, if needed, still describe a third of a metre as a third of a metre.
Or you can give it as a decimal, then convert to metres / kilometres / centimetres / millimetres / ... by shifting the decimal point around.
By the way, for those in yankeeland fishing for a short way to say "kilometre", everybody I know measures both distance and speed in "kay" (so 60k can be 60km or 60kph, depending on context) and weight in "kilos" or "grams".
8 classics, not the BEST 8 classics
The author makes no claim that these are the 8 best 8 bit games, just that they're all classic 8 bit games - which is true.
Personally I would add:
- Lode Runner
- Sentinel
- Stunt Car Racer
- Project: Space Station
- Impossible Mission
iPod/iPhone as eReader
I don't have an iPhone but I have an iPod which has basically the same form factor. It fits around 150 words on a screen of text and is readable indoors or out. Battery life is somewhat lacking but portable chargers are not hard to find. Only real problem is display of pictures, but I mostly read novels anyway.
Key think is that it fits in my breast pocket and is light enough that I really don't notice that it's there. (Also plays games, movies and music if I don't feel like reading.)
Over the years I've worked my way through several Palm PDAs and a couple of generations of iPods reading books. If you find it hard to read text on such devices , the lack is not in the device.
Baen books has a very large collection of DRM-free ebooks purchasable at quite decent prices on their web site.
People still use IE?
I've been using Firefox on Win7x64 without any problems with the CBA.
As excuses go, IE not working with the CBA isn't much of one. This isn't 2000 when the choices were IE or a broken release of Netscape.
The corpse count over the last year or so has been getting a bit silly. It is funny in a way, but the IT angle seems to be getting increasingly ignored.
Why is the BOFH busy killing off the committee when he could be looking for a way to eliminate the cloud proposal in a clever, IT related fashion?
Why isn't he installing a hidden agent on all the test group's PCs to slow them down or grab random pieces of child porn? Why isn't he finding a way into the cloud backend to mysteriously modify the files created? Why didn't he hack the company proxy to redirect references to the cloud to a private store somewhere else? Or have the testers' PCs mysteriously leak key files to each other?
Aside from which defenestration seems altogether too unreliable a method of eliminating one person. People DO survive falling out of windows.
Commonalities
What do Atilla the Hun, Alexander the Great, and Oscar the Ground have in common?
THE SAME MIDDLE NAME.
Clearly there is a pattern here. All three are known for acts of senseless violence. Ban the definite article!
If we banned anything that ever made people feel somewhat more violent we'd quickly run out of things to do. For a start, people who run around banning things that make people violent, probably make people feel violent...
Violence
I generally avoid first person shooters. Killing virtual people with a gory virtual sword or burning them to death with virtually painful magic fire is much more appealing.
Or I suppose I could go out and hurt real people, but that would be silly.
Salt
> turning people into pillars of salt (which isn't polite).
...Oops. My bad.
PSP a failure?
Discounting the PSP Go (about which the less said the better) the PSP was only a failure when compared with the DS, having managed about a third of the sales of the DS, and just slightly less than the XBox 360, which is generally regarded as a successful platform. Over 50 million PSPs were sold (as of mid 2009).
The PSP's main direct competition will be the 3DS, which has had a rocky start due to a few factors: poor battery life, a poor launch lineup, and not being rated for children under seven or so due to the 3D effect.
I've more or less given up on playing games of any depth on the iPod Touch. This is because, firstly, a dollar a game will not fund games of the level we expect in the "home" platforms; and secondly, touch controls lack flexibility and have lousy feedback. I do NOT want to have to repeatedly check the position of my thumbs to figure out which direction I'm going.
Basically I agree that the market for devices such as the PSP Vita and the 3DS is not the same as for smartphone gaming (although there is a large overlap). There are quite a few people around who will buy a dedicated mobile gaming device. The only question at this point is whether there are enough such people to fund the platform, and development of games for the platform, in the long term. That remains to be seen.
Time Travel is nothing special
I'm travelling in time at the moment - forward at roughly one second per second.
Rotating Cylinders and the possibility of Global Causality Violation
There are a number of perfectly serviceable time machine designs that do not involve a photon exceeding a velocity of c. Larry Niven wrote a story based on an actual scientific paper awesomely titled "Rotating cylinders and the possibility of global causality violation" about one such design. The late Robert Forward also wrote about a few designs. However most such require certain types of exotic matter - either negative matter. or large quantities of neutronium or similar.
Sign & ignore
A friend had his 40th birthday not long ago and all the invites & details were coordinated via Facebook.
Eventually I set up a FB account, but I ignore it as much as possible. I think I have exactly one picture posted.
If anything interesting happens, they send me an email.
There's about a half-dozen "Friend" invites from people whose names I don't recognise, that I'm ignoring at the moment. Probably one or two of them are from people that I actually know.
Being an antisocial bastard I can live with that.
$180/month is for a TERABYTE of data
The $180/month plan includes a terybyte of data transfer and is at the maximum available transfer speed. The pricing as quoted is pretty similar to the current pricing plans of the "premium" ADSL providers. The way some treat it, you would thing everybody with a $50/month plan will have their price quadrupled. Not so.
Currently the company I work for has two plans with Internode, for 5GB and 20GB (they're backup links). We are billed $49.95 and $59.95 for these, in addition to the phone line (which is about $30/month). The NBN pricing is uniformly better - $59.95/month for a 30GB commercial service. (Internode now have commercial prixing up on their web site; it's about $10/month over the noncommercial rates.
(Maybe they're ripping us off in comparison to current pricing, in which case it can't hurt to know that Internode are not against ripping their customers off.)
Soap
Guy next to me mentioned that the side of his head felt warm after he had been using his mobile for a while, and he seemed to find this ominous.
I pointed out to him that this would likely also be true if you held a bar of soap to the side of your head.
I think we're all preaching to the converted here; I have noticed a singular lack of an explosion in brain cancer cases in the last twenty years.
Orion...
I persist in thinking of the Orion spacecraft as the concept design driven by nukes and a BIG pusher-plate. It appeared, amongst other places, in the Niven/Pournell SF collaboration "Footfall".
I only know of one instance in fiction where an Orion design spacecraft takes off from Earth (that being Footfall, again) for fairly obvious reasons. Apparently it was a serious proposal in the late 50s however.
SOE hack
I had an account with SOE 4 years ago and while my card had expired in that interval, it had been reissued with a new expiry date. That card was probably one of the 12,700 cards they had listed as not being of interest because they were no longer "active".
I did receive a personal notification concerning the SOE hack, although it didn't say my card WAS compromised, just that it MAY have been.
The PSN hack didn't worry me much because the numbers were allegedly hashed, but I have found no mention anywhere that the SOE card numbers were hashed.
I've cancelled my old card and gotten a new one, as the bank in question was setting card expiries on an anniversary basis (i.e. they would always expire in April, every 3 years or so) - a stupid tactic that they have thankfully now forgone.
I read somewhere that PSN was hacked through a buggy old Apache release.
C&C is real!!
I'm expecting GDI and the Brotherhood of NOD to start duking it out ANY MINUTE NOW.
Piracy is not theft, but it IS unjust enrichment
Piracy-as-theft is very, very rare - it means you don't have your copyrights any more. That's not to say that piracy is right, it's just not theft. The analogy I usually use is a bus or train fare - you are consuming a service (use of the train / software) without paying for it. When you buy software you are *not* buying a good, you are buying a *service*. "Intellectual property" is the right to be paid for services rendered.
IP generally can't be "stolen" as the original owner does not lose anything except the possible revenue stream from the IP. (To "steal" is to "take... property wrongfully" according to Mirriam-Webster; if the original still exists it has not been taken, just copied.)
"Possible" is a key word here however - anybody who thinks every pirated item is a lost sale needs a serious reality check.
Protection from piracy is really only practical at a limited level - you can stop Bob from giving Anne a copy of your software by copying the CD, but you can't stop the professional pirates who reverse-engineer your code and remove the copy protection code. The only practical way around this is to have your program require - not just for the copy protection check but actually REQUIRE - an online connection to a server thant can check the legitimacy of your software.
This model works for network-based applications (and games) but not for a lot of other software, although software can be written to run an initial check when it starts up. Many games use this model.
The flipside to this is that if your software will only work when it can connect to a particular server, and you then turn off that server, you are depriving the purchaser of a service that they have paid for, and YOU are the one who is "stealing". You can supply a patch to "fix" this when you are turning your servers off, and I know of at least one company that actually went ahead and did so.
The thing about copy protection is, you have three categories of people using your software. There are the professional pirates, whi will remove the copy protection. There are the people who would pirate your software if they had the technical nous, but buying it is cheaper than the associated hassle. And there are the people who are willing and able to pay you, and don't want to pirate your software. This third category is your core customer base, the people who actually pay your bills, and your copy protection is punishing those customers (as well as the category two people who don't want to pay you).
Suffice to say that there are bastards on both sides of this particular divide.
Catholic dilithium monopoly
Clearly if they want to contain additional antimatter they will need access to dilithium crystals.
For obvious reasons it's clear the Vatican is holding their dilithium monopoly very closely indeed.
Other things to talk about
There may (Apple is good) be other things (Steve Jobs is God) to talk about (Buy an iPhone). But noe of them (you need an iPad) are nearly as (... and a Mac) interesting or useful (Apple Apple Apple Apple...).
Anyway, these days (Apple makes the best hardware) Apple is the flavour (Apple makes the best operating system) of the month. (Steve Wozniak is the Betrayer.) There's even a fruit named after them! (Apple Apple Apple Apple...)
Doomed black holes
A supermassive black hole will eventually lose all its mass due to Hawking radiation. However "eventually" is a very, VERY long time. The black hole will not shrink until losses from Hawking radiation exceed gains from miscellaneous matter (interstellar dust , cosmic rays etc) and incoming energy (light from other galaxies and assorted stars, the cosmic microwave background radiation). Even with no incoming energy and matter, evaporation would take so long that the numbers would be meaningless to us. We're talking at least high double digits of powers of ten - I don't have the math to figure it out.
As long as the universe is expanding and the mass per cubic meter is failling we'll hit that point eventually. Don't let it worry your grandchildren though.
Conroy MUST be a plant by the Libs...
There's no other explanation for the consistency with which he seems determined to oppose the wishes of the Australian public.
Surveys consistently show that most Australians do not want the firewall. Sadly it seems Conroy is immune to such niceties. Perhaps he's one of those pollies who thinks that the public should shut up between elections.
@Kanhef Re: Abuse of charts
Hear hear! Truncation of graphs is a statistical evil we can live without.
There's the FPS graph, where a 2% difference winds up looking like a 50% difference, and the registry size, where 150 bytes out of 49000 or so (0.3% change!) *also* looks like a 50% difference. A 2% change in framerate is statistically significant, but I challenge anyone to notice it by eye. The changes are displayed entirely disproportionately.
@AC 12:18 GMT: Some of us deal with systems used by people who, y'know, actually WORK for a living, and pay our princely salaries in part to keep them working efficiently. Some of those people are stunningly ignorant outside of their areas of expertise and can be relied upon to open every piece of junk that hits their mailbox.
As such, antivirus and other protection measures have their place, and system cleanup is an ocasional necessity, although we find the best way to do this is to keep work files on a network drive and reimage each PC from a fresh image when it gets screwed up.
I was interested to see that the system tuners pretty much matched my expectations, i.e. they were all fundamentally useless. Defrag regularly and keep your startup clean (HijackThis! does a decent job and is free, but requires a clue to use) and you'll do as well as most of the packages reviewed here.
Odd that nobody else has mentioned browser objects here, which HijackThis! can also clean up.
I have heard that as AV scanners go NOD32 is superior; effective with a small CPU & memory footprint. Not having used it myself, this is merely rumour to me at this time. I can state that the system overheads from Mcafee are ridiculous - resident memory usage frequently exceeds 150MB even when idle and CPU exceed 50% when actively scanning.
ESATA?
70MB/sec isn't bad over gigabit ethernet, although isn't all that great compared to theoretical max. The benchmarks say that the equivalent products are slower, though, which probably explains the reviewer's enthusiasm.
I'd be more interested in seeing the ESATA performance, personally.
Pack this thing with 4 x SSDs and you have a very nice external disk array for a box limited by internal space. But very pricey if all you want is an external drive array - you would probably be better off using a 3.5" array with brackets to mount 2.5" disks if all you wanted was a 2.5" array.
WTB a dumb 2.5" external drive enclosure...
Given pricing is incorrect...
The pricing quoted as being in Euros is actually in dollars (presumably US dollars), at least if the Amiga Forever web page is to be believed.
So the cheap option is $9.95, not 9.95 euros. Given current exchange rates, the difference matters...
The Amiga failed because the PC hardware overtook it technologically - the gap between the original Amiga and a 1994 Amiga is much smaller than the gap between the 1985 PC and a 1994 PC. HAM in all its incarnations was a nightmare to render dynamically; at the time of the AGA amigas 24-bit colour was becoming common on PCs. In the same time CPUs moved from the 80186 to the early Pentiums, with on-chip FPU becoming standard. The Motorola CPUs did not improve at the pace of the Intel chips.
Allegedly a new chipset was designed after the OCS which was considerably better, but the blueprints were lost and put the Amiga back a couple of years.
Anyway, all this resulted in a situation where it moved from being better in all categories (except for productivity software availability) to where the same money would buy a PC which was faster, more capable graphically and sonically, and had a GUI (Windows 3.1) which while lacking the flexibility of AmigaOS got the job done for single-tasking - at a time when most people didn't really understand the advantages of multitasking.
Of course much of the reason *why* the Amiga fell behind is that they put stuffall money into R&D; the Amiga could only have remained a contender if it had *retained* its original edge, but for the first 5 years of its history about the only improvements were EHB mode on colour and expansion of chip RAM to 1MB...
...Ronny
firefightfire drillRe:VectorCommand
“Although virtual environment toolkits are available, they usually only provide a subset of the tools needed to build complete virtual worlds,” he said.
Although my guess would be that price is more of a differentiating factor. Grad student time is cheap, commercial VR sims are not - and you don't get a publication credit for using a tool for the purpose for which it was written...
Did they find some people escaped faster by running while strafing?
ShadowProtect
ShadowProtect from StorageCraft http://www.storagecraft.com/ can snapshot your disk image every 15 minutes and you can roll back to any snapshot (mounting the backup as a drive letter or under an existing directory).
Very nice to use, although I've only used the server flavours.
Its main problem is that it always backs up the entirety of any disk, so if you have a lot of applications installed it can be fairly inefficient.
I don't work for StorageCraft or any of their resellers, have just used their product.
...Ronny
Stopping immigrants...
They need a moat filled with sharks with frickin' laser beams on their heads.
You could probably build it for one MILLION dollars...
...Ronny
@Paul
"It still sucks that it has a EULA of any sort".
It's copyrighted. No licence = no right to use = pirated software.
There needs to be an EULA of *some* sort. It's just a pity that it's not more permissive. The only way around that is to make it Public Domain (i.e. uncopyrighted).
Even free / open source software has a licence. It's just that the GPL and other open licences allow you to do more with the software. The L in GPL stands for *Licence*. (Which makes it an EULA, as well as a licence agreement for non-end-users).
...Ronny
@wayne tavitt
Trained black ops attack squirrels on jihad!!!
We'll be seeing squirrels held for questioning at customs any day now. They're obvious candidates for the Taliban, given their prediliction for nuts.
Mine's the one lined with squirrel fur.
...Ronny
Generic trademarks...
Trademarks can be withdrawn if they come into generic use (ergo you don't need to put a (TM) after asprin). I'd say cloud computing is already well past that stage. If Dell plan to preserve their trademark I wouldn't expect it to last past the first challenge.
The exception is if they're using it in a field where is *isn't* a generic term - eg. if they tied it to storage solutions.
I think the phrase we need is "locking the barn door after the horse has bolted."
Loss on consoles
Allegedly the Wii is made at a profit.
The PS3 is made at a loss, supposedly; this is common in the industry - the console manufacturers make their profits initially by taking a cut on game sales. If you pay $100 for a game, the console manufacturer gets $10-20.
In the later lifetime of the console the hardware price has gone down and game volumes are higher, so that's when the real money is made.
...Ronny
@James Pickett
Do you know that the main idea behind vaccination is to protect the population, so that there's no pool of people to *infect* those too young for vaccination? An immunisation rate above a certain level restricts the spread of a disease. In a population that is otherwise 100% vaccinated, you are probably better off *not* vaccinating your child. However if enough people do this the disease (in this case whooping cough) has the opportunity to spead and the number of children killed vastly exceeds the number affected by side effects from vaccination.
You may also be interested to know that rats != people. I can't speak for whether the antigen also induces fits in humans; personally I would guess not, in the quantities used in the vaccine. But enough of *anything* is a poison. Try drinking a hundred litres of water. Make sure to change your will so we know what happens.
Contariwise, there are very few substances that are poisonous in arbitrarily small quantities. Enough chlorine *will* kill you, and it's not very much, relatively speaking. But the fatal quantities are much higher than is used in drinking water.
Personally I'm perfectly happy with chlorinated, flourinated water.
...Ronny
@donc
"I use both sets for work (work in the aviation industry) and though I was tought in SI units I have a better understanding of what I am dealing with when I think in Imperial. Odd but it works for me..."
I was taught in metric and have a better understanding of units when the units are metric. Go figure.
I know how big a hectare is. It's the distance I had to run for a 100m sprint in school, squared. A meter is roughly hip-height, or the distance from my outstretched finger to the opposite side of my neck, or a longish stride. A Kilo is a weight heavy enough that I start to notice it - or about the weight of a litre of milk.
A 1m cube of water weighs a ton. A hundred litres of water weighs 100kg.
Zero degrees centrigrade is freezing. 100C is boiling. About 30C is moderately warm, 40C uncomfortably so.
I can convert between most of these units very easily. I am *so* glad I never had to deal with imperial units save at their most basic level - I know roughly what an inch is, what a foot is, what a yard is, but dealing with these for actual measurements and calculations is thankfully never necessary. You tell me a distance in square meters, I'll drop four zeroes and give you hectares in a fraction of a second. How many metres in 1.4 kilometres? 1400. How many feet in that many miles? Let me get out my calculator. Heck, how many feet in *one* mile? I usually have to look that one up.
You could argue that the actual base units chosen for metric might have been better chosen, but the convenience of calculating in metric makes up for any of the system's other sins. In any case, familiarity breeds ease of use.
...Ronny
@AC @Kazr
""2.8bn million, and they're not happy". 'Bringing in' implies turnover, not profit. Big difference."
Yah, but 2.8Bn million = 2.8 quadrillion, where did the money GO? That's something like 100 times the gross *world* product. Maybe they sold a bunch of stock back to themselves a few thousand times?
In which case maybe rounding the cents in the VAT calculations is what killed them...
...Ronny
@Pete
"Absolutely no prospect of seeing any textual information. You can just, possibly, get by with a PDA - but the fuss of scrolling side-to-side and up-and-down rapidly turns into a chore."
I'll tell you a secret. You don't HAVE to read ebooks or magazines in a fixed format such as PDF. Many formats lay out quite handily on a small screen, so you only need to scroll down (and rarely up) except for pictures - which are rare in things like novels. The number of words per line is close to what you find in the average newspaper.
My PDA is a cheap model, screen roughly 5cm x 5cm. I can read a screenful of text (around a hundred words) quite comfortably and page down, reading at a speed comparable to a paperback. Except the PDA fits over a dozen novels into an item smaller than my wallet.
It's unlikely that I'll ever buy something like the Eee PC, simply because there's no way it will fit comfortably in my pocket. Paperback size is just too big to carry around when you want to keep your hands free. It's the same core reason why the iPod was such a success: small enough to fit in your pocket, large enough to be useful.
...Ronny
@RIP
> Remember Bill is primarily a lawyer, from legal stock, rather than a software engineer
Bill is (or at least was) a *programmer*, with little or no formal training in software engineering practices. The breed was very common at the time, and probably explains a lot of the bugginess in later projects. Many software engineers start as programmers (without a firm eye on the specification & design process) but most eventually learn better.
The fact that his father was a lawyer does not make Bill primarily a lawyer, although I'm sure it gave him some useful insights. My father was a truck driver, but that doesn't make me "primaily" a truck driver - I don't even have a licence. (Although I do have some idea of how tough life can be for truckie owner/drivers.)
...Ronny
Definition of atheism...
Most professing Christians with whom I have discussed this in the past counted atheists as those who affirmatively state that there is no God (or deity of any sort). Agnosticism was regarded as the "I dunno" position.
Most people who regard themselves as atheists would put their position more as "In the absence of evidence to positively confirm the existence of a deity, I work on the assumption that no divinity exists." Agnosticism is less positive - "I dunno, and you dunno either."
If you are ever arguing with a theist on the existence of God, keep the distinction in mind. You may think (s)he's missing a brick or two because there's no evidence affirming their position. They think that *you* are missing a brick or two because they think there is a *lot* of evidence (most notably the Bible) and there's no evidence proving that they're wrong.
The Bible is taken (assumed) to be true because it *says* it is. "All scripture is inspired by God..." and if you can't trust the Bible in such things, who CAN you trust? The circular logic is missed by a lot of people.
Personally I gave up on the literal truth of the Bible about six pages into a book that professed to explain every single noted inconsistency, then used such a lot of sophistry and weasel-wording that I couldn't stand to side with the author.
If arguing this stuff with a theist, keep in mind that they may just be working on a different set of base assumptions. Automatically assuming that any theist is stupid is likely to be a mistake. There are a lot of stupid theists, but there are also a lot of stupid atheists - intelligence and atheism are correlated, but the causal relationship hasn't been demonstrated. You'll never convince anyone by making step one an assumption that your axioms are true and theirs are false.
...Ronny
@FUD
I bought a laptop a few months ago. Dual core, Nvidia GPU, 2GB RAM, with Vista pre-installed.
I will say that after installing Vista SP1 it did *mostly* stop freezing up at random. I turned off Aero as while it's pretty I'd rather my system spent its time on what I want it to rather than on eye candy. The security "features" really do get in the way sometimes.
There's one program that requires Administrator privileges so I set it to have them. Every time I run it via its desktop shortcut Vista complains that the program needs Administrator access to run. Fortunately when I tell it to continue (by hitting "Cancel") it still works. Yah. Cancel to continue, OK to quit.Thanks Microsoft.
Then there's the Office 2007 preinstall, which as others have pointed out is a definite trap for the unwary.
Overall the performance is probably now on par with what my old P3 laptop (64MB RAM) was doing back in 2000.
So after several years we have an OS with the same performance, but only on vastly superior hardware. I do *not* want to buy new hardware every few years just to feed the Microsoft monopoly.
(O)OXML support
Will it support [O]OXML?
"...and can also open files created with Microsoft’s Office 2007 and Office 2008 for Mac OS X."
Apparently so. Although the degree to which the loaded documents resemble those from Office 2007 remains to be seen.
If you've looked at retail prices for MS Office lately you may get some idea of why people are using OpenOffice.The price of Office does not reflect the amount of work put into it - otherwise MS's Applications division would not be making 60% profits.
...Ronny
Penguins & judges
Penguins are native to Antarctica (and some other places in the southern hemisphere). The only ones living north of the equator are in zoos and the odd Linux enthusiast.
Odd being the word if they want to be called a penguin.
Those who believe that information wants to be free are invited to publish their credit card numbers. Don't forget the expiry date and CSV.
While I agree that current copyright laws are ridiculously out of proportion the verdict is in no way surprising. The judge's job is the enforce the law as it is, not the law as we would like it to be. Ragging on the judge for doing his job is a bit low.
...Ronny
@Robert - zeroes
The magnetic heads modify the magnetic patterns to within certain tolerances, but there will be traces of the old patterns left behind.
If you're just writing zeroes repeatedly, the pattern left on a "1" bit will be a bit stronger than that left on a "0" bit. There's also likely to be a bit of leakage around the edges due to imprecision in seeking the drive heads. The weakened pattern will likely be there even after multiple passes.
If you want to keep a drive in working order (but otherwise erased), you will want to write randomised data repeatedly over the entire drive, in such a fashion that the degree of "fading" will not be predictable.
So while writing zeroes is good enough for attempts to read data using the shipped drive electronics, it will not protect against a determined attacker with the right specialised tools.
...Ronny
Vista capabilities and Vista Basic.
So here's what happens.
(1) MS advertise Vista as having features X, Y and Z.
(2) You buy a new PC that's Vista Capable; it says so on the box.
(3) Vista finally comes out and you find that the version of Vista that can actually run on your PC supports feature Z but not X and Y.
Can't blame them for being ticked off personally.
Saying that a PC runs Vista fine if you bump up the RAM doesn't cut it. Any PC is capable of running pretty much anything if you upgrade some subset of RAM, CPU, motherboard, memory, PSU, hard drives, optical drive... but the PC you wind up with isn't the same PC with which you started.
...Ronny
Velociraptor/Utahraptor
At around the same time Jurassic Park was released partial remains of a dinosaur were found which were much bigger than previous specimens. It was dubbed the Utahraptor.
Obviously this couldn't have been used as a basis for the animals in the film but it was used as a partial justification afterwards as I recall. I think New Scientist had an article about it.
If you check the Wikipedia entry the Utahraptor is, if anything, bigger than the "Velociraptors" (sic) in Jurassic Park.
...Ronny
@Too Slow
"...including the many layers of middle management and the extravagant contracts given to artists..."
Most artists get peanuts, basically. You need to be consistently in the top 40 to have a chance at any decent money.
This is because the payment to the artists usually has a boatload of expenses deducted from it. So a million dollar advance will have recording studio fees, touring expenses, and so on deducted. In the end the artists are lucky to break even while the distributor makes a mint.
...Ronny
Re: C'est la vie
Where it gets murky is that MySQL AB are not the only contributors of code to the MySQL database.
If every contributor of code was required to assign copyright to MySQL AB then that's not a problem. However I suspect that an many cases there was no assignment, and so strictly speaking they need to get permission from the patch authors to sell that code.
On another note, what Standish (and indeed most people who decry Open Source as being the death of the software industry) seem to forget is that for businesses software is a *cost*. As such any revenue lost by the software industry is an expense forgone by the businesses (or home users!) who would otherwise be subject to that cost.
As a result, use of O.S. software boosts overall productivity; the $6B of "lost revenues" is $6B of "lost expenses" for everyone else. The only people I can see unhappy about this are the software companies; Microsoft's margin on MS Office, for example, is ridiculously high (in excess of 70% before taxes).
Home users get the software for free, boosting effective real income (because they get a gain in utility with a very low opportunity cost.)
This won't be the end of the software industry as there are many niche products which don't suit an open source model. But it will get rid of the big drains where a lot of money is spent on products where the real cost of development is greatly exceeded by what is charged.
...Ronny
Reliable receipts...
I can see two ways of doing this.
First, when a selection is made, print a receipt and show it to the voter. They then press another button to confirm or reject the printout. The receipt is then dropped in a bin for later reprocessing if needed.
Alternatively, have an "approve" button to show the vote and screenshot+print the vote screen when a vote is approved. Have the voting electronics made by a separate company to the snapshot software electronics, if possible.
...Ronny
Macromedia
Perhaps the lesson we should be taking from this is that third parties have less interest in the security of the OS than the OS vendors.
The fault was in Macromedia Flash. You know, Macromedia, who dominate the copy protection market. The ones who sell Dreamweaver, which is cused for coding a lot of the web scripts running on the 'Net.
I'm left wondering if there's a way I can pwn a system by subverting the Macrovision copy protection checks.
Leading www...
There are good and rational reasons for *not* pointing the A record for the base domain at the company's web site. The main one is that a domain hosts many services, and the web site doesn't really have any better claim than any other service. The Internet hosts many different services, of which HTTP is only one.
In fact given the default logic (and importance) of mail delivery the email servers arguably have first dibs on the A record. However, given that many web browsers will try a leading www if the base domain fails to resolve, simply omitting the A record is logical.
If you don't type the www then yes, you are just being lazy.
It's a very common form of laziness so from a marketing point of view pointing the A record at the web site makes a certain amount of sense. Making allowance for somebody else's laziness doesn't make it any less a matter of laziness however.
...Ronny
Computer Science
If you think there is no science in Computer Science you've never tutored first year CS.
Hypothesis: This code will fulfil this objective.
Experiment: Run the code. Try various inputs, see if they work.
Conclusion: This code does not work. Let's try a new hypothesis with version 2.0!!
Computer Science is only not science in the hands of those who actually *treat* it as mathematics.
Actually, given the existence of compiler bugs, sometimes even the mathematicians are reduced to this sort of methodology...
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