Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Diebold, Peroxide, Comdex
Diebold Election Systems Round 2 in MD zznate writes "Looks like Diebold is not going to get off the hook so easily in Maryland after all. For anyone local, feel free to contact delegates Hixson or Hollinger to express your support. Perhaps they could even receive a copy or two (or fifty ;-) of the documents listed here."
Diebold is having an easier time at Swarthmore. yoshi_mon writes "Previously reported on /. was the Swarthmore Students Effort to keep the Diebold leaked memo's online. However that effort has been quashed by one Dean Bob Gross. To quote the dean, "We can?t get out in front in this fight against Diebold." BlackBoxVoting.com reports that '[Swarthmore College] is not willing to take a strong stand against Diebold, and is systematically disabling the network access of any student who hosts the files.'"
AT&T says Ha, just kidding! An anonymous reader writes "In an update to an earlier Slashdot article, Telco giant AT&T rushed to withdraw two notices sent to business partners and customers asking for the IP addresses of all outbound SMTP servers because of a 'human error' gaffe."
All this and cheap shrimp cocktail. blackbearnh writes "While the topic has been raised, I thought I'd mention a few other things going on at COMDEX Open-Source wise.
First off, the Open Source and Linux track has been expanded from a half-dozen sessions last year to nearly twenty this year. These will cover everything from the basics of Open Source (taught by folks like Ken Coar of Apache) to an intro to PHP led by Rasmus Lerdorf.
On the show floor, a massive 2500 sq foot Open Source Innovation Center will serve as the site for hourly talks by Open Source evangelists on business-related topics such as case studios proving the benefits of Open Source. There will also be a staffed "clinic" area where attendees can get advice on what Open Source technologies would work well in their business. There will also be install parties held at noon each day, where attendees can bring their laptops to get help installing MySQL or Debian. And lastly, a .ORG village inside the center will host representitives from more than a dozen prominent Open Source organizations, including OpenOffice and Mozilla.
Also, the COMDEX/ApacheCon exchange program continues this year. COMDEX members can get access to the ApacheCon expo floor and BOF sessions, while ApacheCon member can visit the COMDEX show floor and the Open Source keynotes. Shuttle service will link the two conventions.
James Turner
Co-Chair, Open Source, Fall 2003 COMDEX"
It's a crapshoot, eh. Dick Faze writes " Royal Bank of Canada is part of a $50 Million investment in SCO: Has our communist neighbor to the north finally flipped completely?" (We know Mr. Faze is being facetious, here ... don't we?) This is the same $50,000,000 investment deal in which some people suspected Microsoft's involvment.
Patent Office Cancels Swing Patent An anonymous reader writes "Remember the swing patent issued last year covering the method of swinging a swing? Well, the Patent Office must've taken offense at the amount of criticism it received over this patent. It initiated a reexam proceeding and after a year's worth of reexamination, they cancelled the patent on July 1, 2003."
But all the other patents are up to snuff, don't worry.
Carmack's Peroxide Troubles Over? Rob Jellinghaus writes "John Carmack's aerospace company has had problems getting enough concentrated 90% peroxide for their engines. So they have been working on mixed monoprop engines that would need only 50% peroxide, which would pretty much end their fuel troubles for good. They have had many failures, but they may have just succeeded. In his words: 'This is Very Good.'"
Remember, most of the world is still dial-up, at best. Anothermouse Cowered writes "It's a router, it's a firewall, it's a home gateway it's a... In another giant leap for the Open Source community, you can now hack on your own embedded Linux system for under $70. The source code for the ActionTEC Dual modem previously mentioned on Slashdot ('Hacking the Actiontec 56k Modem/Gateway') in September has now been released under the GPL. Downloads available here."
It's good that they have a supplier now, but wouldn't that mean that the other 50% is dead weight in water?
Are there any motives that I'm missing, other than the fact that they are trying to capitalize on SCO's FUD?
Maybe they have money invested in Micro$oft?
Or they have something to lose from SCO (or M$ for that matter) going under?
Anyone?
I think it's only you. I see it more of re-affirming the allegations of corruption and bias that this company has.
In fact, I'd say that I would support downloading and mirroing these files even more strongly than what we did for DeCSS... the truth needs to be told if our democracy is under seige from moneyed interests.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Everyone bemoans bad patents and the effect they can have on Open Source, but is there an effort to actually *do* anything about it?
One of the most obvious issues with software patents is cross-licensing. If IBM infringes on Intel's patents, Intel sues. IBM does a search, and counter-sues because Intel is infringing on umpteen IBM patents. Voila, a cross-licensing agreement is signed, no one gets sued, everyone's happy.
Needless to say, if an open source application unwittingly infringes on a patent (which is more likely over time), there is little recourse.
Shouldn't the EFF or the FSF be encouraging coders (particularly those doing cutting edge work) to submit "patentable" code much like they recommend assigning copyrights to them?
They should offer to do the patent search and submission in return for all licensing rights. This would give a central (hopefully benevolent) organization a "war chest" of patents for future lawsuit avoidance and cross-licensing.
Is this already being done?
With the amount of work going into Open Source, there must be tons of patentable code out there. Even if it's not patentable, it apparently doesn't really matter.
i saw rasmus lerdorf's intro to php at the mysql conference... he takes a whole different view to web development that makes java's claims of speed, stability, scalability ect almost moot.
java will say, php is bad because it can't do x as good as we can, and he will summarily explain why you would never want to do x and how php can solve whatever x's method was trying to solve just as fast.
very good speech.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
It isn't so certain. The open source/closed source philosphy oddly enough often swings with the economy. The classic example of this is the homebrew computer club. When the industry fell into a recession, this club was all about open source - how did you do that? Look waht I did? and so on. Then as the market began to improve and the members started realizing there ideas were profitable they began to move towards the closed source - I can't tell you that. etc. The industry goes down in flames and people sit together and start sharing but when the market turns back (partly cause these open source projects start looking like they can develope into money makers) they go closed source again. As such it is not suprising that the industry has returned to open source in a big way in the last five years. It is out of these projects, alliances, etc that the industry will return to its former glory. Whether open source is here to stay is a question you shouldn't really ask in a recession, its one you should ask in a boom. Personally, I don't think it is ever going to outpace closed source. The simple reason for this is it is money made from open source collaborators and projects that went closed that brought the industry out of the last recession. There is simply more money to be had in closed than open and since we live in a capitalist environment the more money something makes the more sucessful it will always be. Now, the governments patents and overly expensive licenses may prove me wrong but most of boom builders don't come out of big corporations and usually don't come under the stuff of patents. The industry giants miss the new waves and the little fish always get by - not even SCO thinks going after the little guy is worth it. You may be working on some app with a buddy in open source right now but in a few years time when you see the money being put on the table again (as opposed to the ramen noodle soup), chances are your collaboration will go closed. Everyone loves to share when there just toys but when they becoem products and you need the money its a different story. In ten years time, when todays open source calloborators take their ideas to the closed source model while the industry recovers, the open ource people will again be sidelined. But then of course, the market always overcompensates, goes too closed source, the big guys blow it, and the market fall again. Simply put, open source is a nest: the new generation is in the process of hatching but they like there forebears before wil eventaully have to leave that nest.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
You're wrong.
I have recently left a rather large university which imposed rather harse limits on what students could do with their connection as part of the time honored "lets cover our ass and screw the students" policy.
They, however, recently offered students the option of getting DSL in the dorms. This allows them to deal with a real isp which as the grandparent of this post said, have a much fairer sense of the net.
High concentration hydrogen peroxide all by itself makes a low performance, but very convenient, rocket propellant. All hydrogen peroxide is in solution with some amount of water, because even if you had 100% peroxide, some of it would start decomposing to water (and oxygen) as you stored it.
Drugstore peroxide is 3% concentration. If you pour it on a catalyst, like silver or platinum, you will see bubbles forming in the solution (released oxygen), and the liquid will get somewhat warmer due to the released energy. Above roughly 70% concentration, the heat released is enough to vaporize all the water content, so if you pass it through a good catalyst, you will get all gas coming out the other side, and gas can be accelerated through a rocket nozzle to produce thrust. At 70%, the gas is only just above the boiling point of water, but as the concentration goes up, the temperature goes up fast. 90% peroxide, the most common grade used for propulsion, produces gas at about 1400 F temperature. Going all the way to 98% peroxide, the highest concentration produced, gives a few hundred degrees more temperature, but at a significant price increase. Higher temperature lets you use less propellant for a given amount of thrust-time, because it maintains a given chamber pressure with a less dense, but hotter, mixture (a simplification).
"Real" rocket propellants have temperature several thousand degrees higher, which does indeed increase performance, but the engines have to be cooled, and you need to manage both a fuel and an oxidizer in some form. One of our fundamental system trades is that it is better for an X-Prize class vehicle to use a propellant that simplifies vehicle engineering, even if you have to use more of it.
We use 90% peroxide from a small specialty supplier for all of our flight vehicles, but they closed shop a while ago, and we haven't been able to come to terms with the only domestic supplier of 90% peroxide, FMC chemical corp. Because of this, we have been working on alternate propellant schemes for a good part of this year, in parallel with building the full size X-Prize vehicle. If we had been able to just buy 90% peroxide like we buy all of our other industrial chemicals, we never would have bothered with the research.
Just about every week, someone asks why we don't concentrate it ourselves. True, dozens of people have made a few gallons of high concentration peroxide at various times, but there have only been two large scale concentrators operated in the US outside of the official manufacturers - Rotary Rocket had a concentrator, but it only went to 85% concentration, and it didn't do purification, and Beal Aerospace had a large scale concentrator operational after the blew up their first one. Sure, we could figure out how to do it, but then we would be in the chemical plant business instead of the rocket business, and that's not what we want to do. I am funding an operator in Houston to produce a few thousand pounds of 90% for us, but he is six months behind schedule on delivery, which proves my point about it not being as simple as people think.
The direction we have been pursuing is using a combination of 50% peroxide, which is readily available through distributors from multiple manufacturers, and a small amount of miscible fuel (methanol in our current work). 50% peroxide by itself doesn't work as a rocket propellant, because you can't boil all the water, which makes even decomposing most of the peroxide difficult. Adding a fuel and (the tricky part!) getting it to burn with the released oxygen gives you the energy necessary to vaporize the water and get everything up to a high temperature. Mixing fuels with high concentration oxidizers usually makes a touchy and deadly explosive (we have intentionally detonated a mix of 90% peroxide and alcohol - Very Scary), but buffered with 50% water, and running off of stoichemetric mixture ratio, the risk is not very high. We have a study report from the Department of Mines in the late 50's investigating th