In Washington state, there is a town on the Olympic Peninsula called Port Townsend. Every year in the fall they have a Kinetic Sculpture Race.
One year I helped my friend Mike build a kinetic sculpture. His plan was to make a vehicle that could carry four people. He has welding equipment in his garage, to help with all his hobby welding, so he put together a large vehicle. The plan was for it to use car wheels and a car seat, side pontoons, and a water drive with some sort of propeller.
This vehicle looked sort of like a shuttlecraft from the original Star Trek, so Mike wound up naming it the Shuttle Distress. (This is a sort of pun on Shuttle Express, a company that takes you to the airport in minivans for less money than a taxi.)
At a costume shop, I bought a Star Trek: The Next Generation uniform shirt. This is basically a very cheaply made bicycle jersey; bike jerseys are made from polypro, but don't have annoying seams or rough raspy fabric. (I was in red; that's command and navigation, right? I was in the copilot seat so it sort of works! Fortunately it wasn't an original series red shirt. "Dressed in red, soon be dead...")
We had no idea how heavy the vehicle actually was. As it turned out, just the vehicle was over 800 pounds; with Mike, me, one of his kids, and all our gear, we figured it was 1200 pounds or more easy. Well, "easy" isn't the word for pedaling that thing uphill! Fortunately Mike designed it with a really low gear ratio. We didn't set any speed records, but we got up the hill.
If you look at the pictures, you can see the swing-down pontoons on the sides. (These really look a lot like shuttlecraft engine nacelles...) That part works fine. But we ran out of time and never got any sort of propeller. The Shuttle Distress floated okay, but our fallback plan of paddling with oars just plain sucked. One of the volunteers standing by in a boat offered us a tow, which we gratefully accepted, and then of course we had to bribe the Kinetic Kops to look the other way.
It's actually normal at these events to have vehicles that can't quite perform well enough to do everything. You don't get disqualified if you can't do everything; on the contrary, there is a special award you can get if your vehicle can do everything. The "ACE" award goes to vehicles that can do the whole course without the driver having to get out. (For example, on the Shuttle Distress, you have to get out to lock the pontoons down. On ACE vehicles like Lutefisk, you can stay inside even during the land-to-water conversion.)
These events are really fun. You see some beautiful, well-built machines with clever engineering; you also see some weird things that were hacked together in a weekend with dead bicycles, random bits of foam, Barbie doll heads, and what-have-you.
If you live near one of these, go and check it out.
I really love my Motorola StarTac. They don't make it anymore, so I hope it lasts a long time.
Here is a description of my dream cell phone:
Compact, folding size like my StarTac
Audio quality equal to my StarTac
BlueTooth to communicate with my Palm PDA (e.g., so Palm can dial numbers from the address book)
Internet access at a decent speed
Wi-Fi access at full speed
A SD/MMC card slot
An MP3/Ogg player, that automatically pauses the current song when you receive a call or place a call Notice that I didn't specify a high-resolution color touch screen. I don't really object to one, but I don't really want to pay for one either.
A Palm makes a great palmtop computer; I don't need or want my phone to be a palmtop computer. But cell phone communications and Wi-Fi both need battery power, so it makes sense to combine that into one device with one decent battery... and then link to the palmtop with BlueTooth.
I carry my StarTac in a little belt clip holster thing. My dream phone could be used to surf the web or pull up files over Wi-Fi... without even being unclipped from its holster. The palmtop would talk to it via BlueTooth, and tell it to connect to the Internet or whatever. If you plugged in a hands-free headset, and used the palmtop's address book to dial, again you wouldn't need to remove the phone from its holster. That's cool (and I think people with BlueTooth phones can already do that today).
The MP3/Ogg player makes sense because people like hands-free headsets, and you could make one that let you listen to music in stereo. Why carry both a hands-free headset and a set of headphones?
For total BlueTooth madness, how about an iPod or similar device that shares out tunes over BlueTooth and lets you listen using your phone? Then you could have your whole collection of tunes available, and still have it auto-pause during phone calls.
Some PDAs try to be phones too. Some phones try to be PDAs too. I'd like one of each, but I want them to cooperate.
Can your cheap 4-way Xeon dynamically remove a failed processor from the running system? Can it dynamically remove a memory bank from use if it fails?
Of course not.
However, how many customers actually need this? Can a Linux cluster do as well? Because with the cluster, you can swap out entire computers without taking the cluster down.
So the question is not whether one Xeon PC can replace one Sun server, the question is whether cheap commodity hardware (probably clustered) can replace a Sun server. When you add up the hardware, the electricity, and especially the salaries of the IT guys to maintain it, is the cluster a better deal than the Sun server? (I don't know the answer for sure, but I'm guessing it probably is. Consider Google and their massive farm of cheap PC hardware.)
And even if the Sun server is still slightly cheaper this year, will it still be next year?
The 90's will never come again for Sun. Either they need to find a different way to make lots of money, or they are toast.
Umm, no. TurboLinux was a UnitedLinux member (along with Conectiva, SCO, and SuSE).
And at the time OpenLinux started up, SCO hadn't started acting evil yet. As far as the other companies knew, SCO was just a company selling Caldera Linux and SCO UNIX.
I don't plan on supporting SCO in any way until the litigation is over.
You don't need to worry that buying something from TurboLinux is supporting SCO. It isn't.
You seem to think I was uncivil. I did call your theory "silly" and I did make a joke about a tinfoil hat, but I didn't think I was unduly rude. I didn't suggest you f**k yourself, for example. I even said "please" when I requested references.
If you can't be civil, go fuck yourself!
Was this comment civil?
P.S. Still waiting for references. You made a claim, I called you on it. I remember Lotus suing Borland but I don't remember Microsoft suing Borland.
Sounds like MS would rather have a half-baked product now than a great one later (or maybe ever). Nice.
This is not always wrong. In fact, by itself it isn't wrong at all.
If you focus on nothing but short-term stuff, long-term it can come back to bite you, and I'd say this has happened to MS. But customers would rather have 90% of what they need, now, than 99% much later.
In fact, this is a selling point for open-source software. You can use an early, pre-beta program if you can live with its quirks and you don't want to wait for the shiny perfect version that might come out a year from now. With open source, you can use it during development and not have to wait for a release.
It's not just good for MS, it's good for free software too. Just let's be sure to keep our eyes on the long-term goals too.
If you write a GUI OS and don't give developers from competing companies any info about the OS you get to market first, and win.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, Microsoft gave away developer tools to people at computer trade shows. Programming Windows by Charles Petzold sold a ton of copies, too.
Besides, there is no secret black magic to writing Windows programs. The Windows part of any nontrivial app is not the important part, and it's not all that hard to make menus, dialogs and such. Your theory that secret inside information on Windows was the key to MS's success is silly.
Lose the tinfoil hat; you don't need it.
They sued Borland over having drop-down menus in their products... and won.
References, please. I don't remember this, and I have been avidly following industry news for almost 20 years now. I also just googled for it and came up with nothing.
I don't care if it's free. I don't care if it's GPL. I just care if it works.
Do you care whether you will still be allowed to use it next year?
One of the best things about free software is no one can ever take it away from you. If nothing else, the freedom to fork means that if the package developers take the project in a stupid direction, other people can fork and take the project back to sanity.
If gcc had not been free software, the egcs project could not have started as a fork of gcc, and gcc would stagnated. (Eventually, the egcs and gcc projects unforked, which is why you might not have heard of egcs. Look it up on google.) The fact that gcc is free software means it works better today. This is an example of the pragmatic side of using only free software.
You are a perfect customer for Debian. You don't care whether stuff is free; you just want it to work. I have lots of non-free software I bought years ago, that basically doesn't work anymore. If I had just used Debian main, everything I had then, I would still have now.
When Progeny finishes porting the Red Hat installer to Debian, take another look at Debian.
It works on my system. The installer didn't set it up for me; I had to do it by hand. However, I do not choose to reject Debian simply because its installer isn't perfect yet.
By the way, there are people working on spiffy installers for Debian. Progeny is porting the Red Hat installer to Debian (for x86, anyway).
You might say that the debian folks want to force everybody to subscribe to their form of freedom, whereas I don't care if somebody wants to yank large bits of my code, slap it in their system, and sell it for $1,000.
But a BSD-style license is DFSG-compatible. BSD-licensed code can be in Debian main.
One of the cool things about Debian is they way they relentlessly review things to make sure they are free. The Debian Free Software Guidlines (DFSG) are rigorously applied, and anything that doesn't meet DFSG is not allowed in Debian's "main" area.
(I tell people "Debian is fanatic about this stuff so we don't have to be." If you just use Debian main, you are using nothing but free software. Easy!)
Debian has two areas for software that doesn't meet the DFSG: "contrib" and "non-free". Now that this proposal has passed, not only software but documentation and firmware will be migrated out of main and into contrib or non-free.
The first thing I thought when I read this was: I wonder if Richard Stallman will finally be satisfied?
Last August, RMS was asked in an interview, which distribution of GNU/Linux he would recommend. He said he would recommend GNU/LinEx, because it contains no non-free software. As it turns out, he was mistaken about that; GNU/LinEx still has traces of non-free software in it, just as Debian has. He withdrew the recommendation of GNU/LinEx (without, to my knowledge, offering any recommendation to replace it).
RMS has said that he cannot recommend any distro that offers up free and non-free software from the same servers, or contains references to any servers that offer non-free software. (Keep in mind that his definition of non-free is not identical to the "non-free" of the Debian project.) So Debian, the most free distro I know, is still not recommended by RMS.
You can read a somewhat acrimonious discussion thread about this here if you like:
Note that Debian is so committed to free software that they are booting FSF documentation from main, because of the newest version of the "Free Documentation License" that allows invariant sections. Invariant sections are clearly free according to the FSF, but they are not in compliance with the DFSG, and thus do not go in main anymore. Discussion here:
I will close with a final quote from RMS, on the possibility that Debian might one day strip out the non-free software to his satisfaction:
The change that I asked Debian developers to make, some years ago, was to separate the two, such that we could refer people to Debian GNU/Linux without in the same act referring them also to the non-free software. This would make it possible for us to refer the public to Debian GNU/Linux. If in the future Debian GNU/Linux does not include the GNU manuals, this reference could not be wholeheartedly positive, but we could still make the reference.
P.S. If you asked me for a recommendation for a truly free distro, I'd suggest Debian main. If you don't put contrib and non-free in your sources.list file, you will never get any contrib or non-free software and yours system will be fully free software. That's good enough for me, even though it's not good enough for RMS.
isn't this doing the same thing as IE into Windows which everyone on/. says is evil?
I have always thought that having a web browser built in is a good thing; you can use it to view help, for example (why have a redudant help system when help can just be local web pages?).
I think that the major complaint people have about the way Microsoft handled the integration was that Microsoft was using monopoly power to crush their competition. Building IE into Windows allowed MS to take most of the market share of Netscape in a short time.
Integrating GNOME and Firefox would be done in public, with discussions in public, and specs out in the open. If other web browsers wanted to do the work, they could integrate as well, and the GNOME guys might even provide official GNOME testing to help.
In any event this isn't about Firefox crushing its competition, it's about GNOME being a better-integrated environment. It should be good for GNOME's users.
It is really odd that Gnome opted for Epiphany as a default browser in 2.x, when Galeon is a better and more featureful choice.
"better" is subjective.
"more featureful"... if any features are really valuable, they can be added to Epiphany. Features were not the reason Epiphany was given the nod.
I've read that the reasons were that Galeon did not follow some UI guidelines (this could surely be worked out?), and that Epiphany is simpler to use.
The GNOME guys chose Epiphany because Epiphany was better aligned with GNOME, and Epiphany's developer was more interested in being aligned with GNOME.
You say "this could surely be worked out" but the Galeon guys were not at all interested; they liked what they were doing with Galeon and didn't want to change to fit into GNOME better. The whole reason Epiphany exists is because Marco wanted to do something different than the rest of the Galeon guys, and they weren't interested in following him, so he had to fork. (Around the time this happened, one of the Galeon developers publicly blasted the GNOME 2.x HIG, saying it was stupid to take so many features out, and saying he didn't think Galeon should follow it.)
The Galeon guys were upset that Epiphany, not Galeon, was chosen as the official web browser in GNOME. But it shouldn't have been a surprise! GNOME had to pick one, and Epiphany was not only better aligned with GNOME but is developed by a developer who is more interested in being aligned with GNOME (and who didn't make public statements about the GNOME HIG being stupid).
In any event, only one browser can be the offical web browser of GNOME, and they chose one. That doesn't mean GNOME users can't use Galeon. It doesn't even mean that Linux distributers cannot put Galeon on GNOME desktops in their distros. GNOME has not, in any way, sabotaged Galeon. They simply did not choose Galeon over Epiphany.
Here's a web page with the history of Epiphany being chosen for GNOME:
There is one other thing about Galeon: I have personally found it to be less stable than Epiphany. (I haven't tested Galeon recently; perhaps it's stable again. I hope so.) I want my web browser to just work, and for me, Epiphany just works. There are a couple of little things about Epiphany I don't like, but if they were fixed I would call it the perfect web browser. (For me, anyway.)
Please forgive my audacity and insolence in reminding you that the original poster knows that laptops are not allowed in exams. See:
...math and science instructors almost universally do not wish to construct a course in which the learning goes beyond the simplest applications of the principles learned. Therefore, they must almost always artificially control additional information and calculating aids during exams (normally no notes, books, or computers). Calculators are the one concession they do allow, only because their functionality is limited, and therefore the aid they provide is also limited.
Paper ballots are about as secure as voting gets. You need to be able to do a re-count. You need to make it harder to steal an election, so it's good that a bag full of ballots is a big thing that is hard to hide (as opposed to votes stored on a hard disk in a black-box voting machine). You need to be able to check the system, so it's good that you can feed the same ballots into different counting machines to make sure the count is the same, and it's also good that human eyes can read the ballot to verify it.
What happens when someone votes twice?
Null question. There is nothing about this voting system that increases or decreases the odds of someone voting twice.
If you punch two ballots in a punch voting system, you vote twice. What happens then? Same problem.
0) As opposed to poking a hole in a piece of paper?
Perhaps you have used a different punch card voting system than the one I used. The one I used you need to concentrate carefully to make sure you are punching in the right place.
1) As oposed to looking to see that you indeed put a hole in the right spot
Now you are just trolling. Which is easier, verifying that a small hole was punched on number 36 and not on number 37, or reading the names you voted for printed on a sheet? It's a lot easier to just read the names.
2) Would be solved if people actualy did 0 and 1
Don't you remember, after the Florida debacle, the Democrats claiming that lots of people really meant to vote for Gore but were too stupid to figure out how to use the punch-card voting system? (They didn't use the words "too stupid" but that's what it boiled down to.)
Don't you remember how chads could fill up inside the punch voting machine, making it harder to punch a chad completely out, making it harder to vote?
I'm amazed you seem to prefer punch card voting.
If you just want a simple system that works, I like the one where you fill in a circle next to the name of the person you are voting for. That's easy to do and easy to verify. This new system is better for blind folks, though.
If we have a voter verifiable paper trail, that means a vote can be traced back to the person.
It helps to read the article. Go ahead and read it now; I'll wait here.
The computer records the voter's choices, and then prints out a paper ballot, which includes a bar code. If you are not blind, you inspect the ballot with your eyes. If you are blind, you can take the ballot to a bar code reader, and put on headphones, scan the barcode, and listen as it reads back your votes to you.
The vote can't be traced back to the person, because the person verfies the ballot at the polling place, and then deposits the ballot in the ballot box. Since the voter doesn't write his or her name on the ballot, or any other identifying information, it's exactly the same as current paper-based systems of voting.
Note that if you try to steal the election by tricky programming in the poll computer, the inspection of the ballots reveals your plot. If you try tricky programming of the official ballot-counting computers, you can be found out in a recount with different computers.
This system is way better than a black-box "just trust us" e-voting computer.
If we had registration, gun dealers and individuals selling guns would have to indicate to whom guns were sold.
Oh, for Pete's sake, don't you know anything about the laws we already have? Gun dealers already have to indicate to whom guns are sold. They have to check your ID, they have to submit you to the Brady Law computer check, they have to fill out forms. They have to hold onto the forms forever. If they close up their business, they have to turn the forms over to the BATF.
Currently, transfers of already-owned guns between private individuals is not required to do similar paperwork. Lots of people want to change that; they call it the "gun show loophole".
If they won't even take the trouble to don a ski mask or pair of gloves, what's the chance that they will try to modify a gun barrel?
Tell you what. There are systems in place in Maryland and New York. Why don't we just check the news to see how effective they are?
Oh look, the Maryland system has yet to solve a single case.
And everyone on Slashdot knows that computers haven't progressed at all in the last ten years
The problem isn't so much the computers, it's that the markings aren't unique enough. And did you read the part where different bullets, fired from cartridges made by different companies, didn't match, and it wasn't clear that the bullets would match at all after the gun had significant wear?
If the U.S. government decides to unleash the full force of the U.S. military on the people, whether you have a Glock, AK-47, or Remington shotgun is not going to make any difference. You're toast.
So Iraq is completely pacified and meek now, right? Our soldiers over there have stopped taking losses?
How about Vietnam -- did our soldiers take any losses there from random people with firearms?
Yes, one person cannot stand against the full force of the government. But lots of people could, if they had to. Of course I hope it never comes to that. I did say the last resort.
This country has too long a history of supporting individual gun ownership to have me believe that it would turn around and confiscate all guns.
This country has a long history of supporting freedom of speech, yet we are tireless in resisting anything that might tend to infringe on freedom of speech. We should treat the right to keep and bear arms the same way.
This is off-topic. Further, it is most likely a waste of my time. But what the heck, I'll reply this once.
The Supreme Court has already ruled that criminals don't have to register their guns
You call it idiotic distortion, the Supreme Court called it a Fifth Amendment issue. Since convicted criminals have lost their right under the law to have firearms, they would be incriminating themselves to register them, thus convicted criminals are exempt from registration laws.
Did it ever occur to you that "law abiding folks" sometimes become criminals?
Sure. And some of them are stupid enough to commit a crime that can be easily traced back to them. That's why I conceded that registration would catch a few really dumb criminals.
If not, do you get out from under your rock often?
This is why I am probably wasting my time. You are talking like a person who isn't interested in a debate, just interested in "scoring points" with your mind already made up.
Do you really think that ballistics experts would be fooled by the effects from some grit-smeared bullets?
A fired-bullet database would not be searched by ballistics experts, but by computers. The computers already have trouble matching bullets correctly:
"When cartridges from the same manufacturer were test-fired and compared, computer matching failed 38 percent of the time. With cartridges from different manufacturers, computer matching failed 62 percent of the time."
"The experts concluded it's unknown whether cartridges fired after typical firearm break-in and wear can at all be matched to the cartridge fired when the gun was new."
If you worked in a machine shop and some street thug showed up with a Glock and wanted you to change out a perfectly good barrel, wouldn't you get suspicious?
Unless you have some way of keeping criminals from buying machine tools, criminals could put together their own machine shop. That news story I quoted, above, suggested that a file is all you really need to change the barrel enough to make a bullet not match the database.
You wouldn't make much of a cop, would you?
I'll concede that more data is always better than less data, and it might sometimes help to know from whom a weapon was stolen. But it won't help that much. Criminals already buy stolen guns on the street, and a gun might change hands more than once before it's used in a crime.
And remember, this is all assuming the fired-bullet database actually produces reliable matches.
Maybe if one of the "few really dumb criminals" shoots your father, mother, wife, or child, you will get a better perspective on the value of catching them.
If a proposed anti-crime measure caught only a few really dumb criminals, and had no other side effects, I'd be in favor of it, even if it was a bit on the expensive side. But this isn't that simple. If you want to convince me that firearm registration is a good idea, you will need to show evidence that the good outweighs the harm.
And given the special status of firearms -- people use them to defend their families, and they are the last resort against a tyrannical government -- you will need to show exceptional evidence to convince me. Because registration, while it may not inevitably lead to confiscation, certainly paves the road for it.
I don't care about hand-picked statistics since they are normally flawed, skewed, and cooked.
I picked the state where I live. I pointed out that despite the lack of a training requirement, my state has no problems with the folks who get concealed carry licenses. You were the one arguing that people should be required t
There are also plenty of moderate people who would like gun registration to make the job of law enforcement easier
Except that it doesn't work. The Supreme Court has already ruled that criminals don't have to register their guns, so by definition only law-abiding folks will register their guns.
A fired-bullet database sounds like a good idea, but it is fraught with problems. Brand-new barrels don't make the same marks as barrels that have been used a while, and a savvy criminal can take some cartridges, smear some grit on the bullets, and fire the bullets from the gun. Now the barrel marks don't match the database. And of course criminals have access to machine shops just as law-abiding folks do, so they could have the barrels machined or replaced.
Since many criminals use stolen guns anyway, all you would be able to do is figure out from whom the gun was stolen. Doesn't help find the criminal.
Registration will catch a few really dumb criminals, but that's about it. And the Sullivan Act in New York shows that you can require registration, but then not let anyone register, to make a de facto gun ban.
I welcome a registration program that required that owners prove that they are competent in gun safety and marksmanship.
This sounds good, but statistics show that places with such laws aren't actually safer than places without such laws. In Washington state, you don't even need to take a safety class to carry concealed, and there are no problems with people carrying unsafely.
I can both clearly illustrate my point and irritate NRA-types. What you did is referred to as a "false dichotomy" -- implying that I had to do one or the other.
I submit that your example fails to clearly illustrate your point, because of all the baggage it brings along. There are historical examples of confiscation that was preceded by registration, and advocates of gun banning have publicly advocated registration as a first step towards confiscation. I feel it is better to choose an example that stands alone.
I never said your example was invalid; I said it was not the best example.
I don't think the above opinion can fairly be considered a "false dichotomy".
As for whether confiscation is possible in the US, I'll concede that New York is not the best example. California is a better one ("If you own an SKS Sporter, you can't sell it and you can't shoot it. You MUST turn it in before January 1 or face criminal charges and confiscation").
But even if I didn't have any actual examples of actual confiscation in the US, it's still fair to say that it could happen here. There are plenty of people who would like to ban and confiscate all firearms, and some of them are in government positions.
Slashdot Mirror
In Washington state, there is a town on the Olympic Peninsula called Port Townsend. Every year in the fall they have a Kinetic Sculpture Race.
One year I helped my friend Mike build a kinetic sculpture. His plan was to make a vehicle that could carry four people. He has welding equipment in his garage, to help with all his hobby welding, so he put together a large vehicle. The plan was for it to use car wheels and a car seat, side pontoons, and a water drive with some sort of propeller.
This vehicle looked sort of like a shuttlecraft from the original Star Trek, so Mike wound up naming it the Shuttle Distress. (This is a sort of pun on Shuttle Express, a company that takes you to the airport in minivans for less money than a taxi.)
At a costume shop, I bought a Star Trek: The Next Generation uniform shirt. This is basically a very cheaply made bicycle jersey; bike jerseys are made from polypro, but don't have annoying seams or rough raspy fabric. (I was in red; that's command and navigation, right? I was in the copilot seat so it sort of works! Fortunately it wasn't an original series red shirt. "Dressed in red, soon be dead...")
We had no idea how heavy the vehicle actually was. As it turned out, just the vehicle was over 800 pounds; with Mike, me, one of his kids, and all our gear, we figured it was 1200 pounds or more easy. Well, "easy" isn't the word for pedaling that thing uphill! Fortunately Mike designed it with a really low gear ratio. We didn't set any speed records, but we got up the hill.
If you look at the pictures, you can see the swing-down pontoons on the sides. (These really look a lot like shuttlecraft engine nacelles...) That part works fine. But we ran out of time and never got any sort of propeller. The Shuttle Distress floated okay, but our fallback plan of paddling with oars just plain sucked. One of the volunteers standing by in a boat offered us a tow, which we gratefully accepted, and then of course we had to bribe the Kinetic Kops to look the other way.
It's actually normal at these events to have vehicles that can't quite perform well enough to do everything. You don't get disqualified if you can't do everything; on the contrary, there is a special award you can get if your vehicle can do everything. The "ACE" award goes to vehicles that can do the whole course without the driver having to get out. (For example, on the Shuttle Distress, you have to get out to lock the pontoons down. On ACE vehicles like Lutefisk, you can stay inside even during the land-to-water conversion.)
These events are really fun. You see some beautiful, well-built machines with clever engineering; you also see some weird things that were hacked together in a weekend with dead bicycles, random bits of foam, Barbie doll heads, and what-have-you.
If you live near one of these, go and check it out.
steveha
And let us not forget the classic:
Here is a description of my dream cell phone:
Compact, folding size like my StarTac
Audio quality equal to my StarTac
BlueTooth to communicate with my Palm PDA (e.g., so Palm can dial numbers from the address book)
Internet access at a decent speed
Wi-Fi access at full speed
A SD/MMC card slot
An MP3/Ogg player, that automatically pauses the current song when you receive a call or place a call
Notice that I didn't specify a high-resolution color touch screen. I don't really object to one, but I don't really want to pay for one either.
A Palm makes a great palmtop computer; I don't need or want my phone to be a palmtop computer. But cell phone communications and Wi-Fi both need battery power, so it makes sense to combine that into one device with one decent battery... and then link to the palmtop with BlueTooth.
I carry my StarTac in a little belt clip holster thing. My dream phone could be used to surf the web or pull up files over Wi-Fi... without even being unclipped from its holster. The palmtop would talk to it via BlueTooth, and tell it to connect to the Internet or whatever. If you plugged in a hands-free headset, and used the palmtop's address book to dial, again you wouldn't need to remove the phone from its holster. That's cool (and I think people with BlueTooth phones can already do that today).
The MP3/Ogg player makes sense because people like hands-free headsets, and you could make one that let you listen to music in stereo. Why carry both a hands-free headset and a set of headphones?
For total BlueTooth madness, how about an iPod or similar device that shares out tunes over BlueTooth and lets you listen using your phone? Then you could have your whole collection of tunes available, and still have it auto-pause during phone calls.
Some PDAs try to be phones too. Some phones try to be PDAs too. I'd like one of each, but I want them to cooperate.
steveha
Can your cheap 4-way Xeon dynamically remove a failed processor from the running system? Can it dynamically remove a memory bank from use if it fails?
Of course not.
However, how many customers actually need this? Can a Linux cluster do as well? Because with the cluster, you can swap out entire computers without taking the cluster down.
So the question is not whether one Xeon PC can replace one Sun server, the question is whether cheap commodity hardware (probably clustered) can replace a Sun server. When you add up the hardware, the electricity, and especially the salaries of the IT guys to maintain it, is the cluster a better deal than the Sun server? (I don't know the answer for sure, but I'm guessing it probably is. Consider Google and their massive farm of cheap PC hardware.)
And even if the Sun server is still slightly cheaper this year, will it still be next year?
The 90's will never come again for Sun. Either they need to find a different way to make lots of money, or they are toast.
steveha
Umm, no. TurboLinux was a UnitedLinux member (along with Conectiva, SCO, and SuSE).
And at the time OpenLinux started up, SCO hadn't started acting evil yet. As far as the other companies knew, SCO was just a company selling Caldera Linux and SCO UNIX.
I don't plan on supporting SCO in any way until the litigation is over.
You don't need to worry that buying something from TurboLinux is supporting SCO. It isn't.
steveha
You seem to think I was uncivil. I did call your theory "silly" and I did make a joke about a tinfoil hat, but I didn't think I was unduly rude. I didn't suggest you f**k yourself, for example. I even said "please" when I requested references.
If you can't be civil, go fuck yourself!
Was this comment civil?
P.S. Still waiting for references. You made a claim, I called you on it. I remember Lotus suing Borland but I don't remember Microsoft suing Borland.
steveha
Sounds like MS would rather have a half-baked product now than a great one later (or maybe ever). Nice.
This is not always wrong. In fact, by itself it isn't wrong at all.
If you focus on nothing but short-term stuff, long-term it can come back to bite you, and I'd say this has happened to MS. But customers would rather have 90% of what they need, now, than 99% much later.
In fact, this is a selling point for open-source software. You can use an early, pre-beta program if you can live with its quirks and you don't want to wait for the shiny perfect version that might come out a year from now. With open source, you can use it during development and not have to wait for a release.
It's not just good for MS, it's good for free software too. Just let's be sure to keep our eyes on the long-term goals too.
steveha
If you write a GUI OS and don't give developers from competing companies any info about the OS you get to market first, and win.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, Microsoft gave away developer tools to people at computer trade shows. Programming Windows by Charles Petzold sold a ton of copies, too.
Besides, there is no secret black magic to writing Windows programs. The Windows part of any nontrivial app is not the important part, and it's not all that hard to make menus, dialogs and such. Your theory that secret inside information on Windows was the key to MS's success is silly.
Lose the tinfoil hat; you don't need it.
They sued Borland over having drop-down menus in their products... and won.
References, please. I don't remember this, and I have been avidly following industry news for almost 20 years now. I also just googled for it and came up with nothing.
steveha
I don't care if it's free. I don't care if it's GPL. I just care if it works.
Do you care whether you will still be allowed to use it next year?
One of the best things about free software is no one can ever take it away from you. If nothing else, the freedom to fork means that if the package developers take the project in a stupid direction, other people can fork and take the project back to sanity.
If gcc had not been free software, the egcs project could not have started as a fork of gcc, and gcc would stagnated. (Eventually, the egcs and gcc projects unforked, which is why you might not have heard of egcs. Look it up on google.) The fact that gcc is free software means it works better today. This is an example of the pragmatic side of using only free software.
You are a perfect customer for Debian. You don't care whether stuff is free; you just want it to work. I have lots of non-free software I bought years ago, that basically doesn't work anymore. If I had just used Debian main, everything I had then, I would still have now.
When Progeny finishes porting the Red Hat installer to Debian, take another look at Debian.
steveha
It works on my system. The installer didn't set it up for me; I had to do it by hand. However, I do not choose to reject Debian simply because its installer isn't perfect yet.
By the way, there are people working on spiffy installers for Debian. Progeny is porting the Red Hat installer to Debian (for x86, anyway).
steveha
You might say that the debian folks want to force everybody to subscribe to their form of freedom, whereas I don't care if somebody wants to yank large bits of my code, slap it in their system, and sell it for $1,000.
But a BSD-style license is DFSG-compatible. BSD-licensed code can be in Debian main.
steveha
(I tell people "Debian is fanatic about this stuff so we don't have to be." If you just use Debian main, you are using nothing but free software. Easy!)
Debian has two areas for software that doesn't meet the DFSG: "contrib" and "non-free". Now that this proposal has passed, not only software but documentation and firmware will be migrated out of main and into contrib or non-free.
The first thing I thought when I read this was: I wonder if Richard Stallman will finally be satisfied?
Last August, RMS was asked in an interview, which distribution of GNU/Linux he would recommend. He said he would recommend GNU/LinEx, because it contains no non-free software. As it turns out, he was mistaken about that; GNU/LinEx still has traces of non-free software in it, just as Debian has. He withdrew the recommendation of GNU/LinEx (without, to my knowledge, offering any recommendation to replace it).
RMS has said that he cannot recommend any distro that offers up free and non-free software from the same servers, or contains references to any servers that offer non-free software. (Keep in mind that his definition of non-free is not identical to the "non-free" of the Debian project.) So Debian, the most free distro I know, is still not recommended by RMS.
You can read a somewhat acrimonious discussion thread about this here if you like:
linux.debian.legal discussion archived by groups.google.com
Note that Debian is so committed to free software that they are booting FSF documentation from main, because of the newest version of the "Free Documentation License" that allows invariant sections. Invariant sections are clearly free according to the FSF, but they are not in compliance with the DFSG, and thus do not go in main anymore. Discussion here:
another linux.debian.legal discussion archived by groups.google.com
I will close with a final quote from RMS, on the possibility that Debian might one day strip out the non-free software to his satisfaction:
P.S. If you asked me for a recommendation for a truly free distro, I'd suggest Debian main. If you don't put contrib and non-free in your sources.list file, you will never get any contrib or non-free software and yours system will be fully free software. That's good enough for me, even though it's not good enough for RMS.
steveha
isn't this doing the same thing as IE into Windows which everyone on /. says is evil?
I have always thought that having a web browser built in is a good thing; you can use it to view help, for example (why have a redudant help system when help can just be local web pages?).
I think that the major complaint people have about the way Microsoft handled the integration was that Microsoft was using monopoly power to crush their competition. Building IE into Windows allowed MS to take most of the market share of Netscape in a short time.
Integrating GNOME and Firefox would be done in public, with discussions in public, and specs out in the open. If other web browsers wanted to do the work, they could integrate as well, and the GNOME guys might even provide official GNOME testing to help.
In any event this isn't about Firefox crushing its competition, it's about GNOME being a better-integrated environment. It should be good for GNOME's users.
steveha
It is really odd that Gnome opted for Epiphany as a default browser in 2.x, when Galeon is a better and more featureful choice.
& tid=14185
"better" is subjective.
"more featureful"... if any features are really valuable, they can be added to Epiphany. Features were not the reason Epiphany was given the nod.
I've read that the reasons were that Galeon did not follow some UI guidelines (this could surely be worked out?), and that Epiphany is simpler to use.
The GNOME guys chose Epiphany because Epiphany was better aligned with GNOME, and Epiphany's developer was more interested in being aligned with GNOME.
You say "this could surely be worked out" but the Galeon guys were not at all interested; they liked what they were doing with Galeon and didn't want to change to fit into GNOME better. The whole reason Epiphany exists is because Marco wanted to do something different than the rest of the Galeon guys, and they weren't interested in following him, so he had to fork. (Around the time this happened, one of the Galeon developers publicly blasted the GNOME 2.x HIG, saying it was stupid to take so many features out, and saying he didn't think Galeon should follow it.)
The Galeon guys were upset that Epiphany, not Galeon, was chosen as the official web browser in GNOME. But it shouldn't have been a surprise! GNOME had to pick one, and Epiphany was not only better aligned with GNOME but is developed by a developer who is more interested in being aligned with GNOME (and who didn't make public statements about the GNOME HIG being stupid).
In any event, only one browser can be the offical web browser of GNOME, and they chose one. That doesn't mean GNOME users can't use Galeon. It doesn't even mean that Linux distributers cannot put Galeon on GNOME desktops in their distros. GNOME has not, in any way, sabotaged Galeon. They simply did not choose Galeon over Epiphany.
Here's a web page with the history of Epiphany being chosen for GNOME:
http://www.gnomedesktop.org/comments.php?sid=1221
There is one other thing about Galeon: I have personally found it to be less stable than Epiphany. (I haven't tested Galeon recently; perhaps it's stable again. I hope so.) I want my web browser to just work, and for me, Epiphany just works. There are a couple of little things about Epiphany I don't like, but if they were fixed I would call it the perfect web browser. (For me, anyway.)
steveha
Emphasis added by me.
steveha
Clickable link:
e /4device3.html
/ 4device3.jpg
http://www.kfki.hu/~arthp/html/l/leonardo/12engin
You can click on the drawing and get a toolbar that lets you resize it, even past 100%. It's convenient.
Straight to the drawing:
http://www.kfki.hu/~arthp/art/l/leonardo/12engine
No toolbar, but if you click the drawing you zoom it to 100% size.
steveha
I prefer a system which is more secure.
Paper ballots are about as secure as voting gets. You need to be able to do a re-count. You need to make it harder to steal an election, so it's good that a bag full of ballots is a big thing that is hard to hide (as opposed to votes stored on a hard disk in a black-box voting machine). You need to be able to check the system, so it's good that you can feed the same ballots into different counting machines to make sure the count is the same, and it's also good that human eyes can read the ballot to verify it.
What happens when someone votes twice?
Null question. There is nothing about this voting system that increases or decreases the odds of someone voting twice.
If you punch two ballots in a punch voting system, you vote twice. What happens then? Same problem.
steveha
0) As opposed to poking a hole in a piece of paper?
Perhaps you have used a different punch card voting system than the one I used. The one I used you need to concentrate carefully to make sure you are punching in the right place.
1) As oposed to looking to see that you indeed put a hole in the right spot
Now you are just trolling. Which is easier, verifying that a small hole was punched on number 36 and not on number 37, or reading the names you voted for printed on a sheet? It's a lot easier to just read the names.
2) Would be solved if people actualy did 0 and 1
Don't you remember, after the Florida debacle, the Democrats claiming that lots of people really meant to vote for Gore but were too stupid to figure out how to use the punch-card voting system? (They didn't use the words "too stupid" but that's what it boiled down to.)
Don't you remember how chads could fill up inside the punch voting machine, making it harder to punch a chad completely out, making it harder to vote?
I'm amazed you seem to prefer punch card voting.
If you just want a simple system that works, I like the one where you fill in a circle next to the name of the person you are voting for. That's easy to do and easy to verify. This new system is better for blind folks, though.
steveha
0) It's way easier to use than punch cards. Press buttons on a touch screen.
1) It's way easier to verify than punch cards. Just read it.
2) No hanging chads. Inspecting a ballot does not alter the ballot.
3) No hanging chad jokes.
steveha
If we have a voter verifiable paper trail, that means a vote can be traced back to the person.
It helps to read the article. Go ahead and read it now; I'll wait here.
The computer records the voter's choices, and then prints out a paper ballot, which includes a bar code. If you are not blind, you inspect the ballot with your eyes. If you are blind, you can take the ballot to a bar code reader, and put on headphones, scan the barcode, and listen as it reads back your votes to you.
The vote can't be traced back to the person, because the person verfies the ballot at the polling place, and then deposits the ballot in the ballot box. Since the voter doesn't write his or her name on the ballot, or any other identifying information, it's exactly the same as current paper-based systems of voting.
Note that if you try to steal the election by tricky programming in the poll computer, the inspection of the ballots reveals your plot. If you try tricky programming of the official ballot-counting computers, you can be found out in a recount with different computers.
This system is way better than a black-box "just trust us" e-voting computer.
steveha
Is there even one single non-trivial software project made with/on Mono?
/ SoftWare
Using google, I found a list of GTK# apps:
http://www.nullenvoid.com/gtksharp/wiki/index.php
steveha
If we had registration, gun dealers and individuals selling guns would have to indicate to whom guns were sold.
Oh, for Pete's sake, don't you know anything about the laws we already have? Gun dealers already have to indicate to whom guns are sold. They have to check your ID, they have to submit you to the Brady Law computer check, they have to fill out forms. They have to hold onto the forms forever. If they close up their business, they have to turn the forms over to the BATF.
Currently, transfers of already-owned guns between private individuals is not required to do similar paperwork. Lots of people want to change that; they call it the "gun show loophole".
If they won't even take the trouble to don a ski mask or pair of gloves, what's the chance that they will try to modify a gun barrel?
Tell you what. There are systems in place in Maryland and New York. Why don't we just check the news to see how effective they are?
Oh look, the Maryland system has yet to solve a single case.
CNS news story
And everyone on Slashdot knows that computers haven't progressed at all in the last ten years
The problem isn't so much the computers, it's that the markings aren't unique enough. And did you read the part where different bullets, fired from cartridges made by different companies, didn't match, and it wasn't clear that the bullets would match at all after the gun had significant wear?
If the U.S. government decides to unleash the full force of the U.S. military on the people, whether you have a Glock, AK-47, or Remington shotgun is not going to make any difference. You're toast.
So Iraq is completely pacified and meek now, right? Our soldiers over there have stopped taking losses?
How about Vietnam -- did our soldiers take any losses there from random people with firearms?
Yes, one person cannot stand against the full force of the government. But lots of people could, if they had to. Of course I hope it never comes to that. I did say the last resort.
This country has too long a history of supporting individual gun ownership to have me believe that it would turn around and confiscate all guns.
This country has a long history of supporting freedom of speech, yet we are tireless in resisting anything that might tend to infringe on freedom of speech. We should treat the right to keep and bear arms the same way.
steveha
This is off-topic. Further, it is most likely a waste of my time. But what the heck, I'll reply this once.
The Supreme Court has already ruled that criminals don't have to register their guns
You call it idiotic distortion, the Supreme Court called it a Fifth Amendment issue. Since convicted criminals have lost their right under the law to have firearms, they would be incriminating themselves to register them, thus convicted criminals are exempt from registration laws.
Haynes v. U.S. 390 U.S. 85 (1968)
Did it ever occur to you that "law abiding folks" sometimes become criminals?
Sure. And some of them are stupid enough to commit a crime that can be easily traced back to them. That's why I conceded that registration would catch a few really dumb criminals.
If not, do you get out from under your rock often?
This is why I am probably wasting my time. You are talking like a person who isn't interested in a debate, just interested in "scoring points" with your mind already made up.
Do you really think that ballistics experts would be fooled by the effects from some grit-smeared bullets?
A fired-bullet database would not be searched by ballistics experts, but by computers. The computers already have trouble matching bullets correctly:
"When cartridges from the same manufacturer were test-fired and compared, computer matching failed 38 percent of the time. With cartridges from different manufacturers, computer matching failed 62 percent of the time."
"The experts concluded it's unknown whether cartridges fired after typical firearm break-in and wear can at all be matched to the cartridge fired when the gun was new."
How Reliable Is Ballistic Fingerprinting?
If you worked in a machine shop and some street thug showed up with a Glock and wanted you to change out a perfectly good barrel, wouldn't you get suspicious?
Unless you have some way of keeping criminals from buying machine tools, criminals could put together their own machine shop. That news story I quoted, above, suggested that a file is all you really need to change the barrel enough to make a bullet not match the database.
You wouldn't make much of a cop, would you?
I'll concede that more data is always better than less data, and it might sometimes help to know from whom a weapon was stolen. But it won't help that much. Criminals already buy stolen guns on the street, and a gun might change hands more than once before it's used in a crime.
And remember, this is all assuming the fired-bullet database actually produces reliable matches.
Maybe if one of the "few really dumb criminals" shoots your father, mother, wife, or child, you will get a better perspective on the value of catching them.
If a proposed anti-crime measure caught only a few really dumb criminals, and had no other side effects, I'd be in favor of it, even if it was a bit on the expensive side. But this isn't that simple. If you want to convince me that firearm registration is a good idea, you will need to show evidence that the good outweighs the harm.
And given the special status of firearms -- people use them to defend their families, and they are the last resort against a tyrannical government -- you will need to show exceptional evidence to convince me. Because registration, while it may not inevitably lead to confiscation, certainly paves the road for it.
I don't care about hand-picked statistics since they are normally flawed, skewed, and cooked.
I picked the state where I live. I pointed out that despite the lack of a training requirement, my state has no problems with the folks who get concealed carry licenses. You were the one arguing that people should be required t
There are also plenty of moderate people who would like gun registration to make the job of law enforcement easier
Except that it doesn't work. The Supreme Court has already ruled that criminals don't have to register their guns, so by definition only law-abiding folks will register their guns.
A fired-bullet database sounds like a good idea, but it is fraught with problems. Brand-new barrels don't make the same marks as barrels that have been used a while, and a savvy criminal can take some cartridges, smear some grit on the bullets, and fire the bullets from the gun. Now the barrel marks don't match the database. And of course criminals have access to machine shops just as law-abiding folks do, so they could have the barrels machined or replaced.
Since many criminals use stolen guns anyway, all you would be able to do is figure out from whom the gun was stolen. Doesn't help find the criminal.
Registration will catch a few really dumb criminals, but that's about it. And the Sullivan Act in New York shows that you can require registration, but then not let anyone register, to make a de facto gun ban.
I welcome a registration program that required that owners prove that they are competent in gun safety and marksmanship.
This sounds good, but statistics show that places with such laws aren't actually safer than places without such laws. In Washington state, you don't even need to take a safety class to carry concealed, and there are no problems with people carrying unsafely.
steveha
I can both clearly illustrate my point and irritate NRA-types. What you did is referred to as a "false dichotomy" -- implying that I had to do one or the other.
I submit that your example fails to clearly illustrate your point, because of all the baggage it brings along. There are historical examples of confiscation that was preceded by registration, and advocates of gun banning have publicly advocated registration as a first step towards confiscation. I feel it is better to choose an example that stands alone.
I never said your example was invalid; I said it was not the best example.
I don't think the above opinion can fairly be considered a "false dichotomy".
As for whether confiscation is possible in the US, I'll concede that New York is not the best example. California is a better one ("If you own an SKS Sporter, you can't sell it and you can't shoot it. You MUST turn it in before January 1 or face criminal charges and confiscation").
But even if I didn't have any actual examples of actual confiscation in the US, it's still fair to say that it could happen here. There are plenty of people who would like to ban and confiscate all firearms, and some of them are in government positions.
steveha