Re:Expect their products to be leased not sold
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EMC To Acquire VMware
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· Score: 3, Informative
I have Win4Lin also.
Win4Lin requires a patch to the Linux kernel. They just announced support for Linux kernel 2.6; it's a free upgrade for Win4Lin users.
On the whole, I'm pleased with Netraverse as a company. They have been good about upgrade pricing, and they don't require "activation" for Win4Lin. (Just a long annoying license code. I can live with that.)
Win4Lin runs Windows 98 or ME, but not Windows NT, 2000, or XP. (Yet, anyway.) Win4Lin doesn't handle USB devices or a 3D accelerator card. But networking support is complete, including the MS-specific protocols.
If you have a few Windows applications you want to run on a Linux desktop, Win4Lin is a good choice.
P.S. I cannot get Windows Update to run correctly on my Win4Lin desktop. (It doesn't really matter, since Win98 isn't supported anymore. But if you run Win4Lin and Windows Update works for you, please let me know.)
Where do ALLL rights come from? a piece of paper that a body of people i.e. government, backs.
Wow! I'm pretty sure you don't mean that! If I don't get it on paper, from my government, it's not a right? So in a dictatorship, there really isn't a right to free speech?
I reject that. Certain rights are inherent.
Everybody benefits from education.
That's nice. I even agree. But it doesn't really work to make education a "right".
if education is not a right, do you support those who deny education to others?
Of course not. I support the right to not have other people prevent you from getting education. That's a negative right.
Most of the rights a libertarian supports boil down to the right to be left alone. Forbidding education to women is not the same as leaving women alone.
On the CD I donated, I also included the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It states, in Article 26, "Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free at least in the elementary and fundamental stages..."
I'm a libertarian, so I don't agree with this, at least as worded.
A "right" is something that you must always be granted, no matter what. If you look at the Bill of Rights in the US Constitution, you will find they are rights to be left alone: the right to free speech (no one can silence you), the right to not have to testify against yourself, etc. These are "negative" rights, your right to be left alone. (You will notice a right to own and carry weapons, but no mention of where you will get them; no one has any obligation to provide them to you.)
If you have a "right" to education, where does it come from? Do you have a right to grab a teacher and make that teacher teach you? How does your "right" to education compare with a teacher's right to decide what he or she wants to do? What happens if not enough people choose to be teachers -- do we need to force some people to be teachers to guarantee that there are enough teachers for everyone?
I would agree with wording that says "Education is important, and society should make education a priority." I'd even agree with a right to own educational materials. But I don't see how you can make a "right" to education really work, unless the word "right" doesn't mean what I think it does.
0) He says libraries like DVD cases and hate CD jewel cases. Makes sense to me.
1) He says: Going into the future, I see the huge amount of power that magazines with CDs on their covers now have. There is at least one Linux magazine in the United Kingdom that has a DVD case with a CD inside glued to each issue, so I think that's what he's talking about.
2) I'm a raving Debian fan, but I hope he's also providing easy-to-install distros like Mandrake.
3) Once Progeny gets the Red Hat "Anaconda" installer working with Debian, I'd love to see Debian/Anaconda CDs in every library!
every single major character in every single novel the guy ever published is just a thinly veiled version of the author
Johnny Rico? Jubal Harsaw? Valentine Michael Smith? Friday? Mr. Kiku? Waldo? The Great Lorenzo? Thorby? Joe-Jim? The Unmarried Mother? Podkayne, and her obnoxious brother?
These were all thinly veiled versions of Heinlein?
Nope, not buying it.
P.S. I think what's going on here is that Heinlein was always story-driven, much more than character-driven. Some people like that, some people don't. Unless the story happens to be about character development, characters in a story-driven story don't get as much attention.
But to leap from that to saying that every character is RAH himself in disguise is, IMHO, less than insightful.
Perry, our hero, (n reality a thinly veiled version of Heinlein himself)
I'm wondering why book reviewers feel confident in statements like this. How can you be so sure that Perry is a "thinly veiled version of Heinlein himself"? And even if it's true, what makes it such a crime? Are you implying that Heinlein was being lazy or something?
I think you should start with Heinlein's best works, and if you keep reading, finish with his worst ones. So the last ones you read, in order, are I Will Fear No Evil, then To Sail Beyond the Sunset, then "The Number of the Beast". No doubt For Us, the Living goes in there somewhere.
I would recommend starting with Citizen of the Galaxy, Double Star, or The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. I loved all those.
No, she said "There are 12 models of Cylon. I'm a model 6." Then, at the end, we saw multiple identical copies of her, and we saw one of whatever model Boomer is.
I think the whole idea is weak, but they were clear about it. Thus the mysterious anonymous note to Adama at the very end of the fourth hour: THERE ARE 12 MODELS OF CYLONS.
I really liked the explanation of why the Galactica, alone, survived while all the other Battlestars perished.
(In case you missed it: the Galactica has almost nothing automated, by design. Not even a computer network for the teachers. This was true of all ships as old as the Galactica, but the newer ones have automation. The Cylons, through Baltar, introduced back doors into the software in all the newer ships, then exploited the back doors to simply shut down all the ships. The humans were defeated in detail, with essentially no losses to the Cylons.)
Actually, since the Cylons have spies all over the place, I'm amazed they didn't simply wait a week until the Galactica was safely mothballed, and then attack.
Which raises the question: in the original, how did the Galactica survive?
P.S. I just realized something. There are only 12 models of Cylon. The shiny armor-covered ones are one, the "there are no cockpits!" fighters are another. That leaves 10 that might look human. Of those, one model led a tour group through the Galactica early in the show; one served as a mole and was denounced by Baltar; and one is a mole (and maybe doesn't even know it herself). Good grief! That's three out of 10! Why does the Galactica get so much Cylon attention? (If the answer is "they were worried about the Galactica" then why didn't the Cylons make the Galactica a priority target?)
Note that you can always do the MythTV recording using NuppelVideo, the default, but then recompress the data overnight.
In case you are wondering if this will degrade video quality (compressing it twice): I haven't tested it but I don't think it will, as long as you choose a very high quality level for the NuppelVideo.
a hardware MPEG-2 card is the best way I know of to make sure you are paid up on your MPEG-2 license fees
This is if you want to be able to burn DVDs that can play in DVD players, and you want to make sure you are legal with respect to patent license fees. If you don't care about being compatible with DVD players, you could use Ogg Theora when it's ready, and not need to worry about patent fees.
0) My 1 GHz Nehemiah seems fast to me. The DDR memory doesn't hurt, and mine has lots. I haven't tested it against assorted Pentium 3 systems to see where it ranks, and I haven't tried to run games on it.
1) I said "a few years" to be vague enough to have some slack. If the Nehemiah doesn't feel fast enough, go back another year or two; I'm sure it will smoke a 233 MHz Pentium II, say.
Note that you can always do the MythTV recording using NuppelVideo, the default, but then recompress the data overnight.
However, a hardware MPEG-2 card is the best way I know of to make sure you are paid up on your MPEG-2 license fees, while running free software on your computer.
I'm told that the 1 GHz Nehemiah based systems have good integer performance but not so good floating point performance.
All Via C3 chips before the Nehemiah run the FPU at half the clock speed of the rest of the chip. So an 800 MHz C3 runs integer math at 800 MHz but floating point at only 400 MHz. The Nehemiah, on the other hand, runs the FPU at full speed.
So the Nehemiah is the first version of the C3 to suck less at floating point math. It's still going to be not as good as an Athlon or Pentium chip of the same clock speed, but at least its FPU runs at full speed.
Note that a 1 GHz Nehemiah will smoke a computer from just a few years ago. It's all relative.
I don't understand what you wrote. But you seem to be saying that short-selling is low-risk, which is totally wrong.
Here's how short-selling works:
You expect a stock to go down in price. You borrow some shares of the stock, and sell them. Then at a predetermined date, you must buy the stocks back, and return the shares to whomever loaned them to you. If you sell at $16 per share, and buy back at $10 per share, you get to keep $6 per share, less any fees (you need to pay whomever loaned you the shares).
But if you buy at $16, then Darl announces that SCO actually owns South America and the stock price goes up to $26, when it's time to buy back the stock shares you need to pay $10 per share.
If you simply buy some stock, the worst thing that can happen is that the stock devalues to zero, and you lost all the money you spent on the stock. With short-selling, if the stock price unexpectedly soars, you can lose vast sums of money in a hurry. Buy-and-hold is much safer than short-selling.
From earlier discussions on Slashdot, I gathered that there isn't much SCO stock available on the terms that let you short-sell it; and what is available was already grabbed by other short-sellers.
But there is one big problem with short-selling SCO stock:
Short-selling doesn't work unless you can predict when the stock will go down. Given that no rational and well-informed person would buy SCO stock, I'm stumped to guess why it's as high as it is, and twice as stumped to say exactly when it will go down.
You might be all set to short-sell SCO stock, and then Darl McBride might announce that SCO actually owns UNIX, BSD, Windows, MacOS, and CP/M; SCO stock doubles overnight and your short-sale, instead of making you money, loses you a lot of money.
I still use JPilot, even though I use Evolution, because I really want access to my notes.
Evolution developers: please add a "notes" feature to Evolution. Just like on a Palm PDA, the first line of the note should be treated as a title, and there should be a title view for picking a memo. There should be searching within the memo text. The memo feature should use the same character set as the Palm uses so that accents and such display correctly.
P.S. JPilot has plugins, and I'd like to see the same plugins for Evolution. The top one I want to see: Keyring, the password vault.
using doctored voting machines to elect Republicans directly helps the Republican owners
And if Democrat "activists" doctored some voting machines, that wouldn't help them? Wow, you've convinced me. Voting machines with no audit trails are only dangerous in Republican hands! You get a gold star for logical reasoning!
Believe what you will; I've spent enough time on this. Have a nice life.
As it stands, the owners of these companies (who heavily back the Republicans) have carte blanche to steal elections
Or, Democrat "activists" could hack the machines to steal elections. Or, renegade Libertarians could hack the machines to give the election to the Libertarian candidate. Or maybe Ross Perot can finally win.
If there's no auditing, that is BAD, and it doesn't matter which political party you hate the most. Leave the whole Republican/Democrat thing out of this discussion.
I enjoyed the Honor Harrington books. You might, too, if you enjoy reading about heroic people doing heroic things. Honor Harrington is a heroic character: she isn't perfect, but she feels a strong sense of duty and does her best to do her duty. And her best turns out to be very good indeed.
If you are at all interested in the Honor Harrington books, check out the Baen Free Library. The first book is On Basilisk Station. (That link is to the HTML version; there are several downloadable versions as well.)
Take a look and decide for yourself whether these books are for you.
But I saw that episode of BSG and it was not a case of borrowing; it was jacking the plot, filing off the serial numbers, and using it almost unchanged. IIRC there was even a little kid, like in Shane, idolizing the BSG guy. It was bad.
Of course, I was a teenaged kid at the time, and I really wanted to like the show, so at the time I insisted it wasn't really a Shane ripoff. I was wrong.
P.S. IIRC it was Apollo, not Starbuck, who was the Shane standin. But it doesn't really matter.
Slashdot Mirror
I have Win4Lin also.
Win4Lin requires a patch to the Linux kernel. They just announced support for Linux kernel 2.6; it's a free upgrade for Win4Lin users.
On the whole, I'm pleased with Netraverse as a company. They have been good about upgrade pricing, and they don't require "activation" for Win4Lin. (Just a long annoying license code. I can live with that.)
Win4Lin runs Windows 98 or ME, but not Windows NT, 2000, or XP. (Yet, anyway.) Win4Lin doesn't handle USB devices or a 3D accelerator card. But networking support is complete, including the MS-specific protocols.
If you have a few Windows applications you want to run on a Linux desktop, Win4Lin is a good choice.
P.S. I cannot get Windows Update to run correctly on my Win4Lin desktop. (It doesn't really matter, since Win98 isn't supported anymore. But if you run Win4Lin and Windows Update works for you, please let me know.)
steveha
Where do ALLL rights come from? a piece of paper that a body of people i.e. government, backs.
/ freespeechorcivilliberties/rightsvsrights.html
Wow! I'm pretty sure you don't mean that! If I don't get it on paper, from my government, it's not a right? So in a dictatorship, there really isn't a right to free speech?
I reject that. Certain rights are inherent.
Everybody benefits from education.
That's nice. I even agree. But it doesn't really work to make education a "right".
Here's another good essay on the subject:
http://www.libertyhaven.com/personalfreedomissues
steveha
if education is not a right, do you support those who deny education to others?
Of course not. I support the right to not have other people prevent you from getting education. That's a negative right.
Most of the rights a libertarian supports boil down to the right to be left alone. Forbidding education to women is not the same as leaving women alone.
steveha
I would be opposed to a "right" to libraries. I am not opposed to libraries.
steveha
From the article:
..."
1 /rights_and_enti.html
On the CD I donated, I also included the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It states, in Article 26, "Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free at least in the elementary and fundamental stages
I'm a libertarian, so I don't agree with this, at least as worded.
A "right" is something that you must always be granted, no matter what. If you look at the Bill of Rights in the US Constitution, you will find they are rights to be left alone: the right to free speech (no one can silence you), the right to not have to testify against yourself, etc. These are "negative" rights, your right to be left alone. (You will notice a right to own and carry weapons, but no mention of where you will get them; no one has any obligation to provide them to you.)
If you have a "right" to education, where does it come from? Do you have a right to grab a teacher and make that teacher teach you? How does your "right" to education compare with a teacher's right to decide what he or she wants to do? What happens if not enough people choose to be teachers -- do we need to force some people to be teachers to guarantee that there are enough teachers for everyone?
I would agree with wording that says "Education is important, and society should make education a priority." I'd even agree with a right to own educational materials. But I don't see how you can make a "right" to education really work, unless the word "right" doesn't mean what I think it does.
Here's a good essay about this:
http://libertarian.typepad.com/independent/2003/1
steveha
0) He says libraries like DVD cases and hate CD jewel cases. Makes sense to me.
1) He says: Going into the future, I see the huge amount of power that magazines with CDs on their covers now have. There is at least one Linux magazine in the United Kingdom that has a DVD case with a CD inside glued to each issue, so I think that's what he's talking about.
2) I'm a raving Debian fan, but I hope he's also providing easy-to-install distros like Mandrake.
3) Once Progeny gets the Red Hat "Anaconda" installer working with Debian, I'd love to see Debian/Anaconda CDs in every library!
steveha
every single major character in every single novel the guy ever published is just a thinly veiled version of the author
Johnny Rico? Jubal Harsaw?
Valentine Michael Smith?
Friday? Mr. Kiku?
Waldo? The Great Lorenzo?
Thorby? Joe-Jim?
The Unmarried Mother?
Podkayne, and her obnoxious brother?
These were all thinly veiled versions of Heinlein?
Nope, not buying it.
P.S. I think what's going on here is that Heinlein was always story-driven, much more than character-driven. Some people like that, some people don't. Unless the story happens to be about character development, characters in a story-driven story don't get as much attention.
But to leap from that to saying that every character is RAH himself in disguise is, IMHO, less than insightful.
steveha
Perry, our hero, (n reality a thinly veiled version of Heinlein himself)
I'm wondering why book reviewers feel confident in statements like this. How can you be so sure that Perry is a "thinly veiled version of Heinlein himself"? And even if it's true, what makes it such a crime? Are you implying that Heinlein was being lazy or something?
steveha
I think you should start with Heinlein's best works, and if you keep reading, finish with his worst ones. So the last ones you read, in order, are I Will Fear No Evil, then To Sail Beyond the Sunset, then "The Number of the Beast". No doubt For Us, the Living goes in there somewhere.
I would recommend starting with Citizen of the Galaxy, Double Star, or The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. I loved all those.
steveha
No, she said "There are 12 models of Cylon. I'm a model 6." Then, at the end, we saw multiple identical copies of her, and we saw one of whatever model Boomer is.
I think the whole idea is weak, but they were clear about it. Thus the mysterious anonymous note to Adama at the very end of the fourth hour: THERE ARE 12 MODELS OF CYLONS.
steveha
I really liked the explanation of why the Galactica, alone, survived while all the other Battlestars perished.
(In case you missed it: the Galactica has almost nothing automated, by design. Not even a computer network for the teachers. This was true of all ships as old as the Galactica, but the newer ones have automation. The Cylons, through Baltar, introduced back doors into the software in all the newer ships, then exploited the back doors to simply shut down all the ships. The humans were defeated in detail, with essentially no losses to the Cylons.)
Actually, since the Cylons have spies all over the place, I'm amazed they didn't simply wait a week until the Galactica was safely mothballed, and then attack.
Which raises the question: in the original, how did the Galactica survive?
P.S. I just realized something. There are only 12 models of Cylon. The shiny armor-covered ones are one, the "there are no cockpits!" fighters are another. That leaves 10 that might look human. Of those, one model led a tour group through the Galactica early in the show; one served as a mole and was denounced by Baltar; and one is a mole (and maybe doesn't even know it herself). Good grief! That's three out of 10! Why does the Galactica get so much Cylon attention? (If the answer is "they were worried about the Galactica" then why didn't the Cylons make the Galactica a priority target?)
steveha
Note that you can always do the MythTV recording using NuppelVideo, the default, but then recompress the data overnight.
In case you are wondering if this will degrade video quality (compressing it twice): I haven't tested it but I don't think it will, as long as you choose a very high quality level for the NuppelVideo.
a hardware MPEG-2 card is the best way I know of to make sure you are paid up on your MPEG-2 license fees
This is if you want to be able to burn DVDs that can play in DVD players, and you want to make sure you are legal with respect to patent license fees. If you don't care about being compatible with DVD players, you could use Ogg Theora when it's ready, and not need to worry about patent fees.
http://www.theora.org/
steveha
0) My 1 GHz Nehemiah seems fast to me. The DDR memory doesn't hurt, and mine has lots. I haven't tested it against assorted Pentium 3 systems to see where it ranks, and I haven't tried to run games on it.
1) I said "a few years" to be vague enough to have some slack. If the Nehemiah doesn't feel fast enough, go back another year or two; I'm sure it will smoke a 233 MHz Pentium II, say.
steveha
Note that you can always do the MythTV recording using NuppelVideo, the default, but then recompress the data overnight.
However, a hardware MPEG-2 card is the best way I know of to make sure you are paid up on your MPEG-2 license fees, while running free software on your computer.
steveha
I'm told that the 1 GHz Nehemiah based systems have good integer performance but not so good floating point performance.
All Via C3 chips before the Nehemiah run the FPU at half the clock speed of the rest of the chip. So an 800 MHz C3 runs integer math at 800 MHz but floating point at only 400 MHz. The Nehemiah, on the other hand, runs the FPU at full speed.
So the Nehemiah is the first version of the C3 to suck less at floating point math. It's still going to be not as good as an Athlon or Pentium chip of the same clock speed, but at least its FPU runs at full speed.
Note that a 1 GHz Nehemiah will smoke a computer from just a few years ago. It's all relative.
steveha
For the record: I'm a software geek, but not a stock market geek. A bunch of people said I have the details wrong here, and no doubt they are correct.
steveha
It loses you no money
I don't understand what you wrote. But you seem to be saying that short-selling is low-risk, which is totally wrong.
Here's how short-selling works:
You expect a stock to go down in price. You borrow some shares of the stock, and sell them. Then at a predetermined date, you must buy the stocks back, and return the shares to whomever loaned them to you. If you sell at $16 per share, and buy back at $10 per share, you get to keep $6 per share, less any fees (you need to pay whomever loaned you the shares).
But if you buy at $16, then Darl announces that SCO actually owns South America and the stock price goes up to $26, when it's time to buy back the stock shares you need to pay $10 per share.
If you simply buy some stock, the worst thing that can happen is that the stock devalues to zero, and you lost all the money you spent on the stock. With short-selling, if the stock price unexpectedly soars, you can lose vast sums of money in a hurry. Buy-and-hold is much safer than short-selling.
steveha
From earlier discussions on Slashdot, I gathered that there isn't much SCO stock available on the terms that let you short-sell it; and what is available was already grabbed by other short-sellers.
But there is one big problem with short-selling SCO stock:
Short-selling doesn't work unless you can predict when the stock will go down. Given that no rational and well-informed person would buy SCO stock, I'm stumped to guess why it's as high as it is, and twice as stumped to say exactly when it will go down.
You might be all set to short-sell SCO stock, and then Darl McBride might announce that SCO actually owns UNIX, BSD, Windows, MacOS, and CP/M; SCO stock doubles overnight and your short-sale, instead of making you money, loses you a lot of money.
steveha
However, until the day comes that everyone uses Linux (or finds a way around Billy Boy's "evil empire")
:-)
It's here and it's called Debian GNU/Linux
There. Can I get moderated "Insightful" too now?
steveha
Hear, hear.
I still use JPilot, even though I use Evolution, because I really want access to my notes.
Evolution developers: please add a "notes" feature to Evolution. Just like on a Palm PDA, the first line of the note should be treated as a title, and there should be a title view for picking a memo. There should be searching within the memo text. The memo feature should use the same character set as the Palm uses so that accents and such display correctly.
P.S. JPilot has plugins, and I'd like to see the same plugins for Evolution. The top one I want to see: Keyring, the password vault.
steveha
using doctored voting machines to elect Republicans directly helps the Republican owners
And if Democrat "activists" doctored some voting machines, that wouldn't help them? Wow, you've convinced me. Voting machines with no audit trails are only dangerous in Republican hands! You get a gold star for logical reasoning!
Believe what you will; I've spent enough time on this. Have a nice life.
steveha
I suppose, then, that Microsoft is writing the viruses and worms that attack Windows and IE? It "would be far easier" for them to do it.
Machines with no audit trail are at risk of fraud, period. You don't need to single out the Republicans as possible villains.
steveha
As it stands, the owners of these companies (who heavily back the Republicans) have carte blanche to steal elections
Or, Democrat "activists" could hack the machines to steal elections. Or, renegade Libertarians could hack the machines to give the election to the Libertarian candidate. Or maybe Ross Perot can finally win.
If there's no auditing, that is BAD, and it doesn't matter which political party you hate the most. Leave the whole Republican/Democrat thing out of this discussion.
steveha
I enjoyed the Honor Harrington books. You might, too, if you enjoy reading about heroic people doing heroic things. Honor Harrington is a heroic character: she isn't perfect, but she feels a strong sense of duty and does her best to do her duty. And her best turns out to be very good indeed.
If you are at all interested in the Honor Harrington books, check out the Baen Free Library. The first book is On Basilisk Station. (That link is to the HTML version; there are several downloadable versions as well.)
Take a look and decide for yourself whether these books are for you.
steveha
Even great directors "borrow" material.
But I saw that episode of BSG and it was not a case of borrowing; it was jacking the plot, filing off the serial numbers, and using it almost unchanged. IIRC there was even a little kid, like in Shane, idolizing the BSG guy. It was bad.
Of course, I was a teenaged kid at the time, and I really wanted to like the show, so at the time I insisted it wasn't really a Shane ripoff. I was wrong.
P.S. IIRC it was Apollo, not Starbuck, who was the Shane standin. But it doesn't really matter.
steveha