Here in Anchorage 3 mbit down 512 up DSL is over $100/month.
Here in the countryside near Kuopio (which has less than one third the population of Anchorage), we have fiber to the house with 100Mb down 10Mb up plus IP TV for slightly less than that (eur65/month). It would be even cheaper if we lived in Tampere or Turku, which are almost as big as Anchorage.
Those wallpapers are indeed attractive, and I might actually use them on a home desktop, but you're just dreaming if you think they're appropriate for a corporate desktop. Artful or not, you have to keep the naked people off the screens at work. Canonical made a good decision removing those. No harm in them being available on the web as an addon though.
True enough on the corporate point, which is probably why these were never the default wallpapers. In fact, they were not even installed by default. You had to manually install the ubuntu-calender wallpapers package to make them available, after which they could be selected as desktop wallpaper. Curiously, Canonical even removed the ubuntu-calender wallpapers package from the repositories later (around Hoary or Dapper, AFAIR). This was a pity, as they show that a brown background need not be dull, and can be quite pretty.
Oops, forgot to add the NSFW warning. However, the mentions of "prudish" and "body painting" should be adequate tip-offs.
I suspect the linked images are only mildly NSFW, even by prim North American standards. The calendar wallpapers are nudes, but not showing the naughty bits, while the girl with body paint is wearing pants as well as paints.
If they could stop all the child porn and stop all illegal downloads then i'd be all for it, but only if they can stop _only_ child porn, and _only_ illegal downloads, without any 'collatoral damage' of legal material.
Be careful what you wish for; you might get it.
Here's one ugly scenario for effectively blocking copyright-infringing downloads. All material to be made available for download must be registered with a government clearing house[*] before it can be offered for download. Scanning everything for signatures provided by registered copyright owners might introduce a small delay, of course, but that's the cost of making the internet safe from copyright-infringing perverts. Worse, downloads might be legal only if initiated via that clearing house using approved proprietary software, to prevent copyright-infringing perverts from sneakily switching content). Oh, and don't even think about making encrypted or otherwise unrecognizable material available for download - it would be blocked and investigated. After all, you've got nothing to hide, right?
Now, a resourceful person could still circumvent such a scheme, but the inconvenience would render the effort of limited use to typical users. The cost would also entail becoming a federal criminal, and the minimum penalty could be set quite high (20-to-life in a PMITA institution). Don't underestimate the dark side...
[*] Multiple sites distributed around the US to oppress^W protect domestic consumers, and at all points where the net enters the US to thwart illegal import or export of copyright content. A sort-of Great Copyright Wall of the USA. The notion could be extended in much the way the Chinese have developed their censorship barriers, given today's technologies.
I was really wondering about that speedgoat.ch link, it looks a bit like another popular link on/.
I actually checked it out, expecting to be able to post an outraged riposte about inflicting unwholesome holes on the unwary. Turns out that speedgoat.ch is just boring ordinary electronic geek-porn.
Doesn't mean much when your choices are the local cable monopoly or the local telco monopoly. It just makes three strikes into six.
If have the luxury of so many ISP choices. For some, it would still be three strikes.
Of course, if they said it only applied where the local ISP did NOT have a monopoly...
The patent application merely shows they know how to do such a thing. It does not mean that they plan to do so. Google has many unimplemented patents.
Maybe they will, and maybe they won't. But anyone who does will have to factor Google's patent application into their economic reckoning.
It'd be great to be able to project onto a wall for a spur-of-the-moment code discussion, etc. It seems like every time I'm in a meeting & want to share an idea or code snippet, etc. with the group, it happens to be in an area without a projector. If we could have a picoprojector on the backside of my laptop's LCD, you could project from there whenever you need...
Before long, you'd be invited to damn few meetings. You might be on to something there...
Really? In our area, the ISP announced a few years ago that they would not lay any new copper. All connections are now fiber only. That includes TV, telephone, and internet (with 20/2 and 100/10 services). The cost in laying fiber is not much different from laying copper, and the bandwidth is much higher, especially in the boonies.
This was a wise decision, as the "last mile" is the hardest to upgrade, so putting in capacity for the future means that it will not become a bottleneck for some time. The optical switch installed in our house has 8 cat6 (gigabit) ports, so they are probably providing future capacity there also. The present bottleneck is the upstream connection, which relies on a few 10Gbit switches for the fiber through each customer area. Upgrading those switches is much less costly than digging up hundreds of kilometers of "last mile" connections.
Same here. We have fiber to the house for a couple of years: 100/10 internet without caps/limits plus IP TV. The optical switch in our house has 8 cat6 ports, so there may be a future speed increase once the upstream is upgraded (apparently they use some 10Gbit switches for upstream). We use one port for the router/firewall on our protected LAN, another for the unprotected LAN (for our work laptops), and another for the IP TV digibox.
I still have a P3 working at home - it's a Dell Dimension XPS T450 from about 1998. It came originally with Windows 98, and over the years it has received extra RAM, new graphics, and so forth, so it now boasts 384MB RAM and an ATI Rage Pro, as well as a 20GB disk.
Actually, it's really in semi-retirement, as it's a bit slow for modern applications, but it is still on our LAN and occasionally roused from its grave^Wslumber. At one time, it had Win2000, which it could run OK, but it was a little sluggish running Office2000. Nowadays, it dual boots between Ubuntu/Gnome and PCLinuxOS/KDE, which are about as responsive as Win2000 was. It's fine for most web browsing, IRC, file viewing (graphics, PDF, PS, etc.), text editing, and suchlike. It can handle Gimp and Inkscape once the files being edited aren't too big, and can even run LaTeX well enough, but it sucks rocks trying to run OpenOffice.
Pay out once a month. One week before any money is actually transferred each subscriber gets an email with the previous month's clicks. Scammers can be detected and reported. You could have the subscribers confirm each click in the list after logging into the website, or just pay out the money unless the subscriber actively says otherwise.
That's a partial solution at best, and would still degrade the intended simplicity and spontaneity of flattr, since it would involve an extra effort by the donor. In many cases, the email would simply go unanswered, either through laziness or procrastination or lack of time or being rejected by a spam filter. Whether you set the default to paying or not paying, the whole objective is undermined.
Realistically, scammers will each have a long list of scam sites, so the typical email to a donor with an infected PC would have hundreds or thousands of sites listed. Most such sites would only have one or a few flattr clicks from any infected PC, and many scam sites would have names/domains almost like legitimate sites. Who's going to take the time to pick out the intended target such as google.com from a long list which also includes fakes like qoogle.com, gooqle.com, or qooqle.com? Having to go through a long list will generally result in either (i) all sites accepted, (ii) no sites accepted, (iii) first few sites examined and the remainder left at default, or (iv) email ignored with consequent payment or nonpayment to all.
Expending effort is the antithesis of the intended flattr method, so the scammers will win this one. The bastards.
At home, I use 1 APC UPS per PC, except for the laptop. These cheap units give about 30 minutes for the PC and its immediate peripherals (displays, external disks). The PCs run Ubuntu, and automatically recognized the UPS units when they were connected via USB ports. Another UPS powers the fiber switch, headless server, and router. Yet another keeps the network printer and an ethernet switch powered. Total of 4 APC UPS units and less than 350euro investment.
We need this, because we're in the countryside, where power glitches are depressingly common - but often last just a second or two. If the outage lasts until the UPS goes below 50%, then the systems shut down gracefully. By then, of course we would have saved any work in progress. Keeping the whole LAN in operation during this time is essential.
Slashdot Mirror
Here in Anchorage 3 mbit down 512 up DSL is over $100/month.
Here in the countryside near Kuopio (which has less than one third the population of Anchorage), we have fiber to the house with 100Mb down 10Mb up plus IP TV for slightly less than that (eur65/month). It would be even cheaper if we lived in Tampere or Turku, which are almost as big as Anchorage.
But anecdotes suck, in a way.
...transgender lesbian, and let Microsoft try to figure out what that means. They'd probably have to google it!
BTW, Google supplied this hint: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Transgender%20Lesbian
...transgender lesbian, and let Microsoft try to figure out what that means. They'd probably have to google it!
Yes but with Skinput, I would use my wife's keyboard and dual display more often.
And in return, she might use your joystick...
Those wallpapers are indeed attractive, and I might actually use them on a home desktop, but you're just dreaming if you think they're appropriate for a corporate desktop. Artful or not, you have to keep the naked people off the screens at work. Canonical made a good decision removing those. No harm in them being available on the web as an addon though.
True enough on the corporate point, which is probably why these were never the default wallpapers. In fact, they were not even installed by default. You had to manually install the ubuntu-calender wallpapers package to make them available, after which they could be selected as desktop wallpaper. Curiously, Canonical even removed the ubuntu-calender wallpapers package from the repositories later (around Hoary or Dapper, AFAIR). This was a pity, as they show that a brown background need not be dull, and can be quite pretty.
Oops, forgot to add the NSFW warning. However, the mentions of "prudish" and "body painting" should be adequate tip-offs.
I suspect the linked images are only mildly NSFW, even by prim North American standards. The calendar wallpapers are nudes, but not showing the naughty bits, while the girl with body paint is wearing pants as well as paints.
So Canonical are trying something different, for better or worse.
They tried different wallpapers before (calender wallpapers introduced with Breezy), just to prove that brown can indeed be beautiful. Alas, some prudish afterthoughts caused them to be discontinued (removed from Hoary).
http://hacktolive.org/w/images/Ubuntu-calendar-november-ws.jpg
http://hacktolive.org/w/images/Ubuntu-calendar-december-ws.jpg
http://hacktolive.org/w/images/Ubuntu-calendar-march-ws.jpg
Body painting was used to promote Linux at a show, but as far as I recall, Ubuntu was never brave enough to make a wallpaper on the theme: http://linuxologist.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/linux_body_painting_kl-300x278.jpg
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_jLaEIqL6T8Y/SNwXz548U6I/AAAAAAAABcU/SDCXCNMXVmE/s400/Linux_Body_Art.jpg
Makes me wish I hadn't discarded all my extra Bibles...
Contact the Gideon society. Offer to distribute a crate load of bibles to help convert the heathens at the university...
I think the clearinghouse you mentioned would constitute as being damaging to even legal material.
Unfortunately, that might even be viewed as a welcome consequence by those who would institute such a policy.
The digital letdown was when many of the top ideas generated by the process were to legalize marijuana
Or maybe that's because it's a worthwhile and viable policy objective
Get off my grass!
If they could stop all the child porn and stop all illegal downloads then i'd be all for it, but only if they can stop _only_ child porn, and _only_ illegal downloads, without any 'collatoral damage' of legal material.
Be careful what you wish for; you might get it.
Here's one ugly scenario for effectively blocking copyright-infringing downloads. All material to be made available for download must be registered with a government clearing house[*] before it can be offered for download. Scanning everything for signatures provided by registered copyright owners might introduce a small delay, of course, but that's the cost of making the internet safe from copyright-infringing perverts. Worse, downloads might be legal only if initiated via that clearing house using approved proprietary software, to prevent copyright-infringing perverts from sneakily switching content). Oh, and don't even think about making encrypted or otherwise unrecognizable material available for download - it would be blocked and investigated. After all, you've got nothing to hide, right?
Now, a resourceful person could still circumvent such a scheme, but the inconvenience would render the effort of limited use to typical users. The cost would also entail becoming a federal criminal, and the minimum penalty could be set quite high (20-to-life in a PMITA institution). Don't underestimate the dark side...
[*] Multiple sites distributed around the US to oppress^W protect domestic consumers, and at all points where the net enters the US to thwart illegal import or export of copyright content. A sort-of Great Copyright Wall of the USA. The notion could be extended in much the way the Chinese have developed their censorship barriers, given today's technologies.
Don't forget labor costs.
Labor with sufficient security clearance, proper technical certification, and adequate competence. It might be a "pick any two" situation...
I was really wondering about that speedgoat.ch link, it looks a bit like another popular link on /.
I actually checked it out, expecting to be able to post an outraged riposte about inflicting unwholesome holes on the unwary. Turns out that speedgoat.ch is just boring ordinary electronic geek-porn.
Doesn't mean much when your choices are the local cable monopoly or the local telco monopoly. It just makes three strikes into six.
If have the luxury of so many ISP choices. For some, it would still be three strikes.
Of course, if they said it only applied where the local ISP did NOT have a monopoly...
The patent application merely shows they know how to do such a thing. It does not mean that they plan to do so. Google has many unimplemented patents.
Maybe they will, and maybe they won't. But anyone who does will have to factor Google's patent application into their economic reckoning.
Apparently it came in from West to East,
I'd be surprised if it ever came in from any other direction...
It'd be great to be able to project onto a wall for a spur-of-the-moment code discussion, etc. It seems like every time I'm in a meeting & want to share an idea or code snippet, etc. with the group, it happens to be in an area without a projector. If we could have a picoprojector on the backside of my laptop's LCD, you could project from there whenever you need...
Before long, you'd be invited to damn few meetings. You might be on to something there...
In this case, "pico" refers to brain size.
Either of the marketeer who coined the term, or the intended customer. Or both.
the TFA
At least you didn't write "the TFA article"
but at that speed? That's pushing it...
Really? In our area, the ISP announced a few years ago that they would not lay any new copper. All connections are now fiber only. That includes TV, telephone, and internet (with 20/2 and 100/10 services). The cost in laying fiber is not much different from laying copper, and the bandwidth is much higher, especially in the boonies.
This was a wise decision, as the "last mile" is the hardest to upgrade, so putting in capacity for the future means that it will not become a bottleneck for some time. The optical switch installed in our house has 8 cat6 (gigabit) ports, so they are probably providing future capacity there also. The present bottleneck is the upstream connection, which relies on a few 10Gbit switches for the fiber through each customer area. Upgrading those switches is much less costly than digging up hundreds of kilometers of "last mile" connections.
Same here. We have fiber to the house for a couple of years: 100/10 internet without caps/limits plus IP TV. The optical switch in our house has 8 cat6 ports, so there may be a future speed increase once the upstream is upgraded (apparently they use some 10Gbit switches for upstream). We use one port for the router/firewall on our protected LAN, another for the unprotected LAN (for our work laptops), and another for the IP TV digibox.
I still have a P3 working at home - it's a Dell Dimension XPS T450 from about 1998. It came originally with Windows 98, and over the years it has received extra RAM, new graphics, and so forth, so it now boasts 384MB RAM and an ATI Rage Pro, as well as a 20GB disk.
Actually, it's really in semi-retirement, as it's a bit slow for modern applications, but it is still on our LAN and occasionally roused from its grave^Wslumber. At one time, it had Win2000, which it could run OK, but it was a little sluggish running Office2000. Nowadays, it dual boots between Ubuntu/Gnome and PCLinuxOS/KDE, which are about as responsive as Win2000 was. It's fine for most web browsing, IRC, file viewing (graphics, PDF, PS, etc.), text editing, and suchlike. It can handle Gimp and Inkscape once the files being edited aren't too big, and can even run LaTeX well enough, but it sucks rocks trying to run OpenOffice.
And after the forbidding, the oral ... reprimand!
Pay out once a month. One week before any money is actually transferred each subscriber gets an email with the previous month's clicks. Scammers can be detected and reported. You could have the subscribers confirm each click in the list after logging into the website, or just pay out the money unless the subscriber actively says otherwise.
That's a partial solution at best, and would still degrade the intended simplicity and spontaneity of flattr, since it would involve an extra effort by the donor. In many cases, the email would simply go unanswered, either through laziness or procrastination or lack of time or being rejected by a spam filter. Whether you set the default to paying or not paying, the whole objective is undermined.
Realistically, scammers will each have a long list of scam sites, so the typical email to a donor with an infected PC would have hundreds or thousands of sites listed. Most such sites would only have one or a few flattr clicks from any infected PC, and many scam sites would have names/domains almost like legitimate sites. Who's going to take the time to pick out the intended target such as google.com from a long list which also includes fakes like qoogle.com, gooqle.com, or qooqle.com? Having to go through a long list will generally result in either (i) all sites accepted, (ii) no sites accepted, (iii) first few sites examined and the remainder left at default, or (iv) email ignored with consequent payment or nonpayment to all.
Expending effort is the antithesis of the intended flattr method, so the scammers will win this one. The bastards.
At home, I use 1 APC UPS per PC, except for the laptop. These cheap units give about 30 minutes for the PC and its immediate peripherals (displays, external disks). The PCs run Ubuntu, and automatically recognized the UPS units when they were connected via USB ports. Another UPS powers the fiber switch, headless server, and router. Yet another keeps the network printer and an ethernet switch powered. Total of 4 APC UPS units and less than 350euro investment.
We need this, because we're in the countryside, where power glitches are depressingly common - but often last just a second or two. If the outage lasts until the UPS goes below 50%, then the systems shut down gracefully. By then, of course we would have saved any work in progress. Keeping the whole LAN in operation during this time is essential.