This is another of those disgusting Slashdot pseudo-science articles. The warning about metal and lightning has nothing particularly to do with cell phones.
The article itself is all about cell phones and lightning. From the title, "Hang up your cell or get hit by lightning. Don't use your mobile phone outdoors in a storm, doctors warn," to the very end, ""The Australian Lightning Protection Standard recommends that metallic objects, including cordless or mobile phones, should not be used (or carried) outdoors during a thunderstorm," Esprit added. " If it's silly, blame the source M$NBC and Reuters and perhaps link to a more reasonable authority.
Slashdot editors apparently spent their entire childhoods playing video games, and didn't learn anything about the real world.
They should have done like you, Futurepower, and played outside enough to know about lightning from first hand experience. What, the Gods have not struck you down yet? There is no justice.
... a year ago... [Aruba] were already bragging about getting the Microsoft account. That said we didn't go with Aruba, mostly because their pricing was pretty Microsoft-esque. In other words, worse than a prison shower.
It's good to see that Microsoft, like everyone else, is willing to pay the big bucks for the best the market has to offer, even though they have their own line of wireless devices and software. You can understand how they would not want to advertise their sideline romance with free software.
Expect to see the price of Microsoft's wireless equipment plummet. It never sold well anyway did it?
your kid's school (BSA) Please provide proof of this. Thanks.
That's funny because I love to point out how the non free software way is anti-social by pointing to just that. Yes, the BSA has sued public schools for copying text editors. The dumb ass administration handed worker bees M$ Word Docs without purchasing Word for them. The BSA set up exam time ambushes, which cost everyone tons of money and heartache. The same threat is still held over every public school, just like any other place people use non free software. The suits are public record and articles like this one are easy to find.
Pardon my ignorance, but isn't Mono on the wrong side of the fence?... I mean, isn't Mono just an implementation of a MS technology that's already encumbered by many patents?
It's more of a damaged weapon than anything else. Use it if you can and fight to keep it. It might be loose, but you can't just surrender everything that's challenged. The whole point of free software is to be able to use your computer as you see fit. That includes running whatever code you want for whatever purpose you have. I don't have any use for Mono, but others might and I'm glad someone is working on interoperability.
Yes, the war includes all kinds of media and it's creators. Programmers have been joined by all kinds of artists and creators. There's a free media revolution going on. The incumbents have shown their hand and it stinks.
And who says it's a war anyway?
Microsoft and big publishers say it's a war. The goal is TV and Radio broadcast style control of all media. They will sue you in your home (RIAA), at your business (SCO), and at your kid's school (BSA). They don't really care what you do, but they will try their best to have you do as they say.
The goal is to take your money without your consent for any information exchange. You will pay for a M$ license each time you buy a computer. You will pay per minute or byte of conversation on any electronic device, per play of your music, movies novels and textbooks. Your taxes will pay to encoded your information into secret formats and pay again to retrieve it. The new media, paradoxally, will be more expensive and restricted than it's analog and physical predecessors. All of these intentions have been openly declared and loudly demanded by all of the bad actors.
If that's not a declaration of war, I'm not sure what is. The less you know and care, the easier it will be for them to make the world as they wish.
The world does not have to be that way. People do not mind sharing if it cost them nothing and brings greater returns. Excellence thrives in competition and everyone prospers. Success stories are the whole free software movement, which has obliterated the need for non free, and free media: archive.org and creative commons instead of the big three music publishers; YouTube instead of TV; VOIP instead of Telco; Wikipedia instead of expensive paper publications. The economics of electronic data exchange doom the monopoly publishers unless they pass truly unAmerican laws. Fight the bastards by not giving your money to those who would enslave you.
What will really make me laugh is when the majority start using Linux. Right now "Microsoft Linux Users Group" only turns up three results. It's close to being a Google whack but the results are fun to look at: freedompc.com and a Microsoft Boycot site. Ha ha.
Clearly the solution for stopping people finding security holes is to make distributing open source hacking tools illegal.
That's a bad joke, please? Bad because people might get ideas. Makers of crappy devices will soon say much the same. It makes me ill.
The real solution, of course, is to avoid crappy closed source drivers. Efforts such as ndis wrapper, while a nice, bring closed source fragility to free software. Free drivers, when broken will be fixed. Good luck getting a fix for that ancient POS you bought at the CompUSA taken care of.
Sticking your head in the sand won't fix your closed source driver. Free tools will help find the problem. Not having the tool won't make the problem disappear and the kinds of people who would bother with a "drive by" will keep doing it despite any silly laws.
When I used to subscribe to AOL 1.0 they made you call to cancel. There was never a way to do it online.
Do you really think AOL would give Bill an easy way to cancel all of AOL's customers? The wait might be made longer than required, but the phone call itself is a necessary safeguard in a Windoze world.
An M$NBC article bashing AOL, that too is an old story. It would not surprise me if M$ paid people to call all day long and cancel their AOL just to get that recording. That's not beyond a company like Microsoft which has made up all sorts of stories about competitors in the past. "You are annoying the shit out of me." - dude where's the chair crashing noises followed by "I'm going to Fucking Kill AOL, I've done it before and I'll do it again"?
Any kind of big media company... want to actively encourage other people to release their creative works under very free licenses. Preferably, BSD-style
The old, "What's ours is ours and what yours is ours, thanks for giving" license.
Microsoft and others love that and this tool reflects that love. The choices are restricted and the defaults are just what M$ would like:
"Allow commercial use of your work" is first with a default of "yes".
"Allow modification of your work" is the ONLY other option, with a default of "Yes"
Attribution choices are missing which would make this a 2.5 license only. Indeed, OO2 shows a link to the 2.5 license page defined by the author. The defaults are very similar to earlier BSD licenses, which Microsoft loves and encourages.
Cnet's description, "This window allows people to set restrictions on use," is amazing because the defaults do everything to strip away all control and allow maximum exploitation.
The beer industry does not seem to be suffering from the fact that it's illegal to supply liquor to minors; the porn industry does not seem to have been stifled by the fact that Walmart does not stock hardcore videos.
Actually, both of those industries have suffered terribly from crappy local and federal laws designed to "protect minors". Ask yourself why you can't purchase wine over the internet from small vineyards in California or France. Ask youself where all the local breweries have gone. The control of alcohol has severely limited the quality and choice you have when you want any. I'm no friend of the porn industry, but they too suffer from an amazing and contradictory raft of both specific and vague legislation. You can read about their complaints in xbiz.
The state of both of those industries show that specific laws can suck too. In the case of alcohol, the federal government ruled that brewers must respect each local law. This is not only contradicts former notions of state interference with interstate commerce, it's also unreasonably complex and expensive to comply with. Even if you could comply, good luck finding a shipper. See UPS shipping terms for an example. The porn industry suffers similarly, even online where federal laws are being written specifically to burden the industry.
These laws waste enforcement resources for little public good.
You can brag about Lotus Notes all you want, but that was developed from scratch when you can make the proper design decisions. But with Windows being bloated and out of control, you just can't clean it up and make it more simple... can you?
In true M$ style, they will simply purchase Notes to simplify things.
Yes, that's a joke. Thinking they could just buy their way to success by shutting down their competition and slapping what was left all together in one poorly tied knot is how they ended up in this mess. When you add all of the anti-competitive hooks and crazy file formats, what you are left with is XP. Try to DRM it and make it look nice and you get the 10GB boat anchor that is VISTA.
I think you missunderstood the meaning of M$ "outreach". What they really mean is do whatever they can to keep it out of your reach. This includes pretending to be friendly while screwing you harder.
The write up is essentially a FUD piece designed to cast blame on free software for interoperability problems. Anyone who knows the first thing about programming will know that the problems are all created on the closed side. The idea that they can't even look at free source code because of "legal issues" is a laughably stupid part of their FUD campaign. Anyone with any memory will remember Microsoft Unix interoperability from the 90s and how that went. Their attitude towards free software is well reflected in their funding of the SCO fiasco and their continuing "Get the Facts" nonsense.
CDs are getting increasingly poor mastering and engineering applied to them. Just because something is digital doesn't mean it sounds good.
The point is that new technology will remove rights people are used to and enjoy. My digital copy is just as good as the original but that's just the beginning. I can give you exactly what the big three dumb music companies can. If they make it crappy to thwart copying, the competition can do it better and I can still give you the same crap. Either way, they have lost the distribution monopoly 1920's radio technology and bad laws gave them. Enter BS like the broadcast flag and other anti-copying legislation and what most people consider fair use goes into the toilet and we all take a trip back to 1930. No one really wants to go that far back, so the EFF has put that right up front. All of us still expect to be able to share our music with our friends. That we won't be able to in the future, even if we hold onto ancient tape decks, is shocking.
That the analog hole can be closed to anything but the crappiest techniques is news. Most people don't know that they can't make a tape recording of their DVDs. Sooner or later the bastard child of DRM will eliminate the analog rights we have and copyright, which demands that protected works enter the public domain at some point, will be completely without justification or purpose.
Sure you can keep it up for hours. See here for a quick run down on human powered flight. Now consider the fact that a lawn mower, with it's tiny tank, provides ten to twenty times as much power as you can sustain and does it for hours on end. It's not far from there to the whole ultralight aircraft industry.
Those things are too dangerous for me but are lots of fun for those who fly them. I like something with a little more power to get out of trouble. Ultralights get blown around and where the wind blows is not always good for you.
On the other hand, the HP one uses small blades that are shorter and that spin faster. As such they create more thrust/airflow and reduce noise that normal blades produce from the tips of their blades.
That's about all the article says.
The key ingredient to a ducted fan is efficient expansion. Any old array of twisted parts can propell air. I read another article and fabricated such a thing from Dixie cups. After your rotor comes the stator, a very important component missing from ordinary fans, which removes the angular component of the flow velocity. You want to move the air down your axis not around it. Getting the air moving along the axis and expanding it out to larger volumes without wasting your effort is hard to do. Adding any stator will help. Doing it quietly and efficiently is one of those rocket science things.
Women don't know about linux because Linux users don't have girlfriends!
That would only be true if women knew nothing about computers on their own. This proves that you know nothing about women and even less about Linux users.
Neo: I thought you were a man
Trinity: Most men do.
The parent post gives the "booted to the login screen" tidbit as if it's a bug or flaw, but it's actually a security feature and there by design. It makes it impossible for someone to remote desktop to someone else's machine and watch/record them putting in credit card numbers and such.
Is there anyone in the world dumb enough to actually believe that? M$ spokesvole, "Drool, drool, because there's only one elektronik desktop we don't want people to share the GUI resources. Sharing would be a security violation aloving the few secrets not already stolen by browser, email, messenger, pnp idiotzy, drool, born keyloggers to slip off the desktop into the vilelan's hands. Teh only other way to do things would be to simply export the process like any other but that would let people share M$ Word, a horrible financial security threat to us." It's all in your best interest, you see, to have such crappy networking.
People need to start focusing on code density. By code density, I mean how much thought goes into each line you write.
In the M$ case, they need to think harder about the code they buy. Oh wait, there's nothing being created on Windoze worth buying these days. Slim pickings and having to do it themselves is the real reason Vista is taking so long.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, thanks, I missed that. It's been a while since I've seen any Microsoft networking gear. Now it makes sense.
This is another of those disgusting Slashdot pseudo-science articles. The warning about metal and lightning has nothing particularly to do with cell phones.
The article itself is all about cell phones and lightning. From the title, "Hang up your cell or get hit by lightning. Don't use your mobile phone outdoors in a storm, doctors warn," to the very end, ""The Australian Lightning Protection Standard recommends that metallic objects, including cordless or mobile phones, should not be used (or carried) outdoors during a thunderstorm," Esprit added. " If it's silly, blame the source M$NBC and Reuters and perhaps link to a more reasonable authority.
Slashdot editors apparently spent their entire childhoods playing video games, and didn't learn anything about the real world.
They should have done like you, Futurepower, and played outside enough to know about lightning from first hand experience. What, the Gods have not struck you down yet? There is no justice.
It's good to see that Microsoft, like everyone else, is willing to pay the big bucks for the best the market has to offer, even though they have their own line of wireless devices and software. You can understand how they would not want to advertise their sideline romance with free software.
Expect to see the price of Microsoft's wireless equipment plummet. It never sold well anyway did it?
your kid's school (BSA) Please provide proof of this. Thanks.
That's funny because I love to point out how the non free software way is anti-social by pointing to just that. Yes, the BSA has sued public schools for copying text editors. The dumb ass administration handed worker bees M$ Word Docs without purchasing Word for them. The BSA set up exam time ambushes, which cost everyone tons of money and heartache. The same threat is still held over every public school, just like any other place people use non free software. The suits are public record and articles like this one are easy to find.
Your Welcome
Reality:
twitter is a known troll and a hyperbolic shill
Shill for who, Asstroturfer? Yes, I do mean the two "s" version.
Pardon my ignorance, but isn't Mono on the wrong side of the fence? ... I mean, isn't Mono just an implementation of a MS technology that's already encumbered by many patents?
It's more of a damaged weapon than anything else. Use it if you can and fight to keep it. It might be loose, but you can't just surrender everything that's challenged. The whole point of free software is to be able to use your computer as you see fit. That includes running whatever code you want for whatever purpose you have. I don't have any use for Mono, but others might and I'm glad someone is working on interoperability.
It seems to be missing some things.
Yes, the war includes all kinds of media and it's creators. Programmers have been joined by all kinds of artists and creators. There's a free media revolution going on. The incumbents have shown their hand and it stinks.
And who says it's a war anyway?
Microsoft and big publishers say it's a war. The goal is TV and Radio broadcast style control of all media. They will sue you in your home (RIAA), at your business (SCO), and at your kid's school (BSA). They don't really care what you do, but they will try their best to have you do as they say.
The goal is to take your money without your consent for any information exchange. You will pay for a M$ license each time you buy a computer. You will pay per minute or byte of conversation on any electronic device, per play of your music, movies novels and textbooks. Your taxes will pay to encoded your information into secret formats and pay again to retrieve it. The new media, paradoxally, will be more expensive and restricted than it's analog and physical predecessors. All of these intentions have been openly declared and loudly demanded by all of the bad actors.
If that's not a declaration of war, I'm not sure what is. The less you know and care, the easier it will be for them to make the world as they wish.
The world does not have to be that way. People do not mind sharing if it cost them nothing and brings greater returns. Excellence thrives in competition and everyone prospers. Success stories are the whole free software movement, which has obliterated the need for non free, and free media: archive.org and creative commons instead of the big three music publishers; YouTube instead of TV; VOIP instead of Telco; Wikipedia instead of expensive paper publications. The economics of electronic data exchange doom the monopoly publishers unless they pass truly unAmerican laws. Fight the bastards by not giving your money to those who would enslave you.
What will really make me laugh is when the majority start using Linux. Right now "Microsoft Linux Users Group" only turns up three results. It's close to being a Google whack but the results are fun to look at: freedompc.com and a Microsoft Boycot site. Ha ha.
Mr. Hitchcock speaks for himself about sample sizes and what not. How nice of him.
That's a bad joke, please? Bad because people might get ideas. Makers of crappy devices will soon say much the same. It makes me ill.
The real solution, of course, is to avoid crappy closed source drivers. Efforts such as ndis wrapper, while a nice, bring closed source fragility to free software. Free drivers, when broken will be fixed. Good luck getting a fix for that ancient POS you bought at the CompUSA taken care of.
Sticking your head in the sand won't fix your closed source driver. Free tools will help find the problem. Not having the tool won't make the problem disappear and the kinds of people who would bother with a "drive by" will keep doing it despite any silly laws.
Do you really think AOL would give Bill an easy way to cancel all of AOL's customers? The wait might be made longer than required, but the phone call itself is a necessary safeguard in a Windoze world.
An M$NBC article bashing AOL, that too is an old story. It would not surprise me if M$ paid people to call all day long and cancel their AOL just to get that recording. That's not beyond a company like Microsoft which has made up all sorts of stories about competitors in the past. "You are annoying the shit out of me." - dude where's the chair crashing noises followed by "I'm going to Fucking Kill AOL, I've done it before and I'll do it again"?
Any kind of big media company ... want to actively encourage other people to release their creative works under very free licenses. Preferably, BSD-style
The old, "What's ours is ours and what yours is ours, thanks for giving" license.
Microsoft and others love that and this tool reflects that love. The choices are restricted and the defaults are just what M$ would like:
Attribution choices are missing which would make this a 2.5 license only. Indeed, OO2 shows a link to the 2.5 license page defined by the author. The defaults are very similar to earlier BSD licenses, which Microsoft loves and encourages.
Cnet's description, "This window allows people to set restrictions on use," is amazing because the defaults do everything to strip away all control and allow maximum exploitation.
The beer industry does not seem to be suffering from the fact that it's illegal to supply liquor to minors; the porn industry does not seem to have been stifled by the fact that Walmart does not stock hardcore videos.
Actually, both of those industries have suffered terribly from crappy local and federal laws designed to "protect minors". Ask yourself why you can't purchase wine over the internet from small vineyards in California or France. Ask youself where all the local breweries have gone. The control of alcohol has severely limited the quality and choice you have when you want any. I'm no friend of the porn industry, but they too suffer from an amazing and contradictory raft of both specific and vague legislation. You can read about their complaints in xbiz.
The state of both of those industries show that specific laws can suck too. In the case of alcohol, the federal government ruled that brewers must respect each local law. This is not only contradicts former notions of state interference with interstate commerce, it's also unreasonably complex and expensive to comply with. Even if you could comply, good luck finding a shipper. See UPS shipping terms for an example. The porn industry suffers similarly, even online where federal laws are being written specifically to burden the industry.
These laws waste enforcement resources for little public good.
You can brag about Lotus Notes all you want, but that was developed from scratch when you can make the proper design decisions. But with Windows being bloated and out of control, you just can't clean it up and make it more simple... can you?
In true M$ style, they will simply purchase Notes to simplify things.
Yes, that's a joke. Thinking they could just buy their way to success by shutting down their competition and slapping what was left all together in one poorly tied knot is how they ended up in this mess. When you add all of the anti-competitive hooks and crazy file formats, what you are left with is XP. Try to DRM it and make it look nice and you get the 10GB boat anchor that is VISTA.
I think you missunderstood the meaning of M$ "outreach". What they really mean is do whatever they can to keep it out of your reach. This includes pretending to be friendly while screwing you harder.
The write up is essentially a FUD piece designed to cast blame on free software for interoperability problems. Anyone who knows the first thing about programming will know that the problems are all created on the closed side. The idea that they can't even look at free source code because of "legal issues" is a laughably stupid part of their FUD campaign. Anyone with any memory will remember Microsoft Unix interoperability from the 90s and how that went. Their attitude towards free software is well reflected in their funding of the SCO fiasco and their continuing "Get the Facts" nonsense.
We don't need no stinking jammers. The ghetto bird has met it's match. Blam! down it goes.
CDs are getting increasingly poor mastering and engineering applied to them. Just because something is digital doesn't mean it sounds good.
The point is that new technology will remove rights people are used to and enjoy. My digital copy is just as good as the original but that's just the beginning. I can give you exactly what the big three dumb music companies can. If they make it crappy to thwart copying, the competition can do it better and I can still give you the same crap. Either way, they have lost the distribution monopoly 1920's radio technology and bad laws gave them. Enter BS like the broadcast flag and other anti-copying legislation and what most people consider fair use goes into the toilet and we all take a trip back to 1930. No one really wants to go that far back, so the EFF has put that right up front. All of us still expect to be able to share our music with our friends. That we won't be able to in the future, even if we hold onto ancient tape decks, is shocking.
That the analog hole can be closed to anything but the crappiest techniques is news. Most people don't know that they can't make a tape recording of their DVDs. Sooner or later the bastard child of DRM will eliminate the analog rights we have and copyright, which demands that protected works enter the public domain at some point, will be completely without justification or purpose.
Sure you can keep it up for hours. See here for a quick run down on human powered flight. Now consider the fact that a lawn mower, with it's tiny tank, provides ten to twenty times as much power as you can sustain and does it for hours on end. It's not far from there to the whole ultralight aircraft industry.
Those things are too dangerous for me but are lots of fun for those who fly them. I like something with a little more power to get out of trouble. Ultralights get blown around and where the wind blows is not always good for you.
Don't forget the mind you have to lose first.
That's about all the article says.
The key ingredient to a ducted fan is efficient expansion. Any old array of twisted parts can propell air. I read another article and fabricated such a thing from Dixie cups. After your rotor comes the stator, a very important component missing from ordinary fans, which removes the angular component of the flow velocity. You want to move the air down your axis not around it. Getting the air moving along the axis and expanding it out to larger volumes without wasting your effort is hard to do. Adding any stator will help. Doing it quietly and efficiently is one of those rocket science things.
Wikipedia, of course, has a quick article,
and Google turns up an easy design text.Women don't know about linux because Linux users don't have girlfriends!
That would only be true if women knew nothing about computers on their own. This proves that you know nothing about women and even less about Linux users.
Neo: I thought you were a man
Trinity: Most men do.
Adda Lovelace, Jean Sammet and Rear Admiral Hopper would probably be Linux users today. My wife and daughter are.
Thanks for playing the double insult. I enjoy small minded prey.
The parent post gives the "booted to the login screen" tidbit as if it's a bug or flaw, but it's actually a security feature and there by design. It makes it impossible for someone to remote desktop to someone else's machine and watch/record them putting in credit card numbers and such.
Is there anyone in the world dumb enough to actually believe that? M$ spokesvole, "Drool, drool, because there's only one elektronik desktop we don't want people to share the GUI resources. Sharing would be a security violation aloving the few secrets not already stolen by browser, email, messenger, pnp idiotzy, drool, born keyloggers to slip off the desktop into the vilelan's hands. Teh only other way to do things would be to simply export the process like any other but that would let people share M$ Word, a horrible financial security threat to us." It's all in your best interest, you see, to have such crappy networking.
... and you will be able to run it in five minutes.
Five minutes pass.
GOTO LINE 1.
In the M$ case, they need to think harder about the code they buy. Oh wait, there's nothing being created on Windoze worth buying these days. Slim pickings and having to do it themselves is the real reason Vista is taking so long.