There must be at least one slashdotter who could dream up a use for NASA software.
My first reaction was along the lines of "hunh?? Is he kidding"
I could easily see a lot of interesting things coming out of NASA labs and projects...
the rover autonav software could probably find a lot of uses in various areas of robotics..
Imaging... anybody have even a rough estimate of the number of images that nasa has collected ?? I don't even have to look to be able to guess that they have stuff for cataloging, anotating, organizing arranging, regestering, color correcting, etc.etc.etc.
GIS systems
simulations of all sorts
They probably have software for doing orbital mechanics work (both rough and fine) down to a finer art than most of us thought possible.
there are probably aeronautical engineers who would slobber over work that they didn't even know that NASA had put together.
We might even get some interesting open-source project planning and communication software out of them.
sound filtering systems... and weak signal recovery in general
Some stuff, although not strictly useful right now is likely to be of some historical interest (if they can still recover it from backups).
If we got full access to all of their software and it was properly categorized, I'm guessing that almost every slashdotter would find something in there that was at least somewhat interesting.
So, other than power cycling (due to either weather or moving), your machine 'almost never reboots'... Still, in the Unix world rebooting every 2 monts or so still doesn't qualify as 'rarely'.. This differs greatly from the Windows world, where powering off every time you get up to go for coffee isn't entirely unheard of. Once you get stable (and perhaps buy yourself a UPS), you'll probably find that going 6 months without a reboot isn't at all strange.
I dual boot my main box once in a while to play a Windows game (still not supported under wine). Other than that, the prime reasons for rebooting my box are: accidently knocked the power cable loose digging for something else; hardware changes ; playing with new kernels or installing new distributions.
..look at the top 50 uptimes [netcraft.com] though. It's almost all BSD based OSs with a smattering of Linux.
That's because BSD/OS has about the same stability as Linux, but doesn't wrap it's uptime counter at 490 days. If Linux's counter didn't wrap, then I'd expect you to see a mix of BSD and Linux in the top 50. The Cable & Wireless 'linux' boxes 1000+ days uptime are most probably BSD boxes behind a Linux firewall, or something of that nature.
(they have notes on how their OS guesses can sometimes be wrong).
Init scripts concern my very little because I almost never reboot..... my Gentoo box is nearing a month of uptime.
A month? You're not even getting close to full bragging rights. I have one friend who lamented haveing to reboot his Sun after 3 years of uptime (had to flick a dip switch), and another spitting fire because someone at his colo provider f*cked up with the UPS system just about the time his box was set to bread one year of uptime.
Netcraft notes that Linux (among others) has this minor bug in that the uptime counter wraps every 497.1 days. (units 2^32seconds/100 days) You can see it happening regulary in some of their uptime charts. Their "top 50" website uptimes range from 1000 to 1500 days.
For those of you not paying full attention to the areticle, this guy is fine with paying for his software (Oracle licenses, for example are rarely cheap). He's even willing to plug his nose and install a Windows server if necessary.
What he's ticked about is having to put Windows on every desktop because the client end only works on IE (guh!).
I think that you'll still need to get the maintenence handled... Unless you intend to handle the entire apartment building on a $75/month DSL line, (which will spend most of it's time saturated) the money you have left over will get eaten up on bandwidth charges pretty quick.
You may want to seed the first couple of month's worth of usage just to get your neighbours 'hooked' on the idea, but sooner or later you'll need to have them pitching in on the ongoing charges.
For anybody doing any amount of gaming, $10/month to get a 10meg line into the building, with all of the capital costs covered would be one hot steal. If you're really lucky one of them may even offer to hand engrave a plaque thanking your aunt for her bequest.
I really have to agree here.. 48 appartments comes to about $20. each for the wiring and APs another $10/month each would cover a decent high speed hookup to the building. If you want to cover any spare change above that, then go ahead. If it's a condo building, take the idea to the strata council. If it's rental suggest it to the landlord... I'm guessing that it'll make the apartments that much more salable.
Given that you had to ask the question, I'd guess that you could probably use some help.
If you're not used to running and terminating CAT5 cable, then I suggest that you find someone to work with you who is.. as somebody else pointed out, the expensive part would be paying someone to do that part commercially. It's not really that hard, but having someone who knows what they're doing (and perhaps even has their own tester) would really help.
You should also take a look at what it'll take to secure the wires properly to the shaft wall. If they come loose, the elevator won't even notice as it's shredding your cat[56] to kingdom come.
To find out if you can get away with one AP per one or 2 floors, set up an access point near the elevator, and then beg access to some corner suites on that floor and the floors above and below. Even if you can (theoretically) get away with it, I wouldn't suggest less than 1 AP per 2 floors.... otherwise you'll run into bandwidth saturation problems (presuming you're not trying to service the entire building with a 1 Mbit DSL connection).
It's like the difference between 1.853metres and THIS tall. Unless you're in a (rare) situation where that last 3mm makes a difference, then this tall will probably do a better job of getting across just how tall that blonde you just missed was.
Time is a measure, not a number. If you want to know that it's exactly 3:59pm, then a digital display is fine. If you want to know how long you have until it's 3:59, then analog is the way to go..
With a digital clock you have to read the number do the math and then figure out what the resulting number means. That's too much work if your real attention is on something else.
With an analog clock you just note the distance. As that distance gets smaller, so does your time left.. simple as that.
If I have to wake up at a specific time without (or ahead of) an alarm clock, I'll look at the time, convert to analog if necessary (I have a digital watch) and imagine the movement that has to occur between now and when I have to wake up... then I'll go to sleep and wake up at the apointed time.
Dunno why it works. I read it in a (fiction) book once, and tried it. It worked, so I kept it in my bag of tricks.
From what we hear in the news, it's armageddon on the streets, but as these interviews show, there is far more to the story.
The big news media is about delivering eyes to advertisers, not news to the people. Peace On Earth and Goodwill to All Men does not get viewers. As such it does not get reported.
I've been on the inside of enough news stories to be clear that what's reported in the news is unlikely to be whe whole story, and not unlikely to be quite inaccurate.
While I'm on the blame Microsoft kick, I'd also like to point out that MS didn't put a bounty on the DOOM-A, which affected a much larger number of their customers... They only have a bounty on doom-B which is affecting far fewer customers, but inconveniencing Redmond.
Glock Smith & wesson doesn't make glock. Linus doesn't Make Windows. Neither does he write viruses (Microsoft anti-gpl blathering notwithstanding).
Whomever wrote the virus simply knew that Darl would blame Linux supporters and distract people from the fact that this virus was written designed to turn Microsoft boxes into spam-support units.
www A 127.0.0.1
on
SCO Offline
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Given that they knew this was coming, and knew that they didn't have the bandwidth/CPU to handle the masssive overload, why didn't SCO Just set the A record for their website to 127.0.0.1 for a couple of days?? Either that or 192.168.42.42... With the former, a virus infected machine would simply attack itself. With the later, it would try to contact a well known address which would allow sysadmins to find any infected machine (and remove the virus) by simply looking for references to the address.
If there were no copyrights, you can bet the NYT would not be putting content on the Internat unless it was protected with DRM.
Misplaced agression.
The problem isn't the existence of copyright, it is the abuse of the idea.
If there were no copyright, there would be no GPL either (the GPL depends on copyright for its ability to force sharing).
Copyrights that run for 7 generations, chilled political debates, supression of even discussions about encryption algorithms, and forcing the removal of entire websites without sending so much as a sniff past a judge are things that would probably leave Jefferson et.al. spinning in their graves.
From the article:
Thomas Jefferson, for one, considered copyright a necessary evil: he favored providing just enough incentive to create, nothing more, and thereafter allowing ideas to flow freely as nature intended.
''If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property,'' he wrote, ''it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone.''
His conception of copyright was enshrined in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution,.....
If SCO stock tanks (yes, I'm treating it as a hypothetical), they will
probably have to face lawsuits from some of their own disgruntled shareholders
The only people who could sue SCO execs for the stock tanking would be the oldtime stockholders, and they'll have to wait until it drops below about $.50 to sue. The rest came in on the speculation that SCO would win their case against IBM.
For othose who bought in at $5~$20, about the only grounds for a suit would be that Darl was greatly exagerating the stack of 'evidence' that SCO had of Linux violations. In any case, I'm not denying your suggestion.. I'm just pointing out that they'll take years to run thru and, in the middle of that, SCO could spin off a bushwacker.
If you don't have the time, pay someone that does. In a day it did everything that it said it could. In a few days it did exactly everything I wanted it to.
Paying a nerd to do this would cost you about $200. How much did the Wintendos software cost?
Capital isn't that big of a problem.. They got the $50M infusion which I'm expecting to see go mostly into litigation. That'll last them a good bit of time. Even if IBM wins that suit, and counter-suit, hands down next month, SCO can still hold off payment in appeals court for a number of years.
In the meantime, I don't see the Linux community giving Darl's legal "pronouncements" much more credence than the meaningless babbling of a harmless old fool by years' end (in fact, we're almost there already).
I think that they're going to keep doing their dumb shit until the Linux community has learned to completely ignore them. Then, one day, they're going to do something that has some real legal power behind it, and the entire Linux community is going to get blindsided.
The $10,000 request was a "Piss off, I'm not selling it, and this should be high enough to disuade you". Problem is, he wasn't aware that the price isn't entirely unreasonable. I had one friend sell his domain for $35K and another sold his domain for $15 (admittedly, during the.com boom).
$10Million would have been more along the lines of "piss of and don't bother me". Unfortunately, he's a bit young, and so $10K seemed outrageous.
You seem to be implying time and again that it is irrelevant for us to make a moral judgement... e.g. to state that it is wrong to murder innocent people. By what do you measure justice, if not by your own morals?
I'm fine with saying that it's wrong to kill innocents, but where I draw the line is saying that it's more wrong for them to kill innocents than it is for us.
An example would be trying to justify the US blowing up the better part of a city block in a (failed) attempt to kill someone who we supported for the better part of a decade, sold WMD technologies to, barely managed a whimper of protest when he used them, and then let him fly his helicopter gunships to put down the popular rebellion that started in response to Desert Storm.
It's OK for us to pay and train Bin Ladin to blow up Soviet troops occupying Afghanistan, but when his followers are doing the same things to US troops occupying Iraq, they're the devil incarnate.
Leviticus says that we should treat the rights of foreigners with as much reverence as the rights of our own people (It's right afte the oft-quoted "eye for an eye" line, among other places), but we support Israel in treating Palistinians with a racist policy that pales the Jim Crow laws of the US Deep South in the first 2/3ds of the 20th century. The predictibly violent and tragic result of that mistreatment of palistinians pretty much proves the law in the exception.
Then of course, there are the radical Muslims, with koranic laws against suicide and killing civilians they now have Clerics claiming that It's not only OK to kill yourself if you're blowing up civilians in the process -- it'll even get you into they're martyr heaven.
No. It's not morals that I object to, it's their uneven application.
If SCO is sending news services in Germany notes about their license fight with Linux, it seems to met that they'd be in violation of the German injunction. It might be time for LinuxTag to look into whether they can fetch a bounty for the fine that SCO gets for this.
Slashdot Mirror
My first reaction was along the lines of "hunh?? Is he kidding"
I could easily see a lot of interesting things coming out of NASA labs and projects...
- the rover autonav software could probably find a lot of uses in various areas of robotics..
- Imaging... anybody have even a rough estimate of the number of images that nasa has collected ?? I don't even have to look to be able to guess that they have stuff for cataloging, anotating, organizing arranging, regestering, color correcting, etc.etc.etc.
- GIS systems
- simulations of all sorts
- They probably have software for doing orbital mechanics work (both rough and fine) down to a finer art than most of us thought possible.
- there are probably aeronautical engineers who would slobber over work that they didn't even know that NASA had put together.
- We might even get some interesting open-source project planning and communication software out of them.
- sound filtering systems... and weak signal recovery in general
- Some stuff, although not strictly useful right now is likely to be of some historical interest (if they can still recover it from backups).
If we got full access to all of their software and it was properly categorized, I'm guessing that almost every slashdotter would find something in there that was at least somewhat interesting.And then study number two says that heavy internet use makes geeks feel better... again not a shock for those who do it.
You think we use computers to feel worse? We're geeks not masochists (at least, most of us)!
I dual boot my main box once in a while to play a Windows game (still not supported under wine). Other than that, the prime reasons for rebooting my box are: accidently knocked the power cable loose digging for something else; hardware changes ; playing with new kernels or installing new distributions.
That's because BSD/OS has about the same stability as Linux, but doesn't wrap it's uptime counter at 490 days. If Linux's counter didn't wrap, then I'd expect you to see a mix of BSD and Linux in the top 50. The Cable & Wireless 'linux' boxes 1000+ days uptime are most probably BSD boxes behind a Linux firewall, or something of that nature.
(they have notes on how their OS guesses can sometimes be wrong).
A month? You're not even getting close to full bragging rights. I have one friend who lamented haveing to reboot his Sun after 3 years of uptime (had to flick a dip switch), and another spitting fire because someone at his colo provider f*cked up with the UPS system just about the time his box was set to bread one year of uptime.
Netcraft notes that Linux (among others) has this minor bug in that the uptime counter wraps every 497.1 days. (units 2^32seconds/100 days) You can see it happening regulary in some of their uptime charts. Their "top 50" website uptimes range from 1000 to 1500 days.
What he's ticked about is having to put Windows on every desktop because the client end only works on IE (guh!).
You may want to seed the first couple of month's worth of usage just to get your neighbours 'hooked' on the idea, but sooner or later you'll need to have them pitching in on the ongoing charges.
For anybody doing any amount of gaming, $10/month to get a 10meg line into the building, with all of the capital costs covered would be one hot steal. If you're really lucky one of them may even offer to hand engrave a plaque thanking your aunt for her bequest.
It's misspelled the same way Bill Gates misspells it, so we should consider it a standard.
Given that you had to ask the question, I'd guess that you could probably use some help.
If you're not used to running and terminating CAT5 cable, then I suggest that you find someone to work with you who is.. as somebody else pointed out, the expensive part would be paying someone to do that part commercially. It's not really that hard, but having someone who knows what they're doing (and perhaps even has their own tester) would really help.
You should also take a look at what it'll take to secure the wires properly to the shaft wall. If they come loose, the elevator won't even notice as it's shredding your cat[56] to kingdom come.
To find out if you can get away with one AP per one or 2 floors, set up an access point near the elevator, and then beg access to some corner suites on that floor and the floors above and below. Even if you can (theoretically) get away with it, I wouldn't suggest less than 1 AP per 2 floors.... otherwise you'll run into bandwidth saturation problems (presuming you're not trying to service the entire building with a 1 Mbit DSL connection).
It's like the difference between 1.853metres and THIS tall. Unless you're in a (rare) situation where that last 3mm makes a difference, then this tall will probably do a better job of getting across just how tall that blonde you just missed was.
With a digital clock you have to read the number do the math and then figure out what the resulting number means. That's too much work if your real attention is on something else.
With an analog clock you just note the distance. As that distance gets smaller, so does your time left.. simple as that.
If I have to wake up at a specific time without (or ahead of) an alarm clock, I'll look at the time, convert to analog if necessary (I have a digital watch) and imagine the movement that has to occur between now and when I have to wake up... then I'll go to sleep and wake up at the apointed time.
Dunno why it works. I read it in a (fiction) book once, and tried it. It worked, so I kept it in my bag of tricks.
The big news media is about delivering eyes to advertisers, not news to the people. Peace On Earth and Goodwill to All Men does not get viewers. As such it does not get reported.
I've been on the inside of enough news stories to be clear that what's reported in the news is unlikely to be whe whole story, and not unlikely to be quite inaccurate.
$ host www.sco.com
Host www.sco.com not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)
In my view, this is going to result in a much higher load on their name server than a localhost address with an 8 hour TTL.
On the other hand, sco.com still has an address (but is extremely slow).
does anybody know what was the address of sco.com? I'd like to check my firewall logs to see if/how many machines are infected.
While I'm on the blame Microsoft kick, I'd also like to point out that MS didn't put a bounty on the DOOM-A, which affected a much larger number of their customers... They only have a bounty on doom-B which is affecting far fewer customers, but inconveniencing Redmond.
Whomever wrote the virus simply knew that Darl would blame Linux supporters and distract people from the fact that this virus was written designed to turn Microsoft boxes into spam-support units.
Given that they knew this was coming, and knew that they didn't have the bandwidth/CPU to handle the masssive overload, why didn't SCO Just set the A record for their website to 127.0.0.1 for a couple of days?? Either that or 192.168.42.42... With the former, a virus infected machine would simply attack itself. With the later, it would try to contact a well known address which would allow sysadmins to find any infected machine (and remove the virus) by simply looking for references to the address.
Misplaced agression.
The problem isn't the existence of copyright, it is the abuse of the idea.
If there were no copyright, there would be no GPL either (the GPL depends on copyright for its ability to force sharing).
Copyrights that run for 7 generations, chilled political debates, supression of even discussions about encryption algorithms, and forcing the removal of entire websites without sending so much as a sniff past a judge are things that would probably leave Jefferson et.al. spinning in their graves.
From the article:
The only people who could sue SCO execs for the stock tanking would be the oldtime stockholders, and they'll have to wait until it drops below about $.50 to sue. The rest came in on the speculation that SCO would win their case against IBM.
For othose who bought in at $5~$20, about the only grounds for a suit would be that Darl was greatly exagerating the stack of 'evidence' that SCO had of Linux violations. In any case, I'm not denying your suggestion.. I'm just pointing out that they'll take years to run thru and, in the middle of that, SCO could spin off a bushwacker.
Paying a nerd to do this would cost you about $200. How much did the Wintendos software cost?
In the meantime, I don't see the Linux community giving Darl's legal "pronouncements" much more credence than the meaningless babbling of a harmless old fool by years' end (in fact, we're almost there already).
I think that they're going to keep doing their dumb shit until the Linux community has learned to completely ignore them. Then, one day, they're going to do something that has some real legal power behind it, and the entire Linux community is going to get blindsided.
The $10,000 request was a "Piss off, I'm not selling it, and this should be high enough to disuade you". Problem is, he wasn't aware that the price isn't entirely unreasonable. I had one friend sell his domain for $35K and another sold his domain for $15 (admittedly, during the .com boom).
$10Million would have been more along the lines of "piss of and don't bother me". Unfortunately, he's a bit young, and so $10K seemed outrageous.
No longer can calling someone "a vegtable" imply total lack of brain activity.
I'm fine with saying that it's wrong to kill innocents, but where I draw the line is saying that it's more wrong for them to kill innocents than it is for us.
An example would be trying to justify the US blowing up the better part of a city block in a (failed) attempt to kill someone who we supported for the better part of a decade, sold WMD technologies to, barely managed a whimper of protest when he used them, and then let him fly his helicopter gunships to put down the popular rebellion that started in response to Desert Storm.
It's OK for us to pay and train Bin Ladin to blow up Soviet troops occupying Afghanistan, but when his followers are doing the same things to US troops occupying Iraq, they're the devil incarnate.
Leviticus says that we should treat the rights of foreigners with as much reverence as the rights of our own people (It's right afte the oft-quoted "eye for an eye" line, among other places), but we support Israel in treating Palistinians with a racist policy that pales the Jim Crow laws of the US Deep South in the first 2/3ds of the 20th century. The predictibly violent and tragic result of that mistreatment of palistinians pretty much proves the law in the exception.
Then of course, there are the radical Muslims, with koranic laws against suicide and killing civilians they now have Clerics claiming that It's not only OK to kill yourself if you're blowing up civilians in the process -- it'll even get you into they're martyr heaven.
No. It's not morals that I object to, it's their uneven application.
If SCO is sending news services in Germany notes about their license fight with Linux, it seems to met that they'd be in violation of the German injunction. It might be time for LinuxTag to look into whether they can fetch a bounty for the fine that SCO gets for this.