We're talking the office of the president, here -- where a trip to Hawaii probably results in $1M worth of planning. When the backup system starts to exceed that kind of price, you can start to cry to me about costs.
It's not at all uncommon to launch a lawsuit solely for the purpose of using it to get a 'temporary' injunction for something. Once the injunction is obtained, the purpose of the lawsuit is achieved and there is little, if any reason, to continue with the lawsuit to it's final result.
In this case, however, the injunction vanished, and the lawsuit was threatening to become a liability to the company. Making the lawsuit disappear minimizes the liability (but may not eliminate it).
Well, it's like the old communities that used to do 'barn-raisings'... When a new pioneer came into the area, the local neighbors would all gather together and help them build their barn. It had a number of beneficial effects for the community:
no one person had all the skills needed to build a barn
More people in the area with barns meant more resources for the entire community.
it was a community-building exercise.
over time, every body got helped anyways.
The one improvement of GPL software over barns, however, is that -- when someone comes up with a better way of making a door, everybody gets the new software door on their barn.
i.e. if I release my code to GPL, and somebody makes a new -- much nicer -- user interface, I get that new and improved interface. I don't have to be my own UI expert to get that.
and the advantage of having a community support my code instead of myself means that I can go on to the things that I am interested in..
and then, there's the old standby of just wanting to get my code out and used by somebody else. It essentially doesn't cost me anything, so why not? I can be like the dog with the straw, but why???... and if somebody can make some money supporting it, more money to the -- just as long as they don't expect me to do extra work for them for free.
Laptop: whatever fits your size and your price. if you don't need a speed demon, then those are likely to be your key points -- that and battery life. Nothing you can buy today is likely to be to slow for most work -- unless you get it with Vista. Linux, Windows XP or a Mac are your better choices in terms of OS.
cell phone: Don't ask me. Find someone who really cares about the different models. You'd probably be best with a combined phone/GPS rather than having two separate units.
Camera:
If you tend to travel into strange places, you might want to consider one of the waterproof/dustproof models. (I know that Pentax makes one)... It's not too good for zoom range but they have few exposed parts and can easily handle dirty/wet environments, if you want to take a picture in a (dust) storm. They also tend to be more able to take a physical beating.
Most small cameras, these days, take AA batteries -- You might also want to get some NiMH batteries and a charger that will take varied voltages. Many NiMH chargers also have a cord that will allow you to charge off of a cigarette lighter plug -- smaller and more universal. With a 15 minute charger and a cigarette lighter plug, you can charge your batteries on the way to/from... wherever. (also good for other units that take AA or AAA batteries).
(infected) Spamming computers don't get shut down because somebody's spying on them. Spamming computers get shut down because somebody's complaining about them.
I've written scripts that rip apart (spam) emails, peel apart the headers, figure out which ISP is responsible for the machines that sent them to my MX (via the ICANN records) and (where possible) sends an automated complaint email to the 'abuse' address of the responsible provider.
If they get a couple of hundred such complaints from various sources, they don't have to listen in on the customer's line to conclude that there's a problem. About the only reason to listen in on your line at that point is to prove you innocent of the (numerous) allegations against you (in the case of malicious complaints).
Find someone who's giving away an old P2 laptop. Get a second network card for it and put JUST the routing software on it. That way you have something that's small, low power and quiet running your border Then you can dedicate your larger box to it's real task and not have to worry about making gigabytes of storage available to the first hacker to find a hole in your setup.
escape velocity is not the same as instantaneous gravity. It's like the difference between running up a really steep hill, or a longer more gradual hill. Both can climb th same distance, and have the same 'escape' velocity (speed you have to be going at the bottom to coast to the top).
( note that my calculations are based on newtonian physics -- but, as
Ambitwistor pointed out relativity adds an additio0nal twist to the calculation).
Just as The Church was guilty of censorship when it was in power, now we having these scientists refusing to listen to another side of the issue.
I agree with whomever it is that said "The answer to bad speech is more speech, not censorship".
If these scientists had asked for the right to speak in answer to the Pope, I would have been all for it. Demanding that the Pope not speak, on the other hand just smacks of censorship. It's not just the pope who might be . "accusing us of refusing dialog." -- It's just about anybody who believes in free speech and open dialog.
It was early in The Age of Reason. Processes like empirical testing weren't any where near as entrenched and accepted as they are now. many people had no problem starting with what's taught in the bible (and other theological sources), and then extrapolating from there.
It's like if I told you that, the faster you go, the shorter (horizontally) you get. Lots of people still have a hard time wrapping their head around that one little side effect of Relativity theory.
If we were in the same space as them, we might just have had the same reaction as them... and thought ourselves completely sane and rational people in the process.
My bad, but the principle of my point (thankfully) still stands. (Getting facts straight is generally a good thing when you're complaining about someone else having them (maliciously) wrong.)
So, the gravitational curve that one would normally associate with orbital mechanics and acceleration is (roughly) as I calculated, but other relativistic effects mean that the acceleration needed to stay stationary diverges?
Last I heard, the vast majority of work on OpenOffice.org is done by Sun employees. You are obviously confusing ODF with OpenOffice.Org. OOO may be have a lot of SUN influence, but OOXML was developed independently of that process. Although it was based on the original OOO XML-based file format, it underwent extensive editing before it was accepted as a standard, and OO had to be changed to fit those changes. ODF is now controlled by ISO, and the various organizations that produce conforming software are expected and intended to follow that lead.
OOXML, on the other hand, is just a (rather grotty) documentaion of the format that MS back-ended onto Office 2007 (it's not even the default format) ssssssssssssss -- and even though Microsoft claims control of the format, they're not even willing to bind themselves to use it in the future.
This is a really clear case of the coal calling the steel black. (not even the pot calling the kettle).
TFA read:
Open XML is "more complex than ODF, but it's not unnecessarily complex for the contexts it was designed to address," Not unnecessarily complex?!!? freaks! The recent Errata for OOXML is almost six times the size of the full ODF documentation -- and, even then, OOXML docs are missing critical parts!
I'm surprised that the authors don't expect to get laughed out of the hall when they present this report -- even if it is on Microsoft soil.
My very first computer game (other than the arcade version of Pong) was a Radio Shack Model 1 Version 1 (4K ram with a grotty version of Basic). It did very rudimentary checks on cold-boot and could sometimes come up corrupted. As a result, when I tried to play the Blackjack game it had loaded on it, I always lost (( the random number generator was hooped and every card was the 11.5 of Clubs)).. By the time I figured out what was wrong, I had become the local computer guru.
I also got hooked.
The store manager allowed me to use the computer as much as I wanted after school. In return, I demoed the machine to any customers who showed interest).
The manual included a simple moon-lander game, where you punched in the power of the burn you wanted, for each second of the landing sequence, and tried to land without either running out of fuel or smashing your spacecraft. It was a text only-game, and you just typed in a number and got back the result.
I thought that this sucked, so I figured out how to do real-time text input, wrote an simple input editor and added some screen formatting and (very rudimentary) graphics.... now you had to calculate and input the burn rates in real-time. The store manager suggested that I could sell the game, but I really didn't believe him. Unfortunately by the time I saw some of the other crap that people were selling as commercial games, my save-tape of the game had degraded to the point where it was difficult to read, and I'd gone on to other things.
Ah, yeah... those were the days, when a couple nights after school work could give you a commercially viable game!
(At least) one of the authors of the Burton report is giving a presentation at Microsoft's PR blitz tomorrow. I'm betting that he's getting paid a tidy sum to do so. I wouldn't be surprised if the other author of the report gets a similar boondoggle in the not-so-distant future/past.
These lucrative contracts, of course, have nothing to do with the slant of the 'independent' articles.
That's where thinks like the Ubuntu live CD come in handy. if you have a CD with a proper checksum then you know what you have. You can check that code when compiling data that you know. If the code is in any noticable way broken, then you can expect that other people around the world are going to see corrupt checksums. (It's not perfect, but it\s a really effective way of testing against random data).
You are then able to distribute CDs of a known base to everybody, and they can use their own Ubuntu live CDs to check the CD's that they're receiving.
If you have a machine with only one CD reader, (but enough RAM), you can always replace step 2 with a knoppix CD and the load-to-RAM option... or your Pentium-2 vintage laptop with some ancient distro. It's not like you're bound to trust anybody's intro.. in fact, I'd almost be inclined to suggest to people that they use some random way of checksumming the distribution CD in addition to the 'official' one -- that way, it'd be really hard to silently trojan all check processes without going back in time and inducing some (undetectable by the experts) error in the original MD5/SHA implementations.
That's one of the nice things about open source -- you don't really have to trust any one 'blessed' supplier if you don't want to.
(yes, this solution isn't 100% foolproof, but it's statistically unlikely enough to be cheated all-round that you'd be better off betting on George Bush being elected to a third consecutive term in office (including getting the necessary constitutional amendment passed in time).
Well, burton wasn't paid for the report, but Groklaw reports that "However, Burton analyst Peter O'Kelly, one of the report's co-authors, is scheduled to make a presentation at an Open XML press briefing that Microsoft plans to hold in the Seattle area on Wednesday."
I'm betting that he's getting paid really, really well for (ahem) "the presentation" that he was, apparently scheduled to give even before he released his "independent" report.
Perhaps he was so excited about getting the Microsoft gig, that he 'forgot to check his facts and logic' before he released his report.
It could just as easily be the other way 'round. Right now there's a real battle in terms of OO vs MS Office. I'm not sure that either one is going to win that one hands down anytime soon.
In the meantime, people are starting to learn about open Office and -- for a starving student, even $100 for the MS Office Suite vs $0 for OO is gonna be the difference of a handful of beers, or meals.. or a bus pass.
For starving students, TCO =~ license cost, and -- since very few people are buying Office 2007 right now, learning OO is actually a better investment, in the short term, than learning MSO 2007.
So, what I hear you saying is that the limit of the value of the acceleration as you approach the horizon is finite, but the the value at the horizon is infinite (and the coordinate system fundamentally changes once you enter)(?)
I think you missed. My point is that they're not selling japenese cars in a ford shell. If ford wins their claim then all pictures would have to be taken naked in the forest, because anything manufactured would be copyright it's maker and unsuitable for pictures (furniture, clothes, etc. etc. etc.).
The point of access to the sourc code isn't just that they can modify it.... If they have some critical need, they can hire someone to salve that need. End of story.
Then of course, is the fact that, having gotten that change done, they can distribute the modified (or unmodified) code for the cost of the network bits. (read: zero, if it's on the internal network).
Slashdot Mirror
Knockoffs from China... What next? Lies from the WhiteHouse?
We're talking the office of the president, here -- where a trip to Hawaii probably results in $1M worth of planning. When the backup system starts to exceed that kind of price, you can start to cry to me about costs.
In this case, however, the injunction vanished, and the lawsuit was threatening to become a liability to the company. Making the lawsuit disappear minimizes the liability (but may not eliminate it).
(( IANAL. Wanna pay for my law school? ))
- no one person had all the skills needed to build a barn
- More people in the area with barns meant more resources for the entire community.
- it was a community-building exercise.
- over time, every body got helped anyways.
The one improvement of GPL software over barns, however, is that -- when someone comes up with a better way of making a door, everybody gets the new software door on their barn.i.e. if I release my code to GPL, and somebody makes a new -- much nicer -- user interface, I get that new and improved interface. I don't have to be my own UI expert to get that.
and the advantage of having a community support my code instead of myself means that I can go on to the things that I am interested in..
and then, there's the old standby of just wanting to get my code out and used by somebody else. It essentially doesn't cost me anything, so why not? I can be like the dog with the straw, but why??? ... and if somebody can make some money supporting it, more money to the -- just as long as they don't expect me to do extra work for them for free.
cell phone: Don't ask me. Find someone who really cares about the different models. You'd probably be best with a combined phone/GPS rather than having two separate units.
Camera: If you tend to travel into strange places, you might want to consider one of the waterproof/dustproof models. (I know that Pentax makes one)... It's not too good for zoom range but they have few exposed parts and can easily handle dirty/wet environments, if you want to take a picture in a (dust) storm. They also tend to be more able to take a physical beating. ... wherever. (also good for other units that take AA or AAA batteries).
Most small cameras, these days, take AA batteries -- You might also want to get some NiMH batteries and a charger that will take varied voltages. Many NiMH chargers also have a cord that will allow you to charge off of a cigarette lighter plug -- smaller and more universal. With a 15 minute charger and a cigarette lighter plug, you can charge your batteries on the way to/from
I've written scripts that rip apart (spam) emails, peel apart the headers, figure out which ISP is responsible for the machines that sent them to my MX (via the ICANN records) and (where possible) sends an automated complaint email to the 'abuse' address of the responsible provider.
If they get a couple of hundred such complaints from various sources, they don't have to listen in on the customer's line to conclude that there's a problem. About the only reason to listen in on your line at that point is to prove you innocent of the (numerous) allegations against you (in the case of malicious complaints).
Find someone who's giving away an old P2 laptop. Get a second network card for it and put JUST the routing software on it. That way you have something that's small, low power and quiet running your border Then you can dedicate your larger box to it's real task and not have to worry about making gigabytes of storage available to the first hacker to find a hole in your setup.
( note that my calculations are based on newtonian physics -- but, as Ambitwistor pointed out relativity adds an additio0nal twist to the calculation).
Just as The Church was guilty of censorship when it was in power, now we having these scientists refusing to listen to another side of the issue.
I agree with whomever it is that said "The answer to bad speech is more speech, not censorship".
If these scientists had asked for the right to speak in answer to the Pope, I would have been all for it. Demanding that the Pope not speak, on the other hand just smacks of censorship. It's not just the pope who might be . "accusing us of refusing dialog." -- It's just about anybody who believes in free speech and open dialog.
It's like if I told you that, the faster you go, the shorter (horizontally) you get. Lots of people still have a hard time wrapping their head around that one little side effect of Relativity theory.
If we were in the same space as them, we might just have had the same reaction as them ... and thought ourselves completely sane and rational people in the process.
Them(9)
is(2)
fighting(66 with Bingo {not including bonus squares})
words(9) .
I'm wondering if it's appropriate to simply say that spacetime, inside of a black hole is so bent, that it's better to describe it as 'just warped'?
My bad, but the principle of my point (thankfully) still stands. (Getting facts straight is generally a good thing when you're complaining about someone else having them (maliciously) wrong.)
So, the gravitational curve that one would normally associate with orbital mechanics and acceleration is (roughly) as I calculated, but other relativistic effects mean that the acceleration needed to stay stationary diverges?
OOXML, on the other hand, is just a (rather grotty) documentaion of the format that MS back-ended onto Office 2007 (it's not even the default format) ssssssssssssss -- and even though Microsoft claims control of the format, they're not even willing to bind themselves to use it in the future.
This is a really clear case of the coal calling the steel black. (not even the pot calling the kettle).
I'm surprised that the authors don't expect to get laughed out of the hall when they present this report -- even if it is on Microsoft soil.
The store manager allowed me to use the computer as much as I wanted after school. In return, I demoed the machine to any customers who showed interest).
The manual included a simple moon-lander game, where you punched in the power of the burn you wanted, for each second of the landing sequence, and tried to land without either running out of fuel or smashing your spacecraft. It was a text only-game, and you just typed in a number and got back the result. ... now you had to calculate and input the burn rates in real-time. The store manager suggested that I could sell the game, but I really didn't believe him. Unfortunately by the time I saw some of the other crap that people were selling as commercial games, my save-tape of the game had degraded to the point where it was difficult to read, and I'd gone on to other things.
I thought that this sucked, so I figured out how to do real-time text input, wrote an simple input editor and added some screen formatting and (very rudimentary) graphics.
Ah, yeah... those were the days, when a couple nights after school work could give you a commercially viable game!
These lucrative contracts, of course, have nothing to do with the slant of the 'independent' articles.
You are then able to distribute CDs of a known base to everybody, and they can use their own Ubuntu live CDs to check the CD's that they're receiving.
If you have a machine with only one CD reader, (but enough RAM), you can always replace step 2 with a knoppix CD and the load-to-RAM option ... or your Pentium-2 vintage laptop with some ancient distro. It's not like you're bound to trust anybody's intro .. in fact, I'd almost be inclined to suggest to people that they use some random way of checksumming the distribution CD in addition to the 'official' one -- that way, it'd be really hard to silently trojan all check processes without going back in time and inducing some (undetectable by the experts) error in the original MD5/SHA implementations.
That's one of the nice things about open source -- you don't really have to trust any one 'blessed' supplier if you don't want to.
(yes, this solution isn't 100% foolproof, but it's statistically unlikely enough to be cheated all-round that you'd be better off betting on George Bush being elected to a third consecutive term in office (including getting the necessary constitutional amendment passed in time).
I'm betting that he's getting paid really, really well for (ahem) "the presentation" that he was, apparently scheduled to give even before he released his "independent" report.
Perhaps he was so excited about getting the Microsoft gig, that he 'forgot to check his facts and logic' before he released his report.
In the meantime, people are starting to learn about open Office and -- for a starving student, even $100 for the MS Office Suite vs $0 for OO is gonna be the difference of a handful of beers, or meals .. or a bus pass.
For starving students, TCO =~ license cost, and -- since very few people are buying Office 2007 right now, learning OO is actually a better investment, in the short term, than learning MSO 2007.
So, what I hear you saying is that the limit of the value of the acceleration as you approach the horizon is finite, but the the value at the horizon is infinite (and the coordinate system fundamentally changes once you enter)(?)
I think you missed. My point is that they're not selling japenese cars in a ford shell. If ford wins their claim then all pictures would have to be taken naked in the forest, because anything manufactured would be copyright it's maker and unsuitable for pictures (furniture, clothes, etc. etc. etc.).
Then of course, is the fact that, having gotten that change done, they can distribute the modified (or unmodified) code for the cost of the network bits. (read: zero, if it's on the internal network).
This must be the guy who educated George Bush.