It's not the power in the power lines that generates the interference, it's the broadband signal (which, I'm sure, can run without the power running (at least, until the battery backup dies).
In any case, that's not the point... If the broadband signal pushes ham users out of their 'hobby' then, when the power goes out, there won't be any hams with working radios to help coordinate the saving of your unlit butt.
Reminds me of a parable...
"Why is faith more important than knowledge?" The acolyte asked of the priest.
The priest thought for a moment, then replied: "Faith is like a candle, knowlege is like the sun".
"But isn't a candle useless compared to the sun?" asked the acolyte.
"Ask me that question again at midnight," replied the priest.
The ham system is rather like an insurance policy. It often seems like a waste -- until the day you really need it. Of course, the day you really need it, is the wrong time to put it together.
Reviews didn't use to be a big problem... In the days of yore (last year, or so), most people got their reviews from media outlets that were somewhat (or very) behoven to the movie outlets -- thus you'd very rarely see "I was gagging by the second reel". If you remember the IM pager commercials (Canadian) where a text message gets forwarded across the country in 30 seconds.. now people gagging in the movie theatre get to IM their friends waiting in line outside.
____
This whole thing supports my observation (and explanation) that movies released on Fridays are a bad bet and movies released on a Wednesday are a good bet...
If it looks good, they'll release it on Wed, and hope that word of mouth will build the first weekend reciepts. If it looks bad, they'll hype it to death and hope try to maximize income before people find out just how bad it really is.
I'm guessing that the rise of blogging and group email lists also has an effect on the 1st -> 2nd week reciepts, while IM would be what kills the Saturday reciepts.
Maybe that's code that isn't essential to their case - just some code they think they can afford to let the Linux community remove.
Id you want to convince the world that you've got the Linux community by the short & curley's, the last thing you want to do is shoot yourself in the foot with something this stupid.
At SCO's annual reseller show, the company's executives put up a couple of
slides as a way of demonstrating how Unix code had been "stolen" and put
into Linux. The two slides were photographed and have since appeared on
Heise Online; see them here
and here.
The escape of these slides has allowed the Linux community to do something
it has been craving since the beginning of the SCO case: track down the
real origins of the code that SCO claims as its own. The results, in this
case, came quick and clear. They do not bode well for SCO.
The code in question is found in arch/ia64/sn/io/ate_utils.c in the 2.4 tree.
It carries an SGI copyright. It seems that SGI was not entirely
forthcoming in documenting the source of its source; some of the code in
question was, indisputably, not written at SGI. So where does it really
come from?
This code is from sys/sys/malloc.c
in V7 Unix. It has been widely published; among other things, it can be
found in Lion's Commentary on Unix (if you can get a copy). It
featured in this
1984 Usenet posting. And, crucially, it has been circulated with the
V7 Unix source, which was released by Caldera (now
the SCO Group) under the BSD license. SCO would like the world to forget
about that release now, but the
Wayback Machine remembers.
So...SCO's code demonstration, the one that it put up to convince its
resellers of its case, comes from a version of Unix which first came out in
1979. The code was publicly circulated in the 1980's, and explicitly
released under the BSD license by [the company now known as] SCO at the
beginning of 2002. SCO might well have a complaint that SGI did not
properly give credit for the code it used. But there is no possible way
the company can argue that this code's presence in Linux is an infringement
of its copyrights.
And this, of course, is why SCO refuses to show the code that, it claims,
is copied. These claims do not stand up to even a few hours' scrutiny on
the net. SCO may yet have an interesting contract dispute with IBM, but,
from what we have seen so far, its claims of direct copying of code are
hollow.
(Many thanks to those who commented on an
earlier LWN posting on this subject - those comments are the source for
just about everything that appears in this article. Many thanks are due to
LWN's readers; you have shown the best of what the community can do.
Update: see also: this analysis of SCO's
code by Bruce Perens.)
Btw: this stuff is not quite public domain, but it's definitely far from proprietary
Looking at that chunk of malloc code, it is extremely functional. It is a very straightforward and minimal implemetation of first-fit memory allocation from a free pool.
static struct ( size_t m_size, char *m_addr } *chunk;
While(there are more chunks){
if the current chunk is at least as big as we need,{
take what we need out of the chunk
point the pool pointer to the rest of the chunk
adjust the size indicator.
if we're using the entire chunk,{
move this node to the end of the list.
# (so it doesn't block the search) #
} #endif
return the pointer
}#endif
}#endwhile
# couldn't find a big enough chunk
return(NULL) # error
It would be pretty difficult to produce a tight version of this algorithm without a high degree of duplication. I'd say you might as well cut and paste, because about the only changes that I can see making in a tight implementation would be to change the variable names. You'd be lucky to find 4 meaningful permutations of this algorithim, once you tighten up the code for the kernel.
Try to implement the pseudo code above, and see just how far away you end up.
BTW, this is not part of a block of duplicate code.. This is pretty much the entire thing.
If that's the best that they can find, then they're SOL.
The bad news is that we have code in Linux that's tracable back to AT&T, and it doesn't seem to be properly attributed.
The good news is that the easy solution to this is to simply properly attribute this code. (it was apparently released by SCO, under a BSD license, which requires attribution). A better solution might be to simply rewrite it from scratch.
Another good news/bad news is that this is very tight and highly functional code. As such it might be rather hard to rewrite without reproducing.. on the other hand, if that is the case, this might be an indication that this code is not properly copyrightable (IANAL, but my understanding is that functional, as opposed to expressive code is not considered copyrightable).
Better yet, can anybody get hold of Thompson and see if he remembers where he got this algorithm from?
That having been said, this is a very small chunck of code, and may have been further purloined from elsewhere. (anybody have a copy of "Knuth" floating around?)
And you really think that every user of Linux, every vendor and every company should bet that all 890,000+ lines of code come from 1979 or earlier? Do you really think UNIX Version 7 in 1979 had a NUMA implementation?
I'd put it the other way 'round:
Out of almost a million lines of 'stolen' code, the best example that they can come up with is something in the public domain???
Between that and their laughable argument for why the GPL is invalid,
I'm still expecting them to be quashed in court. In fact, my question is whether or not Boyes is going to get censured for filing a 'frivolous and vexatious' case.
Volts, amps -- Does it really matter?? Either way, your dead body rots in the sun.
As somebody else pointed out, as the voltage increase, the potential current also increases. In any case, your average mains power bus can carry far more current than it takes to fry your body parts. If you have any further questions, ask your local coroner.
BTW: My understanding is that DC current is far more deadly than AC current -- especially if applied across your heart.Basically, your heart muscles get spazzed into an excited state. When you manage to let go, they're too exhausted to continue working.
AC current across the heart can (under the right conditions) act as a defibrillator . Think of it like having 60 heart attacks per second until you manage to let go (or get pried off) of the wire. I get the sense that people who kill themselves on AC current pretty much cook themselves to death.
If you've got a mass storage SUN box that's big enough to need 200V power, I'm guessing that you're talking at least $50K, and I'm probably missing a digit there.
An electrician to fix this thing properly will probably cost you under $1K even on the high end.
If your boss balks at the cost of an electrician, then have him get an estimate from SUN and his insurance company on how much it would cost to warranty/insure all the equipment in that room (and you, if you're stupid enough to take that cabinet on) against something going wrong with a jury-rig fix.
After getting that estimate, he should be willing to pay whatever you need to get the gob done right. Make sure you get an electrician with a reasnoable ammount of industrial experience.
You're showing too much red in Pennsylvannia. We didn't loose power, except in the NW (Erie, PA) corner of the state. Certainly not down in the SE, where you've got a lot of red.
You might notice that the red is on the outskirts of bright areas... (I was noticing the same thing). It's also more pink than red -- indicating that there's still some light ther.
Perhaps it's cloud cover obscuring all but the brightest lights..
BTW: The way that I did this was that I took the post-blackout image, and subtracted it from the pre-blackout image (after attempting to register the two). Having that difference, I then turned white to bright red, and then added that back in to the post-blackout image (all in GIMP).
(Getting the two to register more or less properly required that I scale one of the images up by about 3 pixels (~0.3%). )
Given the way that I did this, any sort of darkening (such as from cloud cover) would probably show up as that sort of pink fringing.
From the video: I think that there's a very small percentage of people who've gone over the top.
He recieved between
10 amd 20 orders per day.. that's about 1 order per 5million emails sent.
I'd say that one order per 5 million emails sent would also classify as 'a very small percentage of people'. He's now suffering from the same statistical effect that he's been exploiting -- In a world of 6 billion people, there really is about one born every minute -- whether it's a sucker or just somebody who's very, very irate.
He's not naive... Greedy and perhaps wilfully blind, but not naive.
Think about it -- Presuming that these people are legit, they're willing to scam their own country to the tune of millions of dollars. Do you think that they'd be willing to scam you too??? Who do you think has more experience at this?"
I am a little shocked by people falling over Nigerian scams, even when it was unpopular.
They only need about 1 in 100,000 people to fall for this. Of all the people that you know, do you know of just one person stupid/crooked enough to possibly fall for something like this?? If so, then you're ahead of the curve.
The SCO scam, is pretty much the same... They only need a small handfull of Fortune1000 companies to fall for their threats to make a tidy profit. "I mean, if they're willing to sue IBM, then...."
You expect this from the crowd that lambastes the MPAA one day, and then creams their pants when a Matrix/LOTR/SW/ST.....
I'm not saying that I'm necessarily expecting it, I'm just saying that it would make a big difference in getting game companies to seriously take on doing games on Linux.
What people do with the suggestion is up to them (and how important we think it is to have games running native under Linux).
Besides the.bust and possibly bad management, I think that Loki might have just been a bit too early into the Linux desktop arena. Right now, the Linux
desktop universe is probably at least 5 times what it was in 2000, and may be starting to grow exponentially.
Even so, one big problem that Linux games have is the prevalence of dual-booting. Too many Linux users are willing to keep Windows/wine running,
if only to run games. Under such conditions, making a Linux version splits the market more than it expands it.
If we really want to encourage game companies to start making Linux versions, we're going to have to start boycotting the Windows version, and wait until the Linux version comes out (if it ever does) to buy new games.
Short term pain for long term gain..
I've got a composite of the difference that the blackout made areas that were darker during the blackout are in red. Areas that were bright at both times are white.
but how do you tell the difference between slashdotting, and a regular page load? Just double-clicking on the link is likely to result in TC/IP timeouts.
Whatever happened to the fiscally conservative Republican party?
Besides George Bush???
The republicans are not fiscally conservative. They are politically Conservative. Their fiscal policy depends more on who is looking for handouts -- Little people get nothing, Big companies get lots. Under a solidly Republican party, the US has given lots of money to bug business (mostly via reduced taxes) and then gone to war for big business (thus increasing expenditures and giving even more money to big business).
THe biggest difference between corporate welfare and regular welfare is how much money goes to each recipient, and what they do with it.
call BS. What company unless the entire school district has a contractual obligation with them to only buy from them could possibly C&D you for recommending purchasing something?
You can always send a Cease and Desist letter. It doesn't mean that there's any force behind it. It just means that you're hoping that the recipient will do what you're asking.
Slashdot Mirror
In any case, that's not the point... If the broadband signal pushes ham users out of their 'hobby' then, when the power goes out, there won't be any hams with working radios to help coordinate the saving of your unlit butt.
Reminds me of a parable...
The ham system is rather like an insurance policy. It often seems like a waste -- until the day you really need it. Of course, the day you really need it, is the wrong time to put it together.____
This whole thing supports my observation (and explanation) that movies released on Fridays are a bad bet and movies released on a Wednesday are a good bet...
If it looks good, they'll release it on Wed, and hope that word of mouth will build the first weekend reciepts. If it looks bad, they'll hype it to death and hope try to maximize income before people find out just how bad it really is.
I'm guessing that the rise of blogging and group email lists also has an effect on the 1st -> 2nd week reciepts, while IM would be what kills the Saturday reciepts.
If you can't afford that, you shouldn't be leasing SUN equipment. :-)
Id you want to convince the world that you've got the Linux community by the short & curley's, the last thing you want to do is shoot yourself in the foot with something this stupid.
see also: my own comments on the complexity of this example
At SCO's annual reseller show, the company's executives put up a couple of slides as a way of demonstrating how Unix code had been "stolen" and put into Linux. The two slides were photographed and have since appeared on Heise Online; see them here and here. The escape of these slides has allowed the Linux community to do something it has been craving since the beginning of the SCO case: track down the real origins of the code that SCO claims as its own. The results, in this case, came quick and clear. They do not bode well for SCO.
The code in question is found in arch/ia64/sn/io/ate_utils.c in the 2.4 tree. It carries an SGI copyright. It seems that SGI was not entirely forthcoming in documenting the source of its source; some of the code in question was, indisputably, not written at SGI. So where does it really come from?
This code is from sys/sys/malloc.c in V7 Unix. It has been widely published; among other things, it can be found in Lion's Commentary on Unix (if you can get a copy). It featured in this 1984 Usenet posting. And, crucially, it has been circulated with the V7 Unix source, which was released by Caldera (now the SCO Group) under the BSD license. SCO would like the world to forget about that release now, but the Wayback Machine remembers.
So...SCO's code demonstration, the one that it put up to convince its resellers of its case, comes from a version of Unix which first came out in 1979. The code was publicly circulated in the 1980's, and explicitly released under the BSD license by [the company now known as] SCO at the beginning of 2002. SCO might well have a complaint that SGI did not properly give credit for the code it used. But there is no possible way the company can argue that this code's presence in Linux is an infringement of its copyrights.
And this, of course, is why SCO refuses to show the code that, it claims, is copied. These claims do not stand up to even a few hours' scrutiny on the net. SCO may yet have an interesting contract dispute with IBM, but, from what we have seen so far, its claims of direct copying of code are hollow.
(Many thanks to those who commented on an earlier LWN posting on this subject - those comments are the source for just about everything that appears in this article. Many thanks are due to LWN's readers; you have shown the best of what the community can do. Update: see also: this analysis of SCO's code by Bruce Perens.)
______While I'm here, I have my own comments, that I really don't think that that chunk is copyrightable... It's far too direct an implementation of a simple algorithm to make it past copyright rules.
and:
Btw: this stuff is not quite public domain, but it's definitely far from proprietary
Looking at that chunk of malloc code, it is extremely functional. It is a very straightforward and minimal implemetation of first-fit memory allocation from a free pool.
static struct ( size_t m_size, char *m_addr } *chunk;
While(there are more chunks){
- if the current chunk is at least as big as we need,{
}#endif }#endwhile- take what we need out of the chunk
} #endifpoint the pool pointer to the rest of the chunk
adjust the size indicator.
if we're using the entire chunk,{ move this node to the end of the list.
# (so it doesn't block the search) #
return the pointer
# couldn't find a big enough chunk
return(NULL) # error
It would be pretty difficult to produce a tight version of this algorithm without a high degree of duplication. I'd say you might as well cut and paste, because about the only changes that I can see making in a tight implementation would be to change the variable names. You'd be lucky to find 4 meaningful permutations of this algorithim, once you tighten up the code for the kernel.
Try to implement the pseudo code above, and see just how far away you end up.
BTW, this is not part of a block of duplicate code.. This is pretty much the entire thing. If that's the best that they can find, then they're SOL.
The bad news is that we have code in Linux that's tracable back to AT&T, and it doesn't seem to be properly attributed.
The good news is that the easy solution to this is to simply properly attribute this code. (it was apparently released by SCO, under a BSD license, which requires attribution). A better solution might be to simply rewrite it from scratch.
Another good news/bad news is that this is very tight and highly functional code. As such it might be rather hard to rewrite without reproducing.. on the other hand, if that is the case, this might be an indication that this code is not properly copyrightable (IANAL, but my understanding is that functional, as opposed to expressive code is not considered copyrightable).
Better yet, can anybody get hold of Thompson and see if he remembers where he got this algorithm from?
That having been said, this is a very small chunck of code, and may have been further purloined from elsewhere. (anybody have a copy of "Knuth" floating around?)
(IANAL, but I sometimes get mistaken for one)
I'd put it the other way 'round:
Out of almost a million lines of 'stolen' code, the best example that they can come up with is something in the public domain???
Between that and their laughable argument for why the GPL is invalid, I'm still expecting them to be quashed in court. In fact, my question is whether or not Boyes is going to get censured for filing a 'frivolous and vexatious' case.
As somebody else pointed out, as the voltage increase, the potential current also increases. In any case, your average mains power bus can carry far more current than it takes to fry your body parts. If you have any further questions, ask your local coroner.
BTW: My understanding is that DC current is far more deadly than AC current -- especially if applied across your heart.Basically, your heart muscles get spazzed into an excited state. When you manage to let go, they're too exhausted to continue working.
AC current across the heart can (under the right conditions) act as a defibrillator . Think of it like having 60 heart attacks per second until you manage to let go (or get pried off) of the wire. I get the sense that people who kill themselves on AC current pretty much cook themselves to death.
An electrician to fix this thing properly will probably cost you under $1K even on the high end.
If your boss balks at the cost of an electrician, then have him get an estimate from SUN and his insurance company on how much it would cost to warranty/insure all the equipment in that room (and you, if you're stupid enough to take that cabinet on) against something going wrong with a jury-rig fix.
After getting that estimate, he should be willing to pay whatever you need to get the gob done right. Make sure you get an electrician with a reasnoable ammount of industrial experience.
You might notice that the red is on the outskirts of bright areas... (I was noticing the same thing). It's also more pink than red -- indicating that there's still some light ther.
Perhaps it's cloud cover obscuring all but the brightest lights..
BTW: The way that I did this was that I took the post-blackout image, and subtracted it from the pre-blackout image (after attempting to register the two). Having that difference, I then turned white to bright red, and then added that back in to the post-blackout image (all in GIMP).
(Getting the two to register more or less properly required that I scale one of the images up by about 3 pixels (~0.3%). )
Given the way that I did this, any sort of darkening (such as from cloud cover) would probably show up as that sort of pink fringing.
I think that there's a very small percentage of people who've gone over the top.
He recieved between 10 amd 20 orders per day.. that's about 1 order per 5million emails sent.
I'd say that one order per 5 million emails sent would also classify as 'a very small percentage of people'. He's now suffering from the same statistical effect that he's been exploiting -- In a world of 6 billion people, there really is about one born every minute -- whether it's a sucker or just somebody who's very, very irate.
He's not naive... Greedy and perhaps wilfully blind, but not naive.
That's what volt meters are for....
They only need about 1 in 100,000 people to fall for this. Of all the people that you know, do you know of just one person stupid/crooked enough to possibly fall for something like this?? If so, then you're ahead of the curve.
The SCO scam, is pretty much the same... They only need a small handfull of Fortune1000 companies to fall for their threats to make a tidy profit. "I mean, if they're willing to sue IBM, then ...."
I'm not saying that I'm necessarily expecting it, I'm just saying that it would make a big difference in getting game companies to seriously take on doing games on Linux.
What people do with the suggestion is up to them (and how important we think it is to have games running native under Linux).
Even so, one big problem that Linux games have is the prevalence of dual-booting. Too many Linux users are willing to keep Windows/wine running, if only to run games. Under such conditions, making a Linux version splits the market more than it expands it.
If we really want to encourage game companies to start making Linux versions, we're going to have to start boycotting the Windows version, and wait until the Linux version comes out (if it ever does) to buy new games.
Short term pain for long term gain..
You coull always just hide it behind a SQUID (or other such cache box).
I've got a composite of the difference that the blackout made areas that were darker during the blackout are in red. Areas that were bright at both times are white.
It won't be a false positive for very long. When the alarm goes off, it'll give you a heart attack
(talk about mrbid humor...)
but how do you tell the difference between slashdotting, and a regular page load? Just double-clicking on the link is likely to result in TC/IP timeouts.
Besides George Bush???
The republicans are not fiscally conservative. They are politically Conservative. Their fiscal policy depends more on who is looking for handouts -- Little people get nothing, Big companies get lots. Under a solidly Republican party, the US has given lots of money to bug business (mostly via reduced taxes) and then gone to war for big business (thus increasing expenditures and giving even more money to big business).
THe biggest difference between corporate welfare and regular welfare is how much money goes to each recipient, and what they do with it.
No, wait. Let me rephrase that...
You can always send a Cease and Desist letter. It doesn't mean that there's any force behind it. It just means that you're hoping that the recipient will do what you're asking.