No. Because Microsoft doesn't threaten to sue anyone who sets up playback in Linux.
Conspiracy theory: It doesn't serve MS (yet) to sue people for playing ASF files on Linux.. They're still fighting for a killer share of the market (mostly from RealPlayer). Once they get that , they won't have any need to keep Linux user placated.... then they will sue to disable the use of those codecs.
Small mom and pops probably pay to get their grease picked up -- mostly because it isn't worth the time to negotatiate a payment in the other direction (and/or they don't know that they could). It may also depend on the local/regional grease market. If there's a local user of the stuff available, chances are that the price will be better.
Just because Joe-Bob's grease company is getting paid by the restaurant to pick the stuff up doesn't mean that he doesn't make even more money reselling the grease.
There are lots of cases of service providers getting greased on both palms (if you'd excuse the pun).
The amount of hydrocarbons we expend on creating a gallon of canola oil is supposedly more than the equivalent of a gallon of canola oil.... If this is true, then by switching to to using (virgin) canola oil instead of diesel fuel, we'd actually end up burning more hydrocarbons than if we just burned the diesel fuel directly.
Using Canola is really only a positive thing if you presume that the used fryer fat would have been dumped in a landfill instead of being otherwise recycled. Once demand exceeds used-oil supply, canola based engines becomes a losing proposition.
This raises only one question in my mind:
What would it take to deny Hollings the democratic nomination in his next election bid? This is really the only way to stop him (others of his ilk will respond when they see him die a thousand deaths).
Ah, yes.. the Nixon thing. But Nixon was the president of the United States of America. That makes him the next best thing to god...
Doesn't it?
If The United States were a true democracy, then being willing to look at communist principles shouldn't be considered a crime. The people who liked some of the principles of communism should have been allowed to speak those ideas freely. Being able to hear and discuss those ideas, we the people should be able to accept or reject them freely, and based on their true value.
To reject an idea simply because someone attached the name 'communist' to it is not the pinnacle of democracy. Nor is destroying the lives of people simply because they are friends of such people and possibly shared belief in the value of some of those ideas an expression of the concept of free speech.
As the bible says, "What good does it do a man to rule the world if he loses his own soul?". What good does it do to have a 'democracy' where the only idea that are allowed to be held are those which are in agreement with those in power? What good is 'free speech' that is only free for the wealthy (or, for that matter, the poor)?
Some people might (with good cause) consider the principles behind the Open Source and Free Source movements communistic in nature (just listen to the rantings of the RIAA and MS). Should this, by itself, be just cause to persecute and jail people like RMS and Linus?
Nuclear weapons are a horrid and nasty thing. We've been lucky that they haven't been used since Nagasaki -- and that's probably at least partly due to the face that Einstein was both willing and able to speak out about the horrors that nuclear weapons were capable of producing.
Communism isn't an inherently evil and nasty system.. The communist governments of Russia and China were/are vicious and corrupt, but that's more a statement about the people that lead them than of the basic systems themselves. It's not like the US is a whole lot better with it's support of people like Agusto Pinochet, Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden -- all in the name of so-called 'democracy'. We sometimes forget that these 'evil nasty people' are a product of our own government's support system.
Einstein 'agitated' for peace. He had ideas that were different than those who were in power at the time. These should never be considered crimes in a truly democratic system. The idea behind democracy is that an idea should either stand or fall on it's own merits -- not based on the fact that someone hates the label that some intolerent extremist attaches to it (like Hoover, McCarthy or even Nixon).
Hmm.. I hadn't thought about it that way.. This may mean that digital TV is going to be
the death knell of 'OK reception in the rural areas'. It'll be fine for the cities near antennas, but I'd never be able to recieve things like broadcasts from Vancouver Island in the City of Vancouver.
Reception is bad enough in analog. With digital, I expect that all I'd see would be 400 really large pixels floating across the screen and the sounds of a Vogon enunciator.
As someone else said: This legislation does very little
other than place in stone what the DMA is already doing.
Not many people have the sensitive information that he's
requiring the opt-in for, anyways (it's the nature of 'sensitive' information).
In any case it doesn't matter.
They can't tell me your sexual preference or your medical history, but they can tell me that:
You are male,
You visit 'beefcake' porn sites a lot
you buy AZT on the 'net because it's cheaper.
I can figure out the rest from there.
Re:The difference between M$ and OS
on
Revolution OS
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
He's not a fool, certainly, and I keep wondering why he has allowed so much rubbish to creep into the windows source code. (Particularly at a kernel level where it can do so much damage.)
IMO, Microsoft (and Bill gates as it's leader) is a Market driven
company, not a technology driven company. This is the fundamental difference
between Microsoft and Apple, for example. Apple has put a lot of work into the creation
of the 'perfect OS', but made a lot of marketing errors in the process -- mostly because
it would have diluted the perfection of the OS.
(as an example, opening up the hardware would have created new markets for MAC-OS, but would have made it a bit harder to have the OS remain stable and predictable).
It's been pointed out more than once that, for Microsoft, security and stability are marketing
issues -- not technical ones. They didn't take them seriously until they began to be issues
that were starting to (threaten to) cost them big contracts.
In short: Bill Gates doesn't seem to give a rat's ass about the OS.
He cares about the market. The OS is simply a means to an end.
Not that I like being Politically Correct (especially with a joke), but here goes:
That kind of joke is rather insulting to those people who live in the slums.
Just because people are born to a situation where they are forced to
work damned hard to achieve what we would consider a starvation diet, doesn't mean
that they're lacking either intelligence or dignity.
Feel free to enjoy the
joke, but when you're done laughing, please remember that what it takes to survive in the
slums of Deli is probably beyond the level of stamina and wits that most of us have
become used to using.
If these numbers are what were there before MS got Busted, I'd say that they weren't expecting to be changing the DNS on these boxes (no big surprise). For some sites, it could be a while before the old data expires.
I had always thought a company card belonged to the *company* and that they would bear liability for payment...Apparently it doesn't work that way
When you got the card, you were probably asked to sign some paper. That paper was a contract. Did you read the contract? Did you keep a copy of it?
Always read what you sign. Also be willing to NOT sign it. You'd be impressed with what people ask you to sign. If they say things like "It's really meaningless" when you question something, then ask them to take out the 'meaningless' clause, and see what their reaction is.
If the contract you signed with Amex said that you were jointly (or singly) liable for your credit card, then you are the one on the hook. If it says that you are only responsible for misuse, then that's a diffferent issue.
It's also possible that the contract didn't hold you responsible, but Amex simply went after the easiest target -- but generally large companies like that tend to cover their ass with your hide.
Heh. Found it.. According to a 1993 periodic table, the basic 1993 Indigo had an R3000/33 CPU in it (and 64Meg of ram put you back a cool $7,000 [list]).
Yes, the indigo was a nice machine, but we're talking about relatively old technology here... The first Indigos came out 1n 1992 (I remember the joy of opening the shipping case and seeing that they'd even put thought into making it real easy just to get the cpu out of the box!).
I think that we were slobbering over a 40-60MZ processor back then. Even with decent hardware graphics support (and some of the lower end indigos had rather cheap (8 bit!) graphics), many people would find the former speed-demon Indigos pig slow compared to what we can do today.
While I agree that it is a bit of a step back to put an Intel CPU Inside of an Indigo case, at least he's running a Unix on it. If nothing else, it gives one the nostalga trip of feeling like you've finally managed to get an SGI box onto your home desktop.
A friend of mine (Dan Wilson) who taught computing at the University of Alberta had a program (20 years ago!) that generated statistics on a program to catch cheaters and copiers. From his description of the program, it seemed to work off of the parse tree, so it was essentially imune to simple workarounds like renaming variables or changing the indents.
Of course, he was also aware of the limitations of the program (given that he wrote it), so I don't believe that he took the statistics as the sole sole arbitrator of whether or not students were stealing code.
On the other end of the scale, Dan once found out that someone had published a solution to one of his assignments. He publicly announded in class that he was aware of the cheat. For anybody who had already submitted copied code and couldn't come up with a 'real' solution, he offered a partial amnesty (a zero on the assignment, but otherwise no punnishment) for people who came forward and fessed. He also warned that anybody trying to sneak the cheat past him would be failed from the course.
Despite his warning, a number of students still submitted the known cheat. Some blindly submitted the file without any edits whatsoever -- not even bothering to fix a simple syntax error that kept the program from compiling. As promised, they were removed from the course and reported for cheating.
There's no accounting for abject stupidity.
This was part of the problem with solaris-86 to begin with. I tried to run it on my laptop a couple of years ago, but found that there was no support for my (3com!) ethernet pcmcia card. Now, if I'm going to spend money on hardware just so I can run Solaris, I might as well just go out and get a used Sparc box. At least that way, I get some real support from Sun -- and I can use the same binaries as I use at work.
In some ways, it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. You won't get more drivers without more people using the OS -- but it's not worth spending thousands of dollars to create a driver that dozens of people are going to use... on the other hand, people aren't going to use the OS unless you have the drivers. . . . .
rinse and repeat as necessary.
Limiting the hardware you support even more than already would make the lack of users problem even more acute -- and the crowd (large handful?) of people using current hardware that would be orphaned by such a move would be up in arms about it. Far better to take your hit and essentially walk away from the X-86 market. Give end of life support to people running solaris 8 on X-86, and wean everybody else either onto real sun boxes (the preferred for Sun), or onto Linux -- which at least keeps them in the UN*X market.
The other issue (as someone else pointed ou) is that Sun's primary interest in Solaris-86 was probably to keep people intersted in Unix-type operating systems, even if they only had commodity Intel boxes -- but Linux now does that so well, that it's easier (and cheaper) to put together Linux -> Solaris migration tools (done!) and Let Linux and the BSDs handle the X-86 market which they serve so well, already.
If they had an IPO tomorrow I'd buy, but I'd
sell the next day.
This is, of course, exactly what they WANT you to do. They only get money from the original sale of the stock. I'm presuming that this is a fly-by-night operation, so they're not going to care when (not if) their stock tanks. They've already got their money wired to a bank in the Bahamas. The person who will get hurt is the poor sod who doesn't understand that their claims are pure baloney.
When I read the article, I didn't see anything about lamp cord , barbed wire, etc. All they mentioned was cat1~3 -- in which case the primary advantage to the technology is that you can now wire most old buldings to 10megabit without having to run more copper through the walls (often without anything even approaching conduit in them.
"Plane crash? New York? Bwaaaaaaa! WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!!
This might be another way of killing Bin Laden. Right now I figure he's somewhere near laughing himeself to death at this overreaction. Please remamber that plane crashes happen, and this one does not have any of the hallmarks of terrorist action.
all of the security in the world isn't going to stop murphy's law fromm causing the occasional f*ck up. Flying is still safer than driving, but reading the news may cause a heart-attack if you attribute every tragedy to terrorism.
Let investigators do their job. In the unlikely event that they determine this to be of terrrorist cause, then we can take the appropriate actions
The MDI technology doesn't look all th way into sunspots. It definitely doesn't answer all questions about them. It simply allows us to look deeper into sunspots than we have before. This is allowinf us to validate and expand on some theories about sunspot activities.
Being able to examine sunspots from below (presuming that you could survive) would answer (and raise) alot of questions about sunspots that are still unresolved.
I don't think that Wu's comments are made any less dramitic by current tech. I think it was a morbid joke based on the (low) probability of surviving an examination of the underside of a sunspot -- and how much the thought of doing something like that in person would traumatize the average puppeteer.
1979, man. Silent Hill didn't exist back then. DND was just starting to catch on, and there were few alternatives. (and the first "Halloween" movie hadn't been released yet).
Many years ago, I worked at McDonalds, and it so happened that
I worked a late shift -- finishing at 11:30. I didn't live that
far from work (about a mile and a half), so I decided to walk home.
Near our home was a cemetary, which was in my path. Depending on which
path I took home, the Cemetary was often on my way, and I would either
go around or cut through, depending on my mood.
Well, to be honest, I think that bravado took over...
Damned if I wasn going to avoid the cemetery just because it was
haloween night.
As I walked through the cemetery, the nearest street light was
about 3 blocks away. It was dark, but there was still enough
light for me to see the road ahead of me and the outlines of
the tombstones around me. Suddenly, I saw something white
moving to my left.
I stopped. I turned off my radio. I scanned around where I thought I had seen the movement,
and shortly, I saw something white moving on a grave.
Now, I don't consider myself very superstitious, but at this point,
I was in a prime superstition territory. Midnight, alone om a cemetary
on Haloween night, with something white moving on a grave. If it got
any closer to being a Hollywood movie, I was not going to like the
next scene.
Suddenly the white thing started to move... and I mean move fast!
My heart jumped as I prepared to run like my life depended on it and then I realized what I was facing.....
I don't know who was more scared -- Me or the rabbit -- but I don't
remember ever taking a shortcut though that cemetary again.
It's that damned Anti Terrorism Initiative. We've got so many cops now, that they're reduced to eating the donuts from remote galaxies on their break time.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I'd wait until he gave you the patent numbers before removing the code. No reason to give them an easy kill.
Conspiracy theory: It doesn't serve MS (yet) to sue people for playing ASF files on Linux.. They're still fighting for a killer share of the market (mostly from RealPlayer). Once they get that , they won't have any need to keep Linux user placated.... then they will sue to disable the use of those codecs.
One stone two birds.... Nice shot.
Just because Joe-Bob's grease company is getting paid by the restaurant to pick the stuff up doesn't mean that he doesn't make even more money reselling the grease. There are lots of cases of service providers getting greased on both palms (if you'd excuse the pun).
Using Canola is really only a positive thing if you presume that the used fryer fat would have been dumped in a landfill instead of being otherwise recycled. Once demand exceeds used-oil supply, canola based engines becomes a losing proposition.
This raises only one question in my mind:
What would it take to deny Hollings the democratic nomination in his next election bid? This is really the only way to stop him (others of his ilk will respond when they see him die a thousand deaths).
Doesn't it?
If The United States were a true democracy, then being willing to look at communist principles shouldn't be considered a crime. The people who liked some of the principles of communism should have been allowed to speak those ideas freely. Being able to hear and discuss those ideas, we the people should be able to accept or reject them freely, and based on their true value.
To reject an idea simply because someone attached the name 'communist' to it is not the pinnacle of democracy. Nor is destroying the lives of people simply because they are friends of such people and possibly shared belief in the value of some of those ideas an expression of the concept of free speech.
As the bible says, "What good does it do a man to rule the world if he loses his own soul?". What good does it do to have a 'democracy' where the only idea that are allowed to be held are those which are in agreement with those in power? What good is 'free speech' that is only free for the wealthy (or, for that matter, the poor)?
Some people might (with good cause) consider the principles behind the Open Source and Free Source movements communistic in nature (just listen to the rantings of the RIAA and MS). Should this, by itself, be just cause to persecute and jail people like RMS and Linus?
I think not.
Communism isn't an inherently evil and nasty system.. The communist governments of Russia and China were/are vicious and corrupt, but that's more a statement about the people that lead them than of the basic systems themselves. It's not like the US is a whole lot better with it's support of people like Agusto Pinochet, Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden -- all in the name of so-called 'democracy'. We sometimes forget that these 'evil nasty people' are a product of our own government's support system.
Einstein 'agitated' for peace. He had ideas that were different than those who were in power at the time. These should never be considered crimes in a truly democratic system. The idea behind democracy is that an idea should either stand or fall on it's own merits -- not based on the fact that someone hates the label that some intolerent extremist attaches to it (like Hoover, McCarthy or even Nixon).
Anything bad for MS is evil and nasty and ought not to exist, for reasons of national security.
Reception is bad enough in analog. With digital, I expect that all I'd see would be 400 really large pixels floating across the screen and the sounds of a Vogon enunciator.
They can't tell me your sexual preference or your medical history, but they can tell me that:
- You are male,
- You visit 'beefcake' porn sites a lot
- you buy AZT on the 'net because it's cheaper.
I can figure out the rest from there.IMO, Microsoft (and Bill gates as it's leader) is a Market driven company, not a technology driven company. This is the fundamental difference between Microsoft and Apple, for example. Apple has put a lot of work into the creation of the 'perfect OS', but made a lot of marketing errors in the process -- mostly because it would have diluted the perfection of the OS.
(as an example, opening up the hardware would have created new markets for MAC-OS, but would have made it a bit harder to have the OS remain stable and predictable).
It's been pointed out more than once that, for Microsoft, security and stability are marketing issues -- not technical ones. They didn't take them seriously until they began to be issues that were starting to (threaten to) cost them big contracts.
In short: Bill Gates doesn't seem to give a rat's ass about the OS. He cares about the market. The OS is simply a means to an end.
That kind of joke is rather insulting to those people who live in the slums. Just because people are born to a situation where they are forced to work damned hard to achieve what we would consider a starvation diet, doesn't mean that they're lacking either intelligence or dignity.
Feel free to enjoy the joke, but when you're done laughing, please remember that what it takes to survive in the slums of Deli is probably beyond the level of stamina and wits that most of us have become used to using.
Wehavethewayout.com
origin = bbgate1.unisys.com.
mail addr = hostmaster.unisys.com.
serial = 2002033001
refresh = 28800
retry = 1800
expire = 2592000
minimum = 86400
If these numbers are what were there before MS got Busted, I'd say that they weren't expecting to be changing the DNS on these boxes (no big surprise). For some sites, it could be a while before the old data expires.
When you got the card, you were probably asked to sign some paper. That paper was a contract. Did you read the contract? Did you keep a copy of it?
Always read what you sign. Also be willing to NOT sign it. You'd be impressed with what people ask you to sign. If they say things like "It's really meaningless" when you question something, then ask them to take out the 'meaningless' clause, and see what their reaction is.
If the contract you signed with Amex said that you were jointly (or singly) liable for your credit card, then you are the one on the hook. If it says that you are only responsible for misuse, then that's a diffferent issue.
It's also possible that the contract didn't hold you responsible, but Amex simply went after the easiest target -- but generally large companies like that tend to cover their ass with your hide.
Heh. Found it.. According to a 1993 periodic table, the basic 1993 Indigo had an R3000/33 CPU in it (and 64Meg of ram put you back a cool $7,000 [list]).
I think that we were slobbering over a 40-60MZ processor back then. Even with decent hardware graphics support (and some of the lower end indigos had rather cheap (8 bit!) graphics), many people would find the former speed-demon Indigos pig slow compared to what we can do today.
While I agree that it is a bit of a step back to put an Intel CPU Inside of an Indigo case, at least he's running a Unix on it. If nothing else, it gives one the nostalga trip of feeling like you've finally managed to get an SGI box onto your home desktop.
Of course, he was also aware of the limitations of the program (given that he wrote it), so I don't believe that he took the statistics as the sole sole arbitrator of whether or not students were stealing code.
On the other end of the scale, Dan once found out that someone had published a solution to one of his assignments. He publicly announded in class that he was aware of the cheat. For anybody who had already submitted copied code and couldn't come up with a 'real' solution, he offered a partial amnesty (a zero on the assignment, but otherwise no punnishment) for people who came forward and fessed. He also warned that anybody trying to sneak the cheat past him would be failed from the course.
Despite his warning, a number of students still submitted the known cheat. Some blindly submitted the file without any edits whatsoever -- not even bothering to fix a simple syntax error that kept the program from compiling. As promised, they were removed from the course and reported for cheating.
There's no accounting for abject stupidity.
In some ways, it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. You won't get more drivers without more people using the OS -- but it's not worth spending thousands of dollars to create a driver that dozens of people are going to use... on the other hand, people aren't going to use the OS unless you have the drivers. . . . .
rinse and repeat as necessary.
Limiting the hardware you support even more than already would make the lack of users problem even more acute -- and the crowd (large handful?) of people using current hardware that would be orphaned by such a move would be up in arms about it. Far better to take your hit and essentially walk away from the X-86 market. Give end of life support to people running solaris 8 on X-86, and wean everybody else either onto real sun boxes (the preferred for Sun), or onto Linux -- which at least keeps them in the UN*X market.
The other issue (as someone else pointed ou) is that Sun's primary interest in Solaris-86 was probably to keep people intersted in Unix-type operating systems, even if they only had commodity Intel boxes -- but Linux now does that so well, that it's easier (and cheaper) to put together Linux -> Solaris migration tools (done!) and Let Linux and the BSDs handle the X-86 market which they serve so well, already.
This is, of course, exactly what they WANT you to do. They only get money from the original sale of the stock. I'm presuming that this is a fly-by-night operation, so they're not going to care when (not if) their stock tanks. They've already got their money wired to a bank in the Bahamas. The person who will get hurt is the poor sod who doesn't understand that their claims are pure baloney.
When I read the article, I didn't see anything about lamp cord , barbed wire, etc. All they mentioned was cat1~3 -- in which case the primary advantage to the technology is that you can now wire most old buldings to 10megabit without having to run more copper through the walls (often without anything even approaching conduit in them.
This might be another way of killing Bin Laden. Right now I figure he's somewhere near laughing himeself to death at this overreaction. Please remamber that plane crashes happen, and this one does not have any of the hallmarks of terrorist action.
all of the security in the world isn't going to stop murphy's law fromm causing the occasional f*ck up. Flying is still safer than driving, but reading the news may cause a heart-attack if you attribute every tragedy to terrorism.
Let investigators do their job. In the unlikely event that they determine this to be of terrrorist cause, then we can take the appropriate actions
Being able to examine sunspots from below (presuming that you could survive) would answer (and raise) alot of questions about sunspots that are still unresolved.
I don't think that Wu's comments are made any less dramitic by current tech. I think it was a morbid joke based on the (low) probability of surviving an examination of the underside of a sunspot -- and how much the thought of doing something like that in person would traumatize the average puppeteer.
1979, man. Silent Hill didn't exist back then. DND was just starting to catch on, and there were few alternatives. (and the first "Halloween" movie hadn't been released yet).
Near our home was a cemetary, which was in my path. Depending on which path I took home, the Cemetary was often on my way, and I would either go around or cut through, depending on my mood.
Well, to be honest, I think that bravado took over... Damned if I wasn going to avoid the cemetery just because it was haloween night.
As I walked through the cemetery, the nearest street light was about 3 blocks away. It was dark, but there was still enough light for me to see the road ahead of me and the outlines of the tombstones around me. Suddenly, I saw something white moving to my left.
I stopped. I turned off my radio. I scanned around where I thought I had seen the movement, and shortly, I saw something white moving on a grave.
Now, I don't consider myself very superstitious, but at this point, I was in a prime superstition territory. Midnight, alone om a cemetary on Haloween night, with something white moving on a grave. If it got any closer to being a Hollywood movie, I was not going to like the next scene.
Suddenly the white thing started to move... and I mean move fast! My heart jumped as I prepared to run like my life depended on it and then I realized what I was facing.....
I don't know who was more scared -- Me or the rabbit -- but I don't remember ever taking a shortcut though that cemetary again.
It's that damned Anti Terrorism Initiative. We've got so many cops now, that they're reduced to eating the donuts from remote galaxies on their break time.