I've used things like TellMe, which played an ad everytime it didn't understand you
Regardless of whether TellMe or something like this would be able to understand German, I'm still preferring the keyboard which doesn't spam someone like me who speaks a rather strong Bavarian accent ("Scheissglump vareckts, sacklzement, hoit dei Mai und moch hi...") which is getting even worse if something annoys me;-)
...is trying to load a site linked on/. as soon as the story has appeared and before the target has been slashdotted to death. This time it seems that I'm unlucky, my proxy is reporting "Connection timed out". Game over.
For another, Microsoft must approve every piece of software that runs on a home XBox so that the company can make up the money it spent marketing the console.
That's not the problem. Swap penguins and Billies, have Microsoft gratefully approve it (I bet they won't even demand any money for it) and include a hack for the icons to switch back after a fixed date.
I wonder how long it will take for someone to port xbill (which would be more popular than Quake according to the xbill homepage) to the XBox... there is a port for Win32 available, so it shouldn't be too impossible.
Is it that you don't think the programmer should do everything for free, or is it that you can't afford any really nice software?
You don't understand the difference between free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech. It's the latter which is important GNU/Linux PDA users, not if GNU/Linux or a different free-as-in-speech system is running on the box.
That doesn't mean that GNU/Linux on PDAs is free-as-in-beer. When I bought my iPAQ last summer, the preinstalled GNU/Linux distribution was priced about 40 or 50 €, and I didn't have any problem paying for free-as-in-speech software. I would of course have been able to flash my PDA, but as I hadn't done it before and flashing the bootloader bears the risk of "bricking" a PDA and making it unusable, it was a fair deal. Apart from the preinstalled iPAQ I got a CD with all source codes used for building the GNU/Linux image, even a cross-development environment (binary packages + source + build scripts), everything.
It would be a good idea for Agenda to have a similar business model with commercial free-as-in-speech software, too. That's what GNU/Linux users are looking for.
"This alliance is a testament to HP's strong commitment in Linux market," says Eric Rueda, Software Marketing Manager, HP Business Desktops division.
"We are told not to disclose any information about the proprietary protocol we use to operate our scanners" says the HP scanner support staff.
About a month ago, I wanted to buy a decent HP scanner, which of course had to work with GNU/Linux, that is, with SANE. I went to the next dealer and asked about the possibitily of returning it in case it doesn't work with GNU/Linux and SANE. Of course I could return it within two weeks no matter of the reason, I've been told.
I got a HP ScanJet 2200C USB and took it home. New kernel, recent SANE distribution. After RTFMing a bit, I read that a special SANE plugin would be needed for the scanner to operate, and it would barely get anything but 100dpi b/w out of it.
All I got was one poor scan with the image barely to be recognizable. What is more, the USB host driver in 2.4.17 is unstable. Scan once, boot once. "usb-uhci.o" would get a kernel oops immediately, and "uhci.o" at least stands one scan. Wisefully I'm running a dedicated USB box which can be rebooted within two minutes without anything else to be disturbed.
After fiddling with the kernel, SANE and the special plugin I decided to return the scanner and get a different one. No problem, and a HP ScanJet 4470C was available which is supposed to run better.
Back at home with the 4470C. It didn't run at all. Nothing. Niente. After RTFMing a bit deeper, what I found was not a description about how to make it work, but some Web page (sorry don't remember the link any more) telling that HP reorganized its scanner development lab and refuses to disclose any information about the proprietary protocol, so HP scanners won't any longer work with non-MS operating systems.
So fsck the scanner, I returned it and got my money back, as the targetted Epson 1240U hasn't been available.
Some weeks later at the company I work for, my colleague had to write a driver for a newer HP SCSI scanner to work with HP-UX, so he would need some documentation about the protocol. It took him about three days on the telephone, with everyone telling him that the management forbids any disclosure of proprietary protocols regarding HP scanners, no matter if it should run with HP-UX or anything else. It took our boss several days to kick HP's ass long enough for them to agree releasing the documentation under a strict NDA. I wonder what can be such a valuable secret on a scanner protocol.
And exactly the same company would have a "strong commitment in [the] Linux market" being so hostile to GNU/Linux (even their own Unix variant) in a different division? Exactly the same company which tries to ensure their scanners won't ever work with GNU/Linux tries to get GNU/Linux onto the desktop?
I hope Bruce Perens or someone else of HP can comment on this before I'll have bought an Epson scanner which is known to work with SANE.
When the listener opens his email he finds the track and licence in his mailbox and may play the
music.
Cool. They dare to ask the user to click on a flashy animation of e. g. Christina Aguilera in his inbox, while everyone else told him NOT to click on obscure attachments...
The only thing he'll get to hear is his w1nd0z3 box blowing the whistle(r)...
Audio playback requires some kind of system that converts DRM-protected data into an audible waveform. If the system is published and openly available, then any code monkey can write one that converts it to a.wav or.mp3 file. The only other way that I can think of is fingerprinting, but that has been defeated every time it's been challenged. Other than closed obscurity-based systems, what does that leave?
A good possibility is the inclusion of an encryption chip into audio speakers, which will be delivered with digital DRM-crippled data. The data will be encrypted to a private key stored in the encryption chip of the audio speakers, which can be extracted by a simple command. This way free-as-in-speech software will NOT be excluded.
Of course you could still copy a song to a different computer or even broadcast it via Gnutella or whatever, but you could only play it on your pair of speakers. You could of course copy your private key around the network, but it's impossible to change the speakers' private keys. The only possibility is to disassemble your speakers and grab the data between the decryptor and the DAC, but not if decryptor and DAC are located on the same IC.
If the speakers are blown up, replace them by keeping the DAC/decryption unit.
Apr 2002: Court decision whether the lawsuit will be accepted.
Aug 2002: Call for both sides to file documents about their position until Dec 2002.
Nov 2002: Microsoft seeks the deadline to be postponed until May 2003 as more documents have to be prepared.
Dec 2002: Court rejects Microsoft's effort but nonetheless postpones the deadline until Feb 2003.
Feb 2003: Both AOL and Microsoft file their documents.
Mar 2003: Some independent research institutes compare Mozilla and MSIE, with the latter winning hands down.
May 2003: An internal Microsoft memo has been leaked, dating Jan 2003 and proposing an independent research which should show MSIE as the clear winner, to be published in spring time 2003.
Jun 2003: Court calls for testimonials. Both parties have to file a list of people they wish to testify until Sep 2003.
Aug 2003: Microsoft asks for postponement as they want to have some more people testify. Court rejects but permits to file the list until Oct 2003.
Dec 2003: Court announces testimonials to begin Apr 2004.
May 2004: A video of Steve Ballmer has been shown on court. Asked about some emails he wrote about Netscape, he asks what they mean a web browser would be.
Jul 2004: Time for Bill Gates' testimonial. Bill Gates is absent, sending Al Bundy to court, hoping no one will notice the difference. The judge doesn't, but some of the attourneys do, and Microsoft regrets a "big mistake in using the wrong address database".
Feb 2005: Finding of facts published. Microsoft is guilty of having abused their monopoly to achieve domination of the browser market. Both parties have to file proposals about possible remedies until Jun 2005.
May 2005: AOL proposes Microsoft to split into one enterprise for browser development and a different one for bashing of competitors. Microsoft protests.
Jun 2005: Microsoft proposes to donate software worth $10bn to schools and universities. AOL protests.
Oct 2005: Court rules Microsoft having engaged in anti-competitive practices and orders Microsoft to remove the "features" preventing MSIE to connect to AOL web sites, even if they dare to include a non-Microsoft operating system and a non-Microsoft browser with their CDs.
Dec 2005: Microsoft asks the Supreme Court for the ruling to be overturned.
Jun 2006: Supreme Court rejects.
Oct 2006: AOL and Microsoft launch a common campaign against GNU, Google and Galeon which taken over a large market share while they were busy with each other on court...
They make compilers illegal, that's how. Just like they made Linux and *BSD illegal. They have to, because you couldn't make a compiler which recognizes (and refuses to compile) operating systems, as opposed to harmless applications.
Additionally, they'll make universities etc. stop educating programmers and forbid existing developers to do their job, as these people might use their knowledge and try to circumvent "secure" technology.
Afterwards they will have to go after lots of musically-skilled ex-programmers who try to make a living by playing copyrighted songs with their guitars in downtown places and subway stations.
You're only used to such low mileages. Come to Europe and experience how high fuel prices have made high-mileage cars available and lowered the average fuel consumption about 30 % within ten years.
9.5 mpg is about 25 l / 100 km. The average in Europe is about 7 l / 100 km ^= 33 mpg, in the US 12 l / 100 km ^= 20 mpg. (As a rule of thumb, l/100km = 2.375 * 100 / mpg.)
In Germany a liter of diesel costs about 0.81 €, a liter of 95 octane gas about 1.00 €. Hence fuel for a monster like this one will cost about 0.25 € per km. A good diesel car like a Audi A6 1.9 TDI (130 hp 310 Nm) which is not really small, neither slow (220 km/h), takes about 6 l / 100 km ^= 40 mpg which costs about 0.05 € per km. You could go five (!) times as far for paying the same for fuel, with the A6 driving circles around the Maximog.
These things are great with WLAN, to use the car e. g. as a "mobile storage" for MP3 or such things. Fill up your car's harddisk with music which you have ripped at home, drive to work, download them onto your workstation (or get them on-the-fly) and listen to them. Of course a Freenet-like P2P filesharing network on the motorway would be great, too, to enlargen your music filebase while driving across the country. As a more useful purpose, information about traffic and weather conditions could be gathered by the cars themselves and shared among each other.
"A Samsung representative also confirmed the cancellation of Yopy, the company's planned Linux-based PDA."
Remember the fancy Yopy demos on CeBIT 2000? The add-on camera on top of one of them? The amazingly colorful display? The concept of extensibility with e. g. a GSM cell phone, a GPS receiver, a TV set, some storage and whatever.
Exactly that kind of concept has actually been available for about a year - not Samsung's Yopy but Compaq's iPAQ, and it's running GNU/Linux.
Is it ethical? Practical? Needed? (one question is rethorical)
Practical maybe, but neither needed nor ethical. We'd only go down to the same level. It's not the first time Microsoft had tried to bias an "independent survey", and this has already had some effect of a loss in credibility in the public. Be honest - if you saw the poll on ZDnet, would you really think of anyone to believe the result being the true and neutral opinion of ZDnet readers?
It took a lot of time and was a great effort for GNU/Linux, Free Software and the Open Source Initiative to gain today's amount of credibility and momentum. It was credibility which made it possible for GNU/Linux not only to be considered as a serious competitor against Unix, but in many cases as the only potential competitor against Microsoft, and the only way to escape a 100%-Microsoft-dominated world. Exactly that is what the PR people at Microsoft know, and it's what they want to combat - by Microsoft's rules if we consider to play the game with them.
So little could be more stupid than sacrificing much credibility by manipulating a public opinion poll or doing other unfair things which we don't find tolerable even if done by Microsoft. You're right with your statement that Microsoft's biasing of public surveys and polls can't be tolerated. But it won't change the fact that our rigging of public surveys and polls wouldn't be tolerated either.
Directory Administrator is a GUI (GTK+) frontend for user administration within a LDAP directory. It still requires some knowledge about a LDAP hierarchy, but it helps a lot.
My advice is to create two user hierarchies: one for administrative non-human accounts (e. g. root, mail, www) and one for real users. Same thing for groups. This way you can manage your real-user accounts with some kind of GUI frontend and even re-use the objects in an addressbook like Evolution Contacts without risking a security hole.
When I bought my home workstation about three years ago, the CPU (K6-II/400) was one of the cheapest parts of it. What really made it powerful are the SCSI cache controller and a fast Seagate drive, as well as an adequate (for these days 128 MB were more than enough) amount of RAM. Of course it depends on what you do with your box, but to be honest, most of the time you're waiting for the harddisk, either for loading data or for swapping virtual memory.
Three years later, the only thing I added was some more RAM, with the rest of my workstation being the same. It is still very usable, and I rarely see the need for a more powerful CPU.
In contrast, my former office workstation was a P3-800 with 192 MB RAM (some of which to be "abused" for graphics), an IDE drive and a one-chip-does-everything Intel i810 on the mainboard. SETI was the only thing it could do faster. On pushing the IDE system or the network, sound playback got distorted, and the X server became quite unreactive, it even stalled for a few seconds. A compile run made it impossible to do anything different in parallel, so I would have needed two machines - one for compiling and one for the desktop.
AFAICT especially on Intel systems the trend goes towards integrated one-chip-does-everything systems like i810 and its successors, which can handle everything from graphics to sound to IDE to networking. Of course the Intel people want their customers to come back later, and save some money by using only one chip instead of several ones. Most users will think it's the CPU which is too slow... and buy a new 2 GHz monster with another i8xx-crippled mainboard.
Assuming this is the implementation, in order to crack.NAP, you'd need a mechanism of sending your private key along with any.NAP file you send to another user.
That's quite easy:
Hi! How are you?
I send you this file in order to have your advice
See you later. Thanks
Gadgets dedicated for power supply?
on
Gadgets of 2002
·
· Score: 1, Funny
The ultimative power gadget for independent wearable computing would be a gas turbine powered by highly-ignitable gas everyone of us produces. Farts contain lots of methane which burns quite well. The turbine could even reduce the noise, or make a different sound, probably like a turbocharger.
So have some baked beans and onion for breakfast to ensure power supply for your cell phone, your wristwatch, your PDA and whatever. Unfortunately farts will still stink after combustion, as the stinky parts (H2S and NH3) won't burn off.
GNU/Linux PDAs are important for standards...
on
Linux PDA Part Deux
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Unlike WinCE and PalmOS, there is no single variant of GNU/Linux on PDAs, and the variety is more likely to increase than to consolidate. Some of them run X and a common widget library like Gtk+ or FLTK, some don't and run QT on the framebuffer. One distribution may use the large glibc 2.2, a different one uses a reduced micro-libc. Of course the PDAs run GNU/Linux on different architectures. Some might even choose BSD instead of Linux for the kernel, or not even a Unix-like OS.
It's simply impossible for an ISV to provide off-the-shelf software for GNU/Linux PDAs of any kind. The user won't install a different widget library or even an X server to run the software. He won't install a statically-linked binary of several megabytes in size. A Java engine is still too large at least for the less powerful PDAs.
No, he should only need to install the _content_ and use it with some kind of standardized application - an email client, a web browser, an addressbook, a PIM, a media player, even a geographical map viewer for GPS or navigation.
Today it's sheer incredible how proprietary data formats and protocols have established especially on PDAs, without anyone complaining about it. Exchange data with a desktop PIM? Read a book? Store news from a Web site for offline reading? In any case you'll need a special proprietary application on either the PDA or your desktop (Windoze) PC, or even on both. And all you care about is content, as much as you want to read Slashdot or some other web sites instead of just playing with Mozilla, Galeon, Konqueror, IE, Opera or whatever your favorite Web browser would be.
Fortunately since both PalmOS and WinCE have their market share and GNU/Linux PDAs beginning to appear, there is no single handheld platform with a market share large enough to ignore anything else. So hopefully content vendors will discover that they'll only reach a larger customer base by either providing proprietary data formats and closed-source applications for a dozen of systems, or by using free specifications for their data which can be used on independent applications.
Therefore it's especially the lowest-end GNU/Linux PDAs which contribute to the need of standards. An iPAQ, a Yopy or a Zaurus could easily have two or three different toolkits installed. A VR3 or a LinuxDA certainly can't.
I wonder how it sounds playing "Silent Night" several thousand times in parallel through ONE sound card... sequentially would be stupid, it'd still play on next year's Xmas.
They'll surely have their reason to postpone the ability to control its lights.
Drop in a bunch of plants that don't suck up much water and let them convert the Co2 to Oxygen. Now I wonder if it would actually work?:/
One problem is the thin Martian atmosphere, due to the low gravity. Pressure is about 1/100 of the atmospherie on Earth. That might be enough for some rigid plants, but they will certainly not produce a larger amount of oxygen. Even if they did, the pressure would still be too low for anyone to breathe.
The other problem is contaminating a potentially existing Martian biosphere (tiny single-cell organisms, if at all) with "alien" life. Some micro organisms on Earth could easily stand the unfriendly life conditions on Mars and would cause an effect similiar to "Independence Day".
IIRC, a few years ago the NASA planned to land on a Jupiter moon which they suspect for having water or even some evidence of life. After realizing that they'd contaminate it badly, they threw the vehicle into Jupiter...
Let me paraphrase: Microsoft has a patent on an OS that prevents a computer from booting anything but the "digital rights OS" Seems to me this would do away with dual boot PCs rather nicely.
So what? The "digital rights OS" will usually be loaded _after_ the bootloader... and only if you really decide to load it:
LILO
Enter your choice:
m: Say Hello To Big Brother
l: Say Goodbye To Billyboy
> l
Loading l...
...to drive with vegetable oil - real rapeseed or sunflower oil which is normally used for salads or cooking. Some people even filter oil used for making french fries or hamburgers and drive their cars with it.
In general, vegoil is much thicker than mineral diesel, requiring the fuel system to work harder - the injection pump might break after some time, or the injectors become dirty by inefficiently combusted fuel. So they heat the vegoil before giving it into the injection system. If you have ever put some oil into a pan and heated it, you'll know why - it's getting thin like water and much easier for the diesel engine to handle. Heat is being provided by electrical equipment, similar to a coffee-maker, or by the engine's watercooling system.
There is a community who shares experiences, plans and reports about their modifications on "http://www.fmso.de/" (in German), in a way which is quite similar to the free-software development most of us are familiar with. AFAIK in other countries like France or the UK there is a "vegoil community", too.
Sheer horsepower is not the main reason - most of them drive old non-turbo diesel engines with 50 or 60 hp, and these things don't really become faster with vegoil (there are a few ones who even hack their new TDI (Audi/VW) or CDI (Mercedes) engines - they _are_ hackable if you know how). However, vegoil is much cheaper (EUR 0.45/l) than mineral diesel (EUR 0.80/l), and it is neutral on carbondioxide - the engines spit at most the amount of CO2 into the atmosphere which the oil plants have consumed a year ago. Particles and toxic pollutions are much lower with vegoil than with dino diesel. Yet the main reason for most of these people to hack their cars is "just for fun".
BTW no one of them has a remote-controlled engine starter - these things are illegal in Germany because of unnecessarily polluting the air. If you want to have a warm car on a freezy winter morning, use a combustive or electrical (AC-powered) heating system.
Slashdot Mirror
I've used things like TellMe, which played an ad everytime it didn't understand you
;-)
Regardless of whether TellMe or something like this would be able to understand German, I'm still preferring the keyboard which doesn't spam someone like me who speaks a rather strong Bavarian accent ("Scheissglump vareckts, sacklzement, hoit dei Mai und moch hi...") which is getting even worse if something annoys me
...is trying to load a site linked on /. as soon as the story has appeared and before the target has been slashdotted to death. This time it seems that I'm unlucky, my proxy is reporting "Connection timed out". Game over.
For another, Microsoft must approve every piece of software that runs on a home XBox so that the company can make up the money it spent marketing the console.
That's not the problem. Swap penguins and Billies, have Microsoft gratefully approve it (I bet they won't even demand any money for it) and include a hack for the icons to switch back after a fixed date.
I wonder how long it will take for someone to port xbill (which would be more popular than Quake according to the xbill homepage) to the XBox... there is a port for Win32 available, so it shouldn't be too impossible.
Is it that you don't think the programmer should do everything for free, or is it that you can't afford any really nice software?
You don't understand the difference between free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech. It's the latter which is important GNU/Linux PDA users, not if GNU/Linux or a different free-as-in-speech system is running on the box.
That doesn't mean that GNU/Linux on PDAs is free-as-in-beer. When I bought my iPAQ last summer, the preinstalled GNU/Linux distribution was priced about 40 or 50 €, and I didn't have any problem paying for free-as-in-speech software. I would of course have been able to flash my PDA, but as I hadn't done it before and flashing the bootloader bears the risk of "bricking" a PDA and making it unusable, it was a fair deal. Apart from the preinstalled iPAQ I got a CD with all source codes used for building the GNU/Linux image, even a cross-development environment (binary packages + source + build scripts), everything.
It would be a good idea for Agenda to have a similar business model with commercial free-as-in-speech software, too. That's what GNU/Linux users are looking for.
"This alliance is a testament to HP's strong commitment in Linux market," says Eric Rueda, Software Marketing Manager, HP Business Desktops division.
"We are told not to disclose any information about the proprietary protocol we use to operate our scanners" says the HP scanner support staff.
About a month ago, I wanted to buy a decent HP scanner, which of course had to work with GNU/Linux, that is, with SANE. I went to the next dealer and asked about the possibitily of returning it in case it doesn't work with GNU/Linux and SANE. Of course I could return it within two weeks no matter of the reason, I've been told.
I got a HP ScanJet 2200C USB and took it home. New kernel, recent SANE distribution. After RTFMing a bit, I read that a special SANE plugin would be needed for the scanner to operate, and it would barely get anything but 100dpi b/w out of it.
All I got was one poor scan with the image barely to be recognizable. What is more, the USB host driver in 2.4.17 is unstable. Scan once, boot once. "usb-uhci.o" would get a kernel oops immediately, and "uhci.o" at least stands one scan. Wisefully I'm running a dedicated USB box which can be rebooted within two minutes without anything else to be disturbed.
After fiddling with the kernel, SANE and the special plugin I decided to return the scanner and get a different one. No problem, and a HP ScanJet 4470C was available which is supposed to run better.
Back at home with the 4470C. It didn't run at all. Nothing. Niente. After RTFMing a bit deeper, what I found was not a description about how to make it work, but some Web page (sorry don't remember the link any more) telling that HP reorganized its scanner development lab and refuses to disclose any information about the proprietary protocol, so HP scanners won't any longer work with non-MS operating systems.
So fsck the scanner, I returned it and got my money back, as the targetted Epson 1240U hasn't been available.
Some weeks later at the company I work for, my colleague had to write a driver for a newer HP SCSI scanner to work with HP-UX, so he would need some documentation about the protocol. It took him about three days on the telephone, with everyone telling him that the management forbids any disclosure of proprietary protocols regarding HP scanners, no matter if it should run with HP-UX or anything else. It took our boss several days to kick HP's ass long enough for them to agree releasing the documentation under a strict NDA. I wonder what can be such a valuable secret on a scanner protocol.
And exactly the same company would have a "strong commitment in [the] Linux market" being so hostile to GNU/Linux (even their own Unix variant) in a different division? Exactly the same company which tries to ensure their scanners won't ever work with GNU/Linux tries to get GNU/Linux onto the desktop?
I hope Bruce Perens or someone else of HP can comment on this before I'll have bought an Epson scanner which is known to work with SANE.
When the listener opens his email he finds the track and licence in his mailbox and may play the
music.
Cool. They dare to ask the user to click on a flashy animation of e. g. Christina Aguilera in his inbox, while everyone else told him NOT to click on obscure attachments...
The only thing he'll get to hear is his w1nd0z3 box blowing the whistle(r)...
Audio playback requires some kind of system that converts DRM-protected data into an audible waveform. If the system is published and openly available, then any code monkey can write one that converts it to a .wav or .mp3 file. The only other way that I can think of is fingerprinting, but that has been defeated every time it's been challenged. Other than closed obscurity-based systems, what does that leave?
A good possibility is the inclusion of an encryption chip into audio speakers, which will be delivered with digital DRM-crippled data. The data will be encrypted to a private key stored in the encryption chip of the audio speakers, which can be extracted by a simple command. This way free-as-in-speech software will NOT be excluded.
Of course you could still copy a song to a different computer or even broadcast it via Gnutella or whatever, but you could only play it on your pair of speakers. You could of course copy your private key around the network, but it's impossible to change the speakers' private keys. The only possibility is to disassemble your speakers and grab the data between the decryptor and the DAC, but not if decryptor and DAC are located on the same IC.
If the speakers are blown up, replace them by keeping the DAC/decryption unit.
They make compilers illegal, that's how. Just like they made Linux and *BSD illegal. They have to, because you couldn't make a compiler which recognizes (and refuses to compile) operating systems, as opposed to harmless applications.
Additionally, they'll make universities etc. stop educating programmers and forbid existing developers to do their job, as these people might use their knowledge and try to circumvent "secure" technology.
Afterwards they will have to go after lots of musically-skilled ex-programmers who try to make a living by playing copyrighted songs with their guitars in downtown places and subway stations.
You're only used to such low mileages. Come to Europe and experience how high fuel prices have made high-mileage cars available and lowered the average fuel consumption about 30 % within ten years.
9.5 mpg is about 25 l / 100 km. The average in Europe is about 7 l / 100 km ^= 33 mpg, in the US 12 l / 100 km ^= 20 mpg. (As a rule of thumb, l/100km = 2.375 * 100 / mpg.)
In Germany a liter of diesel costs about 0.81 €, a liter of 95 octane gas about 1.00 €. Hence fuel for a monster like this one will cost about 0.25 € per km. A good diesel car like a Audi A6 1.9 TDI (130 hp 310 Nm) which is not really small, neither slow (220 km/h), takes about 6 l / 100 km ^= 40 mpg which costs about 0.05 € per km. You could go five (!) times as far for paying the same for fuel, with the A6 driving circles around the Maximog.
These things are great with WLAN, to use the car e. g. as a "mobile storage" for MP3 or such things. Fill up your car's harddisk with music which you have ripped at home, drive to work, download them onto your workstation (or get them on-the-fly) and listen to them. Of course a Freenet-like P2P filesharing network on the motorway would be great, too, to enlargen your music filebase while driving across the country. As a more useful purpose, information about traffic and weather conditions could be gathered by the cars themselves and shared among each other.
"A Samsung representative also confirmed the cancellation of Yopy, the company's planned Linux-based PDA."
Remember the fancy Yopy demos on CeBIT 2000? The add-on camera on top of one of them? The amazingly colorful display? The concept of extensibility with e. g. a GSM cell phone, a GPS receiver, a TV set, some storage and whatever.
Exactly that kind of concept has actually been available for about a year - not Samsung's Yopy but Compaq's iPAQ, and it's running GNU/Linux.
Is it ethical? Practical? Needed? (one question is rethorical)
Practical maybe, but neither needed nor ethical. We'd only go down to the same level. It's not the first time Microsoft had tried to bias an "independent survey", and this has already had some effect of a loss in credibility in the public. Be honest - if you saw the poll on ZDnet, would you really think of anyone to believe the result being the true and neutral opinion of ZDnet readers?
It took a lot of time and was a great effort for GNU/Linux, Free Software and the Open Source Initiative to gain today's amount of credibility and momentum. It was credibility which made it possible for GNU/Linux not only to be considered as a serious competitor against Unix, but in many cases as the only potential competitor against Microsoft, and the only way to escape a 100%-Microsoft-dominated world. Exactly that is what the PR people at Microsoft know, and it's what they want to combat - by Microsoft's rules if we consider to play the game with them.
So little could be more stupid than sacrificing much credibility by manipulating a public opinion poll or doing other unfair things which we don't find tolerable even if done by Microsoft. You're right with your statement that Microsoft's biasing of public surveys and polls can't be tolerated. But it won't change the fact that our rigging of public surveys and polls wouldn't be tolerated either.
Directory Administrator is a GUI (GTK+) frontend for user administration within a LDAP directory. It still requires some knowledge about a LDAP hierarchy, but it helps a lot.
My advice is to create two user hierarchies: one for administrative non-human accounts (e. g. root, mail, www) and one for real users. Same thing for groups. This way you can manage your real-user accounts with some kind of GUI frontend and even re-use the objects in an addressbook like Evolution Contacts without risking a security hole.
When I bought my home workstation about three years ago, the CPU (K6-II/400) was one of the cheapest parts of it. What really made it powerful are the SCSI cache controller and a fast Seagate drive, as well as an adequate (for these days 128 MB were more than enough) amount of RAM. Of course it depends on what you do with your box, but to be honest, most of the time you're waiting for the harddisk, either for loading data or for swapping virtual memory.
Three years later, the only thing I added was some more RAM, with the rest of my workstation being the same. It is still very usable, and I rarely see the need for a more powerful CPU.
In contrast, my former office workstation was a P3-800 with 192 MB RAM (some of which to be "abused" for graphics), an IDE drive and a one-chip-does-everything Intel i810 on the mainboard. SETI was the only thing it could do faster. On pushing the IDE system or the network, sound playback got distorted, and the X server became quite unreactive, it even stalled for a few seconds. A compile run made it impossible to do anything different in parallel, so I would have needed two machines - one for compiling and one for the desktop.
AFAICT especially on Intel systems the trend goes towards integrated one-chip-does-everything systems like i810 and its successors, which can handle everything from graphics to sound to IDE to networking. Of course the Intel people want their customers to come back later, and save some money by using only one chip instead of several ones. Most users will think it's the CPU which is too slow... and buy a new 2 GHz monster with another i8xx-crippled mainboard.
Assuming this is the implementation, in order to crack .NAP, you'd need a mechanism of sending your private key along with any .NAP file you send to another user.
That's quite easy:
Hi! How are you?
I send you this file in order to have your advice
See you later. Thanks
The ultimative power gadget for independent wearable computing would be a gas turbine powered by highly-ignitable gas everyone of us produces. Farts contain lots of methane which burns quite well. The turbine could even reduce the noise, or make a different sound, probably like a turbocharger.
So have some baked beans and onion for breakfast to ensure power supply for your cell phone, your wristwatch, your PDA and whatever. Unfortunately farts will still stink after combustion, as the stinky parts (H2S and NH3) won't burn off.
Unlike WinCE and PalmOS, there is no single variant of GNU/Linux on PDAs, and the variety is more likely to increase than to consolidate. Some of them run X and a common widget library like Gtk+ or FLTK, some don't and run QT on the framebuffer. One distribution may use the large glibc 2.2, a different one uses a reduced micro-libc. Of course the PDAs run GNU/Linux on different architectures. Some might even choose BSD instead of Linux for the kernel, or not even a Unix-like OS.
It's simply impossible for an ISV to provide off-the-shelf software for GNU/Linux PDAs of any kind. The user won't install a different widget library or even an X server to run the software. He won't install a statically-linked binary of several megabytes in size. A Java engine is still too large at least for the less powerful PDAs.
No, he should only need to install the _content_ and use it with some kind of standardized application - an email client, a web browser, an addressbook, a PIM, a media player, even a geographical map viewer for GPS or navigation.
Today it's sheer incredible how proprietary data formats and protocols have established especially on PDAs, without anyone complaining about it. Exchange data with a desktop PIM? Read a book? Store news from a Web site for offline reading? In any case you'll need a special proprietary application on either the PDA or your desktop (Windoze) PC, or even on both. And all you care about is content, as much as you want to read Slashdot or some other web sites instead of just playing with Mozilla, Galeon, Konqueror, IE, Opera or whatever your favorite Web browser would be.
Fortunately since both PalmOS and WinCE have their market share and GNU/Linux PDAs beginning to appear, there is no single handheld platform with a market share large enough to ignore anything else. So hopefully content vendors will discover that they'll only reach a larger customer base by either providing proprietary data formats and closed-source applications for a dozen of systems, or by using free specifications for their data which can be used on independent applications.
Therefore it's especially the lowest-end GNU/Linux PDAs which contribute to the need of standards. An iPAQ, a Yopy or a Zaurus could easily have two or three different toolkits installed. A VR3 or a LinuxDA certainly can't.
I wonder how it sounds playing "Silent Night" several thousand times in parallel through ONE sound card... sequentially would be stupid, it'd still play on next year's Xmas.
They'll surely have their reason to postpone the ability to control its lights.
Drop in a bunch of plants that don't suck up much water and let them convert the Co2 to Oxygen. Now I wonder if it would actually work?
One problem is the thin Martian atmosphere, due to the low gravity. Pressure is about 1/100 of the atmospherie on Earth. That might be enough for some rigid plants, but they will certainly not produce a larger amount of oxygen. Even if they did, the pressure would still be too low for anyone to breathe.
The other problem is contaminating a potentially existing Martian biosphere (tiny single-cell organisms, if at all) with "alien" life. Some micro organisms on Earth could easily stand the unfriendly life conditions on Mars and would cause an effect similiar to "Independence Day".
IIRC, a few years ago the NASA planned to land on a Jupiter moon which they suspect for having water or even some evidence of life. After realizing that they'd contaminate it badly, they threw the vehicle into Jupiter...
Wrap the file into a VBS script, a Word macro or a screensaver. Feed it into Outlook and click...
Let me paraphrase: Microsoft has a patent on an OS that prevents a computer from booting anything but the "digital rights OS" Seems to me this would do away with dual boot PCs rather nicely.
So what? The "digital rights OS" will usually be loaded _after_ the bootloader... and only if you really decide to load it:
LILO
Enter your choice:
m: Say Hello To Big Brother
l: Say Goodbye To Billyboy
> l
Loading l...
...to drive with vegetable oil - real rapeseed or sunflower oil which is normally used for salads or cooking. Some people even filter oil used for making french fries or hamburgers and drive their cars with it.
In general, vegoil is much thicker than mineral diesel, requiring the fuel system to work harder - the injection pump might break after some time, or the injectors become dirty by inefficiently combusted fuel. So they heat the vegoil before giving it into the injection system. If you have ever put some oil into a pan and heated it, you'll know why - it's getting thin like water and much easier for the diesel engine to handle. Heat is being provided by electrical equipment, similar to a coffee-maker, or by the engine's watercooling system.
There is a community who shares experiences, plans and reports about their modifications on "http://www.fmso.de/" (in German), in a way which is quite similar to the free-software development most of us are familiar with. AFAIK in other countries like France or the UK there is a "vegoil community", too.
Sheer horsepower is not the main reason - most of them drive old non-turbo diesel engines with 50 or 60 hp, and these things don't really become faster with vegoil (there are a few ones who even hack their new TDI (Audi/VW) or CDI (Mercedes) engines - they _are_ hackable if you know how). However, vegoil is much cheaper (EUR 0.45/l) than mineral diesel (EUR 0.80/l), and it is neutral on carbondioxide - the engines spit at most the amount of CO2 into the atmosphere which the oil plants have consumed a year ago. Particles and toxic pollutions are much lower with vegoil than with dino diesel. Yet the main reason for most of these people to hack their cars is "just for fun".
BTW no one of them has a remote-controlled engine starter - these things are illegal in Germany because of unnecessarily polluting the air. If you want to have a warm car on a freezy winter morning, use a combustive or electrical (AC-powered) heating system.
A: Hey check this, that guy finally found some k3w1 p1c5/m0v135 of [whoever], let's add them to our filebase...
B: Oh, he's using a members only site, let's ask his magic lantern for the password... this stuff is REALLY weird, thanx Dubya