This is a freedom of speech issue, and probably a slam-dunk in terms of a countersuit... since the victim was reporting to the ISPs that their customers were in violation of AUP provisions regarding the sending of unsolicited electronic junk mail, NOT violations of the ICANSPAM act.
There's a legal definition of prohibited spam under the act, and there's the entirely different definition (unsolicited junk mail) in the AUP contracts the spammers signed with their ISPs which is consistent with the popular definition and the definition used in most dictionaries recent enough to include spam as anything but a delicious canned meat product from Hormel.
Breach of contract is the authority that ISPs are using to shut spammers down.
The victim was reporting violations of AUP contracts with their ISPs to the ISPs, NOT violations of ICANSPAM.
This case should have already have been thrown out of court.
Some registrars (godaddy, I know for sure does) activate this lock by default,
If you're with godaddy and haven't locked yours, go check now. I just locked mine at godaddy.
They may lock new accounts by default... mine's a couple or three years old. I'm just saying don't count on your domain being locked unless you have locked it yourself.
Next, he admits that the "Backup" system can't restore files or directories. OMG!!
and the editor accepted the article? Dar on the command line doesn't have that problem and I know it restores individual files and directories. I like GUIs, but that kind of loss of functionality isn't worth it.
When I wrote my own how-to piece, it's a good thing I couldn't get kdar to install. Otherwise I might be in that position. Dar also does individual file compression.
At least all 3 of the backup solutions in my article(clone to disk, differential, compress/burn to DVD) actually work as intended.
Depending on the data, you can get several Gig's onto a single CD.
Do you mean DVD-R or are you getting 10:1 or better compression? Seriously, what if you have more than one DVD of info to back up?
I set things up to separate compression from burn on purpose. That way, I can let the compression run overnight and burn all the DVDs sequentially. Since I've got 30G+ to back up, it actually takes that long to do compression. Of course, if one goes that route, one had better have a lot of free drive space.
I back up complete images. That way, I don't have to reinstall everything separately after reinstalling the OS and/home .
clone your workstation to a backup mirror drive via dd
how to make a differential backup (I back up every other day) using a rsync script (INCLUDED!!!)
how to back up using dar (dar backup script INCLUDED) to generate DVD sized archives and how to use k3b (if you don't like k3b, find your own DVD burner!)
If you want tape solutions, there are plenty on the Net, since most Linux backup software is tape-oriented. Most of us don't do tape and I can't think of any good reason why anybody should start.
Now that I've settled this, what else do you want to talk about?
Real cheap solar cells plus cheap transportation to orbit probably means a very cost-effective solar power satellite system is possible which can make power available 24/7/365 without concerns about storage.
A network of orbital power satellites or putting a big solar cell farm in the L5 position is probably cheaper than the $16,000,000,000 the International Energy Agency says we need to spend to continue our fossil fuel habit.
A whole lot of free content from name writers' backlists, and if you're read the first several books in a series and you want to read the new one which is on sale, they will be very happy to sell it to you, either in dead tree or electronic formats.
NO DRM, and standard word processor document formats
I personally have purchased several books in electronic format from them that I probably wouldn't have bought otherwise.
Ever seen an old movie where a thug walks into a small business and says "Nice place you've got here, be a shame if anything happened to it. We're selling. . . protection from. . . bad things happening to your business."
The idea isn't to protect the customer from anything except for the actions of the people selling "protection", just like it was in that kind of old movie. The thugs are the enforcement arms ot the *AA content cartel, including the ones paid for by our taxes.
I'm going to do my DVD-burner dual-layer upgrade before the new DRM-broken crap goes on sale... because I won't be buying DVD gear afterwards until this "standard" collapses, hopefully, taking at least one of its vendors with it.
I won't be buying any HP stuff until they've got a new CEO, hopefully, because some foriegn company wanted to buy the bankrupt corpse of a US compnay with a recognizable brand name.
The University of New Hampshire biodiesel research project is based on strains of algae which manufacture the kind of long hydrocarbon chains that can be refined into biodiesel.
That is in part why I treat the energy crisis / peak oil / global warming as solvable problems. Check my sig below for a page with links to the research and what I think should be done about it.
Organizations that say "We have an energy crisis coming, and the only solution is radical efficiency combined with lifestyle change combined with shrinking the global economy to achieve a gradual Powerdown" get neither grant money nor political support.
Could it be that they simply do not deserve it?
If we follow the path they recommend, what we will wind up with is a bunch of cities that are just what the environmental lifestyle people want us to live in. Will they survive the conseqences of the global climate change into which the resources which properly applied, might have solved the problem will have been wasted? Will the people in them? I think these people are either innumerate or don't understand the real magnitude of the problem.
The idea that "technology can't solve the problem" is a statement of religious faith that doesn't match the available facts, just as "global warming is junk science" is a statement of religious faith that doesn't match the available facts. For that matter, so is the idea that "hydrogen economy will save us from global warming."
We don't need lifestyle solutions that'll take generations to have an effect, we need replacements for fossil fuel which we can make substantial progress towards implementing in production over the next decade and complete over the next generation.
Such solutions exist and may be cheaper than what we are currently doing.
Did you really believe that people have been working on the alternative energy problem for generations and haven't come up with anything?
We are on the cheap transportation to space over a decade before the Space Elevator will be remotely close to possibl. Solar cell arrays in space are old technology. We know how to transport power via microwave. It's a cheap, clean power source. In this case, anything that costs less than the $16,000,000,000 that the International Energy Agency says is nneded to keep burning fossil fuel is cheap.
Biodiesel is already being sold at the gas pump, and it's carbon-neutral. There are ways to make it cheaper and there are people working on the solutions. (Provisional Patent App in progress) It can be processed and distributed using our existing infrastructure, and changing vehicle assembly lines to make diesels instead of gasoline engine cars is fairly trivial.
Personally, I'd rather buy cheap light bulbs and put the money I save into higher taxes for government programs intended to turn viable lab-scale solutions into production solutions.
If you think we can wait generations for a soltion, go Google on "clathrate gun". Enjoy... if what's discussed is correct, the Pentagon hypothetical global warming worst-case scenario may be optimistic.
Go to the link in my sig for further discussion and links to more info.
The article (yeah, I read it) basically says that there are great opportunities for researchers in the field, not opportunities for society as a whole.
Economic considerations are far more important. Any idea what replacing the US oil distribution infrastructure with a hydrogen distribution infrastructure would cost? The researchers obviously don't.
My WAG would be hundreds of billions of dollars, with luck. Putting giant hydrogen tanks at every gas station? New hydrogen pump islands well away from current gas/oil pumps? Training personnel? How about replacing every single plane, bus, auto, truck, locomotive, and generator on the face of the earth? Just what are we buying with it that we can't get cheaper with biodiesel? (estimate for building energy farms big enough to grow enough biodiesel for the US - $169 billion)
Meeting the volume restrictions in cars or trucks, for instance, requires using hydrogen stored at densities higher than its liquid density
Just what kind of superpressure vessels or exotic chemistries or other technologies are going to be required to fix this problem? Will vehicles based on this cost as little as twice what current vehicles do in volume production?
Solving the problem (cheap space transportation) that is required to make space power satellites cost-effective is comparatively trivial compared to the problem of building hydrogen storage for vehicles comparable in performance to current diesel products.
Frankly, I doubt that "the hydrogen economy" would be cost-effective even at a zero-cost/Kwh and IMHO, it's not worth wasting resources we're going to need to replace fossil fuel in trying.
It's time to say clearly and publically that the "hydrogen economy" is driven by hype and is nothing more or less than a technonerd wankfest, not a viable replacement for fossil fuel.
Not to say that the research should be stopped, we might learn some useful things from it, like how to build safe superpressure vessels for flammable gases.
But no responsible scientist or environmentalist should be discussing replacing fossil fuel or stopping global warning with "THE HYDROGEN ECONOMY!!!". Such talk at best, serves us to distract us from more viable energy alternatives. Anyone who discusses hydrogen energy as a fossil fuel replacement or as a global warning solution is talking through his asshole, whether he knows it or not, you can dismiss him as clueless at best.
Examples:
biomass biodiesel (carbon-neutral), perhaps from sewage - biodiesel provides far more energy per volume than hydrogen can short of the hypothetical technologies discussed in the paper.
The only real technological problem with space power satellites is cheap transportation of solar cells to orbit. Perhaps http://www.jpaerospace.com/ has the answer.
We've been researching alternative energy for generations, we need to bring the most promising technologies up to the pilot plant level NOW, pick winners, and GO while we still have a more-or-less viable planet to work from.
Check the link in my sig for more discussion and links to the source info I'm using to support the above.
Everybody seems to be taking something for granted.
The something is that Microsoft is the only target. While as described, only a drooling tard would pay twice as much for a Windows Media Center of inferior performance deliberately DRM broken with a G5 Mac pizzabox which Just Works as the other choice, I can think of a rapidly expanding niche market that this box would be ideally suited to attack.
The market is, of course, the Linux desktop for the non ubergeek user.
I've put the last year into learning the Linux desktop, and paid for it in part by writing Linux tutorials for publication. In part, I've been doing this because it looks like the market for people who know Linux is expanding rapidly in the places in the world I want to go. (the EU and Canada, the US politicians seem to be bent on destroying the ability for non-corporates to do technology R&D because the Hollywood content cartel wants it that way)
The main advantages of desktop Linux for the non-fanatic are:
that it runs on cheap commodity x86 hardware. (which has its own problems neatly summarized by "cheap")
MS doesn't sell it
it's security doesn't suck shit, even right out of the box
it looks a lot like the future.
The difference between cheap commodity x86 hardware and low cost high-quality Mac hardware is one most of us can probably live with.
The difference between It Just Works and the fun and games involved with adding new hardware and software to a Linux box is also something all of us but the hard core fanatics can live with. While the automated installer tools like apt-get/synaptic are probably as good as anything Apple sells and far better than anything Redmond ever imagined, it's really too bad that outside of the apps bundled with distributions, there isn't a whole lot that you can install with them.
Throw in the much larger number of applications which actually work and meet user needs available on the Mac platform and there aren't a whole lot of reasons to go with Linux as an alternative to Windows given a low-cost entry-level Mac platform which will probably physically break a lot less often than an eMachine or a Dell.
Don't tell me about the wonders of Open Office Writer and other FOSS apps, since I live in the real world, the "minor compatibility issues" get a lot more serious when I'm submitting copy to editors who run MS Word on Windows boxes. GIMP vs PaintShopPro? The only reason I can run Linux on my primary workstation, i.e. the box that helps me make a living is that Win4Lin(WHICH IS NOT FREE) works far better than WINE does, and therefore, I can run just about anything Windows in a Windows window over my copy of Fedora Core 2.
So what would a Linux box on a cheap x86 platform do for a user that a low-cost Mac doesn't? Break more often? Cause a user trying to install something or make it work after installing to spend lots and lots of time on the Web?
As for "looks a lot like the future", imagine yourself as an enterprise CIO who's sick of paying MS tax and paying to fix the endless series of major software security problems with MS and buying cheap commodity PCs that constantly break who gets pitched Apple quality, OSX, and a chance to reduce in-house support staff at the same time. With the other option being a consultant group pitching FOSS and saying "well, some of your boxes will support Linux, we'll have to see".
I've been investing time in Linux because I see a world evolving beyond MS's product line and I want to be one of the people who can explain it and fix it for a world full of Linux newbies who just bought or had corporate get them Linux boxes to replace their aging XP machines. A *nix OS that does everything Linux does, only better, puts that plan in question.
I'm putting my planned x86 hardware upgrade on hold until I find out if this is for real or not. If Apple can compete at the low end, Linux desktops may not have mu
for low-speed ADCs, google on "Plugging the Analog Hole".
America is in the process of becoming a "no go" zone for non-commercially sponsored electronics R&D. Anyone familiar with electronics should be able to come up with any number of devices used on an everyday basis that was invented in a homebrew workshop, not a corporate R&D shop.
The hole they'd be making would be in their own bank accounts. The only currency on Earth which could replace the dollar as a reserve curency is the Euro, and the way things are going, no intervention by non-US interests is required to make this happen. (EUR up 30% agaist the dollar over the last couple of years, for current exchange rates, go to
if you dont have and effective industri you cannot afford an effective army.
Worse. Borrowing, and it's China, India, and the Arabs who are buying those T-bills. They are buying them based on faith in the future of the US economy, and the drop of the USD means that faith is starting to fail.
I used the impact calculator. I used dense rock from the menu for density. The experts said that it would break up in the upper atmosphere, and this says the same thing. The bad news follows. Half a megaton may not sound like much, but if it's your back yard, it'll ruin your whold day.
Enjoy.
Your Inputs:
Distance from Impact: 0.00 km = 0.00 miles
Projectile Diameter: 16.00 m = 52.48 ft = 0.01 miles
Projectile Density: 8000 kg/m3
Impact Velocity: 17.00 km/s = 10.56 miles/s
Impact Angle: 45 degrees
Target Density: 2500 kg/m3
Target Type: Sedimentary Rock
Energy:
Energy before atmospheric entry: 2.48 x 1015 Joules = 592.27 KiloTons TNT
The average interval between impacts of this size somewhere on Earth is 73.5 years
Atmospheric Entry:
The projectile begins to breakup at an altitude of 13400 meters = 44100 ft
The projectile bursts into a cloud of fragments at an altitude of 6880 meters = 22600 ft
The residual velocity of the projectile fragments after the burst is 5.02 km/s = 3.12 miles/s
The energy of the airburst is 2.26 x 1015 Joules = 0.54 x 100 MegaTons.
No crater is formed, although large fragments may strike the surface.
Major Global Changes:
The Earth is not strongly disturbed by the impact and loses negligible mass.
The impact does not make a noticeable change in the Earth's rotation period or the tilt of its axis.
The impact does not shift the Earth's orbit noticeably.
Air Blast:
Microprocessors - The Chip - Federico Faggin, Ted Hoff and Stan Mazor
interviews with and biographies of the inventors - Federico Faggin, Ted Hoff, and Stan Mazor.
By Mary Bellis
In November, 1971, a company called Intel publicly introduced the world's first single chip microprocessor, the Intel 4004 (U.S. Patent #3,821,715), invented by Intel engineers Federico Faggin, Ted Hoff, and Stan Mazor. After the invention of integrated circuits revolutionized computer design, the only place to go was down -- in size that is. The Intel 4004 chip took the integrated circuit down one step further by placing all the parts that made a computer think (i.e. central processing unit, memory, input and output controls) on one small chip. Programming intelligence into inanimate objects had now become possible.
Apple put itself in that corner. They had the cash in hand in the bank to buy Universal, buzz I heard said that they could have gotten it for way under the asking price with a few golden parachutes.
If they had done this, they could have dynamited the RIAA label business model at great profit to themselves, the artists, and the rest of us. Everybody wins except the parasites. Would an iPod sell better with 100 free legal downloads of Universal products? Would getting Universal way under the asking price have reduced the "value" of the other labels, making them affordable targwts for HP, IBM, Dell, etc. and giving us a record people run by more or less sane people who don't see profit in paying RIAA lobbyists? We'll never know.
Instead, they decided to stay a loyal RIAA customer. Their doing this reinforced the business model that prevents them from selling music profitably. Jobs made the short-sighted and stupid decision to make his profit on the hardware only. Great, assuming that Apple has the only people on the face of the earth capable of making a music player and pay-per-download system with a cool UI. This is, of course, the wrong end of a sucker bet.
This isn't an Apple-killer, just an example of the kind of thinking that's kept a clearly superior OS from becoming a dominant player instead of an eternal niche market.
And the Apple fanboys will keep on buying and defending Apple.
Have all the 4" wafer fabs been torn down? Aren't the 6" fabs obsolescent at this point? Why not put them back online making a useful product?
Why can't these be turned into solar cell plants making wafer-scale solar cell arrays (arrays to avoid the problem of defective chips, simply disable cells with defects).
However, I think it time to deviate from the tradition that calls for solar cell arrays to cover our building roofs.
if they have that much influence I might like to join.
Easily done. Get your net worth to above $10,000,000 and get a lobotomy. At this point, you should be able to go to the PNAC site and find that everything you see there makes perfect sense. At that point, you'll be a true neocon. Go to the Republican National Committee website and donate them most of your money.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a freedom of speech issue, and probably a slam-dunk in terms of a countersuit... since the victim was reporting to the ISPs that their customers were in violation of AUP provisions regarding the sending of unsolicited electronic junk mail, NOT violations of the ICANSPAM act.
Breach of contract is the authority that ISPs are using to shut spammers down.
The victim was reporting violations of AUP contracts with their ISPs to the ISPs, NOT violations of ICANSPAM.
This case should have already have been thrown out of court.
Anyone tracked down and named the lawyers yet?
thanks, I just set a monthly calendar reminder to do that myself.
If you're with godaddy and haven't locked yours, go check now. I just locked mine at godaddy.
They may lock new accounts by default... mine's a couple or three years old. I'm just saying don't count on your domain being locked unless you have locked it yourself.
and the editor accepted the article? Dar on the command line doesn't have that problem and I know it restores individual files and directories. I like GUIs, but that kind of loss of functionality isn't worth it.
When I wrote my own how-to piece, it's a good thing I couldn't get kdar to install. Otherwise I might be in that position. Dar also does individual file compression.
At least all 3 of the backup solutions in my article(clone to disk, differential, compress/burn to DVD) actually work as intended.
Depending on the data, you can get several Gig's onto a single CD.
Do you mean DVD-R or are you getting 10:1 or better compression? Seriously, what if you have more than one DVD of info to back up?
I set things up to separate compression from burn on purpose. That way, I can let the compression run overnight and burn all the DVDs sequentially. Since I've got 30G+ to back up, it actually takes that long to do compression. Of course, if one goes that route, one had better have a lot of free drive space.
I back up complete images. That way, I don't have to reinstall everything separately after reinstalling the OS and /home .
This will tell you how to:
If you want tape solutions, there are plenty on the Net, since most Linux backup software is tape-oriented. Most of us don't do tape and I can't think of any good reason why anybody should start.
Now that I've settled this, what else do you want to talk about?
Real cheap solar cells plus cheap transportation to orbit probably means a very cost-effective solar power satellite system is possible which can make power available 24/7/365 without concerns about storage.
A network of orbital power satellites or putting a big solar cell farm in the L5 position is probably cheaper than the $16,000,000,000 the International Energy Agency says we need to spend to continue our fossil fuel habit.
A whole lot of free content from name writers' backlists, and if you're read the first several books in a series and you want to read the new one which is on sale, they will be very happy to sell it to you, either in dead tree or electronic formats.
NO DRM, and standard word processor document formats
I personally have purchased several books in electronic format from them that I probably wouldn't have bought otherwise.
Go check it out.
his primary project, the "Jesussonic" FX box at the moment runs in Linux / Mac / Windows, and I'm not depressed in the least about this.
Ever seen an old movie where a thug walks into a small business and says "Nice place you've got here, be a shame if anything happened to it. We're selling. . . protection from. . . bad things happening to your business."
The idea isn't to protect the customer from anything except for the actions of the people selling "protection", just like it was in that kind of old movie. The thugs are the enforcement arms ot the *AA content cartel, including the ones paid for by our taxes.
I'm going to do my DVD-burner dual-layer upgrade before the new DRM-broken crap goes on sale... because I won't be buying DVD gear afterwards until this "standard" collapses, hopefully, taking at least one of its vendors with it.
I won't be buying any HP stuff until they've got a new CEO, hopefully, because some foriegn company wanted to buy the bankrupt corpse of a US compnay with a recognizable brand name.
That is in part why I treat the energy crisis / peak oil / global warming as solvable problems. Check my sig below for a page with links to the research and what I think should be done about it.
Could it be that they simply do not deserve it?
If we follow the path they recommend, what we will wind up with is a bunch of cities that are just what the environmental lifestyle people want us to live in. Will they survive the conseqences of the global climate change into which the resources which properly applied, might have solved the problem will have been wasted? Will the people in them? I think these people are either innumerate or don't understand the real magnitude of the problem.
The idea that "technology can't solve the problem" is a statement of religious faith that doesn't match the available facts, just as "global warming is junk science" is a statement of religious faith that doesn't match the available facts. For that matter, so is the idea that "hydrogen economy will save us from global warming."
We don't need lifestyle solutions that'll take generations to have an effect, we need replacements for fossil fuel which we can make substantial progress towards implementing in production over the next decade and complete over the next generation.
Such solutions exist and may be cheaper than what we are currently doing.
Did you really believe that people have been working on the alternative energy problem for generations and haven't come up with anything?
We are on the cheap transportation to space over a decade before the Space Elevator will be remotely close to possibl. Solar cell arrays in space are old technology. We know how to transport power via microwave. It's a cheap, clean power source. In this case, anything that costs less than the $16,000,000,000 that the International Energy Agency says is nneded to keep burning fossil fuel is cheap.
Biodiesel is already being sold at the gas pump, and it's carbon-neutral. There are ways to make it cheaper and there are people working on the solutions. (Provisional Patent App in progress) It can be processed and distributed using our existing infrastructure, and changing vehicle assembly lines to make diesels instead of gasoline engine cars is fairly trivial.
Personally, I'd rather buy cheap light bulbs and put the money I save into higher taxes for government programs intended to turn viable lab-scale solutions into production solutions.
If you think we can wait generations for a soltion, go Google on "clathrate gun". Enjoy... if what's discussed is correct, the Pentagon hypothetical global warming worst-case scenario may be optimistic.
Go to the link in my sig for further discussion and links to more info.
Economic considerations are far more important. Any idea what replacing the US oil distribution infrastructure with a hydrogen distribution infrastructure would cost? The researchers obviously don't.
My WAG would be hundreds of billions of dollars, with luck. Putting giant hydrogen tanks at every gas station? New hydrogen pump islands well away from current gas/oil pumps? Training personnel? How about replacing every single plane, bus, auto, truck, locomotive, and generator on the face of the earth? Just what are we buying with it that we can't get cheaper with biodiesel? (estimate for building energy farms big enough to grow enough biodiesel for the US - $169 billion)
Meeting the volume restrictions in cars or trucks, for instance, requires using hydrogen stored at densities higher than its liquid density
Just what kind of superpressure vessels or exotic chemistries or other technologies are going to be required to fix this problem? Will vehicles based on this cost as little as twice what current vehicles do in volume production?
Solving the problem (cheap space transportation) that is required to make space power satellites cost-effective is comparatively trivial compared to the problem of building hydrogen storage for vehicles comparable in performance to current diesel products.
Frankly, I doubt that "the hydrogen economy" would be cost-effective even at a zero-cost/Kwh and IMHO, it's not worth wasting resources we're going to need to replace fossil fuel in trying.
It's time to say clearly and publically that the "hydrogen economy" is driven by hype and is nothing more or less than a technonerd wankfest, not a viable replacement for fossil fuel.
Not to say that the research should be stopped, we might learn some useful things from it, like how to build safe superpressure vessels for flammable gases.
But no responsible scientist or environmentalist should be discussing replacing fossil fuel or stopping global warning with "THE HYDROGEN ECONOMY!!!". Such talk at best, serves us to distract us from more viable energy alternatives. Anyone who discusses hydrogen energy as a fossil fuel replacement or as a global warning solution is talking through his asshole, whether he knows it or not, you can dismiss him as clueless at best.
Examples:
We've been researching alternative energy for generations, we need to bring the most promising technologies up to the pilot plant level NOW, pick winners, and GO while we still have a more-or-less viable planet to work from.
Check the link in my sig for more discussion and links to the source info I'm using to support the above.
The something is that Microsoft is the only target. While as described, only a drooling tard would pay twice as much for a Windows Media Center of inferior performance deliberately DRM broken with a G5 Mac pizzabox which Just Works as the other choice, I can think of a rapidly expanding niche market that this box would be ideally suited to attack.
The market is, of course, the Linux desktop for the non ubergeek user.
I've put the last year into learning the Linux desktop, and paid for it in part by writing Linux tutorials for publication. In part, I've been doing this because it looks like the market for people who know Linux is expanding rapidly in the places in the world I want to go. (the EU and Canada, the US politicians seem to be bent on destroying the ability for non-corporates to do technology R&D because the Hollywood content cartel wants it that way)
The main advantages of desktop Linux for the non-fanatic are:
The difference between cheap commodity x86 hardware and low cost high-quality Mac hardware is one most of us can probably live with.
The difference between It Just Works and the fun and games involved with adding new hardware and software to a Linux box is also something all of us but the hard core fanatics can live with. While the automated installer tools like apt-get/synaptic are probably as good as anything Apple sells and far better than anything Redmond ever imagined, it's really too bad that outside of the apps bundled with distributions, there isn't a whole lot that you can install with them.
Throw in the much larger number of applications which actually work and meet user needs available on the Mac platform and there aren't a whole lot of reasons to go with Linux as an alternative to Windows given a low-cost entry-level Mac platform which will probably physically break a lot less often than an eMachine or a Dell.
Don't tell me about the wonders of Open Office Writer and other FOSS apps, since I live in the real world, the "minor compatibility issues" get a lot more serious when I'm submitting copy to editors who run MS Word on Windows boxes. GIMP vs PaintShopPro? The only reason I can run Linux on my primary workstation, i.e. the box that helps me make a living is that Win4Lin(WHICH IS NOT FREE) works far better than WINE does, and therefore, I can run just about anything Windows in a Windows window over my copy of Fedora Core 2.
So what would a Linux box on a cheap x86 platform do for a user that a low-cost Mac doesn't? Break more often? Cause a user trying to install something or make it work after installing to spend lots and lots of time on the Web?
As for "looks a lot like the future", imagine yourself as an enterprise CIO who's sick of paying MS tax and paying to fix the endless series of major software security problems with MS and buying cheap commodity PCs that constantly break who gets pitched Apple quality, OSX, and a chance to reduce in-house support staff at the same time. With the other option being a consultant group pitching FOSS and saying "well, some of your boxes will support Linux, we'll have to see".
I've been investing time in Linux because I see a world evolving beyond MS's product line and I want to be one of the people who can explain it and fix it for a world full of Linux newbies who just bought or had corporate get them Linux boxes to replace their aging XP machines. A *nix OS that does everything Linux does, only better, puts that plan in question.
I'm putting my planned x86 hardware upgrade on hold until I find out if this is for real or not. If Apple can compete at the low end, Linux desktops may not have mu
America is in the process of becoming a "no go" zone for non-commercially sponsored electronics R&D. Anyone familiar with electronics should be able to come up with any number of devices used on an everyday basis that was invented in a homebrew workshop, not a corporate R&D shop.
Yet Another Slashdot Astroturfer?
No, these are honest bets, just stupid ones.
Enjoy.
Your Inputs:
Distance from Impact: 0.00 km = 0.00 miles
Projectile Diameter: 16.00 m = 52.48 ft = 0.01 miles
Projectile Density: 8000 kg/m3
Impact Velocity: 17.00 km/s = 10.56 miles/s
Impact Angle: 45 degrees
Target Density: 2500 kg/m3
Target Type: Sedimentary Rock
Energy:
Energy before atmospheric entry: 2.48 x 1015 Joules = 592.27 KiloTons TNT
The average interval between impacts of this size somewhere on Earth is 73.5 years
Atmospheric Entry:
The projectile begins to breakup at an altitude of 13400 meters = 44100 ft
The projectile bursts into a cloud of fragments at an altitude of 6880 meters = 22600 ft
The residual velocity of the projectile fragments after the burst is 5.02 km/s = 3.12 miles/s
The energy of the airburst is 2.26 x 1015 Joules = 0.54 x 100 MegaTons.
No crater is formed, although large fragments may strike the surface.
Major Global Changes:
The Earth is not strongly disturbed by the impact and loses negligible mass.
The impact does not make a noticeable change in the Earth's rotation period or the tilt of its axis.
The impact does not shift the Earth's orbit noticeably. Air Blast:
Intel 4004 - The World's First Single Chip Microprocessor http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa09299
Intel 4004 cpu
Inventors of the Modern Computer Series
Microprocessors - The Chip - Federico Faggin, Ted Hoff and Stan Mazor
interviews with and biographies of the inventors - Federico Faggin, Ted Hoff, and Stan Mazor.
By Mary Bellis
In November, 1971, a company called Intel publicly introduced the world's first single chip microprocessor, the Intel 4004 (U.S. Patent #3,821,715), invented by Intel engineers Federico Faggin, Ted Hoff, and Stan Mazor. After the invention of integrated circuits revolutionized computer design, the only place to go was down -- in size that is. The Intel 4004 chip took the integrated circuit down one step further by placing all the parts that made a computer think (i.e. central processing unit, memory, input and output controls) on one small chip. Programming intelligence into inanimate objects had now become possible.
rest at the URL.
If they had done this, they could have dynamited the RIAA label business model at great profit to themselves, the artists, and the rest of us. Everybody wins except the parasites. Would an iPod sell better with 100 free legal downloads of Universal products? Would getting Universal way under the asking price have reduced the "value" of the other labels, making them affordable targwts for HP, IBM, Dell, etc. and giving us a record people run by more or less sane people who don't see profit in paying RIAA lobbyists? We'll never know.
Instead, they decided to stay a loyal RIAA customer. Their doing this reinforced the business model that prevents them from selling music profitably. Jobs made the short-sighted and stupid decision to make his profit on the hardware only. Great, assuming that Apple has the only people on the face of the earth capable of making a music player and pay-per-download system with a cool UI. This is, of course, the wrong end of a sucker bet.
This isn't an Apple-killer, just an example of the kind of thinking that's kept a clearly superior OS from becoming a dominant player instead of an eternal niche market.
And the Apple fanboys will keep on buying and defending Apple.
Why can't these be turned into solar cell plants making wafer-scale solar cell arrays (arrays to avoid the problem of defective chips, simply disable cells with defects).
However, I think it time to deviate from the tradition that calls for solar cell arrays to cover our building roofs.
Remember JP Aerospace and its project to build blimps capable of shipping freight to orbit for $1/ton-LEO?
Most of us should, it was covered on slashdot.
Solar cell arrays in space are a proven technology, as is microwave power transport and the main pieces of the JP Aerospace project.
These projects seem to me to be a natural fit.
So go buy one and learn how to use it. So much the better if you're in one of the states where the Federal "assault rifle" ban expired.
Easily done. Get your net worth to above $10,000,000 and get a lobotomy. At this point, you should be able to go to the PNAC site and find that everything you see there makes perfect sense. At that point, you'll be a true neocon. Go to the Republican National Committee website and donate them most of your money.
Glad I could help.
You'll see that the description is both dramatic and accurate.
For the document... Google is your friend, right?