It took me 3 working days to get my Lexmark Z605 printer running under Linux.
It took me a full month to find Linux backup software that can actually be installed and made to work by a non l33t uberh4xx0r, and all I was trying to do was clone a drive, make incremental backups, and archive to DVD-R. I wound up having to rewrite a rsync script I found to do the incremental backup. Interesting experience, since I haven't had to do script stuff since I had a DOS desktop.
I got the how to back up Linux workstations article done 30 minutes before the deadline. The reason was that it took DAR several hours to make a DVD-burnable backup and I wasn't going to explain how to use it until after I knew it worked, since I'd installed other packages and couldn't get them working.
To claim that the problems are solved is total bullshit. This is stuff that I shouldn't have been able to sell articles about because THIS STUFF SHOULD HAVE BEEN WORKING OUT OF THE BOX (FC2, in my case)
I shouldn't need to run a Windows emulation (Win4Lin) to get my work done, but I do, and I'm finding myself having to install MORE Windows software because dia suxx0rs (I'm using Visual Thought) and it looks like my search for Linux project management software as good even as the original MacProject running on the MacPlus of 10+ years ago has been in vain.
ALL THE PROBLEMS ARE SOLVABLE, BUT THEY WILL NOT BE SOLVED AS LONG AS PEOPLE DENY THE PROBLEMS ARE REAL.
Fix the problems and we can push MS into the tarpits. Telling us that anyone who doesn't know that Linux desktops are ready for prime time is technically clueless only serves the interests of Microsoft.
So, yes, Osama Bin Laden supports Kerry, and so do the Chinese. That Osama and Beijing support Kerry is a little disturbing. Ditto for the fact that Korean intelligence agents are rallying the Korean-American community to vote for Kerry and funneling money into Kerry's campaign.
It's a trifle embarrassing to know that there are still Americans naive enough to believe that Usama bin Laden will actually tell them the truth about who he wants them to vote for.
Here's a clue: Bush has been al-Queda's best recruiter. Any President other than Bush would make it harder for al-Queda to recruit simply on the basis that there hasn't been time for anybody else to have attracted the level of accumulated hatred that's been built up over Bush's rather peculiar actions in the "War on Terror" he claims to be waging.
Here's another clue: The majority of 9/11 hijackers were Saudi Arabian citizens, and that the Saudi Arabian government has publically declared its support for Bush. If you think the Saudis are our friends, well, I've already called you an idiot once. Go googls on "Grover Norquist", terrorism, Bush and "Saudi Arabia" sometime. Grover is still a top-level GOP operative despite a history of playing for the other team. Not that I expect facts to change your mind.
So go to the polls, do the will of Usama bin Laden. . . vote for Bush. Then go whack off over a picture of Ann Coulter.
You are living proof that an passing an IQ test at a level of 100+ should be added to the qualifications for voting in the USA.
JP Aerospace has a far cheaper and safer way to get to space.
Building ultra-high altitude blimps is within the means of technology we know how to do and materials we know how to make, and building blimps to go to high altitude carrying cargo isn't all that big an extension of this.
Like the Space Elevator, I see nuclear powered rockets for use within Earth's atmosphere as just another blind alley. Outsise Earth's atmosphere, they might be a good idea.
The truth about DRE machines is probably somewhere in between the positions taken by people like Harris and Cohen, said Dan Seligson, editor of Electionline.org, the Web site of a non-partisan Washington, D.C., group that tracks election reform across the U.S.
"There are two sides of this issue: Elections officials say that (DRE machines) are one hundred percent safe and accurate, and on the other side, computer scientists say they're fraught with problems. The truth is in the middle. No system is 100 percent secure, nor are they rife with security breaches."
And what are Dan Seligson's qualifications in the area of computer technology?
The mistake InfoWorld made was to review this as a public policy issue having to do with technology as an issue on which reasonable people can disagree.
The DRE issue is one where the only people who have a right to have their opinions treated with respect are persons with expertise in computer security. If a person doesn't have this expertise, the best he or she can do is provide pointers to people who do have it.
I am not aware of any report by technically qualified people not on the Diebold/ES&S payroll that says that the technology packaged by this company (they are effectively one) is remotely close to adequate.
An IT publication is supposed to write about issues from an IT viewpoint according to the facts and informed opinions available.
On no-paper trail touchscreen voting machines, there is no support an IT publication should take seriously for the viewpoint that Diebold/ESS has provided its customers with anything but a total FUBAR.
The approach here is "treat the symptons" instead of the cause. The result is a gigantic pork barrel whose unfortunate side effect will be a USA where "papers, please" will be an everyday event instead of something only seen in World War II movies in countries ruled by the bad guys.
The cause of this wave of terrorism really doens't have a lot to do with US government policy and less to do with Israel/Palestine.
It is because there is a great deal of anger and frustration brought on by the use of the money we have spent on oil in the Middle East not on public education and infrastructure and the other things required to build a First World society, but on building up the bank accounts of the kings and sheiks and princes whose countries have the oil and perhaps more important, on the security apparatuses and military organizations necessary to keep angry internal customers from putting them permanently out of business.
Their main tactic for keeping their citizens off their backs has historically been using religion as a tool to persuade their people that their troubles are not a result of their own government's inaction, but caused by EVIL WESTERN INFIDELS!!!
That's most of us.
In the course of this, they've worked with their religious institutions and religious leaders to create a generation of anti-Western fanatics ripe for exploitation by terrorists and are funding the spread of this ideology everywhere in the Muslim world.
The long-term solution to this is to reallocate much of the "War on Terror" funding to programs to replace oil from the Middle East with carbon-neutral biomass and solar energy solutions like the Solar Power Satellite program scrapped by the Bush Administration. Simply deleting the "snake oil" items like biometric ID from the anti-terror budget should by itself fund a good part of this. A rational analyis of the budget should find many places where we can cut funding without cutting security, and a few places where we should spend more money.
There is also an excellent chance that energy alternatives will also wind up much, much cheaper than $53 a barrel oil, whose price is escalating with no relief in sight, unless we make some. Stronger money, stronger nation, and this also will make it possible to spend more money on the military in the long run should we find that we have to.
Cutting off the funding the oil nations require to keep their governments in business against the will of their citizens and to export terror into the Western world means future terrorist efforts will have to be locally funded.
While this doesn't mean that terrorism will be eliminated, it will reduce its incidence and severity to something law enforcement can deal with as European governments have successfully dealt with terrorists for generations. The older Europeans around here will remember terrorist organizations like Baader-Meinhof and the Red Army, and that law enforcement working with intel agencies nailed them. The people responsible for the al-Queda bombing in Spain are already behind bars. Did the Europeans turn their societies into police states to make themselves safe from terror? Other than the Brit experiment with Orwellian surveillance they are engaged in, no.
This kind of bill does not need to be passed in the heat of an election. We are more secure with NO law rather than this one. Buying snake oil doesn't buy security, it's more likely to be a political payoff to the snake oul vendors using our money.
For more information on the technology side of energy replacement, click here for a summary with links to the DOE, University of New Hampshire, and NASA sites relevant to a program of this sort.
AFAIK, nobody's demonstrated a compelling enough advantage to a hydrogen economy to show me why it's worth the trouble to convert every gas station and auto in the US to run hydrogen even if the hydrogen is available for free. (as in beer)
If burning fossil fuel were the only alternative capable of powering a world economy, I'd be one of the first to say "Let's roll up our sleeves and get started.
The point behind burning coal and oil is cheap energy. If we have to store every liter of CO2 produced by generators forever, this is no longer cheap energy.
It's time to grow our oil instead of drilling it in an increasing number of Third World nations hostile to the USA. Biomass oil is inherently carbon-neutral, the carbon dioxide released when it is burned came from the atmosphere to begin with.
We KNOW how to build orbiting solar cell arrays that work in space. We are on the edge of being able to put those arrays in space for under $1/pound, otherwise known as the SPS (Space Power Satellite) projects. Remember the blimp to orbit project? The engineering yet to be done to make this work is a hell of a lot less complex than these "'Zero' Emission Power Plants" (development of exotic new materials is unnecessary... and utterly necessary for the zero-emission powerplant program and the ridiculous "supergrid" and the cost numbers for develoing either are likely to be in proportion. We're better off funding whatever is left that's unfunded with respect to cheap orbital launch technology.
Biomass oil allows refining and distribution via existing refineries and distribution networks. Rectenna farms to receive energy from space power satellites can be built on the rooftops of existing generator facilities, and in addition, in places that have never had electricity before at minimal cost.
I like "big" thinking, but it only makes sense when it's pointed in the right direction. The article leaves out little details like "where is the methane coming from". Does he propose to capture cow farts? The leakage from city dumps? He makes no more sense than the hydrogen advocates do. People who like machines with lots of moving parts may find his concept k3w1 and l335, but I prefer systems where the moving parts are either electrons or E/M radiation which aren't prone to mechanical failure.
NASA's original plan for the Space Power Satellite was based on $200+ per pound, and the program made sense even then. It makes much more sense now.
You can get to the links to NASA and the DOE and an American univerity that substantiate what I've said from here.
That is an exactly proper use for the tort mechanism.The administrator chose to attack his employee in public for no reason that a reasonable person would take seriously in a way that any reasonable person would expect to compromise the victim's ability to find future employment in his field.
The organization that hired the meathead running the IT organization should be forced to pay out a multimillion dollar damage judgement. Unfortunately, this will come out ot the pockets of the taxpayers, not stockholders, but shit happens.
The reduction in customer service calls that using any browser that isn't IE should result in should be big enough to produce a fairly hefty impact on AOL's profit margin.
This is a major reason why people all over the world are asking "Why would AOL do a stupid thing like that?"
It's a bit surprising that they aren't already back up. There are other hosting providers than Rackspace, and many of them are completely outside US jurisdiction. Aren't there offsite copies?
On the whole, these sites were intended to be local to various EU countries. The only reason this worked was that the warrant was given to US hosting company with oervers in foriegn countries.If they restored to a server outside of any US jurisdiction,the only way the US could intervene directly would be by playing games with the root server, and I suspect that the rest of the world might have something to say about that.
Perhaps they were depending on a US tradition of "freedom of speech". Will they learn from experience?
You are obviously wearing your tinfoil hat improperly. Don't you know that the Commie mind-control rays will get you if you don't wear it right?
. Most were students from all over the country, indoctrinated by communist teachers at surrounding universities.
The ultra-right doesn't take Communism seriously anymore. You sound like a 1950s John Bircher. Remember the "Red Chinese"? China's now a hotbed of 19th century "fuck the environment" capitalism. In the time you seem to think you are living in, possesion of all those MADE IN CHINA items in your computer would have meant somebody broke the law.
I don't know what time warp you stepped out of, but. . .
THIS IS 2004, NOT 1954.
Those things in front of you are a computer, monitor, and keyboard, not a typewriter and television..
YOU ARE COMMUNICATING VIA THE INTERNET, not whatever it is you think you are doing.
The president is no longer a nice guy named Ike.
The current threat to what we call the free world is Islamic terrorism, which has absolutely nothing to do with Communism. Were you vacationing on another planet when 9/11 happened?
We don't have any oppressive laws anymore
DMCA? PATRIOT ACT 1 and 2 (in progress)? Are you telling us that holding American citizens in US-controlled prisons without charges or an attorney is against the law? You have no problem with INDUCE?
I have no idea where you are getting your news or your recreational drugs, but if I were you, I'd change both immediately.
"Victims of the protests"? Funny, they were generally rather peaceful in all the media coverage, even the march that got a court order that allowed them to protest outside the protestors' cage.
"Riot groups"? And what flying saucer did they step out of?
Don't waste our time with the tinfoil hat crap, if you're going to make extraordinary claims, let's see some extraordinary proof.
How will a set of regulations intended to ensure rocket safety be applied to a blimp-to-orbit venture or a Space Elevator?A railgun orbital launcher?
How would regulations intended to, say, ensure that a passenger can physically withstand X number of Gs at launch be applied where the max launch acceleration is 1G?
I can easily imagine new set of space environmental laws being used to interfere with the development of non-rocket space technology in the USA.
The Internet isn't rocket science, copyright isn't rocket science, but corporations in pursuit of their own interests against the public have worked with Congress to do their best to fuck up both areas. So what happens when the regulations cover an area that is rocket science?
Your arguments for corporate adoption of Linux are completely correct.
IMHO, Yankee Group's analysts are talking out of their assholes when they speculated about early SOHO uptake of Linux.
SOHOs generally use whatever software they can get running, perhaps with consultant (or a brother-in-law or their kids' help) and don't change it unless they buy a new computer or they are forced to for some reason. The exception, of course, are geek SOHO businesses. This isn't going to change until the problems with desktop Linux are fixed;
peripheral drivers
installation (yes, yum/apt-get work well, on the rare applications in repositories... using bare rpms is a great way to wind up in dependency hell)
lack of applications... where is the equivalent of PaintShopPro (yeah, I know of Krita and it isn't ready) and Corel Draw (I've got Inkscape... maybe in a year or two?)
I think that the uptake of Linux is going to happen from the top down.
Large corporations and governments will adopt it and force anyone who wants to stay in their vendor chain to get compatible or get out.
If they are in a hurry to force compliance, they can start requiring responses to RFQs in OO native format.
However, until the problems with desktop Linux are really and truly solved, this is something we do NOT want to happen, only MS is served by a perception that Linux is junk, and to somebody who isn't a serious geek, who does NOT have instant tech support, and needs to find and install applications beyond Net clients and office suites, that is still what it is.
Re:I've been expecting this
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The net result of spreading the marketing budget over more options is fewer total sales;
Where's your evidence?
they know this, because they will have tried it out at some point (on a small scale, of course).
You're assuming facts not in evidence. I would agree that they would be complete idiots not to try this, but dinosaurs don't have to be intelligent, just big. They're depending on monopoly control of mass media and venues on the basis that "if our artists are the only ones the public sees, that is what they will buy". They are dealing with "The Long Tail" issues by hiding under the bed and hoping that by some miracle, American Bandstand will return and tell ALL the kids what to listen to.
The problem with a monopoly of sales based on information control is the Internet and that's why they are creating anti-technology legislation like INDUCE.
whre the business will wind up?
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'the tail' possibly pay for projects that cost hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars
My guess is that it generally won't. However, the price of technology is dropping, we're only a few years from being able to make movies with comparable-to-Hollywood production values with no more than a closet full of PCs full of programmable video cards, i.e. a poor-man's CGI renderfarm.
The dominant reality is that the market is fragmenting and the projects which can reasonably expected to be profitable with multimillion production budgets are going to get fewer and fewer. So some people will be making content with $100K, others will make it with pocket change, and we'll be able to find either if we really want to.
The big discontinuities will happen when this catches up with the Hollywood content cartel providers in the form of a shakeout.
Their best hope is to put this off long enough for the current CEOs to retire.
Sony will probably survive, via crosssubsidy from it's consumer products. My guess is that one of the others in the Big 5 will be smart enough to see which way the wind is going and change business models in time.
The other 4 will exist. . . nominally, they'll be bought out by investors to get their content catalogues and their production assets will probably be put on the block at fire sale prices.
I've been expecting this
on
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I've said for years that record companies need to rebuild their business model so they can service and profit from lots of artists that can sell 10K units in a good year.The problem is solvable. Hint: their problem is based on physical CD distribution. What if all new record sales at record stores were burned on demand except for a small minority of megahits?
There is no American teen sound and hasn't been for years, and the music business model hasn't really changed since the days of American Bandstand. A musician who might do perfectly well on his own selling 10K records a year at $5/profit per record isn't helped by the industry to sell 20K or 50K, he's dumped by the label and out of the nusic business.
Remember heavy metal? It's fragmented into a number of subgenres as different as chalk and cheese.
I'm sure this is going on in lots of markets that I'm not even remotely familiar with.
How can gigantic entertainment monoliths get their ears into enough sub-markets to find the most profitable players? Well, automated analysis of P2P network downloads is one possibility, but they're paying for it while they are trying to make them illegal.
This is the content industry's ultimate long-tern problem, and if they don't solve it, no amount of DRM and anti-technology legislation can save them.
about 2 operating system families surviving the shakeout.
The bad news for him is that Windows probably won't be one of them.
Windows is already the most expensive component in a low-end computer system. When Linux is "good enough", vendors will be happy to bundle it instead of Windows on their new computer systems.
when distros are bundled with enough software to get a typical home/office user going (Why isn't mplayer bundled with FC2? Why does it take hours of research to find that one can clone HDs with dump?)
when the installation problems are solved (yes, apt-get / yum / urpmi are good enough, when one can find an application which is of actual use which can be installed by them)
When some sort of conversion facility is available to make it possible to run Windows drivers for peripherals so we don't have to deal anymore with vendors who offer nominal support for Linux, i.e. Red Hat 7.
Just about every major vendor except MS is throwing billions of dollars a year at the problem of making Linux "good enough", in addition to the efforts of Open Source developers.
Anyone who's tried, say, RH9 followed by FC2 knows how far Linux has gone in just a year. I see no reason why this progress shouldn't continue.
We will see "good enough", and I'd be very surprised if we were still asking "when will Linux be ready for the home or SOHO user?" even a year from now.
I write for a living at this point, if my computer goes down, I'm not working.
I'm feeling happy about my Linux box because with Win4Lin running over it, I can run my legacy apps on a Windows environment that almost never crashes on a Linux box that stays up until I decide to shut it down.
Though I was not happy doing the work needed to get the Linux part of this box up to this point and I'm still picking out backup solutions for both my bootable clone drive (ok, I used dd once... looking at an rsync script since I don't need to recreate partitions or back up swap/boot... and suspect that dump might be overkill) and DVD-R.
While I think there's a lot that should be in distros (I use FC2) right out of the box (how about a configured mplayer? how about a backup program? A GUI ftp client?)... switching from a pure Windoze setup to this is the smartest thing I've done since I got a 286 way back when.
Slashdot Mirror
It took me a full month to find Linux backup software that can actually be installed and made to work by a non l33t uberh4xx0r, and all I was trying to do was clone a drive, make incremental backups, and archive to DVD-R. I wound up having to rewrite a rsync script I found to do the incremental backup. Interesting experience, since I haven't had to do script stuff since I had a DOS desktop.
I got the how to back up Linux workstations article done 30 minutes before the deadline. The reason was that it took DAR several hours to make a DVD-burnable backup and I wasn't going to explain how to use it until after I knew it worked, since I'd installed other packages and couldn't get them working.
To claim that the problems are solved is total bullshit. This is stuff that I shouldn't have been able to sell articles about because THIS STUFF SHOULD HAVE BEEN WORKING OUT OF THE BOX (FC2, in my case)
I shouldn't need to run a Windows emulation (Win4Lin) to get my work done, but I do, and I'm finding myself having to install MORE Windows software because dia suxx0rs (I'm using Visual Thought) and it looks like my search for Linux project management software as good even as the original MacProject running on the MacPlus of 10+ years ago has been in vain.
ALL THE PROBLEMS ARE SOLVABLE, BUT THEY WILL NOT BE SOLVED AS LONG AS PEOPLE DENY THE PROBLEMS ARE REAL.
Fix the problems and we can push MS into the tarpits. Telling us that anyone who doesn't know that Linux desktops are ready for prime time is technically clueless only serves the interests of Microsoft.
It's a trifle embarrassing to know that there are still Americans naive enough to believe that Usama bin Laden will actually tell them the truth about who he wants them to vote for.
Here's a clue: Bush has been al-Queda's best recruiter. Any President other than Bush would make it harder for al-Queda to recruit simply on the basis that there hasn't been time for anybody else to have attracted the level of accumulated hatred that's been built up over Bush's rather peculiar actions in the "War on Terror" he claims to be waging.
Here's another clue: The majority of 9/11 hijackers were Saudi Arabian citizens, and that the Saudi Arabian government has publically declared its support for Bush. If you think the Saudis are our friends, well, I've already called you an idiot once. Go googls on "Grover Norquist", terrorism, Bush and "Saudi Arabia" sometime. Grover is still a top-level GOP operative despite a history of playing for the other team. Not that I expect facts to change your mind.
So go to the polls, do the will of Usama bin Laden. . . vote for Bush. Then go whack off over a picture of Ann Coulter.
You are living proof that an passing an IQ test at a level of 100+ should be added to the qualifications for voting in the USA.
So you don't have to live with people looking into your qualifications, if any, to evaluate her work.
I'm simply writing you off as somebody who had a class with her as a teacher who she flunked for good reason.
So why did Iraq get invaded instead of Saudi Arabia? Anybody who thinks Saudi Arabia isn't oppressive believed 1000 Bush press releases too many.
I started telling my foriegn friends to stay the hell out of the USA a year ago.
Building ultra-high altitude blimps is within the means of technology we know how to do and materials we know how to make, and building blimps to go to high altitude carrying cargo isn't all that big an extension of this.
Like the Space Elevator, I see nuclear powered rockets for use within Earth's atmosphere as just another blind alley. Outsise Earth's atmosphere, they might be a good idea.
"There are two sides of this issue: Elections officials say that (DRE machines) are one hundred percent safe and accurate, and on the other side, computer scientists say they're fraught with problems. The truth is in the middle. No system is 100 percent secure, nor are they rife with security breaches."
And what are Dan Seligson's qualifications in the area of computer technology?
The mistake InfoWorld made was to review this as a public policy issue having to do with technology as an issue on which reasonable people can disagree.
The DRE issue is one where the only people who have a right to have their opinions treated with respect are persons with expertise in computer security. If a person doesn't have this expertise, the best he or she can do is provide pointers to people who do have it.
I am not aware of any report by technically qualified people not on the Diebold/ES&S payroll that says that the technology packaged by this company (they are effectively one) is remotely close to adequate.
An IT publication is supposed to write about issues from an IT viewpoint according to the facts and informed opinions available.
On no-paper trail touchscreen voting machines, there is no support an IT publication should take seriously for the viewpoint that Diebold/ESS has provided its customers with anything but a total FUBAR.
The cause of this wave of terrorism really doens't have a lot to do with US government policy and less to do with Israel/Palestine.
It is because there is a great deal of anger and frustration brought on by the use of the money we have spent on oil in the Middle East not on public education and infrastructure and the other things required to build a First World society, but on building up the bank accounts of the kings and sheiks and princes whose countries have the oil and perhaps more important, on the security apparatuses and military organizations necessary to keep angry internal customers from putting them permanently out of business.
Their main tactic for keeping their citizens off their backs has historically been using religion as a tool to persuade their people that their troubles are not a result of their own government's inaction, but caused by EVIL WESTERN INFIDELS!!!
That's most of us.
In the course of this, they've worked with their religious institutions and religious leaders to create a generation of anti-Western fanatics ripe for exploitation by terrorists and are funding the spread of this ideology everywhere in the Muslim world.
The long-term solution to this is to reallocate much of the "War on Terror" funding to programs to replace oil from the Middle East with carbon-neutral biomass and solar energy solutions like the Solar Power Satellite program scrapped by the Bush Administration. Simply deleting the "snake oil" items like biometric ID from the anti-terror budget should by itself fund a good part of this. A rational analyis of the budget should find many places where we can cut funding without cutting security, and a few places where we should spend more money.
There is also an excellent chance that energy alternatives will also wind up much, much cheaper than $53 a barrel oil, whose price is escalating with no relief in sight, unless we make some. Stronger money, stronger nation, and this also will make it possible to spend more money on the military in the long run should we find that we have to.
Cutting off the funding the oil nations require to keep their governments in business against the will of their citizens and to export terror into the Western world means future terrorist efforts will have to be locally funded.
While this doesn't mean that terrorism will be eliminated, it will reduce its incidence and severity to something law enforcement can deal with as European governments have successfully dealt with terrorists for generations. The older Europeans around here will remember terrorist organizations like Baader-Meinhof and the Red Army, and that law enforcement working with intel agencies nailed them. The people responsible for the al-Queda bombing in Spain are already behind bars. Did the Europeans turn their societies into police states to make themselves safe from terror? Other than the Brit experiment with Orwellian surveillance they are engaged in, no.
This kind of bill does not need to be passed in the heat of an election. We are more secure with NO law rather than this one. Buying snake oil doesn't buy security, it's more likely to be a political payoff to the snake oul vendors using our money.
For more information on the technology side of energy replacement, click here for a summary with links to the DOE, University of New Hampshire, and NASA sites relevant to a program of this sort.
AFAIK, nobody's demonstrated a compelling enough advantage to a hydrogen economy to show me why it's worth the trouble to convert every gas station and auto in the US to run hydrogen even if the hydrogen is available for free. (as in beer)
The point behind burning coal and oil is cheap energy. If we have to store every liter of CO2 produced by generators forever, this is no longer cheap energy.
It's time to grow our oil instead of drilling it in an increasing number of Third World nations hostile to the USA. Biomass oil is inherently carbon-neutral, the carbon dioxide released when it is burned came from the atmosphere to begin with.
We KNOW how to build orbiting solar cell arrays that work in space. We are on the edge of being able to put those arrays in space for under $1/pound, otherwise known as the SPS (Space Power Satellite) projects. Remember the blimp to orbit project? The engineering yet to be done to make this work is a hell of a lot less complex than these "'Zero' Emission Power Plants" (development of exotic new materials is unnecessary... and utterly necessary for the zero-emission powerplant program and the ridiculous "supergrid" and the cost numbers for develoing either are likely to be in proportion. We're better off funding whatever is left that's unfunded with respect to cheap orbital launch technology.
Biomass oil allows refining and distribution via existing refineries and distribution networks. Rectenna farms to receive energy from space power satellites can be built on the rooftops of existing generator facilities, and in addition, in places that have never had electricity before at minimal cost.
I like "big" thinking, but it only makes sense when it's pointed in the right direction. The article leaves out little details like "where is the methane coming from". Does he propose to capture cow farts? The leakage from city dumps? He makes no more sense than the hydrogen advocates do. People who like machines with lots of moving parts may find his concept k3w1 and l335, but I prefer systems where the moving parts are either electrons or E/M radiation which aren't prone to mechanical failure.
NASA's original plan for the Space Power Satellite was based on $200+ per pound, and the program made sense even then. It makes much more sense now.
You can get to the links to NASA and the DOE and an American univerity that substantiate what I've said from here.
Horseshit. He didn't cite any evidence, just an assertion that he is a "scientist".
The organization that hired the meathead running the IT organization should be forced to pay out a multimillion dollar damage judgement. Unfortunately, this will come out ot the pockets of the taxpayers, not stockholders, but shit happens.
This is a major reason why people all over the world are asking "Why would AOL do a stupid thing like that?"
On the whole, these sites were intended to be local to various EU countries. The only reason this worked was that the warrant was given to US hosting company with oervers in foriegn countries.If they restored to a server outside of any US jurisdiction,the only way the US could intervene directly would be by playing games with the root server, and I suspect that the rest of the world might have something to say about that.
Perhaps they were depending on a US tradition of "freedom of speech". Will they learn from experience?
. Most were students from all over the country, indoctrinated by communist teachers at surrounding universities.
The ultra-right doesn't take Communism seriously anymore. You sound like a 1950s John Bircher. Remember the "Red Chinese"? China's now a hotbed of 19th century "fuck the environment" capitalism. In the time you seem to think you are living in, possesion of all those MADE IN CHINA items in your computer would have meant somebody broke the law.
I don't know what time warp you stepped out of, but. . .
We don't have any oppressive laws anymore
DMCA? PATRIOT ACT 1 and 2 (in progress)? Are you telling us that holding American citizens in US-controlled prisons without charges or an attorney is against the law? You have no problem with INDUCE?
I have no idea where you are getting your news or your recreational drugs, but if I were you, I'd change both immediately.
"Riot groups"? And what flying saucer did they step out of?
Don't waste our time with the tinfoil hat crap, if you're going to make extraordinary claims, let's see some extraordinary proof.
in the case of the *AA organizations, malice is the way to bet. Malice amplified by stupidity is their usual modus operandi.
How would regulations intended to, say, ensure that a passenger can physically withstand X number of Gs at launch be applied where the max launch acceleration is 1G?
I can easily imagine new set of space environmental laws being used to interfere with the development of non-rocket space technology in the USA.
The Internet isn't rocket science, copyright isn't rocket science, but corporations in pursuit of their own interests against the public have worked with Congress to do their best to fuck up both areas. So what happens when the regulations cover an area that is rocket science?
IMHO, Yankee Group's analysts are talking out of their assholes when they speculated about early SOHO uptake of Linux.
SOHOs generally use whatever software they can get running, perhaps with consultant (or a brother-in-law or their kids' help) and don't change it unless they buy a new computer or they are forced to for some reason. The exception, of course, are geek SOHO businesses. This isn't going to change until the problems with desktop Linux are fixed;
I think that the uptake of Linux is going to happen from the top down.
Large corporations and governments will adopt it and force anyone who wants to stay in their vendor chain to get compatible or get out.
If they are in a hurry to force compliance, they can start requiring responses to RFQs in OO native format.
However, until the problems with desktop Linux are really and truly solved, this is something we do NOT want to happen, only MS is served by a perception that Linux is junk, and to somebody who isn't a serious geek, who does NOT have instant tech support, and needs to find and install applications beyond Net clients and office suites, that is still what it is.
Where's your evidence? they know this, because they will have tried it out at some point (on a small scale, of course).
You're assuming facts not in evidence. I would agree that they would be complete idiots not to try this, but dinosaurs don't have to be intelligent, just big. They're depending on monopoly control of mass media and venues on the basis that "if our artists are the only ones the public sees, that is what they will buy". They are dealing with "The Long Tail" issues by hiding under the bed and hoping that by some miracle, American Bandstand will return and tell ALL the kids what to listen to.
The problem with a monopoly of sales based on information control is the Internet and that's why they are creating anti-technology legislation like INDUCE.
My guess is that it generally won't. However, the price of technology is dropping, we're only a few years from being able to make movies with comparable-to-Hollywood production values with no more than a closet full of PCs full of programmable video cards, i.e. a poor-man's CGI renderfarm.
The dominant reality is that the market is fragmenting and the projects which can reasonably expected to be profitable with multimillion production budgets are going to get fewer and fewer. So some people will be making content with $100K, others will make it with pocket change, and we'll be able to find either if we really want to.
The big discontinuities will happen when this catches up with the Hollywood content cartel providers in the form of a shakeout.
Their best hope is to put this off long enough for the current CEOs to retire.
Sony will probably survive, via crosssubsidy from it's consumer products. My guess is that one of the others in the Big 5 will be smart enough to see which way the wind is going and change business models in time.
The other 4 will exist. . . nominally, they'll be bought out by investors to get their content catalogues and their production assets will probably be put on the block at fire sale prices.
There is no American teen sound and hasn't been for years, and the music business model hasn't really changed since the days of American Bandstand. A musician who might do perfectly well on his own selling 10K records a year at $5/profit per record isn't helped by the industry to sell 20K or 50K, he's dumped by the label and out of the nusic business.
Remember heavy metal? It's fragmented into a number of subgenres as different as chalk and cheese.
I'm sure this is going on in lots of markets that I'm not even remotely familiar with.
How can gigantic entertainment monoliths get their ears into enough sub-markets to find the most profitable players? Well, automated analysis of P2P network downloads is one possibility, but they're paying for it while they are trying to make them illegal.
This is the content industry's ultimate long-tern problem, and if they don't solve it, no amount of DRM and anti-technology legislation can save them.
The bad news for him is that Windows probably won't be one of them.
Windows is already the most expensive component in a low-end computer system. When Linux is "good enough", vendors will be happy to bundle it instead of Windows on their new computer systems.
Just about every major vendor except MS is throwing billions of dollars a year at the problem of making Linux "good enough", in addition to the efforts of Open Source developers.
Anyone who's tried, say, RH9 followed by FC2 knows how far Linux has gone in just a year. I see no reason why this progress shouldn't continue.
We will see "good enough", and I'd be very surprised if we were still asking "when will Linux be ready for the home or SOHO user?" even a year from now.
I'm feeling happy about my Linux box because with Win4Lin running over it, I can run my legacy apps on a Windows environment that almost never crashes on a Linux box that stays up until I decide to shut it down.
Though I was not happy doing the work needed to get the Linux part of this box up to this point and I'm still picking out backup solutions for both my bootable clone drive (ok, I used dd once... looking at an rsync script since I don't need to recreate partitions or back up swap/boot... and suspect that dump might be overkill) and DVD-R.
While I think there's a lot that should be in distros (I use FC2) right out of the box (how about a configured mplayer? how about a backup program? A GUI ftp client?)... switching from a pure Windoze setup to this is the smartest thing I've done since I got a 286 way back when.
There's a Bible search engine here that's an OK keyword search setup, I'd look this up myself if I had time.