we can't arbitrarily replace current baseload power (coal/nuclear) with wind or PV solar(*) without a major technological advance in energy storage.
Nobody proposed to, we can't replace every coal facility with wind / solar this year, it's physically impossible to do so.
As I recall, EU countries are running up to 30% intermittent power and only starting to run into trouble. If we make a serious national commitment to renewable energy, serious enough to put all our idle heavy manufacturing capacity to work, we might get there in a decade. So far, I don't see any such commitment on the part of the Federal government. Certainly there is no such major commitment in the energy bill wandering through Congress right now.
Given a decade and adequate research funding as needed and funding for deployment when we have a manufacturable smartgrid design, and given the substantial progress already made in high-density electrical storage, I regard it as ridiculous to assume that we won't know how to build either a smartgrid or the electrical storage desirable to buffer it by 2019.
But given a more likely generational timeframe, assuming we actually get a Congress which is willing to listen to scientists and engineers instead of corporate lobbyists, the only people who can reasonably argue that these problems are unsolvable within the timeframe in which they actually need to be solved can only do this on the basis of Big Coal talking points on the basis that they are paid to do so.
this is what the author really wants to sell us as an alternative to moving to renewable energy.
and the demonstration of technology such as carbon capture and sequestration, which could prove a cheaper way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions
Capturing CO2 simply requires running smokestack emissions through a chilled ammonia bath at the cost of 25% input power... i.e. we get to pay for a 125% increase in the amount of coal burned.
How do we move all these gigatons of CO2 to disposal sites and store it forever?
Big, high pressure pipelines. Odd that nobody talking up a "clean" coal future ever talks about the comparative costs of a national pipeline network vs a smartgrid.
We have massive unused heavy manufacturing capability in terms of both idle car factories and a trained labor force that can be converted to building renewable generation capability. The question of replacing coal with wind/concentrated thermal solar is a question of political will, not technological capability.
Andreessen says. 'Our secret plan is to watch what gets acquired and fund the next company. A good template is to fund companies doing whichever the next-generation product would have been.'"
Better to have really kept the business plan secret, that fewer people might laugh at it.
It's been noticed by everyone who follows the VC industry that VCs move in herds.
The 3F rule "First, Fabulous, or Failed" rule applies to VC-funded high-tech as well as mass-market publication.
Everyone knows what "first-mover" advantage is. You can overcome this by being "fabulous", i.e. a far better product than the "first-mover" has got if everyone isn't already locked into the first-mover's solution and even sometimes even after everyone is locked in and decides the "fabulous" solution is worth the trouble to switch to.
What Andressen seems to have in mind is to back the "second movers", i.e. follow the part of the herd that moves fastest without recognizing that being faster than just about everyone else doesn't necessarily correlate with being smarter.
His investors would probably be better off if he used a dartboard to select companies for funding. Or based his selections on finding the smartest and most cost-effective next-gen technologies and figuring on helping these companies to bring them to market and putting his VC value-add there, and refraining from the buzzword-compliant micromanagement by people who don't understand the technologies and market realities (as in who might be induced to buy the damned things) which is a large part of why the old "1 in 6" rule of 'which takes off, which dies' in the VC-funded high tech model has been replaced by "1 in 8+".
What's in TFA is part of why I'm not looking to VC to fund the alternative energy R&D I want to do.
built in 3G wireless chip set. A Linux netbook may be the only way left to get a SSD flash drive (lower power consumption and better ruggedness), find one that Kubuntu or netbook remix are known to work on. (as in for which driver support exists) If battery life is a problem, get a larger aftermarket battery, and if you're reading local content, turn off the wireless card and run the backlight at the minimum that works in your lighting environment.
My netbook OS (eeepc 900) is stock Kubuntu Jaunty. So I read PDFs basically the same way that anyone else does. I tried PDF software on my PalmPDA and I never found anything that does not suck on that display. I carry my PalmPDA at times when I know I won't be around any open WAPs. (I don't get a 3G wireless setup... yet)
On my netbook, I run fbreader and any of 3 different PDF e-readers and Mobipocket + Ereader in Crossover Office to run DRM-broken ebook files for books I'm really compulsive about having. The only e-book format I know of that I can't read is Kindle's, and that doesn't really worry me, it's possible to find conversion programs even for that format if it's the only way to get an ebook I really want.
I use a mirror drive in a mobile rack as a backup and an rsync script on a modified liveCD to allow me to point and click to the rsync script to tell it to run the backup. I plug in the mobile rack drive and boot from the LiveCD. When the mobile rack is not in active use, i.e. either being backed up to or restored from, it is stored well away from the computer.
This has served me well for years, including after a hard drive crash. I was up and running in 15 minutes after the crash.
Though since the Knoppix 5 LiveCD it was based on does not recognize SATA running in ACHI mode, I have to rebuild around another LiveCD. The big advantage of this is that a drive in a mobile rack that is not plugged in is completely immune to anything awful happening to the main system, including the events which are most likely to blow up a hard drive.
to intimidate individuals, a group, or nation to advance political goals.
Doesn't matter whether you agree with both the Iranian crazies attacking people on behalf of the tyrannical Iranian regime or the anti-abortion fetus fanatics or both. (I presume both from the content of your post.)
Doesn't matter if you simply think it impolite to call people who commit political violence terrorists.
It's STILL terrorism.
No matter how much you 'understand what's driving those people even if you can't publicly condone their methods'.
We have foreigners representing a foreign government attacking a US citizen on US soil for political and religious reasons. That's terrorism by definition. The Administration Party Line is "lone nuts" and there's no attempt to investigate the organizations they are connected to.
We have a plague of right-wing extremists killing Americans for political and religious reasons. That's terrorism by definition. The Administration Party Line is "lone nuts" and there's no attempt to investigate the organizations they are connected to.
Where the hell is the FBI and DHS?
ON what planet is this supposed to be "Change We Can Believe In?"
My desktop has a hard drive. I might throw in SSD to in effect, provide me a faster HD cache. If this were a server, I might be even more inclined to do so. Either way, I'd figure that the SSD is essentially an expensive special-purpose consumable rather than a cost-effective form of mass storage.
My netbook has an SSD, and that's something I chose on purpose. IMO, in a mobile environment, ruggedness is more important than millicents per megabyte. Though it helps that my real netbook mass storage is my desktop HD, I keep as little data as possible on the netbook and access the desktop via remote to get to my real personal database.
The economics will change when SSD long-term reliability improves and the cost drops, this is a question I'll revisit in a couple of years.
YMMV.
this actually makes sense. If Win7 does not save M$, a fallback position with a proprietary *nix with virtualization and XP built in by default with their flagship apps ported to Win-IX with its introduction and their less important apps ported to -ix as fast as their programmers can work might be a Very Good Thing for them to have.
Ben Franklin warned about when he said: "They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security".
The biggest problem is that historically, people who give up civil liberties for security don't get either liberty or security, though you may not hear a lot of complaints about this problem once it happens because they no longer feel safe in speaking of it.
That said, I wouldn't take for granted that the IP addresses in blog server logs are accurate. Mine said a few seconds ago that I was accessing the Net from a German IP. I've never been to Germany. (tor / privoxy are your friends)
So how are you doing with your Zune? Happy with your Vista installation? Do you miss MS Office's Clippy? Are you old enough to remember Microsoft Bob?
What M$ has going for it is consumer inertia, monopoly business practices, and a big installed base. Your belief in their genius at understanding consumer wants is faith-based. The list of M$ marketing and tech failures above is a long way from complete.
That said, I use Bing occasionally when I don't find what I want in the first couple of pages of google hits. It isn't better, but sometimes, different is what's needed. As for their translation setup... the dual window thing might be useful for a professional language translator who's trying to clean up the translator's output, but if one doesn't speak the language, google's straightforward translation interface that simply throws the translation on a page works better.
While google should watch them as they do any other competitor, they have no reason for concern. At least not this year.
My 22W CFLs are considered 100W incandescent-equivalent, and good white LED lamps designed for regular light sockets are slightly better. And LEDs are being improved.
If I understand the press release correctly, 60 watts in for the equivalent of 100W incandescent out is the theoretical maximum for this technology.
Making this a non-starter for general illumination needs, particularly as US Federal law says that the incandescent is going to become unavailable for general lighting in any case.
However, the filterless pure color and polarized light possibilities suggest this device has a great future in specialized industrial, scientific, and even theatrical lighting uses.
Use Kubuntu Jaunty as the main OS (assuming it's got the drivers for your mobile PC)... and use WINE or Crossover Office or Virtualbox-XP virtual machine depending on the level of Windows compatibility you really need for what you're doing and how powerful your mobile computer is. (mine is an Eee PC900... I stopped at Crossover Office because I don't want to turn my netbook into a battery-powered space heater that executes programs with glacial slowness)
Then, just create a guest account using KUser.
Bonus... Amarok2 is part of the default OS install. It's a great way to run and more to the point, find streaming "Internet Radio" by genre.
Better security and stability, and the unfamiliar Linux UI will hopefully encourage people to find other ways to get to their content. (of course it's easy to use, but most people will make no effort to learn about anything that's "different").
good that you managed to get out of that mess. So many don't. I expect that some of the 'blame the victim' types around here are going to be ones that don't when that don't when the 'recession' bites them personally in the ass.
newspapers are supposed to provide. If we're going to be informed, we need paid boots on the ground at the routine school board and other government agency meetings and corporate board of directors meetings and press conferences.
Note that I said routine. The meetings where interesting things are expected to happen will have plenty of people tweeting out of them and plenty of blog postings afterwards. Sometimes, routine turns into 'all hell breaks loose' and then, it's a very good thing there's a reporter there if there is one. But if nothing much happens, a reporter can build relationships with involved parties who can explain the context and the players when things are no longer routine and there's a story to cover.
However,given the decreasing credibility of the mass media, (WHO told us that the War on Iraq was a good idea by parroting Bush Administration propaganda?) and the increasing awareness that the media news agenda is dictated by people whose interests and ours have nothing in common, of course you're going to find fewer and fewer people willing to pay for the product.
Paywalls will hasten the demise of every publication that doesn't provide anything worth buying. Not only due to direct effects, but google isn't going to provide a whole lot of reader eyeballs to content it can't access, and blogs aren't going to be pointing people at content their owners don't find worth buying on the average.
We need new business models that will subsidize "beat reporters". I hope they evolve, but I'm pretty sure that they won't come out of corporate-owned media. How can you get paid for local reporting without a corporate owner?
are a very good thing. Too many vendors are still using Linux to attempt to deliver a fixed-function 'websurf and office app only' netappliance experience that there is no known market for outside the imaginations of Yet Another Generation of Marketdroids. Personally, I see 'positive' reviews of Linux netbooks that start with "after I replaced the OEM OS with Ubuntu" as evidence of EPIC FAIL on the software side of OEM netbook vendors... people generally don't replace OSs which deliver satisfactory performance.
Given driver support, an ordinary Linux install on a netbook is just like any other Linux install, open the install wizard, set a few things, find something else to do for quite a while, loading the OS files on a netbook SSD takes a long time.
Unfortunately, if you like your hardware warranty, you can't do this on most netbooks. So I installed Kubuntu Jaunty to a flash card living in the card reader of my Eee PC900. Here's how I did it, part II of the article refers to customizing Ubuntu-Gnome-Intrepid using tweaks that aren't needed with Kubuntu Jaunty. This is probably not for n00bs, the first step is installing Sun Virtualbox on your desktop Linux box so you can install the OS to a flash card that shows up in Virtualbox as the only available HD if you've set it up correctly.
Having a vendor willing to pre-install it and back it up via warranty saves quite a lot of time and work. It took me weeks to figure out how to make the alternative install to flash card work so I could write it up for publication.
Don't bet on it. All a government has to do is threaten to stop buying M$ and M$'ll make all sorts of concessions on things other than price and licensing terms. The choice M$ may have had was between pulling the MSN plug or having NO government users in the affected countries. When making a choice between enabling freedom of speech and making a few bucks, why should suggesting that M$ is no different from Google on this issue be considered evidence of "bias"?
The netbook looks enough like a "real computer" that people expect to see conventional-looking desktops on it. This is a major reason why XP-Home is the dominant player at this point, if XP-Home had been repackaged as the netappliance desktop suppliers of netbook "Linux" are under delusion that the public wants, and the XP desktops were locked down so you couldn't install standard Windows apps to them, nobody would buy XP-Home netbooks, either.
IMO, Intel's efforts would be better spent building drivers for Open Source distros so that more netbooks will run straight out of the box with Open Source installed, and pushing vendors to install conventional desktop UIs rather than "netbook UIs".
Smartphones don't have that problem because people don't have fixed expectations as to what a smartphone desktop ought to look like, it just has to be easy to use and mildly extensible.
That said, I'm running Kubuntu Jaunty 'right out of the box' on my Eee PC900 (and yes, that's a 900MHz computer with the original 1G DRAM) . . . without concern about my warranty because it lives on an SDHC flash card sitting in the internal card reader. Looks great, works well, and it's a standard KDE4.2.2 desktop.
Find out how here. Just Part 1, the tweaks needed for Ubuntu-Intrepid described in Part II are not needed with the new Kubuntu. If you don't have an Eee PC900, make sure Kubuntu-Jaunty has the drivers required to support your netbook or you know where to get them first. Google is your friend.
he or she isn't posting from somebody else's account? Or an account created for the specific purpose of posting this question by somebody living in FL using a throwaway e-mail account?
secrets have been discovered on surplus hard drives sold on places like eBay by people who didn't get your memo and did check the drives.
High quality drive scrubbing software like Eraser (Windoze) and shredder (any Open Source distro as part of GPG, presumably Windoze and OSX versions available) is readily available for free download, use it before selling or giving away any HD with confidential content on it.
From an author's POV, it's a form letter, google is your friend, right? Find one, customize, read the procedures on submission, send.
Any big provider providing website services (as opposed to the people who run virtual hosts on them) is going to pay attention to a DMCA takedown letter, though you'll have to poke around to find the DMCA agent.
Eee PC900, it was ready to go, too. Getting it to connect to my wireless LAN was less work than getting XP computers on my LAN running. However, it's moderately stupid for Asus not to have provided my computer with a real Linux distro instead of a Xandros deliberately dumbed down to provide a net appliance.
A netbook looks enough like a conventional computer that people expect to see a conventional desktop, with menus and icons. And any halfway workable arrangement of these will work for experienced computer non-geek end users whether it's from M$, Apple, Linux, or OpenSolaris.
A net appliance UI is a bad idea that never worked out for anyone who tried selling one. And a computer that the user can't install applications from anyone with is a non-starter. People who bought the Linux version of netbooks to get a Linux experience have replaced the OEM OS en masse.
People don't have the same kind of fixed expectation of smartphone UIs, so OEMs can experiment here and pepple can generally live with anything workable.
I doubt the author of the original article has ever seen a "Linux" netbook in operation, basing his comments on Linux stereotypes based on the Linux of days gone by. Otherwise his comment about Linux netbooks would have been about net appliances.
I doubt anyone would buy XP Home repackaged as a net appliance UI, either.
When Mark Shuttleworth was asked what role WINE will play in Ubuntu's success, he said that Ubuntu cannot simply be a better platform to run Windows apps.
Shuttleworth need not be concerned that installing WINE on Ubuntu by default will turn Ubuntu into a "better platform to run Windows apps". Usability of WINE and for that matter, even Crossover Office with real-world Windows apps is too hit and miss to make this possible. While WINE is a remarkable technical accomplishment, I've got two proprietary Windoze e-book readers that lock up when one points their library paths at large numbers of books. I'd say that Crossover Office works well with about 1/2 the apps I've tried it on.
While I do run Linux (Debian) and Windows on this desktop box, I run XP via virtualbox, and practically everything Just Works. I also run XP for about an hour a week to access a few legacy apps with features I need... or that simply do not exist in Linux, like the USPS Shipping Assistant. And during that hour, it's a better Windows app platform than Windows ever was running native on any box I've ever dealt with. But Linux apps really are good enough for about 99% of my computer use.
I run Kubuntu full time on my netbook... the only reason I have Crossover Office on the Eee PC is so I can read the very few DRM-broken e-books I own on it. (Mobipocket and eReader will work if you import books into the library one at a time). And it came up when installed on my netbook with no significant problems, even the wireless worked.
IMO, there is simply no reason not to install WINE by default with (K)Ubuntu unless one is doing a very lean installation for a very small mass storage environment, and that's an option that can be deselected in the install process.
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Nobody proposed to, we can't replace every coal facility with wind / solar this year, it's physically impossible to do so.
As I recall, EU countries are running up to 30% intermittent power and only starting to run into trouble. If we make a serious national commitment to renewable energy, serious enough to put all our idle heavy manufacturing capacity to work, we might get there in a decade. So far, I don't see any such commitment on the part of the Federal government. Certainly there is no such major commitment in the energy bill wandering through Congress right now.
Given a decade and adequate research funding as needed and funding for deployment when we have a manufacturable smartgrid design, and given the substantial progress already made in high-density electrical storage, I regard it as ridiculous to assume that we won't know how to build either a smartgrid or the electrical storage desirable to buffer it by 2019.
But given a more likely generational timeframe, assuming we actually get a Congress which is willing to listen to scientists and engineers instead of corporate lobbyists, the only people who can reasonably argue that these problems are unsolvable within the timeframe in which they actually need to be solved can only do this on the basis of Big Coal talking points on the basis that they are paid to do so.
Capturing CO2 simply requires running smokestack emissions through a chilled ammonia bath at the cost of 25% input power... i.e. we get to pay for a 125% increase in the amount of coal burned.
How do we move all these gigatons of CO2 to disposal sites and store it forever?
Big, high pressure pipelines. Odd that nobody talking up a "clean" coal future ever talks about the comparative costs of a national pipeline network vs a smartgrid.
We have massive unused heavy manufacturing capability in terms of both idle car factories and a trained labor force that can be converted to building renewable generation capability. The question of replacing coal with wind/concentrated thermal solar is a question of political will, not technological capability.
Better to have really kept the business plan secret, that fewer people might laugh at it.
It's been noticed by everyone who follows the VC industry that VCs move in herds.
The 3F rule "First, Fabulous, or Failed" rule applies to VC-funded high-tech as well as mass-market publication.
Everyone knows what "first-mover" advantage is. You can overcome this by being "fabulous", i.e. a far better product than the "first-mover" has got if everyone isn't already locked into the first-mover's solution and even sometimes even after everyone is locked in and decides the "fabulous" solution is worth the trouble to switch to.
What Andressen seems to have in mind is to back the "second movers", i.e. follow the part of the herd that moves fastest without recognizing that being faster than just about everyone else doesn't necessarily correlate with being smarter.
His investors would probably be better off if he used a dartboard to select companies for funding. Or based his selections on finding the smartest and most cost-effective next-gen technologies and figuring on helping these companies to bring them to market and putting his VC value-add there, and refraining from the buzzword-compliant micromanagement by people who don't understand the technologies and market realities (as in who might be induced to buy the damned things) which is a large part of why the old "1 in 6" rule of 'which takes off, which dies' in the VC-funded high tech model has been replaced by "1 in 8+".
What's in TFA is part of why I'm not looking to VC to fund the alternative energy R&D I want to do.
built in 3G wireless chip set. A Linux netbook may be the only way left to get a SSD flash drive (lower power consumption and better ruggedness), find one that Kubuntu or netbook remix are known to work on. (as in for which driver support exists) If battery life is a problem, get a larger aftermarket battery, and if you're reading local content, turn off the wireless card and run the backlight at the minimum that works in your lighting environment.
My netbook OS (eeepc 900) is stock Kubuntu Jaunty. So I read PDFs basically the same way that anyone else does. I tried PDF software on my PalmPDA and I never found anything that does not suck on that display. I carry my PalmPDA at times when I know I won't be around any open WAPs. (I don't get a 3G wireless setup... yet)
On my netbook, I run fbreader and any of 3 different PDF e-readers and Mobipocket + Ereader in Crossover Office to run DRM-broken ebook files for books I'm really compulsive about having. The only e-book format I know of that I can't read is Kindle's, and that doesn't really worry me, it's possible to find conversion programs even for that format if it's the only way to get an ebook I really want.
I use a mirror drive in a mobile rack as a backup and an rsync script on a modified liveCD to allow me to point and click to the rsync script to tell it to run the backup. I plug in the mobile rack drive and boot from the LiveCD. When the mobile rack is not in active use, i.e. either being backed up to or restored from, it is stored well away from the computer.
This has served me well for years, including after a hard drive crash. I was up and running in 15 minutes after the crash.
Though since the Knoppix 5 LiveCD it was based on does not recognize SATA running in ACHI mode, I have to rebuild around another LiveCD. The big advantage of this is that a drive in a mobile rack that is not plugged in is completely immune to anything awful happening to the main system, including the events which are most likely to blow up a hard drive.
to intimidate individuals, a group, or nation to advance political goals.
Doesn't matter whether you agree with both the Iranian crazies attacking people on behalf of the tyrannical Iranian regime or the anti-abortion fetus fanatics or both. (I presume both from the content of your post.)
Doesn't matter if you simply think it impolite to call people who commit political violence terrorists.
It's STILL terrorism.
No matter how much you 'understand what's driving those people even if you can't publicly condone their methods'.
We have foreigners representing a foreign government attacking a US citizen on US soil for political and religious reasons. That's terrorism by definition. The Administration Party Line is "lone nuts" and there's no attempt to investigate the organizations they are connected to.
We have a plague of right-wing extremists killing Americans for political and religious reasons. That's terrorism by definition. The Administration Party Line is "lone nuts" and there's no attempt to investigate the organizations they are connected to.
Where the hell is the FBI and DHS?
ON what planet is this supposed to be "Change We Can Believe In?"
My desktop has a hard drive. I might throw in SSD to in effect, provide me a faster HD cache. If this were a server, I might be even more inclined to do so. Either way, I'd figure that the SSD is essentially an expensive special-purpose consumable rather than a cost-effective form of mass storage.
My netbook has an SSD, and that's something I chose on purpose. IMO, in a mobile environment, ruggedness is more important than millicents per megabyte. Though it helps that my real netbook mass storage is my desktop HD, I keep as little data as possible on the netbook and access the desktop via remote to get to my real personal database.
The economics will change when SSD long-term reliability improves and the cost drops, this is a question I'll revisit in a couple of years. YMMV.
this actually makes sense. If Win7 does not save M$, a fallback position with a proprietary *nix with virtualization and XP built in by default with their flagship apps ported to Win-IX with its introduction and their less important apps ported to -ix as fast as their programmers can work might be a Very Good Thing for them to have.
Ben Franklin warned about when he said: "They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security".
The biggest problem is that historically, people who give up civil liberties for security don't get either liberty or security, though you may not hear a lot of complaints about this problem once it happens because they no longer feel safe in speaking of it.
That said, I wouldn't take for granted that the IP addresses in blog server logs are accurate. Mine said a few seconds ago that I was accessing the Net from a German IP. I've never been to Germany. (tor / privoxy are your friends)
So how are you doing with your Zune? Happy with your Vista installation? Do you miss MS Office's Clippy? Are you old enough to remember Microsoft Bob?
What M$ has going for it is consumer inertia, monopoly business practices, and a big installed base. Your belief in their genius at understanding consumer wants is faith-based. The list of M$ marketing and tech failures above is a long way from complete.
That said, I use Bing occasionally when I don't find what I want in the first couple of pages of google hits. It isn't better, but sometimes, different is what's needed. As for their translation setup... the dual window thing might be useful for a professional language translator who's trying to clean up the translator's output, but if one doesn't speak the language, google's straightforward translation interface that simply throws the translation on a page works better.
While google should watch them as they do any other competitor, they have no reason for concern. At least not this year.
My 22W CFLs are considered 100W incandescent-equivalent, and good white LED lamps designed for regular light sockets are slightly better. And LEDs are being improved.
If I understand the press release correctly, 60 watts in for the equivalent of 100W incandescent out is the theoretical maximum for this technology.
Making this a non-starter for general illumination needs, particularly as US Federal law says that the incandescent is going to become unavailable for general lighting in any case.
However, the filterless pure color and polarized light possibilities suggest this device has a great future in specialized industrial, scientific, and even theatrical lighting uses.
Use Kubuntu Jaunty as the main OS (assuming it's got the drivers for your mobile PC)... and use WINE or Crossover Office or Virtualbox-XP virtual machine depending on the level of Windows compatibility you really need for what you're doing and how powerful your mobile computer is. (mine is an Eee PC900... I stopped at Crossover Office because I don't want to turn my netbook into a battery-powered space heater that executes programs with glacial slowness)
Then, just create a guest account using KUser.
Bonus... Amarok2 is part of the default OS install. It's a great way to run and more to the point, find streaming "Internet Radio" by genre.
Better security and stability, and the unfamiliar Linux UI will hopefully encourage people to find other ways to get to their content. (of course it's easy to use, but most people will make no effort to learn about anything that's "different").
good that you managed to get out of that mess. So many don't. I expect that some of the 'blame the victim' types around here are going to be ones that don't when that don't when the 'recession' bites them personally in the ass.
newspapers are supposed to provide. If we're going to be informed, we need paid boots on the ground at the routine school board and other government agency meetings and corporate board of directors meetings and press conferences.
Note that I said routine. The meetings where interesting things are expected to happen will have plenty of people tweeting out of them and plenty of blog postings afterwards. Sometimes, routine turns into 'all hell breaks loose' and then, it's a very good thing there's a reporter there if there is one. But if nothing much happens, a reporter can build relationships with involved parties who can explain the context and the players when things are no longer routine and there's a story to cover.
However,given the decreasing credibility of the mass media, (WHO told us that the War on Iraq was a good idea by parroting Bush Administration propaganda?) and the increasing awareness that the media news agenda is dictated by people whose interests and ours have nothing in common, of course you're going to find fewer and fewer people willing to pay for the product.
Paywalls will hasten the demise of every publication that doesn't provide anything worth buying. Not only due to direct effects, but google isn't going to provide a whole lot of reader eyeballs to content it can't access, and blogs aren't going to be pointing people at content their owners don't find worth buying on the average.
We need new business models that will subsidize "beat reporters". I hope they evolve, but I'm pretty sure that they won't come out of corporate-owned media. How can you get paid for local reporting without a corporate owner?
are a very good thing. Too many vendors are still using Linux to attempt to deliver a fixed-function 'websurf and office app only' netappliance experience that there is no known market for outside the imaginations of Yet Another Generation of Marketdroids. Personally, I see 'positive' reviews of Linux netbooks that start with "after I replaced the OEM OS with Ubuntu" as evidence of EPIC FAIL on the software side of OEM netbook vendors... people generally don't replace OSs which deliver satisfactory performance.
Given driver support, an ordinary Linux install on a netbook is just like any other Linux install, open the install wizard, set a few things, find something else to do for quite a while, loading the OS files on a netbook SSD takes a long time.
Unfortunately, if you like your hardware warranty, you can't do this on most netbooks. So I installed Kubuntu Jaunty to a flash card living in the card reader of my Eee PC900. Here's how I did it, part II of the article refers to customizing Ubuntu-Gnome-Intrepid using tweaks that aren't needed with Kubuntu Jaunty. This is probably not for n00bs, the first step is installing Sun Virtualbox on your desktop Linux box so you can install the OS to a flash card that shows up in Virtualbox as the only available HD if you've set it up correctly.
Having a vendor willing to pre-install it and back it up via warranty saves quite a lot of time and work. It took me weeks to figure out how to make the alternative install to flash card work so I could write it up for publication.
2. Malware writers do indeed write code targeting AV software. But not all of them.
Don't bet on it. All a government has to do is threaten to stop buying M$ and M$'ll make all sorts of concessions on things other than price and licensing terms. The choice M$ may have had was between pulling the MSN plug or having NO government users in the affected countries. When making a choice between enabling freedom of speech and making a few bucks, why should suggesting that M$ is no different from Google on this issue be considered evidence of "bias"?
The netbook looks enough like a "real computer" that people expect to see conventional-looking desktops on it. This is a major reason why XP-Home is the dominant player at this point, if XP-Home had been repackaged as the netappliance desktop suppliers of netbook "Linux" are under delusion that the public wants, and the XP desktops were locked down so you couldn't install standard Windows apps to them, nobody would buy XP-Home netbooks, either.
IMO, Intel's efforts would be better spent building drivers for Open Source distros so that more netbooks will run straight out of the box with Open Source installed, and pushing vendors to install conventional desktop UIs rather than "netbook UIs".
Smartphones don't have that problem because people don't have fixed expectations as to what a smartphone desktop ought to look like, it just has to be easy to use and mildly extensible.
That said, I'm running Kubuntu Jaunty 'right out of the box' on my Eee PC900 (and yes, that's a 900MHz computer with the original 1G DRAM) . . . without concern about my warranty because it lives on an SDHC flash card sitting in the internal card reader. Looks great, works well, and it's a standard KDE4.2.2 desktop.
Find out how here. Just Part 1, the tweaks needed for Ubuntu-Intrepid described in Part II are not needed with the new Kubuntu. If you don't have an Eee PC900, make sure Kubuntu-Jaunty has the drivers required to support your netbook or you know where to get them first. Google is your friend.
he or she isn't posting from somebody else's account? Or an account created for the specific purpose of posting this question by somebody living in FL using a throwaway e-mail account?
secrets have been discovered on surplus hard drives sold on places like eBay by people who didn't get your memo and did check the drives.
High quality drive scrubbing software like Eraser (Windoze) and shredder (any Open Source distro as part of GPG, presumably Windoze and OSX versions available) is readily available for free download, use it before selling or giving away any HD with confidential content on it.
Use this link instead. I hit post instead of preview by mistake.
From an author's POV, it's a form letter, google is your friend, right? Find one, customize, read the procedures on submission, send.
Any big provider providing website services (as opposed to the people who run virtual hosts on them) is going to pay attention to a DMCA takedown letter, though you'll have to poke around to find the DMCA agent.
If they ignore you, go to the Feds to complain... here's a quick primer on DMCA.
It's a mainly bad law, but it can be very useful for the few legitimate complaints the law was allegedly intended to cover.
Eee PC900, it was ready to go, too. Getting it to connect to my wireless LAN was less work than getting XP computers on my LAN running. However, it's moderately stupid for Asus not to have provided my computer with a real Linux distro instead of a Xandros deliberately dumbed down to provide a net appliance.
A netbook looks enough like a conventional computer that people expect to see a conventional desktop, with menus and icons. And any halfway workable arrangement of these will work for experienced computer non-geek end users whether it's from M$, Apple, Linux, or OpenSolaris.
A net appliance UI is a bad idea that never worked out for anyone who tried selling one. And a computer that the user can't install applications from anyone with is a non-starter. People who bought the Linux version of netbooks to get a Linux experience have replaced the OEM OS en masse.
People don't have the same kind of fixed expectation of smartphone UIs, so OEMs can experiment here and pepple can generally live with anything workable.
I doubt the author of the original article has ever seen a "Linux" netbook in operation, basing his comments on Linux stereotypes based on the Linux of days gone by. Otherwise his comment about Linux netbooks would have been about net appliances.
I doubt anyone would buy XP Home repackaged as a net appliance UI, either.
Shuttleworth need not be concerned that installing WINE on Ubuntu by default will turn Ubuntu into a "better platform to run Windows apps". Usability of WINE and for that matter, even Crossover Office with real-world Windows apps is too hit and miss to make this possible. While WINE is a remarkable technical accomplishment, I've got two proprietary Windoze e-book readers that lock up when one points their library paths at large numbers of books. I'd say that Crossover Office works well with about 1/2 the apps I've tried it on.
While I do run Linux (Debian) and Windows on this desktop box, I run XP via virtualbox, and practically everything Just Works. I also run XP for about an hour a week to access a few legacy apps with features I need... or that simply do not exist in Linux, like the USPS Shipping Assistant. And during that hour, it's a better Windows app platform than Windows ever was running native on any box I've ever dealt with. But Linux apps really are good enough for about 99% of my computer use.
I run Kubuntu full time on my netbook... the only reason I have Crossover Office on the Eee PC is so I can read the very few DRM-broken e-books I own on it. (Mobipocket and eReader will work if you import books into the library one at a time). And it came up when installed on my netbook with no significant problems, even the wireless worked.
IMO, there is simply no reason not to install WINE by default with (K)Ubuntu unless one is doing a very lean installation for a very small mass storage environment, and that's an option that can be deselected in the install process.