"And even when some of you wish to exclaim that this is not that cut and dry, one thing that no one can argue is that their effort behind the notion that open source cannot be profitable."
Can someone please parse this sentence for me? It seems to be short a verb.
I guess I have half-a-dozen or so containers, but only two are in the kitchen. There's one for garbage, which is defined as anything that the chickens are willing to eat, and one for combustible trash, which is anything that isn't acceptable for paper recycling and which winds up in a fire pit behind the barn. (It's mostly heavy cardboard, so burning it is mostly CO2 neutral.) There's a wicker basket in the family room that gets newspapers and other paper; it get recycled as it fills up. There's a container in the garage for glass, aluminum, etc.; it gets hauled into town every month or so and sorted at the recycling center. I also have shoe boxes on my office bookcase for alkaline batteries and CDs, but they haven't filled up in several years. I haven't had any CFLs go bad yet, so I don't have a place for them.
Proud? Heck, at it's peak the Dragon had more subscribers than any of the SF magazines; having jut one story published there was sufficient to join the SFWA. Of course, they only bought one story a month, compared to those others.
Funny, but you've almost perfectly described a "summer house" that I inherited. It's in the Ozarks, which means no line of sight to anything unless you're lucky enough to be on top of a ridge. I don't know anyone who has a cell phone; even in town there's never anough signal to make it worth while. All of my water comes from a well fifty feet from the house, and (since the indoor plumbing was installed in the sixties) the waste goes into a septic tank fifty feet from the opposite side of the house. There is a land line, but I can never get more that 36KB out of it, usually less. Personally, I love it since I can completely unhook myself from the outside world, but I suspect that my neighbors would like better connectivity. Some of the wealthier families have tried satellite; as you say, it isn't cheap, but it also feels sluggish. Something to do with the packets making a 2x26,000 mile detour. The poorer neighbors, however, have to do without.
(I am thinking about putting an 850 MHz Yagi on the tower holding up my TV aerial and running a cable to my cellphone, for those instances where I really need to make a call to get my land line working. Of course, that's based on the hope that a bit of altitude will let me "see" the nearest cell tower, 18 miles away.)
I misread the previous title, "Bethesda Investigates Shivering Isles Bug". I thought it referred to Bethesda Hospital investigating a new tropical disease.
Whether humans are the primary cause of global warming or whether it's due to a long-term solar cycle, the fact is that the exact causes are irrelevant right now. Regardless of the cause, the globe is warming, and the effects will be bad for a lot of people unless we can do something about it. Reflecting sunlight (by injecting aerosols into the upper atmosphere or launching many tiny mirrors) should help whether GW is humanity's fault or a natural phenomenon. Dr. Gerold O'Neil had a plan to get humanity into space 30 years ago, but the US dropped the ball. This may be our last chance to build a large permanent infrastructure in space, and we should take it now.
No, I've got a better idea: Let's introduce *double* and *triple* DST. You'd have three months in the winter of "normal" time, roughly six weeks in the spring and six more in the fall where clocks are moved forward one hour, six more weeks in spring and fall where clocks are moved forward two hours, and then three months in the summer where the clocks are moved three hours. Instead of trying to approximate having the sun directly overhead at the same time every day (aka "noon"), which DST proponents seem to dislike, we can better approximate having the sun *rise* at the same time every day. (Averaging around 7:49am where I am.) Of course, the sun then won't set until 10:30 pm in the summer, but since school usually isn't in session during the summer, it'll be OK to let them stay up that late.
Well, you admit that you have a karma bonus because you've "been making contributions for a longer period and tend to avoid trolling/vandalism". One of the purposes of moderation is to have "more or less neutral-quality statements" produce more or less zero points, so apparently everything is working as intended in your case. Limits on Slashdot karma seem to work because it drives a binary state; my proposal uses karma levels to drive a multi-layer spectrum of editorship, which means that a ceiling imposes an eventual limit on editorial abilities. Using the rule "level = log(points)" means that it takes longer and longer to get to the next level. In slashdot, you can pretend to be "virtuous" until you hit the ceiling, and then start trolling/spamming. A lack of a ceiling means that there's no obvious place to switch behaviors.
I thought that I'd posted something on this before, but I posted it at Wikipedia and they don't seem to have a search engine for discussions. Anyway, I can't find anything by Googling, so I'll (re-)state my idea here.
I propose a Slashdot-like system for giving users karma points for good deeds, such as article submissions and editing. Some sort of moderation system would separate the good edits from the bad, and users would receive "Karma Levels" that are basically "log(points)", again like/. but without any upper limit. Add to this an ability for anyone to lock-out edits made by people of a lower level. Misuse can be avoided by also having a way to "jam the lock", preventing lower level users from locking a page. This would quickly create a hierarchy of users who could appeal to higher-level users whenever misuse occurs. Most problems could (and I expect would) be solved in the middle levels; only rarely would things filter up to the Board of Directors (who would all be hard-coded to level 1000 or so).
http://www.dailyhaha.com/_pics/nice_teef.jpg
But seriously, I've lost most of the enamel at my gum line (apparently due to brushing too virorously!), I've had one root canal (== dead tooth), and several big fillings. I've been eagerly awaiting someone to figure out how to grow new teeth so that when I yawn, people aren't blinded by sunlight refelcting off all the silver in my mouth.
I'd love to see Windows make a clean break with the past; by dropping backwards compatibility, the codebase would become much smaller (and hopefully more secure). This could be done if you booted to a hypervisor and then ran new apps in one VM and old ones in another. A "seamless windows" mode such as is offered by Parallels would even allow old and new windows to live together on the desktop.
If I could get my WiFi to work under Linux, then I'd go the VM route. I do use VM server to do rPath development; I've got a Conary repository and a build box running all the time, and test boxes come and go like pop songs.
Dapper Drake never worked with my desktop's on-board video card, Edgy Eft worked out of the box; this it what got me to install it on my laptop. Unfortunately, neither release seems to work with my Dell's built-in WiFi. This isn't a big deal at work, where everything is 100baseT, but it means that most of that 20% of the time I'm in Windows is when I'm at home. I eagerly await Feisty Fawn in the hope that WiFi will "just work".
When you (re)install, make sure your/home folder is on a different partition, this way you can basically reinstall without losing any settings when you screw up. Or do what I do and burn/home to a CD. This gives me a worst-case backup if my hard drive ever goes south.
I've dual-booted for a long time, but it's only been recently that I started spending more time in Linux than in Windows. (And the shift was both dramatic and quick. In a single day, I went from less than 20% of my time spent in Linux to over 80%.) This is mostly due to the proliferation of Web 2.0. The latest version of Exchange's Webmail means that I no longer need to use Outlook, and Open Office is a more than adequate substitute for Office. There are a few internal web-apps that claim to require IE, but Greasemonkey has been letting me repair the worst of them. (BTW, I would love to have a way for User Agent Switcher to recognize certain URLs as needing a special string, instead of me getting an error page and having to change the string manually.)
Re:I'm groovy and haven't found an alternative yet
on
Alternative to Groove?
·
· Score: 1
Folks - Groove does nothing really new or that you can't get elsewhere. It's just that it encompasses the features of all these technologies (and more) in an integrated and user-friendly environment.
Elsewhere, someone suggested using a VM to package an assortment of "Groove-like" technologies. Right now, I'm running VMware's free Virtual Server to do something similar, only I'm running "single-user" servers for Gallery and WordPress. It's a great way to encapsulate web services, especially since it sidesteps the whole problem of using Web 2.0 while you're on a plane.
BTW, your list has made me think about hacking Gaim so that it constantly advertises the title of my active window ("Alternative to Groove? - Mozilla Firefox", at the moment). On the one hand, I'm not sure I want to broadcast if I'm playing Solitaire; on the other, I can see advantages to letting people know if I'm neck deep in troubleshooting or documenting. I'd probably need to map possible titles to a presence message.
Re:I'm groovy and haven't found an alternative yet
on
Alternative to Groove?
·
· Score: 1
Here's what you'd have to build:
1. Distributed directory system that allows people to authenticate each other out of band or via corporate server
LDAP? I don't know enough about state-of-the-art authentication. Maybe Open ID, especially if if works well with #9.
2. WAN P2P protocols
rsync
3. LAN P2P protocols
rsync
4. Local encrypted database
modified SQLite (although see my note for #6; maybe just encrypted flat files for iCard and iCal)
5. Communications encryption
SSL or SSH
6. Robust synchronization algorithms, including offline support
Ran into some trouble with one antiquated EDI application that just HAD to have a serial port.
If the app can use a USB-to-serial adapter, then you can get around this, too. There's a white paper somewhere about a grocery that replaced its per-register servers with a single ESX server (local to the store) using USB over IP to plug each lane's hardware into the appropriate VMs. Pretty damn cool, if you ask me.
2) Does C-SPAN send someone in to shoot the video, or are they government cameras with C-SPAN just picking up a feed and rebroadcasting? If it's the former, then sure they should get attribution. If the later, they should not.
It depends. Congress provides the cameras and crews for the floor of the House and Senate; CPAN sends someone in to shoot comittee meetings and the like. Of course, CPAN has (up until now, at least) aggressively defended its claim of "ownership" of all of that footage.
Slashdot Mirror
"And even when some of you wish to exclaim that this is not that cut and dry, one thing that no one can argue is that their effort behind the notion that open source cannot be profitable."
Can someone please parse this sentence for me? It seems to be short a verb.
I guess I have half-a-dozen or so containers, but only two are in the kitchen. There's one for garbage, which is defined as anything that the chickens are willing to eat, and one for combustible trash, which is anything that isn't acceptable for paper recycling and which winds up in a fire pit behind the barn. (It's mostly heavy cardboard, so burning it is mostly CO2 neutral.) There's a wicker basket in the family room that gets newspapers and other paper; it get recycled as it fills up. There's a container in the garage for glass, aluminum, etc.; it gets hauled into town every month or so and sorted at the recycling center. I also have shoe boxes on my office bookcase for alkaline batteries and CDs, but they haven't filled up in several years. I haven't had any CFLs go bad yet, so I don't have a place for them.
I was complaining about the stupidification of Digg in January of last year: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=174429&cid=145 43675
we have recently seen several other TLDs drop their prices down into the sub $0.25 per year range"
Hey! Where do I find these ultra-cheap TLDs?
Proud? Heck, at it's peak the Dragon had more subscribers than any of the SF magazines; having jut one story published there was sufficient to join the SFWA. Of course, they only bought one story a month, compared to those others.
Funny, but you've almost perfectly described a "summer house" that I inherited. It's in the Ozarks, which means no line of sight to anything unless you're lucky enough to be on top of a ridge. I don't know anyone who has a cell phone; even in town there's never anough signal to make it worth while. All of my water comes from a well fifty feet from the house, and (since the indoor plumbing was installed in the sixties) the waste goes into a septic tank fifty feet from the opposite side of the house. There is a land line, but I can never get more that 36KB out of it, usually less. Personally, I love it since I can completely unhook myself from the outside world, but I suspect that my neighbors would like better connectivity. Some of the wealthier families have tried satellite; as you say, it isn't cheap, but it also feels sluggish. Something to do with the packets making a 2x26,000 mile detour. The poorer neighbors, however, have to do without.
(I am thinking about putting an 850 MHz Yagi on the tower holding up my TV aerial and running a cable to my cellphone, for those instances where I really need to make a call to get my land line working. Of course, that's based on the hope that a bit of altitude will let me "see" the nearest cell tower, 18 miles away.)
I misread the previous title, "Bethesda Investigates Shivering Isles Bug". I thought it referred to Bethesda Hospital investigating a new tropical disease.
Whether humans are the primary cause of global warming or whether it's due to a long-term solar cycle, the fact is that the exact causes are irrelevant right now. Regardless of the cause, the globe is warming, and the effects will be bad for a lot of people unless we can do something about it. Reflecting sunlight (by injecting aerosols into the upper atmosphere or launching many tiny mirrors) should help whether GW is humanity's fault or a natural phenomenon. Dr. Gerold O'Neil had a plan to get humanity into space 30 years ago, but the US dropped the ball. This may be our last chance to build a large permanent infrastructure in space, and we should take it now.
No, I've got a better idea: Let's introduce *double* and *triple* DST. You'd have three months in the winter of "normal" time, roughly six weeks in the spring and six more in the fall where clocks are moved forward one hour, six more weeks in spring and fall where clocks are moved forward two hours, and then three months in the summer where the clocks are moved three hours. Instead of trying to approximate having the sun directly overhead at the same time every day (aka "noon"), which DST proponents seem to dislike, we can better approximate having the sun *rise* at the same time every day. (Averaging around 7:49am where I am.) Of course, the sun then won't set until 10:30 pm in the summer, but since school usually isn't in session during the summer, it'll be OK to let them stay up that late.
I wonder if these students are using this software library?
Well, you admit that you have a karma bonus because you've "been making contributions for a longer period and tend to avoid trolling/vandalism". One of the purposes of moderation is to have "more or less neutral-quality statements" produce more or less zero points, so apparently everything is working as intended in your case. Limits on Slashdot karma seem to work because it drives a binary state; my proposal uses karma levels to drive a multi-layer spectrum of editorship, which means that a ceiling imposes an eventual limit on editorial abilities. Using the rule "level = log(points)" means that it takes longer and longer to get to the next level. In slashdot, you can pretend to be "virtuous" until you hit the ceiling, and then start trolling/spamming. A lack of a ceiling means that there's no obvious place to switch behaviors.
I thought that I'd posted something on this before, but I posted it at Wikipedia and they don't seem to have a search engine for discussions. Anyway, I can't find anything by Googling, so I'll (re-)state my idea here.
I propose a Slashdot-like system for giving users karma points for good deeds, such as article submissions and editing. Some sort of moderation system would separate the good edits from the bad, and users would receive "Karma Levels" that are basically "log(points)", again like /. but without any upper limit. Add to this an ability for anyone to lock-out edits made by people of a lower level. Misuse can be avoided by also having a way to "jam the lock", preventing lower level users from locking a page. This would quickly create a hierarchy of users who could appeal to higher-level users whenever misuse occurs. Most problems could (and I expect would) be solved in the middle levels; only rarely would things filter up to the Board of Directors (who would all be hard-coded to level 1000 or so).
http://www.dailyhaha.com/_pics/nice_teef.jpg
But seriously, I've lost most of the enamel at my gum line (apparently due to brushing too virorously!), I've had one root canal (== dead tooth), and several big fillings. I've been eagerly awaiting someone to figure out how to grow new teeth so that when I yawn, people aren't blinded by sunlight refelcting off all the silver in my mouth.
I'd love to see Windows make a clean break with the past; by dropping backwards compatibility, the codebase would become much smaller (and hopefully more secure). This could be done if you booted to a hypervisor and then ran new apps in one VM and old ones in another. A "seamless windows" mode such as is offered by Parallels would even allow old and new windows to live together on the desktop.
We have to keep destroying all the mountains. They get in the way of winds and make power generation less efficient.
...that you can wear!!!
If I could get my WiFi to work under Linux, then I'd go the VM route. I do use VM server to do rPath development; I've got a Conary repository and a build box running all the time, and test boxes come and go like pop songs.
Dapper Drake never worked with my desktop's on-board video card, Edgy Eft worked out of the box; this it what got me to install it on my laptop. Unfortunately, neither release seems to work with my Dell's built-in WiFi. This isn't a big deal at work, where everything is 100baseT, but it means that most of that 20% of the time I'm in Windows is when I'm at home. I eagerly await Feisty Fawn in the hope that WiFi will "just work".
When you (re)install, make sure your /home folder is on a different partition, this way you can basically reinstall without losing any settings when you screw up. Or do what I do and burn /home to a CD. This gives me a worst-case backup if my hard drive ever goes south.
I've dual-booted for a long time, but it's only been recently that I started spending more time in Linux than in Windows. (And the shift was both dramatic and quick. In a single day, I went from less than 20% of my time spent in Linux to over 80%.) This is mostly due to the proliferation of Web 2.0. The latest version of Exchange's Webmail means that I no longer need to use Outlook, and Open Office is a more than adequate substitute for Office. There are a few internal web-apps that claim to require IE, but Greasemonkey has been letting me repair the worst of them. (BTW, I would love to have a way for User Agent Switcher to recognize certain URLs as needing a special string, instead of me getting an error page and having to change the string manually.)
Elsewhere, someone suggested using a VM to package an assortment of "Groove-like" technologies. Right now, I'm running VMware's free Virtual Server to do something similar, only I'm running "single-user" servers for Gallery and WordPress. It's a great way to encapsulate web services, especially since it sidesteps the whole problem of using Web 2.0 while you're on a plane.
BTW, your list has made me think about hacking Gaim so that it constantly advertises the title of my active window ("Alternative to Groove? - Mozilla Firefox", at the moment). On the one hand, I'm not sure I want to broadcast if I'm playing Solitaire; on the other, I can see advantages to letting people know if I'm neck deep in troubleshooting or documenting. I'd probably need to map possible titles to a presence message.
Here's what you'd have to build:
1. Distributed directory system that allows people to authenticate each other out of band or via corporate server
LDAP? I don't know enough about state-of-the-art authentication. Maybe Open ID, especially if if works well with #9.
2. WAN P2P protocols
rsync
3. LAN P2P protocols
rsync
4. Local encrypted database
modified SQLite (although see my note for #6; maybe just encrypted flat files for iCard and iCal)
5. Communications encryption
SSL or SSH
6. Robust synchronization algorithms, including offline support
Use lots of small files, not one big information store. Otherwise, you get bitten hard when your anti-virus program decides to delete any files that it thinks are infected.
7. Presence/awareness (no only does it tell you someone is online, but it will show what workspace and tool they are working in)
Jabber, with cutomized presence messages.
8. Messaging (IM)
Jabber
9. RBAC (Role Based Access Control)
OpenID?
10. Integrated forms development for custom applications
Ruby on Rails? Catalyst? depends on underlying scripting platform.
11. About 20 tools that sit on the preceeding architecture and assume all of the capabilities therein
should happen fast if you use an established scripting environment (Perl, Python, Ruby)
12. Another 30 items I'm sure you don't want to read!
Ditto #11
C-SPAN has, in the past, aggressively asserted ownership of the C-SPAN "bug" that they overlay on the floor footage, as well as the captions that identify who is speaking. Metavid was forced to overlay the "bug" with one of their own that says, "Public Domain". (See http://metavid.ucsc.edu/wiki/index.php/Democratizi ng_the_Archive:_An_Open_Interface_for_Mediation#Me tavid.E2.80.99s_Legal_Framework for details and other discussion.)