At times like this I think of what my dad used to say to me.. When in darkness or in doubt run in circles scream and shout. Umm anyway..
I think companies are really missing something by not picking up all these laidoff workers on the cheap right now. I for one am working for about 2/3 of what I was two years ago and am glad to have found a decent job finally. I'm sure others would feel the same way I do to be back to work. Also IMO perks can make up for lower pay. I really enjoy being able to telecommute with flexible hours and taking vacations when I feel like it is great. IMO freedoms such as those are a lot better than having Nerf gun fights and making a few bucks more an hour.
One thing a company could do if they wanted to hire me for less and not have me jump ship when the market warms is to sign a contract by which they have to keep me for a certain time or pay some release fee to me. I'd agree to stay with the company for the same amount of time or pay a release fee to them. I'm willing to risk working for less money for a time rather than have to worry about being on unemployment.
I'd have to agree with you that these sort of restrictions often end up being silly. Compare them to the rating of television or movie content where the difference between PG-13, R, and NC-17 is often how many seconds a nipple is displayed without blinking away.
You get wrapped into levels and things just get confussed. Is cartoon violence such as Looney Toons disallowed? What about nudity such as in Sailor Moon? What about videos of child birth? Can we show a model of the human body without fig leaves? Can there be a wildlife site that pictures animals mating? Shall we go the National Geographic way and it's okay to show sex and nudity of humans if they are from a third world country and are non-white?
I do think there is something to be said for a domain set aside for childrens sites but I don't really think it'll be possible to keep all porn, violence, etc off the domain. What if I'm on a shared server and my porn site happens to also be address as someone elses kids site? Some kid types smiles.kids.us/~happygetlucky instead of smiles.kids.us/~happygolucky and I'm charged with some crime? Why no chat area? Don't let your kid talk to other kids because there might be a pedophile hiding in the park? That makes no sense.
PARENTS SHOULD ACTIVELY PARTICIPATE IN THEIR CHILDRENS LIVES. EVEN ONLINE! That's the only way to keep children safe. There is no magic law that'll heal all. There is no magic technological button to heal all. Parents must take responsibility.
These sound like exactly the same people that want to deny opensource licenses to software created with taxpayer dollars. How long before they go after opensource in general?
Linux is keeping Microsoft from making that last 5% of the profit they could be squeezing out and is therefore Communist, anti-Capitalist, anti-American, and evil. Lets outlaw sites like Sourceforge and Freshmeat. Heck lets shutdown Ibiblio and get rid of public literature, research, and software all in one punch.
Welcome to America. Corporate greed and political corruption next 3000 miles. Please have a credit reference ready before departing the train.
I'll stick to Netflix thanks. I can watch the movie as often as I want and return it when I want. Pretty slick. Wish my local Blockbuster would let me just drop the rentals in the mailbox back to them. No little plastic discs in the landfill either and no risk of leaving the disc til tomorrow to watch and finding it dead.
I like the features, price, and look of this device. If it can use other flavors of Linux besides Lindows and dual boot Linux and XP this might be a real winner for me. It's larger than a PDA.. which are to small for my tastes but not as bulky or expensive as a laptop.
For everyone whining about it not being either a PDA or a laptop they are missing the point.. some of us want something that is neither a PDA or a laptop and tablet PC's fit that need well. For me at least though I don't want to pay a laptop price for a tablet. $500-$800 hits the sweet spot for me.
I've spent a lot of time recently looking for work. The big questions posed by most companies seem to be Oracle, Java, Cisco, and ASP. However it was my Linux, MySQL, Perl, PHP, Python skills that actually found me a job. If you cover all those bases you'll probably do okay at finding a job now and in the near future. For long-term I'd say Oracle, MySQL, Linux, Cisco, PHP, and Python are probably the most useful.
They are a threat but they are not seriously hurting Microsoft yet.. but.. Linux is a force which they can't easily buy or destroy. In roughly a decade Linux has caught up with and in many ways surpassed Windows as an OS. It is already hurting Microsoft in ther server area and KDE and Gnome and the Linux OS itself are improving ease of use issues constantly. They aren't yet as polished as Windows but they are evolving much faster. There will come a point when they reach and exceed Windows as an OS on the desktop as well as the server. At that point Linux will begin to seriously hurt their sales of Windows OS and eventually it will become unprofitable to sell the OS as development will cost more than is earned in sales. There are advantages to having your own OS though so they won't want to give that up.. so the obvious solution is to give away the OS and let the community develop it while staying the #1 company to distribute the OS.
Also it would probably destroy Microsoft if they lost 50% of their customers. Investor confidence would sour, more attention would be drawn to Linux, more uses would switch.. causing a nasty little negative spiral. If I'm not mistaken I believe Microsoft is one of those companies that somewhat cooks their books (not illegal but problematic).. if their stock takes a serious plunge all that becomes a problem for them.
Giving away the OS without the source wouldn't help them. They'd stop their income from the OS but still have the development cost. No, I think they'll release the source and keep selling the OS. The only alternative I can see them taking is to sell off the OS but I think they get to much benefit from controlling the OS to risk taking that route.
They got 42 billion in the bank from years without real competition. Competition will make them stronger but it might shake them a lot first.
Oh the economy will rebound but I doubt that will effect the adoption of OSS much. Microsoft changing their licensing to be less insane might help slow the adoption of OSS. As long as Microsoft is treating their own customers badly the adoption of OSS will go on. Even if they stopped scaring managers though OSS would still be creaping in from the bottom up because a good majority of geeks like OSS. They build it, they use it, it does what they want. It's gained enough ground now that it won't easily be stuff down some hole.
Free/Opensource software is really pretty immortal as a movement and product. Microsoft could keep people from using it but not from developing it. Their efforts to do just that, as the article says, have mixed results for them at best.
If Microsoft really wants to compete with Linux they'll release the source to Windows. Eventually I think they'll do just that but not until they think they've pumped every dime out of Windows they can. Having Windows opensourced would of course benefit their competition also but as with most OSS projects the original owner of the code carries the big stick. Everyone else is free to split their own trees.. resell.. etc but if the original owner is selling it themselves then they'll get 90% of the business. Also they'll have a better chance at selling their apps, hardware, and support.
I believe that is one reason Linus does not sell a Linux dist. RedHat is not the first Linux dist but it's been doing it a long time and has had the most solid business of the different dists so it usually gets a large majority of the business.. but does not corner the market because Linus doesn't work for them.
Microsoft may bully some countries, the US included, into a protection racket for their software but in doing so would probably cause a backlash from many businesses.. even those currently using Microsoft products. Companies may like Microsoft software but having their choice forcible removed would give them reason to turn against Microsoft the company. So really I can't see DRM and such as a real stick for Microsoft to beat Linux up with.
So look for M$ OpenWindows one of these days. Microsoft is slow to pick up on trends but once they grasp the way the wind is blowing they play the game well. You can't compete with the community that makes your software and the community that uses your software when there is an alternative. They'll have to change their business model to stay in business but once having done so they'll no doubt execute the change better than most others and probably come out stronger for the change.
They'll probably follow a MacOS path of porting Windows to FreeBSD with some semi-open UI layer though my guess would be they'll be more likely to use KDE/Gnome as their base than start from scratch. Then they'll keep the applications commercial as long as they can.. slowly releasing layers of source as those layers are no longer profitable. I think Office will follow not to long after Windows as OSS because competition is strong there. That is one reason for their current XML push for file formats. I think they'll focus on the entertainment and business markets. Games have little direct OSS competition because large portions of them are more art than code. Games have a somwhat short profit lifetime so even if an OSS alternative comes out eventually Microsoft would have earned the profits from the game already. Vertical business apps just aren't very fun so most OSS devers don't make them. A few businesses release their own but usually they don't want to release anything that gives them a wedge over their competition.
So get this card and a WiFi card and configure your computer to change over to the WiFi network when possible. Something similar to how dual-band phones work. The project to implement an open (free as in speech and beer) wireless phone network is designed in such a way.
The article predicts this within the next 1000 years. You seriously think that within even the next hundred years we won't have improved our technology to the point of making this sort of change moot or at least a minor speed bump?
Nanotech, genetic engineering, holographic computing, etc are all technologies already making changes to our world. I think we can handle some changes to the magnetic poles and some radiation. We're nearing the peak of the mountain and discovering we have grown wings.
Now on a short-term scale.. if this happened in the next 10 years.. I'd probably agree with what you say. I just think we're at the point where our technology will cross a barrier that changes these risks.
Possibly the shift would create magnetic bursts that'd wipe hardrives clean forcing everyone to upgrade to Windows Armageddon. Things are okay. The world may be dying but Bill Gates stock portfolio looks great.
I blame everybody that helped avoid a Y2K crash (myself included) for the current state of the economy. If we geeks had had the foresight not to fix things to well the economy would still be buzzing. We should have fixed the stuff that could kill people and then left the rest broken.;) We need to think of some other bug we can induce fear about so as to boost our own pay rate again.:)
The only real point of a device like this is to provide ram-based harddrive emulation to those sucky OS's that for whatever reason don't support this basic feature.
I often run items such as my database or proxy server on a ram disk to improve speed and lower wear and tear on my drives. If you have a UPS that sends a signal when you're about to lose power then write a script that will dump your ram disk to real disk when power is going down. Obviously you also run it on normal shutdowns and if you care much for your data on a cronjob. Then just add a startup script that'll dump that data back into the ram disk. No sweat. Same functionality, faster, and much cheaper than this drive.
With this ram disk I can just imagine what happens to your data if your coworker accidently pulls the power cord free while messing with wires.
I'd like to be able to select a kids package (Nick, Disney, & Cartoon Network maybe?) and an education package (Discovery, TLC, History channel, Animal Planet, etc) but I've yet to live somewhere that this was possible. Typically these channels are spread throughout 3 or 4 packages with mostly channels I don't want. At least most digital systems I've tried elt you block out the channels you don't want to see but it's still really stupid to pay for them. A friend that works for a cable company tells me they only pay $.50/month per subscriber per channel. They need some competition so we could see special pricing for custom packages.
I'll see the movie.. probably several times. I'll buy the DVD.. and probably at least one collectors edition.. and probably the complete set when all the movies are out.. but I'll still copy the DVD's, play them in Linux, and burn DiVX versions so I don't risk tearing up my originals. I might even get really evil and give a copy to a friend now and then or play it in a public place without paying a licence fee.
Actually, I've seen setups that require you to keep pedaling to keep watching tv. Usually they have a small battery so you can take a second to breath now and then but the battery is charged by pedaling. Myself, I'm more into solar and wind power but to each their own.:)
If we Slashdot their company webservers will they send FBI agents after us too? Damn it's evil of us using up bandwidth. We shouldn't take deep breaths either.. we might be depriving others in our neighborhood of oxygen. Or would the neighborhood committee have to force us to sign an EULA when we moved in to criminzlize that?
Monopoly companies think they can force anything from their customers but how long until their customers just cut the monopoly out of the loop. Electric companies screw over customers.. alternative power is gaining in popularity. Phone companies screw over customers.. VoIP is on the rise. Cable companies screw over their customers.. kids download movies off the Internet. Internet screw customers.. Mesh computing is on the rise. It takes time but these companies are choking themselves.
Myself I like the idea of a system that allows you to weight canidates with 0 being neutral. 1 postive. 2 strongly positive. -1 negative. -2 strongly negative. This evectively lets you vote for only those your interested in while also allowing you to rank you selections and also vote against those you don't want in office.
I'm interested in trust-based societies that allow any citizen to rank any other citizen in this method (being able to change their opinion at any time of course) and selecting the political leaders based on whom is trusted the most. Of course a good system of this nature has short-circuit support that keeps public opinion from swinging back and forth. You have both the real ranking and the effective ranking. The effective ranking follows the real ranking but can only move up or down so many points in a day. This would, for example, give a political leader a cushion if they made an unpopular decision that pleased voters in how it worked out.
Such a trust system removes voting as a one day event and makes it a way of life which can have interesting additional properties. An example would be if your economic system was tied to the voting system. Those that are above median income are taxed while those below the median income are awarded payments. Both taxes and awards can be based on the citizens trust ranking. A citizen that is highly trusted would be taxed the least and awarded the most. A citizen that isn't trusted would be taxed the highest or awarded the least. This would enable the citizens to punish a rich merchant that rips off a lot of people by giving some of their money to poor charities. If enough people actually did like Linux more than Windows they could vote and for every dollar Bill Gates makes Linus might get $.5 of it. It'd certainly be an interesting change to tax laws.
It seems to me a rather bad and outdated idea to try broadcasting digital signals in this method.. using lots of power and just blasting the signal out for miles around. It makes more sense to devote more of the spectrum to the public it belongs to and use wireless networking to route the data intelligently to where it needs to go. If I can stream a DVD-quality movie over a fairly congested WiFi network at home I don't see why television couldn't be broadcast in the same way and quite a lot cheaper than building an expensive tower and licensing your own spectrum. The mesh networking units/.'d yesterday look like they'd work for this with few tweaks required. I'd probably create a smart routing protocol that'd let multiple users view the same stream rather than copying it along the route for each user but that isn't a new concept so it'd probably be possible to use off the shelf technology for that also.
Anyone else find it odd that their cell phone and wifi equipment works fine but emergency dispatch equipment goes in the shitter? I knew the FBI used cell phones (well on X-Files at least) for good reason.:)
The best method in my experience is to just hang on the line until you finally get someone at the top that actually knows what they are doiaisn't just reading a script. Get their name and extension. Be nice with them. Be brief. Write a letter to the company saying how helpful that person has been and is personally responsible for the extra money your spending on their companies services etc. This is a good way to have this person become your personal tech support guy for all future needs. It's even my experience that when that guy (or gal) leaves the company will try to find someone of equal skill to help you.
Actually my parents have a P4 with a winmodem and it still sometimes losses connection if you have to many processes running (like 3 netscape windows, a text editor, and a bash window). Also when trying to connect the whole machine slows down a lot. I would have thought that by now winmodems could work half way decently but a cheap hardware modem still beats a winmodem hands down. Slap on a $30 external modem and everything works a lot better.
Not really an anti-Windows rant, more an anti-winmodem rant.:)
I'd have no problem with that. It's the government of a country (or union) and it has certain obligations to try to benefit it's own people and businesses. As it'd be GPL also this would have no adverse effect on individuals or companies willing to share their changes. Of course two countries that both had a lot to offer could do the usual and make an agreement by which they'd share.
Of course a concept like the web would have just been rewritten by others if the license fees were to high. The software has been rewritten quite a few times anyway but thanks to your open specifications everything mostly plays nicely together. I'm a big fan of free and open protocol specs. That's even more vital than free software.:)
I'd seen similar software before the web. Gopher was already popular and in some ways is similar to the web. I'd have to say the real brilliance behind the web as we know it is the lack of security and not doing to much. Less is more.
First off I'll say I like AbiWord and use it and wish their project well.. that being said.. on with my rant..
Every time someone has a problem with PayPal they whine that it is actting like a bank without being a bank. Obviously they must be stupid because PayPal states clearly that it is not a bank and has no federal insurance. Somehow they think being a bank would make it better. IMO banks suck. They've ripped me off countless times. I don't want PayPal to be a bank. They've never done me wrong and they give me freedoms a bank wouldn't be able to. If you want a bank go open a bank account. If you want a PayPal account open a PayPal account. If your not bright enough to know the difference than spare us the cry story.
I've had very good customer support from PayPal. They were a little slow but no worse than the banks I've dealt with and at least they didn't give me the run around like banks usually do. If a security flaw in PayPal allowed your money to be stolen I'd suspect they'll be willing to refund your money. If you just picked the name of your dog as a password and some bozo guessed it then I'd say tough luck. If you pissed off an ex-girlfriend and she took your money then again tough luck.
If you are smart you won't leave very large funds all in one place in PayPal, a bank, under your bed, or anywhere. This is common sense. PayPal makes it easy to transfer your money back into the bank account of your choice. If you wanted to do this you had the option open to you.
So try contacting them again. It's not that difficult to do. Make sure you have a good password on your account. Frequently empty your account into one or more bank accounts, PayPal accounts, or coffee cans (Whatever you like) so that you don't have a giant honeypot tempting all the bees. Just stop whining about them not being a bank. Hope ya get your money back.
You could modify the basic BSD license to apply only to certain persons and corporations including the right to transfer the license only to others that also qualify.
I'd suggest a dual license. First under the GPL with the second license BSD-style for American based companies and for a fee for foreign companies. This way anyone that would return the code to the community could use it freely either way and anyone hiring American workers would be free to make a profit off of it. Of course there would always be the countries that'd let their companies use our source code free anyway but leave that up to those nasty people that keep harping on the greatness of worldwide 200 year copyrights.:)
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At times like this I think of what my dad used to say to me.. When in darkness or in doubt run in circles scream and shout. Umm anyway..
I think companies are really missing something by not picking up all these laidoff workers on the cheap right now. I for one am working for about 2/3 of what I was two years ago and am glad to have found a decent job finally. I'm sure others would feel the same way I do to be back to work. Also IMO perks can make up for lower pay. I really enjoy being able to telecommute with flexible hours and taking vacations when I feel like it is great. IMO freedoms such as those are a lot better than having Nerf gun fights and making a few bucks more an hour.
One thing a company could do if they wanted to hire me for less and not have me jump ship when the market warms is to sign a contract by which they have to keep me for a certain time or pay some release fee to me. I'd agree to stay with the company for the same amount of time or pay a release fee to them. I'm willing to risk working for less money for a time rather than have to worry about being on unemployment.
I'd have to agree with you that these sort of restrictions often end up being silly. Compare them to the rating of television or movie content where the difference between PG-13, R, and NC-17 is often how many seconds a nipple is displayed without blinking away.
You get wrapped into levels and things just get confussed. Is cartoon violence such as Looney Toons disallowed? What about nudity such as in Sailor Moon? What about videos of child birth? Can we show a model of the human body without fig leaves? Can there be a wildlife site that pictures animals mating? Shall we go the National Geographic way and it's okay to show sex and nudity of humans if they are from a third world country and are non-white?
I do think there is something to be said for a domain set aside for childrens sites but I don't really think it'll be possible to keep all porn, violence, etc off the domain. What if I'm on a shared server and my porn site happens to also be address as someone elses kids site? Some kid types smiles.kids.us/~happygetlucky instead of smiles.kids.us/~happygolucky and I'm charged with some crime? Why no chat area? Don't let your kid talk to other kids because there might be a pedophile hiding in the park? That makes no sense.
PARENTS SHOULD ACTIVELY PARTICIPATE IN THEIR CHILDRENS LIVES. EVEN ONLINE! That's the only way to keep children safe. There is no magic law that'll heal all. There is no magic technological button to heal all. Parents must take responsibility.
These sound like exactly the same people that want to deny opensource licenses to software created with taxpayer dollars. How long before they go after opensource in general?
Linux is keeping Microsoft from making that last 5% of the profit they could be squeezing out and is therefore Communist, anti-Capitalist, anti-American, and evil. Lets outlaw sites like Sourceforge and Freshmeat. Heck lets shutdown Ibiblio and get rid of public literature, research, and software all in one punch.
Welcome to America. Corporate greed and political corruption next 3000 miles. Please have a credit reference ready before departing the train.
I'll stick to Netflix thanks. I can watch the movie as often as I want and return it when I want. Pretty slick. Wish my local Blockbuster would let me just drop the rentals in the mailbox back to them. No little plastic discs in the landfill either and no risk of leaving the disc til tomorrow to watch and finding it dead.
I like the features, price, and look of this device. If it can use other flavors of Linux besides Lindows and dual boot Linux and XP this might be a real winner for me. It's larger than a PDA.. which are to small for my tastes but not as bulky or expensive as a laptop.
For everyone whining about it not being either a PDA or a laptop they are missing the point.. some of us want something that is neither a PDA or a laptop and tablet PC's fit that need well. For me at least though I don't want to pay a laptop price for a tablet. $500-$800 hits the sweet spot for me.
I've spent a lot of time recently looking for work. The big questions posed by most companies seem to be Oracle, Java, Cisco, and ASP. However it was my Linux, MySQL, Perl, PHP, Python skills that actually found me a job. If you cover all those bases you'll probably do okay at finding a job now and in the near future. For long-term I'd say Oracle, MySQL, Linux, Cisco, PHP, and Python are probably the most useful.
They are a threat but they are not seriously hurting Microsoft yet.. but.. Linux is a force which they can't easily buy or destroy. In roughly a decade Linux has caught up with and in many ways surpassed Windows as an OS. It is already hurting Microsoft in ther server area and KDE and Gnome and the Linux OS itself are improving ease of use issues constantly. They aren't yet as polished as Windows but they are evolving much faster. There will come a point when they reach and exceed Windows as an OS on the desktop as well as the server. At that point Linux will begin to seriously hurt their sales of Windows OS and eventually it will become unprofitable to sell the OS as development will cost more than is earned in sales. There are advantages to having your own OS though so they won't want to give that up.. so the obvious solution is to give away the OS and let the community develop it while staying the #1 company to distribute the OS.
Also it would probably destroy Microsoft if they lost 50% of their customers. Investor confidence would sour, more attention would be drawn to Linux, more uses would switch.. causing a nasty little negative spiral. If I'm not mistaken I believe Microsoft is one of those companies that somewhat cooks their books (not illegal but problematic).. if their stock takes a serious plunge all that becomes a problem for them.
Giving away the OS without the source wouldn't help them. They'd stop their income from the OS but still have the development cost. No, I think they'll release the source and keep selling the OS. The only alternative I can see them taking is to sell off the OS but I think they get to much benefit from controlling the OS to risk taking that route.
They got 42 billion in the bank from years without real competition. Competition will make them stronger but it might shake them a lot first.
Oh the economy will rebound but I doubt that will effect the adoption of OSS much. Microsoft changing their licensing to be less insane might help slow the adoption of OSS. As long as Microsoft is treating their own customers badly the adoption of OSS will go on. Even if they stopped scaring managers though OSS would still be creaping in from the bottom up because a good majority of geeks like OSS. They build it, they use it, it does what they want. It's gained enough ground now that it won't easily be stuff down some hole.
Free/Opensource software is really pretty immortal as a movement and product. Microsoft could keep people from using it but not from developing it. Their efforts to do just that, as the article says, have mixed results for them at best.
If Microsoft really wants to compete with Linux they'll release the source to Windows. Eventually I think they'll do just that but not until they think they've pumped every dime out of Windows they can. Having Windows opensourced would of course benefit their competition also but as with most OSS projects the original owner of the code carries the big stick. Everyone else is free to split their own trees.. resell.. etc but if the original owner is selling it themselves then they'll get 90% of the business. Also they'll have a better chance at selling their apps, hardware, and support.
I believe that is one reason Linus does not sell a Linux dist. RedHat is not the first Linux dist but it's been doing it a long time and has had the most solid business of the different dists so it usually gets a large majority of the business.. but does not corner the market because Linus doesn't work for them.
Microsoft may bully some countries, the US included, into a protection racket for their software but in doing so would probably cause a backlash from many businesses.. even those currently using Microsoft products. Companies may like Microsoft software but having their choice forcible removed would give them reason to turn against Microsoft the company. So really I can't see DRM and such as a real stick for Microsoft to beat Linux up with.
So look for M$ OpenWindows one of these days. Microsoft is slow to pick up on trends but once they grasp the way the wind is blowing they play the game well. You can't compete with the community that makes your software and the community that uses your software when there is an alternative. They'll have to change their business model to stay in business but once having done so they'll no doubt execute the change better than most others and probably come out stronger for the change.
They'll probably follow a MacOS path of porting Windows to FreeBSD with some semi-open UI layer though my guess would be they'll be more likely to use KDE/Gnome as their base than start from scratch. Then they'll keep the applications commercial as long as they can.. slowly releasing layers of source as those layers are no longer profitable. I think Office will follow not to long after Windows as OSS because competition is strong there. That is one reason for their current XML push for file formats. I think they'll focus on the entertainment and business markets. Games have little direct OSS competition because large portions of them are more art than code. Games have a somwhat short profit lifetime so even if an OSS alternative comes out eventually Microsoft would have earned the profits from the game already. Vertical business apps just aren't very fun so most OSS devers don't make them. A few businesses release their own but usually they don't want to release anything that gives them a wedge over their competition.
So get this card and a WiFi card and configure your computer to change over to the WiFi network when possible. Something similar to how dual-band phones work. The project to implement an open (free as in speech and beer) wireless phone network is designed in such a way.
The article predicts this within the next 1000 years. You seriously think that within even the next hundred years we won't have improved our technology to the point of making this sort of change moot or at least a minor speed bump?
Nanotech, genetic engineering, holographic computing, etc are all technologies already making changes to our world. I think we can handle some changes to the magnetic poles and some radiation. We're nearing the peak of the mountain and discovering we have grown wings.
Now on a short-term scale.. if this happened in the next 10 years.. I'd probably agree with what you say. I just think we're at the point where our technology will cross a barrier that changes these risks.
Possibly the shift would create magnetic bursts that'd wipe hardrives clean forcing everyone to upgrade to Windows Armageddon. Things are okay. The world may be dying but Bill Gates stock portfolio looks great.
I blame everybody that helped avoid a Y2K crash (myself included) for the current state of the economy. If we geeks had had the foresight not to fix things to well the economy would still be buzzing. We should have fixed the stuff that could kill people and then left the rest broken. ;) We need to think of some other bug we can induce fear about so as to boost our own pay rate again. :)
The only real point of a device like this is to provide ram-based harddrive emulation to those sucky OS's that for whatever reason don't support this basic feature.
I often run items such as my database or proxy server on a ram disk to improve speed and lower wear and tear on my drives. If you have a UPS that sends a signal when you're about to lose power then write a script that will dump your ram disk to real disk when power is going down. Obviously you also run it on normal shutdowns and if you care much for your data on a cronjob. Then just add a startup script that'll dump that data back into the ram disk. No sweat. Same functionality, faster, and much cheaper than this drive.
With this ram disk I can just imagine what happens to your data if your coworker accidently pulls the power cord free while messing with wires.
I'd like to be able to select a kids package (Nick, Disney, & Cartoon Network maybe?) and an education package (Discovery, TLC, History channel, Animal Planet, etc) but I've yet to live somewhere that this was possible. Typically these channels are spread throughout 3 or 4 packages with mostly channels I don't want. At least most digital systems I've tried elt you block out the channels you don't want to see but it's still really stupid to pay for them. A friend that works for a cable company tells me they only pay $.50/month per subscriber per channel. They need some competition so we could see special pricing for custom packages.
I'll see the movie.. probably several times. I'll buy the DVD.. and probably at least one collectors edition.. and probably the complete set when all the movies are out.. but I'll still copy the DVD's, play them in Linux, and burn DiVX versions so I don't risk tearing up my originals. I might even get really evil and give a copy to a friend now and then or play it in a public place without paying a licence fee.
Actually, I've seen setups that require you to keep pedaling to keep watching tv. Usually they have a small battery so you can take a second to breath now and then but the battery is charged by pedaling. Myself, I'm more into solar and wind power but to each their own. :)
If we Slashdot their company webservers will they send FBI agents after us too? Damn it's evil of us using up bandwidth. We shouldn't take deep breaths either.. we might be depriving others in our neighborhood of oxygen. Or would the neighborhood committee have to force us to sign an EULA when we moved in to criminzlize that?
Monopoly companies think they can force anything from their customers but how long until their customers just cut the monopoly out of the loop. Electric companies screw over customers.. alternative power is gaining in popularity. Phone companies screw over customers.. VoIP is on the rise. Cable companies screw over their customers.. kids download movies off the Internet. Internet screw customers.. Mesh computing is on the rise. It takes time but these companies are choking themselves.
Myself I like the idea of a system that allows you to weight canidates with 0 being neutral. 1 postive. 2 strongly positive. -1 negative. -2 strongly negative. This evectively lets you vote for only those your interested in while also allowing you to rank you selections and also vote against those you don't want in office.
I'm interested in trust-based societies that allow any citizen to rank any other citizen in this method (being able to change their opinion at any time of course) and selecting the political leaders based on whom is trusted the most. Of course a good system of this nature has short-circuit support that keeps public opinion from swinging back and forth. You have both the real ranking and the effective ranking. The effective ranking follows the real ranking but can only move up or down so many points in a day. This would, for example, give a political leader a cushion if they made an unpopular decision that pleased voters in how it worked out.
Such a trust system removes voting as a one day event and makes it a way of life which can have interesting additional properties. An example would be if your economic system was tied to the voting system. Those that are above median income are taxed while those below the median income are awarded payments. Both taxes and awards can be based on the citizens trust ranking. A citizen that is highly trusted would be taxed the least and awarded the most. A citizen that isn't trusted would be taxed the highest or awarded the least. This would enable the citizens to punish a rich merchant that rips off a lot of people by giving some of their money to poor charities. If enough people actually did like Linux more than Windows they could vote and for every dollar Bill Gates makes Linus might get $.5 of it. It'd certainly be an interesting change to tax laws.
It seems to me a rather bad and outdated idea to try broadcasting digital signals in this method.. using lots of power and just blasting the signal out for miles around. It makes more sense to devote more of the spectrum to the public it belongs to and use wireless networking to route the data intelligently to where it needs to go. If I can stream a DVD-quality movie over a fairly congested WiFi network at home I don't see why television couldn't be broadcast in the same way and quite a lot cheaper than building an expensive tower and licensing your own spectrum. The mesh networking units /.'d yesterday look like they'd work for this with few tweaks required. I'd probably create a smart routing protocol that'd let multiple users view the same stream rather than copying it along the route for each user but that isn't a new concept so it'd probably be possible to use off the shelf technology for that also.
:)
Anyone else find it odd that their cell phone and wifi equipment works fine but emergency dispatch equipment goes in the shitter? I knew the FBI used cell phones (well on X-Files at least) for good reason.
The best method in my experience is to just hang on the line until you finally get someone at the top that actually knows what they are doiaisn't just reading a script. Get their name and extension. Be nice with them. Be brief. Write a letter to the company saying how helpful that person has been and is personally responsible for the extra money your spending on their companies services etc. This is a good way to have this person become your personal tech support guy for all future needs. It's even my experience that when that guy (or gal) leaves the company will try to find someone of equal skill to help you.
Actually my parents have a P4 with a winmodem and it still sometimes losses connection if you have to many processes running (like 3 netscape windows, a text editor, and a bash window). Also when trying to connect the whole machine slows down a lot. I would have thought that by now winmodems could work half way decently but a cheap hardware modem still beats a winmodem hands down. Slap on a $30 external modem and everything works a lot better.
:)
Not really an anti-Windows rant, more an anti-winmodem rant.
I'd have no problem with that. It's the government of a country (or union) and it has certain obligations to try to benefit it's own people and businesses. As it'd be GPL also this would have no adverse effect on individuals or companies willing to share their changes. Of course two countries that both had a lot to offer could do the usual and make an agreement by which they'd share.
:)
Of course a concept like the web would have just been rewritten by others if the license fees were to high. The software has been rewritten quite a few times anyway but thanks to your open specifications everything mostly plays nicely together. I'm a big fan of free and open protocol specs. That's even more vital than free software.
I'd seen similar software before the web. Gopher was already popular and in some ways is similar to the web. I'd have to say the real brilliance behind the web as we know it is the lack of security and not doing to much. Less is more.
First off I'll say I like AbiWord and use it and wish their project well.. that being said.. on with my rant..
Every time someone has a problem with PayPal they whine that it is actting like a bank without being a bank. Obviously they must be stupid because PayPal states clearly that it is not a bank and has no federal insurance. Somehow they think being a bank would make it better. IMO banks suck. They've ripped me off countless times. I don't want PayPal to be a bank. They've never done me wrong and they give me freedoms a bank wouldn't be able to. If you want a bank go open a bank account. If you want a PayPal account open a PayPal account. If your not bright enough to know the difference than spare us the cry story.
I've had very good customer support from PayPal. They were a little slow but no worse than the banks I've dealt with and at least they didn't give me the run around like banks usually do. If a security flaw in PayPal allowed your money to be stolen I'd suspect they'll be willing to refund your money. If you just picked the name of your dog as a password and some bozo guessed it then I'd say tough luck. If you pissed off an ex-girlfriend and she took your money then again tough luck.
If you are smart you won't leave very large funds all in one place in PayPal, a bank, under your bed, or anywhere. This is common sense. PayPal makes it easy to transfer your money back into the bank account of your choice. If you wanted to do this you had the option open to you.
So try contacting them again. It's not that difficult to do. Make sure you have a good password on your account. Frequently empty your account into one or more bank accounts, PayPal accounts, or coffee cans (Whatever you like) so that you don't have a giant honeypot tempting all the bees. Just stop whining about them not being a bank. Hope ya get your money back.
You could modify the basic BSD license to apply only to certain persons and corporations including the right to transfer the license only to others that also qualify.
I'd suggest a dual license. First under the GPL with the second license BSD-style for American based companies and for a fee for foreign companies. This way anyone that would return the code to the community could use it freely either way and anyone hiring American workers would be free to make a profit off of it. Of course there would always be the countries that'd let their companies use our source code free anyway but leave that up to those nasty people that keep harping on the greatness of worldwide 200 year copyrights. :)