Rest assured, that there will be binary versions for ALL unices - Sun, SGI, SCO, *BSD, etc..
Those guys at Netscape got those machines you know:)
How about non-Intel Linux versions?
Netscape for Sparc-based Linux has been stalled at 4.51 for a long time, and you won't find any non-Intel Linux versions on the Netscape FTP sites. I would dearly love to see a "Linux isn't just x86" campaign to get this message through to companies who insist on calling x86-only Linux products "Linux" versions instead of "Linux (x86)", and ignoring Sparcs, Alphas, PPCs etc.
Thankfully Mozilla does have builds for non-Intel Linux, so there is some hope for Netscape...
The article says that the laptop contained "sensitive" data, but it makes no mention of the classification involved. Encryption does not imply a security classification; you'd expect (and hope) that agencies like MI5 encrypt all classified information (particularly if it's left around where any Artful Dodger can pinch it.)
You can't turn buckyballs into lighter fluid, but you can turn lighter fluid into buckyballs - some of the soot deposited from the flame (e.g. onto a spoon) will contain some buckyballs. (Candles are a better source of soot, but the principle is the same for any carbon-based fuel source.) Could you build buckyballs from other elements e.g. silicon? It's been years since I did high school chemistry, so I'm a little rusty (to put it mildly!)
StorageReview.com is a good source of this information (though it would be better if it had Linux benchmarks.) It's very frustrating though - as soon as the fastest disks are available here in Oz, a newer, faster disk beats it on the leaderboard... (Trying to find a store that sells disks by brand and model, not just capacity, is also a challenge.)
Take the Oscars broadcast; the average person does not know anything beyond the top 5 or 6 awards (movie, actors, supporting actors, etc), so they will NOT know that a song with profanity will be in the works. In addition, the Oscar broadcast has generally been PG, at work; making the entire 2+ hr broadcast a TV-M first means that it can't be aired until after 10pm, and second, they will lose viewers. They (ABC) have no choice to do *something* about Blame Canada.
And the "do something" should be saying "Warning: the following song contains language which some viewers may find offensive. If you don't want to hear the words 'fart', 'bitch' and 'fuck', turn down your sound now."
I find it highly ironic that a country that worships the gun and glorifies firearm-related violence is so puritanical about a few low-grade swear words (with the possible exception of "fuck", though I've seen plenty of Hollywood movies where "fuck" constituted a large proportion of the diologue, too.)
Scenario: 1) User creates a document, priceless.doc; decides to take a copy for safe keeping. 2) copy priceless.doc priceless.bak 2) W2K notices it's a bit-for-bit copy; replaces priceless.bak with a link to priceless.doc (or vice versa.)...later... 3) Clumsy user damages/destroys priceless.doc 4) "No problem, I've got a backup." 5) User looks at precious.bak 6) "AAARRRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!"
P.S. Another message on the list hints how you can hijack an account and get at the docs. Anyone willing to do this and post a login? Or make a mirror?
In Australia, most CDs retail for A$30.99. This is almost exactly US$18.99 at current exchange rates - coincidence, or price fixing?
The computer game industry also squawks about piracy eating into their profits, but I have no sympathy for them. New release game prices are A$80 or so - I'm not going to pay that much for a game unless I know it's *good* (like Thief.) If the initial release price was A$50, more people would be inclined to buy it without a detailed cost/benefit analysis.
Colour screens are not always power hungry. For example, the Garmin 12CX GPS unit boasts a three colour display (red, green, blue) vs. the monochrome screen of the equivalent 12XL model, yet has 50% *better* battery life (36 hours vs. 24 hours.) I don't know how they did it, but that's pretty neat.
I own a Palm III (ye olde "ugly" screen - 4 level greyscale at a pinch) and love it. While I don't find it lacking compared to the 16 greyscale IIIe etc. or now 256 colour Palm IIIc, there are some occasions when a better display would be handy. Offering these models does not detract from the Palm's features - it offers flexibility. As with Linux, variety is the key to success; while some may consider it superfluous, others may see it as a necessity. Either way, it's another nail in the WinCE coffin.
Rather than quibble about the virtues of the hardware, it would be far better to evangelise the benefits of GPL and freeware, which are sadly lacking on the Palm (with some notable exceptions.)
> "Help, help, I'm trapped under a parachute." The Russian Venera program has a few amusing snafus of its own. After building a probe strong enough to survive the Venusian atmosphere (extreme heat, pressure and sulphuric acid rain), they successfully landed it on the surface. Unfortunately they didn't get any pictures because the lens cap had melted and stuck on! A subsequent mission did get the pictures, but when the arm designed to place a sensor on the surface to measure its properties was deployed, it landed (you guessed it) on the ejected lens cap...
Why hasn't this thread been moderated "Offtopic"? Sorry, but no matter how true the trolling issue may be, the topic is "Virginia House passes UCITA" and posts that aren't about this (including this message) should be labelled "Offtopic". (Someone not from the US like me could have got the impression that UCITA was about trolling in Slashdot based on the message scores!) As I understand it, non-AC messages automatically get a score of 1. If there are a large number of troll messages getting through with a score of 1, set your message threshold to 2 (as I do) and filter them out. Scores of 2 and above must have been moderated up at least one point, so you can expect them being worthy of that adjustment. This isn't fair in some cases (not all ACs write crap), but isn't it easier to moderate up a few good posts than moderate down a flood of bad ones? (For my sins, this message will probably get moderated "-1, Flamebait", but that's life.:-)
This would seem to be an ideal opportunity for IBM to offer a Linux solution in addition to the previously safe Microsoft "solution"? Sure, it probably won't be successful this time around (bureaucracy has more inertia than an aircraft carrier...) but it shows that they are serious about Linux and that they are listening to what the customer wants.
"F-150 XLT SP1 will fix the wiper problem; that should remove about 33,000 bugs from the windshield. The lack of heating is a misunderstanding reported by some customers - it's actually a feature to prevent Baked-on-Bugs (TM). We're still looking at a way to resolve the 10,000 bugs on the headlights and radiator grill since the initial release..."
The are more than two parts, really. If selection favoured only the best design, cheetahs would run at 500km/h (and gazelles at 501km/h.) They don't - costs are involved, so a "better" design can incur a selection penalty (I could use the fast vs. efficient car analogy, but I'll resist.)
If quantum "smart" evolution were truly smart, we'd see "quantum leaps" in design, not just variations on a theme. To make a flying pig, "smart" evolution would add a pair of wings; in reality, pterosaurs, birds, bats etc. adapted existing limbs into wings because we are largely tied to the original chordate blueprint - to radically differ from this would require a *large* mutation, and large mutations are almost invariably bad mutations. Smart evolution would not have allowed "dumb" designs to occur either - only an idiot would build an eye with the blood vessels and nerve connections *in front* of the light sensors, but that's what we've got. (Squids - non chordates - got this one right.)
Richard Dawkins has written some excellent books (IMHO) on this subject that are well worth reading: "The Blind Watchmaker" is most applicable in this case, but "The Selfish Gene" and "The Extended Phenotype" are good background reading.
...This scientist claimed that his data showed that ball lightening seemed to show up in areas of geologic instability... near fault lines, etc... He postulated that the incredible forces involved along these fault lines caused the quartz in the rock to super-heat and become almost plasma-like.
I remember this too. However, since quartz is silicon dioxide, it may in fact be the same thing as the NZ discovery, just a different way of achieving the same result. IIRC, the key feature of this type of "ball lightning" was the lack of thunderstorms in the area at the time of the sightings, and apparent clustering of sightings along fault lines. I also seem to remember reading about this in a book, either about lightning/ball lightning, or a famous (infamous?) series of UFO sightings in NZ in the late 70's or early 80's; if it was the latter, ball lightning (and particularly the seismic variety) was offered as a possible explanation.
A variation on this theme is to purchase rack shelves; these let you mount all sorts of items in the rack - great for modems, transceivers etc. Desktop PC's are usually under 19 inches wide, so also fit on the shelves (watch out for U=shaped shelves with sides - these can be too narrow.)
The rack units can still be expensive, though; ladder frame bookshelves might be a cheaper equivalent solution. Ikea make a few styles of these; being modular and you can add as many shelves as you need.
Re:He can be amazed all he wants
on
Free Solaris 8
·
· Score: 1
If it gives them a platform on which to sell other stuff, probably for a while. I don't know what their costs and margins look like.
Very nicely, thank you, from what I've seen of their spare parts pricing. While you have to give them some allowance for the lower volume compared to the PC industry, I've nearly choked when the price on the invoice turned out to be per item not the subtotal! (Fortunately I'm not the one paying the bill.) Having said that, I have no complaints about the performance or reliability.)
As a hardware manufacturer, throwing in Solaris for free isn't going to hurt them; it throws down the gauntlet to Microsoft who know damn well they can't do the same - when people realise that W2K means yet another big hardware upgrade to just run the thing (e.g. minimum 64MB RAM), they won't be able to give it away if they tried!
The big trouble with IDE is still that they are "dumb" devices that require CPU resources to manage. SCSI also requires "CPU" resources, the difference being that SCSI controllers take care of the details themselves instead of nagging the main CPU for attention. Bus-mastering DMA controllers have gone some way towards removing this overhead. I don't see why you couldn't build a "smart" IDE disk controller that places no more load on the system that a SCSI controller, or even one that looks like a SCSI controller to the computer, but uses IDE disks (so long as you have room on the card, give them all a dedicated IDE channel, too.) The price difference between the drives should pay for the controller!
Little Penguins (Eudyptula minor) are 14" (35cm) tall - not 4" tall! While they look cute, these guys bite - just ask Linus.;-)
While the oil slick is relatively small (e.g. the French spill), it has come at a particularly bad time for the penguins - they have chicks in their burrows, so Mum and Dad need to fish twice as often. While the number of dead adults is known, I haven't heard how many chicks have starved in the burrows; expect this number to be high.
Slashdot Mirror
Rest assured, that there will be binary versions for ALL unices - Sun, SGI, SCO, *BSD, etc..
:)
Those guys at Netscape got those machines you know
How about non-Intel Linux versions?
Netscape for Sparc-based Linux has been stalled at 4.51 for a long time, and you won't find any non-Intel Linux versions on the Netscape FTP sites. I would dearly love to see a "Linux isn't just x86" campaign to get this message through to companies who insist on calling x86-only Linux products "Linux" versions instead of "Linux (x86)", and ignoring Sparcs, Alphas, PPCs etc.
Thankfully Mozilla does have builds for non-Intel Linux, so there is some hope for Netscape...
Slashdot goes tabloid?
The article says that the laptop contained "sensitive" data, but it makes no mention of the classification involved. Encryption does not imply a security classification; you'd expect (and hope) that agencies like MI5 encrypt all classified information (particularly if it's left around where any Artful Dodger can pinch it.)
Just the facts, Ma'am.
You can't turn buckyballs into lighter fluid, but you can turn lighter fluid into buckyballs - some of the soot deposited from the flame (e.g. onto a spoon) will contain some buckyballs. (Candles are a better source of soot, but the principle is the same for any carbon-based fuel source.) Could you build buckyballs from other elements e.g. silicon? It's been years since I did high school chemistry, so I'm a little rusty (to put it mildly!)
Now I can surf the Internet without fear of being exposed to Mariah Carey and her music. Thank you censorware! :-)
StorageReview.com is a good source of this information (though it would be better if it had Linux benchmarks.) It's very frustrating though - as soon as the fastest disks are available here in Oz, a newer, faster disk beats it on the leaderboard... (Trying to find a store that sells disks by brand and model, not just capacity, is also a challenge.)
Take the Oscars broadcast; the average person does not know anything beyond the top 5 or 6 awards (movie, actors, supporting actors, etc), so they will NOT know that a song with profanity will be in the works. In addition, the Oscar broadcast has generally been PG, at work; making the entire 2+ hr broadcast a TV-M first means that it can't be aired until after 10pm, and second, they will lose viewers. They (ABC) have no choice to do *something* about Blame Canada.
And the "do something" should be saying "Warning: the following song contains language which some viewers may find offensive. If you don't want to hear the words 'fart', 'bitch' and 'fuck', turn down your sound now."
I find it highly ironic that a country that worships the gun and glorifies firearm-related violence is so puritanical about a few low-grade swear words (with the possible exception of "fuck", though I've seen plenty of Hollywood movies where "fuck" constituted a large proportion of the diologue, too.)
Scenario: 1) User creates a document, priceless.doc; decides to take a copy for safe keeping. 2) copy priceless.doc priceless.bak 2) W2K notices it's a bit-for-bit copy; replaces priceless.bak with a link to priceless.doc (or vice versa.) ...later... 3) Clumsy user damages/destroys priceless.doc 4) "No problem, I've got a backup." 5) User looks at precious.bak 6) "AAARRRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!"
P.S. Another message on the list hints how you can hijack an account and get at the docs.
Anyone willing to do this and post a login? Or make a mirror?
Where do I buy the T-shirt?
In Australia, most CDs retail for A$30.99. This is almost exactly US$18.99 at current exchange rates - coincidence, or price fixing?
The computer game industry also squawks about piracy eating into their profits, but I have no sympathy for them. New release game prices are A$80 or so - I'm not going to pay that much for a game unless I know it's *good* (like Thief.) If the initial release price was A$50, more people would be inclined to buy it without a detailed cost/benefit analysis.
Colour screens are not always power hungry. For example, the Garmin 12CX GPS unit boasts a three colour display (red, green, blue) vs. the monochrome screen of the equivalent 12XL model, yet has 50% *better* battery life (36 hours vs. 24 hours.) I don't know how they did it, but that's pretty neat.
I own a Palm III (ye olde "ugly" screen - 4 level greyscale at a pinch) and love it. While I don't find it lacking compared to the 16 greyscale IIIe etc. or now 256 colour Palm IIIc, there are some occasions when a better display would be handy.
Offering these models does not detract from the Palm's features - it offers flexibility. As with Linux, variety is the key to success; while some may consider it superfluous, others may see it as a necessity. Either way, it's another nail in the WinCE coffin.
Rather than quibble about the virtues of the hardware, it would be far better to evangelise the benefits of GPL and freeware, which are sadly lacking on the Palm (with some notable exceptions.)
> "Help, help, I'm trapped under a parachute." The Russian Venera program has a few amusing snafus of its own. After building a probe strong enough to survive the Venusian atmosphere (extreme heat, pressure and sulphuric acid rain), they successfully landed it on the surface. Unfortunately they didn't get any pictures because the lens cap had melted and stuck on! A subsequent mission did get the pictures, but when the arm designed to place a sensor on the surface to measure its properties was deployed, it landed (you guessed it) on the ejected lens cap...
Why hasn't this thread been moderated "Offtopic"? Sorry, but no matter how true the trolling issue may be, the topic is "Virginia House passes UCITA" and posts that aren't about this (including this message) should be labelled "Offtopic". (Someone not from the US like me could have got the impression that UCITA was about trolling in Slashdot based on the message scores!) As I understand it, non-AC messages automatically get a score of 1. If there are a large number of troll messages getting through with a score of 1, set your message threshold to 2 (as I do) and filter them out. Scores of 2 and above must have been moderated up at least one point, so you can expect them being worthy of that adjustment. This isn't fair in some cases (not all ACs write crap), but isn't it easier to moderate up a few good posts than moderate down a flood of bad ones? (For my sins, this message will probably get moderated "-1, Flamebait", but that's life. :-)
This would seem to be an ideal opportunity for IBM to offer a Linux solution in addition to the previously safe Microsoft "solution"? Sure, it probably won't be successful this time around (bureaucracy has more inertia than an aircraft carrier...) but it shows that they are serious about Linux and that they are listening to what the customer wants.
MicroFord responds...
"F-150 XLT SP1 will fix the wiper problem; that should remove about 33,000 bugs from the windshield. The lack of heating is a misunderstanding reported by some customers - it's actually a feature to prevent Baked-on-Bugs (TM). We're still looking at a way to resolve the 10,000 bugs on the headlights and radiator grill since the initial release..."
The are more than two parts, really. If selection favoured only the best design, cheetahs would run at 500km/h (and gazelles at 501km/h.) They don't - costs are involved, so a "better" design can incur a selection penalty (I could use the fast vs. efficient car analogy, but I'll resist.)
If quantum "smart" evolution were truly smart, we'd see "quantum leaps" in design, not just variations on a theme. To make a flying pig, "smart" evolution would add a pair of wings; in reality, pterosaurs, birds, bats etc. adapted existing limbs into wings because we are largely tied to the original chordate blueprint - to radically differ from this would require a *large* mutation, and large mutations are almost invariably bad mutations. Smart evolution would not have allowed "dumb" designs to occur either - only an idiot would build an eye with the blood vessels and nerve connections *in front* of the light sensors, but that's what we've got. (Squids - non chordates - got this one right.)
Richard Dawkins has written some excellent books (IMHO) on this subject that are well worth reading: "The Blind Watchmaker" is most applicable in this case, but "The Selfish Gene" and "The Extended Phenotype" are good background reading.
Grape of course - they occur naturally in bunches.
...This scientist claimed that his data showed that ball lightening seemed to show up in areas of geologic instability... near fault lines, etc...
He postulated that the incredible forces involved along these fault lines caused the quartz in the rock to super-heat and become almost plasma-like.
I remember this too. However, since quartz is silicon dioxide, it may in fact be the same thing as the NZ discovery, just a different way of achieving the same result. IIRC, the key feature of this type of "ball lightning" was the lack of thunderstorms in the area at the time of the sightings, and apparent clustering of sightings along fault lines. I also seem to remember reading about this in a book, either about lightning/ball lightning, or a famous (infamous?) series of UFO sightings in NZ in the late 70's or early 80's; if it was the latter, ball lightning (and particularly the seismic variety) was offered as a possible explanation.
A variation on this theme is to purchase rack shelves; these let you mount all sorts of items in the rack - great for modems, transceivers etc. Desktop PC's are usually under 19 inches wide, so also fit on the shelves (watch out for U=shaped shelves with sides - these can be too narrow.)
The rack units can still be expensive, though; ladder frame bookshelves might be a cheaper equivalent solution. Ikea make a few styles of these; being modular and you can add as many shelves as you need.
If it gives them a platform on which to sell other stuff, probably for a while. I don't know what their costs and margins look like.
Very nicely, thank you, from what I've seen of their spare parts pricing. While you have to give them some allowance for the lower volume compared to the PC industry, I've nearly choked when the price on the invoice turned out to be per item not the subtotal! (Fortunately I'm not the one paying the bill.) Having said that, I have no complaints about the performance or reliability.)
As a hardware manufacturer, throwing in Solaris for free isn't going to hurt them; it throws down the gauntlet to Microsoft who know damn well they can't do the same - when people realise that W2K means yet another big hardware upgrade to just run the thing (e.g. minimum 64MB RAM), they won't be able to give it away if they tried!
The big trouble with IDE is still that they are "dumb" devices that require CPU resources to manage.
SCSI also requires "CPU" resources, the difference being that SCSI controllers take care of the details themselves instead of nagging the main CPU for attention. Bus-mastering DMA controllers have gone some way towards removing this overhead.
I don't see why you couldn't build a "smart" IDE disk controller that places no more load on the system that a SCSI controller, or even one that looks like a SCSI controller to the computer, but uses IDE disks (so long as you have room on the card, give them all a dedicated IDE channel, too.) The price difference between the drives should pay for the controller!
Little Penguins (Eudyptula minor) are 14" (35cm) tall - not 4" tall! While they look cute, these guys bite - just ask Linus. ;-)
While the oil slick is relatively small (e.g. the French spill), it has come at a particularly bad time for the penguins - they have chicks in their burrows, so Mum and Dad need to fish twice as often. While the number of dead adults is known, I haven't heard how many chicks have starved in the burrows; expect this number to be high.