Guess Crays aren't quite what they used to be. Maybe they should make them in grape colors:)
Actually Crays are (or at least were) available in your choice of colors. When I went on a tour of NCAR in Boulder the guides made a joke out of the fact that they were. Funny that choice of color is now considered to be a big thing.
It appears that the ultimate problem here is that the DMCA is inconsistent in its goals. A very relevant portion of the ruling states that:
Section 107 of the Act provides in critical part that certain uses of copyrighted works that otherwise would be wrongful are "not . . . infringement[s] of copyright.'' Defendants, however, are not here sued for copyright infringement. They are sued for offering to the public and providing technology primarily designed to circumvent technological measures that control access to copyrighted works and otherwise violating Section 1201(a)(2) of the Act. If Congress had meant the fair use defense to apply to such actions, it would have said so.
IOW, the DMCA says that conventional fair use is perfectly acceptable, but that it's illegal to circumvent technological means that prevent fair use. That is not simply inconsistent but positively schizophrenic. Protection of fair use is clearly not worth the paper it's printed on if the copyright owner can legally prevent it through technological means.
This is clearly something that the courts will eventually have to settle, provided that Congress doesn't amend the law first. Unfortunately for the defendants in this case, a District Judge is unlikely to be willing to make a ruling on this matter. This is going to have to be sorted out in the appeals process, and will probably wind up in the Supreme Court eventually (whether in this case or another).
A similar article is running on CNN.com. Some interesting highlights:
The plaintifs are asking for $1000 per person, with 8 million people affected.
AOL is claiming that the lawsuit "has no basis in fact or law," (Big surprise there) and is claiming protection based on the users accepting their EULA by clicking on the box during installation.
Prodigy is also complaining because of the problems with multi-ISP setups.
I seriously doubt that plaintiffs are going to get anything close to what they're asking, even if they win. $1000 seems like a lot of money, even if you include punative damages. More importantly, it sounds as though a reasonable percentage of users had no problems with the install. The $8 billion figure is just a headline grabber. A more interesting question is whether AOL is going to stick with their "they clicked accept, so tough luck" defense, and whether it will fly if they do.
In the keynote address this morning, Linus said 2.4 will have support for firewire. Anyone know more on this subject? I haven't exactly followed the evolution of the 2.3.x branch, but I thought firewire still had a long way to go, more so than USB...
There is firewire support in at least the most recent 2.3.x kernels. I haven't actually tested it myself (lacking any firewire ports and equipment) but it is there. FWIW, there's also support for UDF, the file system used on DVDs and some CDs (particularly those written by programs like DirectCD).
Thats not to say Perl isn't useful or good, but I would not want to learn about programming by learning Perl as my first language. It has way to many oddities that, if you are interested in programming, don't make the conceptual leap, as it were, to other languages.
Well, Perl has some advantages and disadvantages as a learning programing language. I definitely agree that its lack of strong typing and quirky handling of nested data structures are things that I wouldn't want to force a beginning programer to learn. OTOH, I think that some of its other features, like being interpreted, having localizable variable, and having easy file handling, are things that are desirable for a learner.
What might be interesting is a list of features that should be in a language for beginners. Everyone seems to complain about the things that various languages do wrong or don't include, but it might be nice to have a list of things that should be included. My modest attempt at this:
Declared variables: having variables pop into existence when mentioned is a big source of bugs. Even Perl seems to accept this, which is a big reason that everyone is encouraged to run under strict at all times.
Some typing: At the very least numbers and strings should be kept separate, even if there's no int/float distinction. The complex rules about casting strings to numbers in Perl are more confusing to a learner than requiring separate types would be.
Interpreted: I find that interpreted languages are much easier to debug than compiled ones, and a learning programer probably cares more about that than the speed of a compiled language. If you really want, you could have some sort of compiler, too.
Strong support for subroutines: Any good language has this.
Good commenting: It's never too easy to learn how to do in code documentation.
Good libraries: This should help a beginner to write more significant and satisfying programs. If the source is included, as it should be in an interpreted language, they can also provide a good style guide.
I kinda like the idea that the "File/Folder" paradigm is western-centric. I mean, really it does deal in organizational concepts geared towards tie-wearing office drones. That said, I can't think of a better way of expressing the heirarchical tree concept. Would anybody else who's actually from India care to comment on the matter, and perhaps suggest a more culturally appropriate scheme?
I would imagine that an image like bags or boxes might be more appropriate than folders. One comment that I remember hearing is that the file/folder image is actually somewhat inappropriate because people rarely use deeply nested heirachies of folders. Putting one box or bag inside another is much more common, so it's intuitively more reasonable.
I also think that the file metaphor is a bit dated. After all, many "files" these days are the function equivalent of things very different from physical files. They include a wide variety of things from movies and photgraphs to movie players and game boxes. You can see that people already feel that way from the icons that they choose to represent their files, and most of those objects would never fit into a file folder.
...person by person, country by country -- and starting with the corners of the world that are ignored: where there are barriers to language, barriers to affordability, barriers to access, barriers to the type of application that is needed.
Support the world outside of the little space you inhabit. Think outside the USA, think outside white Europe. Most of the world isn't like you. Look after them, and it'll pay back a hundredfold...
This last is possibly underappreciated. India in particular is often regarded as a country with a lot of untapped programming talent. If all or most of those programmers wind up using free software, that's going to contribute a huge developer pool.
Many of those people are going to be working on old hardware that still requires clever programming to get decent performance, and that could be helpful, too. We all know that even good programs can often be improved by detailed hand optimizing of the code, and that's an itch that those third world programmers are likely to want to scratch. An army of good programmers writing free software and pumping out carefully optimized code sounds like a very nice payback.
One comment in the Linux Journal article that I found interesting was the comment about the new, encrypted CD's. They said:
The other problem is that consumers (remember, business people don't refer to people as people, they refer to us as 'consumers') already have these old CD players that can't play new, encrypted CDs, and we'd all have to buy new players.
I'm not the tiniest bit convinced that the manufacturers consider this to be a problem at all. The consumer electronics industry depends on constantly shoveling new technology down our throats, which is where we got lousy ideas like quadrophonic sound, 8-track tapes, minidisks, and the advanced photo system. They positively hate things like old-fashioned LP's that remain technically adequate for decades. I am sure that they'd like nothing better than to force everyone to buy new players to play their new encryped CD's. The truly sad part is that all they have to do is A) stop putting out the most popular music in the old format and B) provide some thin shell of an argument for the technical superiority of the new system and gullible people will start buying.
The major advantage of a graphical user interface is that it is graphical. Shortcuts may be useful to the expert but they are of limited value to the casual user. There is also the danger that they can become too complicated, the GUI equivalent of control-alt-meta-cokebottle.
The whole advantage of shortcuts, and IMO also the reason they can be hard to find out about, is that they are optional. Obviously, as Tog's experience shows, it's possible to use a system at a very high level for a long time without knowing all of the shortcuts. Instead, you pick up the shortcuts that are related to the things that you do most often and most help your productivity. Hence most people probably know the cut/copy/paste shortcuts better than the find/replace shortcuts because of the freqency with which they use them. Of course learning by doing can be problematic because you may never happen to stumble on an important shortcut and hence never learn it.
To me, the most troubling thing about the test is the subjectivity of many of the results. I can accept that from things that are essentially subjective by nature, like which tools are easiest to use. The problem is that some of the elements of the test are essentially objective features but have not been tested objectively.
A total of 40% of the overall score was in the categories of Scalability (20%), Security (10%), and Stability and Fault Tolerance (10%). Those are objective categories. You can test how well a system scales, how secure it is, and how stable and fault tolerant it is. Instead of testing, though, the reviewers "took a qualitative look at each NOS's management tools, security measures, stability and fault-tolerance features..."
Based on their comments, these judgments were made not on the basis of how well each system actually performed in the listed fields but by what features it offers or claims to offer. No mention was made of critical factors like system uptime/downtime. No test was performed to see if the offered features actually succeeded in providing the capabilities they were alleged to give. It's simply unreasonable to give overall scores to 2 decimal places when the data going in is a bunch of subjective judgment based on no substantive testing.
It looks, and sounds, like they gave major points for "ease of use" aka point and click configuration and wizards.
And oddly enough, they don't seem to have included ease of tuning into their comments about ease of use. In order to get the (comparatively poor) results they got out of Win2K, they had to hack the registry as part of their tuing procedure. They comment:
Tuning Microsoft Windows 2000 was fairly involved. Tuning included file system, network and some memory management modifications.
Registry hacking ranks right up there with kernel modifications, neither for the inexperienced system administrator.
I can't speak for anyone else, but that hardly sounds like "ease of use" to me.
Or maybe Linux has some things going for it that AIX doesn't have... yet. Why do people see Linux as ever-changing and improving, yet think that other operating systems (read: Windows 2000 and Solaris) are just getting worse and more bloated.
Derivatives. Windows* and Solaris were big deals five years ago, and while they've been improved it has been fairly incremental. Linux was barely on the radar five years ago and it's improvement since then has been amazing. This gives the impression that Linux is getting better much faster than the other guys. Whether this is reasonable or not (i.e. whether it's just that Linux has benefitted by chasing others' taillights) seems to be ignored.
he linuxnewbie.org's web page has the ? problem. All the single quotes appear as question marks. This happens if the web page was edited using any Micro$oft software, because M$ once again decided to bastardize the standard (unicode in this case).
For anyone interested, there is a solution to this problem. There's a public domain program called demoroniser that parses html and cuts out Microsoft's bogus unicode mangling. It's conveniently written in Perl, so you can modify it if you don't particularly like the way that the original author decided to correct MS's mistakes.
You know, a long time ago, cars were usually built by just one person. He'd design and build the engine, assemble the chassis, hammer the body panels, etc. One person decided how the car would look, how the driving controls would work, and which side of the car the driver would sit on. This gave the car a certain feel, similar to the one you experience when you read a poem or look at a painting. The car was an artform.
Today, the cars are developed by teams of people, sometimes thousands. There are engineers, designers, marketeers, and even people whose job it is to do nothing but manage the aforementioned people.
Who cares about "objective" measures of quality, like acceleration, top speed, fuel economy, and polution. Who cares about trivial issues like a standardized control system. I'd give up knowing that the gas and the brake were always in the same place for the soul of one of those old fashioned cars.
It's pretty bad that you just can't tell anymore whether this is a result of incompetence or a deliberate move to monopolize the computer. After a great deal of thought, I can only come to the conclusion that it's just incompetence.
After all, AOL is a flat rate service now. They get their monthly fee whether the user logs on or not, so they have little incentive to prevent anyone from logging on to other providers. You could even claim that they should encourage users to spend as much time as possible using alternate providers, because that way they won't be tying up AOL's phone lines.
Still, the conspiracy theory folks are going to have a field day.
but Corel is evidently thinking logically and rationally about how to make money without damaging the energy and vitality of the community.
Certainly not out of the goodness of their hearts, though. Not damaging the vitality of the community that produced Linux and its tools is in their long-term best interest.
That may be, but that in and of itself is already a step forward. Think about how many software companies view open source as inherently inimical to their way of business. The fact that they understand the importance of not killing the golden goose- that they can make money because of, not inspite of, the open source community- is a big win.
Presto: the protection is compromised, and the DVD coalition is vulnerable to their (erstwhile) partner's legal fury. The content owners could sue the DVD makers right into their pockets for failure to come through on the protection of their content if the DVD coalition doesn't nip this in the bud..
But why should they want to sue? It would just be taking money out of one pocket and putting it into another. The studios are owned by the same media conglomerates that make the players. That's the real reason that such a ridiculous system got implemented in the first place. The studio arm of the conglomerates bullied the hardware arm into putting in the "copy protection" scheme, even though it wasn't really in the hardware side's best interests.
There are plenty of people who would be willing to fork over big bucks to buy DVD-R and DVD-RW players if they were available. There are plenty of valid reasons why people want and should be allowed to have them- like recording home movies onto a longer lasting and more up to date medium than video tape, or backing up modern large hard drives. The hardware manufacturers could be making a lot of money on that market, but the studio arm won't let them.
It seems as though games are the first class of real "desktop" applications that are being ported to Linux in any number. Is this because Linux people tend to be a bunch of games hounds, or because game makers are more likely to be Linux friendly? Will games be the first reall killer app for Linux on the desktop?
They will be producing water and carbon dioxide, humans produce much more than their share of carbon dioxide already, proliferation of this fashion of fuel cell would increase that. I'm all for the longer lasting battery but you have to weigh it's TOTAL cost against its apparent costs.
Of course you're also failing to consider the total cost of conventional batteries. The electicity that goes to recharge those batteries comes from somewhere, often from fossil fuel burning, polution and carbon dioxide emitting power plants. Since fuel cells are actually more efficient than conventional power systems, that's a point in favor of fuel cells. Furthermore batteries often contain nice toxic things like cadmium, the mining of which often causes horrible toxic polution. Fuel cells are far from perfect, but they're probably more environmentally friendly than conventional batteries.
Carbon dioxide is poisonous in sufficient quantities, and could cause the respiratory system to fail if the partial pressures get thrown out of whack. No big deal if you're running a whole bunch of these things in a very large closed system (say, the Earth). A big deal if enough of these are running in a small enclosed system (say, a safe). I suspect the risk of suffocation, even if everyone on a crowded jet were running two cells simultaneously (laptop and cd player?), would be just about zero, but it is a low-grade potential problem.
Actually, if you think about it, it's obviously no real problem. A typical laptop consumes less than 20 Watts of power, and even considering inefficiency in the fuel cell it still won't consume 40 Watts total. Meanwhile, a human burns something like 100+ Watts and produces the same water and carbon dioxide byproducts. Even with two laptops per person, you're only talking about increasing air flow by a factor of 2- a trivial problem.
Are these things meant to be throw away? From the sound of it, either you buy a whole new one or refill the methanol manually:
They would use small plastic canisters similar to those used for fountain pen ink. Consumers could easily check the methanol level to find out when to replace the fuel cell, which will likely cost as much as or less than traditional rechargeables, Ooms said.
This sounds like it's a confusion between fuel cell (the neat chemical trick for getting electicity) and fuel cell (the cell containing the fuel). The whole advantage of fuel cell technology is that you don't have to throw it away very often; it's roughly the equivalent of an electrical generator. For convenience and probably safety, though, it makes sense to package the fuel in a disposable container to minimize user handling of methanol. Most people are going to want to minimize the amount they have to handle something moderately toxic and flamable (and needing to be kept at high purity) like methanol.
Is Methanol much more volatile or explosive then hard liquor? People fly with multi-liter jugs of Vodka, Whisky and other flammable liquids all the time. Why is methanol different?
Methanol most certainly is more volatile than typical hard liquor, for two reasons. For one thing, methanol by itself is more volatile than ethanol, the alcohol in hard liquor. This is basically a matter of molecular weight; methanol's is lower than ethanol's and among related compounds the lower molecular weight typically has a lower boiling point. More importantly, methanol is a lot more volatile and flamable than hard liquor because it's pure. Hard liquor is typically only 40% alcohol by volume with the rest water. Compare the difference in flamability of vodka and everclear sometime- it's quite dramatic.
I get a sort of queasy feeling about it - there wasn't much to be gained by blocking them, and we might have gotten some bad repute as a result.
It looks like fairly standard trademark stuff to me. Linus has the trademark on the name Linux, and in order to retain it legally he has to take certain steps to protect it. That means formally licensing any use of the Linux name for use in describing something associated with Linux the OS kernel, even if the there is no licensing fee. If Linus fails to challenge people who use his trademarked name without a license, he will lose the trademark.
You could even argue that Linus is protecting people by insisting that the names not be randomly auctioned. Someone might very well try to buy a name, only to find out that Linus won't grant them a license to use the name. At that point they'll be out the money they spent, and they might even lose the name without compensation in a cybersquatter case to a later firm that does get the license. In any case, it doesn't look as though Linus is objecting to the concept of cybersquatting on the names (or of the company making money by selling them) but just to the idea of selling them willy-nilly.
Don't be too quick to judge based on the statistics Security Focus gave:
Looking at their results, the time to fix 50% of the bugs is 4 days for Red Hat and 3 days for Microsoft.
After 1 day, Microsoft fixed 42% of their bugs. Red Hat only 29%.
I know I'll probably get moderated to hell for this, but the simple fact is the "average" statistic tells nothing at all. What the results seem to be saying is that Microsoft is faster on simple bugs (probably better distribution channels) though they fail on the more difficult bugs (probably more complex code, but who can tell without the source).
Acutally, there is some discussion of this point in the article, and your interpretation of the statistics is probably more of a distortion than the "average" time presented in the article. One point specifically made in the article is that the time it actually takes to fix a bug is not well demonstrated by their statistics. The time they mention is the time between when the security hole is generally known and when it's fixed- not between when it's first discovered and fixed.
A significant percentage of the security holes are discovered, worked on, and not publicized until the bug fix is already available. It's litterally a case of "We found this hole and here's the patch," and not one of actually fixing the bug in less than a day. Apparently, about 42% of Windows holes and 29% of Linux holes fit into this category. In that respect, the statistics are much more favorable to Linux than to Microsoft. They actually mean that only about 14% (8% of all bugs v.s. 58% not announced and patched simultaneously) of holes in Windows that are publicized by someone other than Microsoft are patched within 3 days. In Linux, though, about 30% are fixed and available as RPMs within 4 days.
That also means that the average time for bugs not announced by the respective vendors is actually longer than the averages presented. The average time to fix a non-vendor announced bug is more like 27 days for Microsoft and 17 days for Red Hat. Since the non-vendor announced holes are the really scary ones- the vulnerability is known and there's no available cure- that's a more reasonable comparison.
I.e. if I can profit from closed-source development for only the duration of my employment at, say, BigSoftwareCo, then it behooves me to maximize my salary & benefits during that duration, leaving it essentially up to BigSoftwareCo to decide how it will maximize its long-term viability. Since I can profit from OSS development for the duration of the practical life of that software, I have more incentive to make it live a long, healthy life, even if that means making less $$ in the short run (not necessarily always the trade-off I have to make, but one I've willingly made a few times already).
Of course the whole argument works the other way, too. If you're employed at a closed source shop you just might want to write a crufty, awful, undocumented nightmare that only you understand as a way of guaranteeing job security. I don't work in a software shop, but I have seen the "only I know how it works so you'll just have to put up with me" trick pulled. Others have alleged that many undocumented API's in Windows have been engineered as a form of job security.
That kind of programmer initiated crap is also not practical with open source. The peer review inherent to the system will tend to weed out lousy, difficult to maintain code before it gets into the main distribution. It also means that programmers are more easily replaced. After all, there are already plenty of people out there who have been working on the source and know the system. They won't need break in time while they learn the code, and the code they've already submitted can act as a portfolio in judging them.
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Guess Crays aren't quite what they used to be. Maybe they should make them in grape colors :)
Actually Crays are (or at least were) available in your choice of colors. When I went on a tour of NCAR in Boulder the guides made a joke out of the fact that they were. Funny that choice of color is now considered to be a big thing.
It appears that the ultimate problem here is that the DMCA is inconsistent in its goals. A very relevant portion of the ruling states that:
IOW, the DMCA says that conventional fair use is perfectly acceptable, but that it's illegal to circumvent technological means that prevent fair use. That is not simply inconsistent but positively schizophrenic. Protection of fair use is clearly not worth the paper it's printed on if the copyright owner can legally prevent it through technological means.
This is clearly something that the courts will eventually have to settle, provided that Congress doesn't amend the law first. Unfortunately for the defendants in this case, a District Judge is unlikely to be willing to make a ruling on this matter. This is going to have to be sorted out in the appeals process, and will probably wind up in the Supreme Court eventually (whether in this case or another).
A similar article is running on CNN.com. Some interesting highlights:
I seriously doubt that plaintiffs are going to get anything close to what they're asking, even if they win. $1000 seems like a lot of money, even if you include punative damages. More importantly, it sounds as though a reasonable percentage of users had no problems with the install. The $8 billion figure is just a headline grabber. A more interesting question is whether AOL is going to stick with their "they clicked accept, so tough luck" defense, and whether it will fly if they do.
In the keynote address this morning, Linus said 2.4 will have support for firewire. Anyone know more on this subject? I haven't exactly followed the evolution of the 2.3.x branch, but I thought firewire still had a long way to go, more so than USB...
There is firewire support in at least the most recent 2.3.x kernels. I haven't actually tested it myself (lacking any firewire ports and equipment) but it is there. FWIW, there's also support for UDF, the file system used on DVDs and some CDs (particularly those written by programs like DirectCD).
Well, Perl has some advantages and disadvantages as a learning programing language. I definitely agree that its lack of strong typing and quirky handling of nested data structures are things that I wouldn't want to force a beginning programer to learn. OTOH, I think that some of its other features, like being interpreted, having localizable variable, and having easy file handling, are things that are desirable for a learner.
What might be interesting is a list of features that should be in a language for beginners. Everyone seems to complain about the things that various languages do wrong or don't include, but it might be nice to have a list of things that should be included. My modest attempt at this:
Any other ideas for what a language should have?
I kinda like the idea that the "File/Folder" paradigm is western-centric. I mean, really it does deal in organizational concepts geared towards tie-wearing office drones. That said, I can't think of a better way of expressing the heirarchical tree concept. Would anybody else who's actually from India care to comment on the matter, and perhaps suggest a more culturally appropriate scheme?
I would imagine that an image like bags or boxes might be more appropriate than folders. One comment that I remember hearing is that the file/folder image is actually somewhat inappropriate because people rarely use deeply nested heirachies of folders. Putting one box or bag inside another is much more common, so it's intuitively more reasonable.
I also think that the file metaphor is a bit dated. After all, many "files" these days are the function equivalent of things very different from physical files. They include a wide variety of things from movies and photgraphs to movie players and game boxes. You can see that people already feel that way from the icons that they choose to represent their files, and most of those objects would never fit into a file folder.
Support the world outside of the little space you inhabit. Think outside the USA, think outside white Europe. Most of the world isn't like you. Look after them, and it'll pay back a hundredfold...
This last is possibly underappreciated. India in particular is often regarded as a country with a lot of untapped programming talent. If all or most of those programmers wind up using free software, that's going to contribute a huge developer pool.
Many of those people are going to be working on old hardware that still requires clever programming to get decent performance, and that could be helpful, too. We all know that even good programs can often be improved by detailed hand optimizing of the code, and that's an itch that those third world programmers are likely to want to scratch. An army of good programmers writing free software and pumping out carefully optimized code sounds like a very nice payback.
One comment in the Linux Journal article that I found interesting was the comment about the new, encrypted CD's. They said:
I'm not the tiniest bit convinced that the manufacturers consider this to be a problem at all. The consumer electronics industry depends on constantly shoveling new technology down our throats, which is where we got lousy ideas like quadrophonic sound, 8-track tapes, minidisks, and the advanced photo system. They positively hate things like old-fashioned LP's that remain technically adequate for decades. I am sure that they'd like nothing better than to force everyone to buy new players to play their new encryped CD's. The truly sad part is that all they have to do is A) stop putting out the most popular music in the old format and B) provide some thin shell of an argument for the technical superiority of the new system and gullible people will start buying.
The major advantage of a graphical user interface is that it is graphical. Shortcuts may be useful to the expert but they are of limited value to the casual user. There is also the danger that they can become too complicated, the GUI equivalent of control-alt-meta-cokebottle.
The whole advantage of shortcuts, and IMO also the reason they can be hard to find out about, is that they are optional. Obviously, as Tog's experience shows, it's possible to use a system at a very high level for a long time without knowing all of the shortcuts. Instead, you pick up the shortcuts that are related to the things that you do most often and most help your productivity. Hence most people probably know the cut/copy/paste shortcuts better than the find/replace shortcuts because of the freqency with which they use them. Of course learning by doing can be problematic because you may never happen to stumble on an important shortcut and hence never learn it.
To me, the most troubling thing about the test is the subjectivity of many of the results. I can accept that from things that are essentially subjective by nature, like which tools are easiest to use. The problem is that some of the elements of the test are essentially objective features but have not been tested objectively.
A total of 40% of the overall score was in the categories of Scalability (20%), Security (10%), and Stability and Fault Tolerance (10%). Those are objective categories. You can test how well a system scales, how secure it is, and how stable and fault tolerant it is. Instead of testing, though, the reviewers "took a qualitative look at each NOS's management tools, security measures, stability and fault-tolerance features..."
Based on their comments, these judgments were made not on the basis of how well each system actually performed in the listed fields but by what features it offers or claims to offer. No mention was made of critical factors like system uptime/downtime. No test was performed to see if the offered features actually succeeded in providing the capabilities they were alleged to give. It's simply unreasonable to give overall scores to 2 decimal places when the data going in is a bunch of subjective judgment based on no substantive testing.
It looks, and sounds, like they gave major points for "ease of use" aka point and click configuration and wizards.
And oddly enough, they don't seem to have included ease of tuning into their comments about ease of use. In order to get the (comparatively poor) results they got out of Win2K, they had to hack the registry as part of their tuing procedure. They comment:
I can't speak for anyone else, but that hardly sounds like "ease of use" to me.
Or maybe Linux has some things going for it that AIX doesn't have... yet. Why do people see Linux as ever-changing and improving, yet think that other operating systems (read: Windows 2000 and Solaris) are just getting worse and more bloated.
Derivatives. Windows* and Solaris were big deals five years ago, and while they've been improved it has been fairly incremental. Linux was barely on the radar five years ago and it's improvement since then has been amazing. This gives the impression that Linux is getting better much faster than the other guys. Whether this is reasonable or not (i.e. whether it's just that Linux has benefitted by chasing others' taillights) seems to be ignored.
he linuxnewbie.org's web page has the ? problem. All the single quotes appear as question marks. This happens if the web page was edited using any Micro$oft software, because M$ once again decided to bastardize the standard (unicode in this case).
For anyone interested, there is a solution to this problem. There's a public domain program called demoroniser that parses html and cuts out Microsoft's bogus unicode mangling. It's conveniently written in Perl, so you can modify it if you don't particularly like the way that the original author decided to correct MS's mistakes.
You know, a long time ago, cars were usually built by just one person. He'd design and build the engine, assemble the chassis, hammer the body panels, etc. One person decided how the car would look, how the driving controls would work, and which side of the car the driver would sit on. This gave the car a certain feel, similar to the one you experience when you read a poem or look at a painting. The car was an artform.
Today, the cars are developed by teams of people, sometimes thousands. There are engineers, designers, marketeers, and even people whose job it is to do nothing but manage the aforementioned people.
Who cares about "objective" measures of quality, like acceleration, top speed, fuel economy, and polution. Who cares about trivial issues like a standardized control system. I'd give up knowing that the gas and the brake were always in the same place for the soul of one of those old fashioned cars.
It's pretty bad that you just can't tell anymore whether this is a result of incompetence or a deliberate move to monopolize the computer. After a great deal of thought, I can only come to the conclusion that it's just incompetence.
After all, AOL is a flat rate service now. They get their monthly fee whether the user logs on or not, so they have little incentive to prevent anyone from logging on to other providers. You could even claim that they should encourage users to spend as much time as possible using alternate providers, because that way they won't be tying up AOL's phone lines.
Still, the conspiracy theory folks are going to have a field day.
but Corel is evidently thinking logically and rationally about how to make money without damaging the energy and vitality of the community.
Certainly not out of the goodness of their hearts, though. Not damaging the vitality of the community that produced Linux and its tools is in their long-term best interest.
That may be, but that in and of itself is already a step forward. Think about how many software companies view open source as inherently inimical to their way of business. The fact that they understand the importance of not killing the golden goose- that they can make money because of, not inspite of, the open source community- is a big win.
Presto: the protection is compromised, and the DVD coalition is vulnerable to their (erstwhile) partner's legal fury. The content owners could sue the DVD makers right into their pockets for failure to come through on the protection of their content if the DVD coalition doesn't nip this in the bud..
But why should they want to sue? It would just be taking money out of one pocket and putting it into another. The studios are owned by the same media conglomerates that make the players. That's the real reason that such a ridiculous system got implemented in the first place. The studio arm of the conglomerates bullied the hardware arm into putting in the "copy protection" scheme, even though it wasn't really in the hardware side's best interests.
There are plenty of people who would be willing to fork over big bucks to buy DVD-R and DVD-RW players if they were available. There are plenty of valid reasons why people want and should be allowed to have them- like recording home movies onto a longer lasting and more up to date medium than video tape, or backing up modern large hard drives. The hardware manufacturers could be making a lot of money on that market, but the studio arm won't let them.
It seems as though games are the first class of real "desktop" applications that are being ported to Linux in any number. Is this because Linux people tend to be a bunch of games hounds, or because game makers are more likely to be Linux friendly? Will games be the first reall killer app for Linux on the desktop?
They will be producing water and carbon dioxide, humans produce much more than their share of carbon dioxide already, proliferation of this fashion of fuel cell would increase that. I'm all for the longer lasting battery but you have to weigh it's TOTAL cost against its apparent costs.
Of course you're also failing to consider the total cost of conventional batteries. The electicity that goes to recharge those batteries comes from somewhere, often from fossil fuel burning, polution and carbon dioxide emitting power plants. Since fuel cells are actually more efficient than conventional power systems, that's a point in favor of fuel cells. Furthermore batteries often contain nice toxic things like cadmium, the mining of which often causes horrible toxic polution. Fuel cells are far from perfect, but they're probably more environmentally friendly than conventional batteries.
Carbon dioxide is poisonous in sufficient quantities, and could cause the respiratory system to fail if the partial pressures get thrown out of whack. No big deal if you're running a whole bunch of these things in a very large closed system (say, the Earth). A big deal if enough of these are running in a small enclosed system (say, a safe). I suspect the risk of suffocation, even if everyone on a crowded jet were running two cells simultaneously (laptop and cd player?), would be just about zero, but it is a low-grade potential problem.
Actually, if you think about it, it's obviously no real problem. A typical laptop consumes less than 20 Watts of power, and even considering inefficiency in the fuel cell it still won't consume 40 Watts total. Meanwhile, a human burns something like 100+ Watts and produces the same water and carbon dioxide byproducts. Even with two laptops per person, you're only talking about increasing air flow by a factor of 2- a trivial problem.
Are these things meant to be throw away? From the sound of it, either you buy a whole new one or refill the methanol manually:
They would use small plastic canisters similar to those used for fountain pen ink. Consumers could easily check the methanol level to find out when to replace the fuel cell, which will likely cost as much as or less than traditional rechargeables, Ooms said.
This sounds like it's a confusion between fuel cell (the neat chemical trick for getting electicity) and fuel cell (the cell containing the fuel). The whole advantage of fuel cell technology is that you don't have to throw it away very often; it's roughly the equivalent of an electrical generator. For convenience and probably safety, though, it makes sense to package the fuel in a disposable container to minimize user handling of methanol. Most people are going to want to minimize the amount they have to handle something moderately toxic and flamable (and needing to be kept at high purity) like methanol.
I'm not a Chemist, so forgive my ignorance.
Well I am, and you're forgiven ;-)
Is Methanol much more volatile or explosive then hard liquor? People fly with multi-liter jugs of Vodka, Whisky and other flammable liquids all the time. Why is methanol different?
Methanol most certainly is more volatile than typical hard liquor, for two reasons. For one thing, methanol by itself is more volatile than ethanol, the alcohol in hard liquor. This is basically a matter of molecular weight; methanol's is lower than ethanol's and among related compounds the lower molecular weight typically has a lower boiling point. More importantly, methanol is a lot more volatile and flamable than hard liquor because it's pure. Hard liquor is typically only 40% alcohol by volume with the rest water. Compare the difference in flamability of vodka and everclear sometime- it's quite dramatic.
I get a sort of queasy feeling about it - there wasn't much to be gained by blocking them, and we might have gotten some bad repute as a result.
It looks like fairly standard trademark stuff to me. Linus has the trademark on the name Linux, and in order to retain it legally he has to take certain steps to protect it. That means formally licensing any use of the Linux name for use in describing something associated with Linux the OS kernel, even if the there is no licensing fee. If Linus fails to challenge people who use his trademarked name without a license, he will lose the trademark.
You could even argue that Linus is protecting people by insisting that the names not be randomly auctioned. Someone might very well try to buy a name, only to find out that Linus won't grant them a license to use the name. At that point they'll be out the money they spent, and they might even lose the name without compensation in a cybersquatter case to a later firm that does get the license. In any case, it doesn't look as though Linus is objecting to the concept of cybersquatting on the names (or of the company making money by selling them) but just to the idea of selling them willy-nilly.
Don't be too quick to judge based on the statistics Security Focus gave:
Looking at their results, the time to fix 50% of the bugs is 4 days for Red Hat and 3 days for Microsoft.
After 1 day, Microsoft fixed 42% of their bugs. Red Hat only 29%.
I know I'll probably get moderated to hell for this, but the simple fact is the "average" statistic tells nothing at all. What the results seem to be saying is that Microsoft is faster on simple bugs (probably better distribution channels) though they fail on the more difficult bugs (probably more complex code, but who can tell without the source).
Acutally, there is some discussion of this point in the article, and your interpretation of the statistics is probably more of a distortion than the "average" time presented in the article. One point specifically made in the article is that the time it actually takes to fix a bug is not well demonstrated by their statistics. The time they mention is the time between when the security hole is generally known and when it's fixed- not between when it's first discovered and fixed.
A significant percentage of the security holes are discovered, worked on, and not publicized until the bug fix is already available. It's litterally a case of "We found this hole and here's the patch," and not one of actually fixing the bug in less than a day. Apparently, about 42% of Windows holes and 29% of Linux holes fit into this category. In that respect, the statistics are much more favorable to Linux than to Microsoft. They actually mean that only about 14% (8% of all bugs v.s. 58% not announced and patched simultaneously) of holes in Windows that are publicized by someone other than Microsoft are patched within 3 days. In Linux, though, about 30% are fixed and available as RPMs within 4 days.
That also means that the average time for bugs not announced by the respective vendors is actually longer than the averages presented. The average time to fix a non-vendor announced bug is more like 27 days for Microsoft and 17 days for Red Hat. Since the non-vendor announced holes are the really scary ones- the vulnerability is known and there's no available cure- that's a more reasonable comparison.
I.e. if I can profit from closed-source development for only the duration of my employment at, say, BigSoftwareCo, then it behooves me to maximize my salary & benefits during that duration, leaving it essentially up to BigSoftwareCo to decide how it will maximize its long-term viability. Since I can profit from OSS development for the duration of the practical life of that software, I have more incentive to make it live a long, healthy life, even if that means making less $$ in the short run (not necessarily always the trade-off I have to make, but one I've willingly made a few times already).
Of course the whole argument works the other way, too. If you're employed at a closed source shop you just might want to write a crufty, awful, undocumented nightmare that only you understand as a way of guaranteeing job security. I don't work in a software shop, but I have seen the "only I know how it works so you'll just have to put up with me" trick pulled. Others have alleged that many undocumented API's in Windows have been engineered as a form of job security.
That kind of programmer initiated crap is also not practical with open source. The peer review inherent to the system will tend to weed out lousy, difficult to maintain code before it gets into the main distribution. It also means that programmers are more easily replaced. After all, there are already plenty of people out there who have been working on the source and know the system. They won't need break in time while they learn the code, and the code they've already submitted can act as a portfolio in judging them.