The whole idea of patents is to force people to not use your method.
I'd have said the whole point was to get them to pay you royalties for using your R&D. Sure, some may choose not to release patents. At that point, I'd have said the point switches to "Allowing you to sue someone's ass off".
In either case, patents are all about getting money back 'cos you spent money on something. It should be proportionate, but that last factor is something many lawyers (RIAA, etc) like to exaggerate.
Personally, I'd have to agree that ZFS is probably the way forwards for storage at the moment. I've not tried FUSE yet, although I have looked into Solaris and Nexenta, installing them on virtual machines for testing (I want to ensure my backup is stable, and want to put it through its paces before I setup what will be my next server).
Okay: It seems that I was wrong in a couple of ways. The second number (eg, 2.5) was the number that denoted unstable. See here (big page, so Cntrl-F 'unstable') and mvdwege is correct that presently every there's no 'unstable' branch (as 2.3 and 2.5 were) linky here.
It is stable, but it will take a little while for the packages to find their way into the network for your particular distribution.
Generally any release with an even number at the end will be a stable release. The kernel development cycle is basically: add functionality (odd releases), make stable (even releases).
As for whether 2.6.30 is really bleeding edge, I wouldn't have said so. It's not yet in wide use, as not that many new distros have been released since it came out. See: Distros are often built on top of a kernel, so changing the kernel just before it's about to be released can rock the boat a little even if the kernel itself is stable. I personally wouldn't bother upgrading unless there's a feature in the kernel that you needed. 2.6.31 could be considered bleeding edge, however, as that's an unstable release that they'll be shoving a lot of new functionality or completing stuff that wasn't ready for 2.6.30.
That said, there were features that I wanted to check-out in the 2.6.30.1 kernel and so I did download and compile it (but only put it on the machine that needed it).
Well, Microsoft got that market share by providing cheap software, specifically DOS. It was arguably of low quality, but who cares that much about the quality if it's cheap, right?
I don't know if it was originally the plan, but at some point along the way Microsoft realized they had a monopoly. They leveraged their share by putting up prices and using FUD tactics to discourage people from switching. The main issue I have is that although the prices went up, the comparative quality of software didn't. Sure, It looks a lot better than DOS, but that's because modern computers are practically supercomputers compared to what DOS ran on. So you see, having a large market share doesn't mean the company isn't a piece of shit, it just means they can be a piece of shit and get away with it.
Sure, you can argue that a bug in the latest Linux kernel is a sign that there are bugs in lots of OSes. The difference is that with Linux it'll be fixed in a couple of days. Very few people will be using the latest kernel, AFAIK none of the big distros released with it yet, and although some users may have downloaded and compiled the source themselves (I did so myself, as it offered some driver compatibility for new hardware) the architecture is versatile enough that you can simply switch between different kernels, even without fully rebooting, although not completely without disruption.
Definitely good to stay modular, and it's a good way for businesses to run as there should probably be a 'friend' (read tech support) around (possibly even in another country) with SSH access.
All OO.org needs is some external, low-level, interface allowing the support to prompt a save. If a save's not possible, then perhaps a memory dump of the application from which the document might be recovered.
Really? If you write the file whilst the power goes down then you've just written a corrupted file and lost everything. If your autosave gets corrupted, at-least you still have the original.
Personally, I'd suggest a balance, preferably on a machine running ZFS.
Then-again, sometimes office crashes when saving a document. If it's not saved right, office won't open it, but open office can recover some of the information.
After leaving university, I've worked in 6+ different programming languages. I'd have said that a course which introduces you to a broad range of languages is better than one which ties you into one language, even if that language was the industry standard in many areas. I mean, lots of languages share a set of similar conventions, but no one language is sufficient to introduce you to all of them. You simply cannot guarantee that you will always work in the same language for your entire working life, and IMHO you're better getting experience with other languages when you're at university than when struggling to meet an unrealistic schedule in a real job.
Ah, I had forgotten google were offering wave for people to run on their own servers. If someone can modify Wave to act as an in-place replacement for an exchange server (converting emails into waves and so on) then I think a lot of people might be sold on it. Whether storing data on Google's servers is a real threat or not, it certainly strikes me that people on here perceive it as a threat. As perceived threats are the real barrier to adoption, removing it might tip the balance for some companies.
Tab Mix Plus definitely makes having a large number of tabs open easier. I have it set-up to open a tab in a new window if I double click on it, perfect for if I find another hub of information from which I'm likely to want to spawn more tabs.
If you've got a page with a high number of links on it (for example, a TRAC bugs list) you can open maybe 20, look through them, right-click on your original tab, and choose close tabs to the right. Hey presto, you're ready to look at the next 20.
If I'm fixing a computer-illiterate friend's PC, I wouldn't even considering charging for fuel. I mean, they're a friend. You don't factor the time you spend working to fix their problem at the same hourly rate you work at, do you?
There's also the fact that, if you buy it for them, there's no risk of them getting it wrong and buying the wrong item.
If you're fixing an acquaintance's computer, maybe a friend of a friend, then in my experience they offer some form of exchange rather than expecting it to be done for free. Maybe beer, maybe some cash, whatever it is it's generally worth more than the fuel you'd spend on a trip to the local electronics store.
So true. Even experienced computer users get it wrong.
IE: Lets say your computer crashes when a game starts. Experienced users may have had that problem before, some with graphics drivers, it could possibly be a hardware problem, and it can be a sign of an aging PSU in these days of supercomputing GPUs. Knowing all the names and having a few years of experience aren't always good enough to make an accurate diagnosis first time.
Re:The Achilles heel of this...
on
Phoenix BIOSOS?
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· Score: 1
How on earth is suggesting Linux might have problems with getting consistent drivers Trolling? Seems someone's tried to find -1 disagree and settled for -1 troll.
As it happens, I don't agree with this post either. It's possible to run Linux without all of the drivers your machine would normally use. Sure, you don't have full functionality, but if you need it then you can boot into windows or whatever other OS you run.
Secondly, this strikes me as a useful BIOS for putting on laptops. If the hardware won't change then it's a lot easier to tailor things so the drivers work predictably. The current distros are good at auto-configuring, which at-least means you don't need to hand-configure every driver like you used to, but it's not gonna compare to hand-tweaking for a fixed platform.
If I hadn't already posted here, I'd have modded this insightful.
Do bear in-mind, however, that the violent criminals in prison are the one's who've been caught. Also, if you only take a snapshot in the jail at one time, then it'd be skewed towards people in there for longer. Perhaps that's better if you want to factor severity of crimes into the mix, but a better sample would be everyone jailed over some period (say, a year).
The problem with guns is that to fight one, you need one. Criminals need one if they're gonna break into somewhere that might have one. Home owners need one if criminals are gonna be busting into their houses with guns. It ups the odds.
Living in a country where gun crime is much less prevalent, I feel much safer knowing that if someone wants to hurt me: they've got to give me a good sound thrashing.
Your example could have gone much worse for someone in a similar scenario, if they pulled a gun on some criminals. What if they only planned a burglary, and instead the guy pulling a gun on the two armed intruders freaked them into killing everyone there? Heck, one girl in the article was shot several times. Isn't that a sign that guns are a liability? What if the criminals didn't have easy access to firearms, might that stop them from attempting such a heist in the first place?
Also, do you really think that the people with small arms could rise up and take down the government? Have you ever seen the videos shot from an AC130? You say angry mob, they say red splatter. Unless you start having civilians with SOTA military gear, tanks and all, then the military would wipe them out.
Please, when did either I or timeOday state that "everything we know about the Solar System besides the Earth and the Moon comes from robotic missions"? Allow me to quote the statement I defended:
Robotic exploration already accounts for 100% of our success in visiting other planets.
That's visiting other planets, no more no less.
Your choice to bring telescopes into this is an interesting one, however. I'd expect that every telescope of scientific use for the last 25 years has been essentially controlled by a machine (I know as my father was a programmer for instruments on telescopes as long ago as 27 years ago), making it a large stationary robot. When does it stop becomming robot-power and start becomming man-power?
I'm not saying that it's impossible to get to the moon, merely that it's much more expensive. Given that the space race was basically a big political dick-swinging contest, unless some power attempts to swing its dick to mars and another government thinks its dick should get there first then I don't think there's going to be a manned trip to mars any time soon. Science can fund far more unmanned trips to mars than it can fund manned ones, and unless you equip a manned mission to perform every single experiment you ever could desire to do then it's probably cheaper to send multiple smaller missions with specific goals.
It all comes down to cost versus benefit. You might be able to get there in one week, but is that ever gonna be cheaper than seinding a robot there in 9 months? The benefit of sending a human to mars would be relatively small, as basically they'd just be overseeing robotic sensors and it'd cost them a lot to get there anyway. When they want more mineral samples, they're more likely to send a robot with the ability to return samples than a manned team with shovels and bags. the mars landings happened when robotic technology was basically unheard of. If they wanted samples from the moon nowadays, they'd just send a robotic probe.
I'll berhaps retract my 'hopeless romanticism' assertion, but only the hopeless part. I agree that the technology exists for man to reach mars. It's just that there's no reason to send man to mars other than the romantic assertion that something must be experienced first-hand to be understood. Scientists have been making reliable observations through machines for many years now, maybe even before people reached the moon. I see no reason for them to stop now, especially with advanced telepresence technology around these days.
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I'd have said the whole point was to get them to pay you royalties for using your R&D. Sure, some may choose not to release patents. At that point, I'd have said the point switches to "Allowing you to sue someone's ass off".
In either case, patents are all about getting money back 'cos you spent money on something. It should be proportionate, but that last factor is something many lawyers (RIAA, etc) like to exaggerate.
If I had mod points, you'd get +1 Funny.
Personally, I'd have to agree that ZFS is probably the way forwards for storage at the moment. I've not tried FUSE yet, although I have looked into Solaris and Nexenta, installing them on virtual machines for testing (I want to ensure my backup is stable, and want to put it through its paces before I setup what will be my next server).
Once you realize that ZFS can run Raid-Z in a system on chronically faulty hardware, and it still loses no data, then you understand that any other storage methods (bar possibly online backup) are second-class in comparison.
Really? Oops. Checking facts...
Okay: It seems that I was wrong in a couple of ways. The second number (eg, 2.5) was the number that denoted unstable. See here (big page, so Cntrl-F 'unstable') and mvdwege is correct that presently every there's no 'unstable' branch (as 2.3 and 2.5 were) linky here.
It is stable, but it will take a little while for the packages to find their way into the network for your particular distribution.
Generally any release with an even number at the end will be a stable release. The kernel development cycle is basically: add functionality (odd releases), make stable (even releases).
As for whether 2.6.30 is really bleeding edge, I wouldn't have said so. It's not yet in wide use, as not that many new distros have been released since it came out. See: Distros are often built on top of a kernel, so changing the kernel just before it's about to be released can rock the boat a little even if the kernel itself is stable. I personally wouldn't bother upgrading unless there's a feature in the kernel that you needed. 2.6.31 could be considered bleeding edge, however, as that's an unstable release that they'll be shoving a lot of new functionality or completing stuff that wasn't ready for 2.6.30.
That said, there were features that I wanted to check-out in the 2.6.30.1 kernel and so I did download and compile it (but only put it on the machine that needed it).
Well, Microsoft got that market share by providing cheap software, specifically DOS. It was arguably of low quality, but who cares that much about the quality if it's cheap, right?
I don't know if it was originally the plan, but at some point along the way Microsoft realized they had a monopoly. They leveraged their share by putting up prices and using FUD tactics to discourage people from switching. The main issue I have is that although the prices went up, the comparative quality of software didn't. Sure, It looks a lot better than DOS, but that's because modern computers are practically supercomputers compared to what DOS ran on. So you see, having a large market share doesn't mean the company isn't a piece of shit, it just means they can be a piece of shit and get away with it.
Sure, you can argue that a bug in the latest Linux kernel is a sign that there are bugs in lots of OSes. The difference is that with Linux it'll be fixed in a couple of days. Very few people will be using the latest kernel, AFAIK none of the big distros released with it yet, and although some users may have downloaded and compiled the source themselves (I did so myself, as it offered some driver compatibility for new hardware) the architecture is versatile enough that you can simply switch between different kernels, even without fully rebooting, although not completely without disruption.
Definitely good to stay modular, and it's a good way for businesses to run as there should probably be a 'friend' (read tech support) around (possibly even in another country) with SSH access.
All OO.org needs is some external, low-level, interface allowing the support to prompt a save. If a save's not possible, then perhaps a memory dump of the application from which the document might be recovered.
Really? If you write the file whilst the power goes down then you've just written a corrupted file and lost everything. If your autosave gets corrupted, at-least you still have the original. Personally, I'd suggest a balance, preferably on a machine running ZFS.
Then-again, sometimes office crashes when saving a document. If it's not saved right, office won't open it, but open office can recover some of the information.
Would any video do? Like, maybe pron or something?
Everything except expencive hookers. They're a big money cock sucking void.
After leaving university, I've worked in 6+ different programming languages. I'd have said that a course which introduces you to a broad range of languages is better than one which ties you into one language, even if that language was the industry standard in many areas. I mean, lots of languages share a set of similar conventions, but no one language is sufficient to introduce you to all of them. You simply cannot guarantee that you will always work in the same language for your entire working life, and IMHO you're better getting experience with other languages when you're at university than when struggling to meet an unrealistic schedule in a real job.
Ah, I had forgotten google were offering wave for people to run on their own servers. If someone can modify Wave to act as an in-place replacement for an exchange server (converting emails into waves and so on) then I think a lot of people might be sold on it. Whether storing data on Google's servers is a real threat or not, it certainly strikes me that people on here perceive it as a threat. As perceived threats are the real barrier to adoption, removing it might tip the balance for some companies.
Yeah, this is /., I believe a car analogy is customary.
Yeah, no point in losing your userbase. As long as they update graphics and add stuff every once in a while, everyone's happy.
Everyone, that is, except those who've realized it's basically just a big time and money-sucking void.
Tab Mix Plus definitely makes having a large number of tabs open easier. I have it set-up to open a tab in a new window if I double click on it, perfect for if I find another hub of information from which I'm likely to want to spawn more tabs.
If you've got a page with a high number of links on it (for example, a TRAC bugs list) you can open maybe 20, look through them, right-click on your original tab, and choose close tabs to the right. Hey presto, you're ready to look at the next 20.
If I'm fixing a computer-illiterate friend's PC, I wouldn't even considering charging for fuel. I mean, they're a friend. You don't factor the time you spend working to fix their problem at the same hourly rate you work at, do you?
There's also the fact that, if you buy it for them, there's no risk of them getting it wrong and buying the wrong item.
If you're fixing an acquaintance's computer, maybe a friend of a friend, then in my experience they offer some form of exchange rather than expecting it to be done for free. Maybe beer, maybe some cash, whatever it is it's generally worth more than the fuel you'd spend on a trip to the local electronics store.
So true. Even experienced computer users get it wrong.
IE: Lets say your computer crashes when a game starts. Experienced users may have had that problem before, some with graphics drivers, it could possibly be a hardware problem, and it can be a sign of an aging PSU in these days of supercomputing GPUs. Knowing all the names and having a few years of experience aren't always good enough to make an accurate diagnosis first time.
How on earth is suggesting Linux might have problems with getting consistent drivers Trolling? Seems someone's tried to find -1 disagree and settled for -1 troll.
As it happens, I don't agree with this post either. It's possible to run Linux without all of the drivers your machine would normally use. Sure, you don't have full functionality, but if you need it then you can boot into windows or whatever other OS you run.
Secondly, this strikes me as a useful BIOS for putting on laptops. If the hardware won't change then it's a lot easier to tailor things so the drivers work predictably. The current distros are good at auto-configuring, which at-least means you don't need to hand-configure every driver like you used to, but it's not gonna compare to hand-tweaking for a fixed platform.
Yep. That's why you can get a ~200 GFLOP computer with a built-in BluRay DVD player for $300.
Out of interest, is he in prison for violent or gun-related crime?
If I hadn't already posted here, I'd have modded this insightful.
Do bear in-mind, however, that the violent criminals in prison are the one's who've been caught. Also, if you only take a snapshot in the jail at one time, then it'd be skewed towards people in there for longer. Perhaps that's better if you want to factor severity of crimes into the mix, but a better sample would be everyone jailed over some period (say, a year).
The problem with guns is that to fight one, you need one. Criminals need one if they're gonna break into somewhere that might have one. Home owners need one if criminals are gonna be busting into their houses with guns. It ups the odds.
Living in a country where gun crime is much less prevalent, I feel much safer knowing that if someone wants to hurt me: they've got to give me a good sound thrashing.
Your example could have gone much worse for someone in a similar scenario, if they pulled a gun on some criminals. What if they only planned a burglary, and instead the guy pulling a gun on the two armed intruders freaked them into killing everyone there? Heck, one girl in the article was shot several times. Isn't that a sign that guns are a liability? What if the criminals didn't have easy access to firearms, might that stop them from attempting such a heist in the first place?
Also, do you really think that the people with small arms could rise up and take down the government? Have you ever seen the videos shot from an AC130? You say angry mob, they say red splatter. Unless you start having civilians with SOTA military gear, tanks and all, then the military would wipe them out.
Given the amount of porno on this machine, that'd be a dirty bomb :-O
Please, when did either I or timeOday state that "everything we know about the Solar System besides the Earth and the Moon comes from robotic missions"? Allow me to quote the statement I defended:
That's visiting other planets, no more no less.
Your choice to bring telescopes into this is an interesting one, however. I'd expect that every telescope of scientific use for the last 25 years has been essentially controlled by a machine (I know as my father was a programmer for instruments on telescopes as long ago as 27 years ago), making it a large stationary robot. When does it stop becomming robot-power and start becomming man-power?
I'm not saying that it's impossible to get to the moon, merely that it's much more expensive. Given that the space race was basically a big political dick-swinging contest, unless some power attempts to swing its dick to mars and another government thinks its dick should get there first then I don't think there's going to be a manned trip to mars any time soon. Science can fund far more unmanned trips to mars than it can fund manned ones, and unless you equip a manned mission to perform every single experiment you ever could desire to do then it's probably cheaper to send multiple smaller missions with specific goals.
It all comes down to cost versus benefit. You might be able to get there in one week, but is that ever gonna be cheaper than seinding a robot there in 9 months? The benefit of sending a human to mars would be relatively small, as basically they'd just be overseeing robotic sensors and it'd cost them a lot to get there anyway. When they want more mineral samples, they're more likely to send a robot with the ability to return samples than a manned team with shovels and bags. the mars landings happened when robotic technology was basically unheard of. If they wanted samples from the moon nowadays, they'd just send a robotic probe.
I'll berhaps retract my 'hopeless romanticism' assertion, but only the hopeless part. I agree that the technology exists for man to reach mars. It's just that there's no reason to send man to mars other than the romantic assertion that something must be experienced first-hand to be understood. Scientists have been making reliable observations through machines for many years now, maybe even before people reached the moon. I see no reason for them to stop now, especially with advanced telepresence technology around these days.