I think a better approach to this situation is block the MAC addresses of people infected with viruses and such and notify them. Only then should the school's official AV packages and stuff be offered to the students. Some people have effective protections of their computers and aren't electronic Typhoid Marys. Requiring these people to potentially break their working systems with the school's software as a matter of policy is ridiculous. It should be optional and a well definied portion of the ResNet's TOS.
Eventually such a policy will lead to non-Windows systems being banned from the network. If some AV package is required by unavailable and not likely to be needed on MacOS or Linux some jackass will eventually rule that those OSes shouldn't be allowed to break the network policy. Linux and Mac users (along with savvy Windows users) should be punished because Windows is ubiquitous and insecure.
Re:I've been dying to know....
on
Xgrid Agent for Unix
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· Score: 2, Interesting
You're trying to shoehorn the wrong sort of application into Xgrid and for some reason expecting it to work. Problems that can't be solved in a loosely coupled parallel environment are not well suited to be run on something like Xgrid. In the case of your fax numbers a custom Xgrid plug-in would probably be the least efficient way of doing the work. It would likely take longer to distribute the list and binaries to agents than it would for one fast system to run through the program.
Xgrid isn't meant to solve all computational problems. It is designed to solve the ones involving long independent or at worst loosely coupled problems.
Re:I've been dying to know....
on
Xgrid Agent for Unix
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Feeding a remote process data is not as difficult as you're describing. If the program you're using doesn't support ranges in arguments it isn't too difficult to wrap a script around it that does understand input ranges. The Xgrid client makes it pretty simple to use ranges as arguments for programs. It's possible to use the likes of Blender and Xgrid to do distributed rendering. Ergo input control doesn't seem to be a terribly difficult hurdle to overcome with Xgrid.
I suspect the Allen Telescope Array will be providing quite a bit more data for SETI@Home to chew on. Not only will be it scanning a wider range of frequencies but an order of magnitude more stars. The extra data along with the enhanced processing taken from the 3.03 S@H client will likely keep the project plenty busy for a while longer. Optical SETI is also gaining some mindshare and research dollars. I don't think it will be too long before an optical scan tool is added to the new BOINC client.
Before the Cingular buyout, AT&T was implementing EDGE in several of their larger markets. IIRC it was released in the greater Chicago area, Los Angeles, and the Northeast Corridor. I assume but am not sure that the service is still in existance as AT&T's GPRS service hasn't changed since the buyout.
Actually with EDGE you're looking at maximum connection speeds of 384kbps with 48kbps per time slot. While a good EDGE connection won't compare to a high speed DSL or cable connection it doesn't necessarily have to in order to be useful. Web browsing and checking/sending e-mail doesn't exactly require a 4mbps internet connection. For many simply being able have an online presence is enough. Instant messaging, RSS feeds, and e-mail aren't necessarily technologies in need of überbandwidth.
The Mac platform is in a very strong position right now. It's taken several years but finally the Mac is a strong platform with lots of third party support and momentum in the computer market. Seven years ago people weren't even sure Apple would be around to honor three year AppleCare warranties; today people are building supercompuers with Apple logos. The Mac is making a comeback in niche markets it largely lost to Windows-based workstations in the late 90s. It's also entering the Enterprise market and making a big impression in the big iron Unix world.
What VARs and Apple Specialists need to do is turn themselves into support services for these markets. They can continue to sell Apple's hardware but they need to start focussing on the words in their titles. Selling a school some eMacs is one thing. Selling them some eMacs and setting them up a central directory, file, and mail server with a hardware support contract is something else entirely. These sorts of services they can bill by the hour and guarantee with contracts.
Many companies only stick with Windows PCs because they don't think there's anything else in the world that can possibly work. Part of the job of the Apple retail stores is to provide a place where people can come see their products in action. VARs and SPs should go a step beyond that and really show businesses that they could save money or make more money by switching away from Windows.
Lets face it, Microsoft's primary focus on home/clueless computing is a detrement to corporate deployments.
Likewise their focus on corporate deployments really hinders home/clueless users. There's too many parts of Windows that are needlessly complex and confusing and require a professional to really handle. That is ridiculous even in an OS intended for corporate deployments. Needless complexity only increases the possibility of something going wrong.
Hemp and Muastard seeds have very high oil and protein contents. They're both about 40% oil in the seeds. The leftover mash is high in protein and makes excellent animal feed.
Hey there's this awesome invention, maybe you've heard of it, it's called the Sun. At our distance from it we receive about 1kW/m^2 of energy at ground level. That is a lot of energy to collect. Photosynthetic organisms make excellent use of this energy and can do all sorts of cool things with it.
Oh yeah we can also convert this energy into other forms and store it for our own use chemically. Crop tenders, processing equipment, water pumps, and many other aspects of biodiesel manufacture can be performed by solar powered machinery.
Besides you seem to not understand the biofuel carbon cycle is closed. Any carbon released from burning biodiesel is carbon absorbed from the atmosphere during photosynthesis. If you've got an end-to-end solar-biodiesel system you're not releasing any extra carbon into the environment. Pumping fossil fuels out of the ground and burning them is releasing carbon into the environment that has been effectively removed from it for millions of years.
The real cool thing with this story is the fact the black holes were discovered using the Astronomical Virtual Observatory (AVO). The AVO is a giant database of images take from a variety of telescopes including Hubble, Chndra, and the VLT in Chile.
Hubble for instance aquires about a terabyte of data every year. Some projects under development now will collect that much data every single day. Virtual observatories let anyone grab some of this data to work with it. There's a lot of new information being collected or digitzed every day which means just that much more data to mine for every region of the sky.
An excellent example of this (besides this recent discovery) is the research done on the KBO 2001 KX76. A team of European astronomers used a program called Astrovirtel based out of the European Southern Observatory to better map the orbit of the KBO. They were able to parse over data going back to 1982 which means they were able to watch almost 20 years worth of the KBO's orbit. One of the researchers was even able to perform some of the processing work on his home computer. The orbital mapping of 2001 KX76 gives credence to the theory that it is actually larger than Ceres and thus the largest space rock discovered in the solar system thus far.
Virtual astronomy can easily find information on just about any observed object that varies by some bit over time. Examining old plates has been a hallmark of astronomy for years but these new virtual observatory projects take the concept to a higher level. The discoveries of these black holes is a testament to how useful it is to be able to mine through years of observations from entirely different types of observatories. For some types of research it makes telescope time, which is typically hard to come by, a bit less important. It also opens the door for anyone to do astronomical research.
Virtual astronomy is really open source astronomy. The collective work of hundreds of individuals can be leveraged by just about anyone. These same people can also contribute back to the VOs for other people down the road to work with.
You really need to get your fact straight before spouting off this sort of crap. In 1983 Steve Jobs began to court John Sculley, the president of Pepsi, to join Apple. By April of that year Sculley was working for Apple. Even though Sculley was a good businessman it became quite obvious he knew squat about the computer industry or computers altogether. In 1985 Jobs and Sculley were arguing like crazy. Jobs was convinced sculley was going to run Apple into the ground. He planned a boardroom coup while Sculley was on a business trip but somebody told Sculley before he left and him and Jobs got into it. The board sided unanimously with Sculley and Jobs resigned that day.
Ergo your mythical tale of Steve Jobs keeping the price of the Mac too high is far-fetched at best and outright stupid at worst. Sculley made a swath of ridiculous business descisions and was responsible for Apple's look-and-feel lawsuit loss against Microsoft. Sculley got Bill Gates to put in writing that Windows 1.0 wouldn't use any of the Mac's technologies. Gates' lawyers made sure the contract was airtight. The contract didn't mention any system besides Windows 1.0, Microsoft was contractually free to copy the Mac interface willy nilly in subsequent versions of Windows.
People love to blame Steve Jobs for all of Apple's problems but he was entirely absent from business descisions between 1985 and 1997. In the times Jobs has been present the Mac and Apple have done pretty well. Jobs has made tons of mistakes but he isn't responsible for many of Apple's problems in the past two decades.
I haven't seen a case where disabling swap actually increases performance. I have however seen lots of cases where disregard for logic involving swap space caused serious performance problems. The old 1.5x and 2x rules for swap space are outdated and even dangerous in today's systems with ooglebytes of memory.
With less than 128MB of RAM you practically need 2x your physical memory worth of swap space. Running a full GUI environment, even a relatively lightweight one, needs quite a bit of system memory. With 64MB of RAM and a 128MB of swap space you'll be able to run a light GUI environment but have a crappy filesystem cache. The system will crawl but it won't get constant OOM errors if you're not overzealous with your app usage.
The 2x RAM rule on a system with 512MB of physical RAM on the otherhand is excessive. With 1GB of swap space most of it will end up empty unless you're running programs needing huge amounts of allocated memory. With more than 512MB or more of physical memory on a single user workstation you're pretty unlikely to run into situations where active pages are swapped out to disk.
I've seen the runaway process situation crop up on more than one system with excessive amounts of swap space. Since swap is so slow it can be troublesome to kill a process that is using so much memory that it ends up having active pages swapped to disk. The system ends up spending 99% of its time trying to handle the disk IO from the heavy swapping which can make the system totally unresponsive for local and remote users. Because the systems had way more swap space than was logical the offending processes never got OOM errors even though they were using up almost all of the system's resources.
I've pretty much set 256MB as the upper limit for my systems with 256MB or more of physical memory. That is enough swap space to hold any dirty pages or unused processes but not so much that a runaway process is going to eat up all my disk IO for a couple of hours. Once a system hits the 256MB threshold I toss out the silly 2x RAM rules for something with a little more cognitive thought.
There's a few basics you need to consider for your project page. What your project is, what it is used for, where to get it, how to use it, and where to go if you need help. There's a lot of SF projects that totally fail to provide that information to potential users.
The first thing your project site needs to tell me is what the hell the project is. Acronyms are nice and all but without some real words somewhere it is going to make it exceedingly difficult to tell the difference between MyPBS, phpBB, CBS, NBC, and FBI. This part should be in relatively simple terms with lots of keywords so search engines can easily find and rank it.
Unless it is glaringly obvious tell me what I might do with this. Your project might be just the thing I'm looking for but it also might be almost what I need. I might be able to adapt it and fire off an e-mail to you informing you of my extentions and your project can grow a little bit. If I'm looking for some particular bit of information out of two billion plus pages indexed in Google I'd notice your project if you make it simple for me to find such information.
Next tell me where I can pick up the latest and past releases of the project. I loathe having to skim through SourceForge's project pages to find a particular link to the latest release of some project. A couple of direct links won't kill you and they'll make my life easier.
Once I've got the sucker downloaded let me know how to install and use it. Well written instructions can mean the difference between your project growing and being popular or being stagnant and overlooked. Your potential users shouldn't have to pour over your source code to figure out how to use your software. If you feel static documentation is a little too daunting of a task make a documentation Wiki. Write out your initial set of instructions and such and let your users and developers amend those instructions as needed. Users who couldn't code to save their lives might be able to contribute some clarified instructions or maybe provide usage examples from their own experiences.
Finally provide me with a couple different means of communicating with members of the project team. If you really want to build a nice bit of software make it easy to form a community out of your users. Mailing lists, bulletin boards, and newsgroups help turn groups of overwise disconnected users into a connected community. I personally feel OSS projects work much better when the developers and users have a lot of interaction. With OSS users can often times be unofficial developers which makes this interaction all the more important.
As was already mentioned, your project page doesn't need to be some big parade of multimedia. As long as it conveys the information it is supposed to and is clearly laid out it doesn't matter what you do stylistically to it. If you don't intend to update the page often don't under any circumstances put a contemporary news section. If you feel the need for "news" post the changelogs for your latest releases or maybe a project status section. Few things are worse on OSS project pages than seeing "news" that is more than six months old despite an aggressive release schedule. HTH.
Pixar is doing extremely well thus far because they've released hits, some of these were hits due in no small part to the Disney marketing machine. While I don't think Pixar's exactly on the losing end of the breakup a lot of their success has been tied to their partnership with Disney.
Disney's power comes from its ability to milk their franchises dry. They've got the Disney channel, their retail chain, third party retailers, and their theme parks to generate cash. They can start a media and retail blitz to hype their movies. A movie that doesn't do well at the box office might end up being a DVD darling or have a successful line of toys or collectibles. They've also got the media channel to do animated series or sequels based on their feature films.
Aladdin is an excellent example of their franchise machine. The movie was very successful in the box office and probably one of the better movies they had done in a long time. The movie was supported by a blitz of toys, video games, and collectibles. Following the success of the movie they made a rather popular television series based on the first film. The series was capped with two straight to video sequels, one featuring the return of Robin Williams as the voice of the Genie. Their one movie that might have made a few hundred million in the box office worldwide ended up making them tons more money as a franchise.
Toy Story has turned into the same sort of franchise. There's an animated series based around Buzz Lightyear, a huge line of toys and collectibles, and then a second movie that was more popular even than the first. Pixar sees only a small fraction of the TS franchise revenue.
Because Disney designs all their films to be franchise darlings is not necessarily a good thing. Pixar's strength lies in its ability to make good movies. Disney's films are just shiny enough to sucker little kids into building Disney themed Christmas lists. Pixar's films are entertaining to people of various ages and rarely give you the feeling you're being hypnotized into buying licensed products at your earliest convenience.
I think Pixar and the other non-Disney studios stand a pretty good chance of ending Disney's media reign in the near (10 yrs) future. Dreamwrosk in particular has been honing their art of sniping away at Disney's core audience. Shrek is friendly enough for the Disney core audience yet enticing enough to keep their parents interested. I don't have any doubt Pixar will be able to pull the same stunt once they're out from the Disney mantle. Neither has the marketing machine of Disney but they are both giving the artistic aspects of their companies more creative control than the suited bean counters. There's a huge market of people yearning for some entertainment that isn't the watered down uncreative crapfest that Disney's films have become.
I suppose you don't do real work on your computer. For many people their home directories store thousands of man-hours worth of work. Whether its uncommited code, customer databases, important e-mail, Photoshop files, iTunes music, or a master's thesis it is all stuff you're not getting back if it goes away. Someone doesn't have to get ahold of your bank account numbers to cause you financial harm either. If they can snag an e-mail with your Paypal information they can do all sorts of nasty stuff.
That is far worse than losing your system and application software with a root level exploit. You can reinstall your system and applications, you can't necessarily reinstall your personal files.
You can only modify/Applications if you're an admin user. Standard users don't have write privileges in/Applications. Though OSX doesn't do it by default it ought to make all new users Standard users. Panther will ask if to authenticate if you do try to drag something into/Applications.
There's quite a bit of hemp farming in eastern Europe (Romainia and Hungary) and Asia. There's also quite a bit of hemp farming going on in western Europe and a production base is growing slowly in Canada. The main import of hemp in the US is in the form of sterilized seeds used for animal feed. A good 20% of commercial bird feed is hemp seeds as they're extremely high in protein for their mass. Because hemp has had seventy years of bad press for various reasons it isn't nearly as popular in Western farming as it is elsewhere. China produces quite a few hemp textile products but you rarely find them in the US due to ridiculously high protective tariffs.
DuPont and Hearst attacking hemp production for their own ends isn't a conspiracy theory, it is what happened. From about 1000B.C. until after the American Civil War hemp was the world's largest crop. During the second World War farmers were innundated with incentives to grow hemp for various uses by the USDA. If you grew hemp on your farm you and your sons were exempt from military service. Up until 1920 all government documents were printed on hemp paper. Even Henery Ford was in on hemp production. He found that making plastics out of hemp oil and cellulose resulted in side panels for cars that were ten times the impact strength of steel panels.
Once the Marijuana Taxation Act passed it became too expensive and effectively illegal to grow hemp. The US government had to override the MTA to allow farmers to grow hemp during the war. In the 1920s the situation with DuPont and Hearst came about because a man named George Schlichten invented a decorticator which could strip fibers from any plant. It was the Witney cotton gin of the hemp industry. Until then processing hemp was an extremely labor intensive process and had fallen behind cotton as the number one textile crop after the abolition of slavery in the US. Schlichten's decorticator was set to revitalize the hemp industry before Hearst and his cohorts started their campaign.
Using hemp to make paper is even better than you might realize (or maybe you do realize. Hemp can be bleached with relatively friendly hydrogen peroxide. The paper itself is naturally less acidic so it doesn't yellow or become brittle with age. Wood pulp paper on the other hand has to be bleached with chlorine-based bleach and the waste water of the process is a main source of the world's dioxin pollution. Also without additional processing wood pulp paper is fairly acidic and yellows and becomes brittle with age. Find an old newspaper for material evidense of this phenomenon. The processing of the hemp pulp also only uses 14-25% of the sulfer-based acids that the wood pulp process uses.
On the recycling front hemp paper is quite a bit more useful than wood pulp paper. Hemp paper can be easily recycled up to seven times while wood pulp paper is strained to be recycled three times. The various lengths of fiber in hemp plants are also well suited to different tasks. The long fibers work well in stationary and books while the shorter fibers are good for making newsprint, tissue paper, and packing material.
As to why hemp is not grown in the US look no further than big business. The short story is Lammont Du Pont's company figured out how to refine coal and oil into synthetic fibers of various trade names they also figured out a new (cheaper) method to make paper from wood pulp. William Hearst's Paper Manufacturing division, Kimberly Clark (USA), owned some 800,000 acres of forested land and wanted to use DuPont's process for making newsprint. Hemp's advantages over wood pulp paper were well known in the 1930s. Hearst's monopolistic control over the country's newspapers let him start a huge yellow journalism smear campaign against hemp. He attacked the marijuana plant which is a small shrub-like cousin of hemp. Good marijuana plants are about 7-11% THC where the typical hemp plant is only 0.9%, hemp is not going to get anyone high.
Hearst got a lackey of his, Herman Oliphant the general counsel of the Treasury Department, to draw up an anti-hemp bill. Oliphant did so by modeling the Marijuana Taxation Act after the National Firearms Act passed in 1934. The NFA was designed as anti-machinegun legistlation but instead of technically prohibiting them merely taxed them in preposterous ways making them virtually prohibited. The MTA was based on the same principle and had a legal leg to stand on when the NFA was uphelp by the Supreme Court in 1937, two weeks before the MTA was introduced. Later marijuana was attached to the Boggs act in 1951 which was a list of prohibited narcotic substances.
The disk: protocol is designed to automount images off the web, that is why it exists in the first place. Developers can offer up images off their sites users can mount directly so there's no need to download the image, install the app, and delete the image. Once the app is installed the user can just unmount it. It is a nice functionality but Apple needs to sandbox the process since an image mounted off the web should be untrusted.
AT&T and Cingular both charge $80 a month for unlimited GPRS data access. Only T-Mobile is offering $20/mo data service, that is not a trend. AT&T and Cingular might drop their rates tomorrow making my arguement invalid but as of right now they are only offer extremely expensive unlimited access.
WiFi hot spots aren't exactly lowering their prices either. Because Boingo has a subsidized network they're offering cheap but limited access to doesn't mean the core networks are lowering their prices. Boingo might be out of business next week. I think Boingo's situation is all the more sobering with Cometa calling it quits. Cometa was backed by companies with a good deal of money and they weren't able to offer unlimited cheap WiFi access. That does not really lend support to your assertion that prices are heading downward.
Boingo currently supports the following:
Windows 98SE, Windows 2000, Windows Me, Windows XP, Pocket PC (2002 operating system with ARM processor and portrait screen).
% uname -v Darwin Kernel Version 7.3.0: Fri Mar 5 14:22:55 PST 2004; root:xnu/xnu-517.3.15.obj~4/RELEASE_PPC
Sorry but Boingo's service is not compatible with my computer. I should not have to download their special software to access their network. If they can't figure out a way to sell me connectivity without their software I'm not interested. The price is right but their convenience is not. Simply lacking PalmOS support Boingo is cutting off a huge swath of the business traveler market. By not having support for MacOS they're ignoring a growing segment of the business traveler market and a large portion of the recreaction traveler market.
T-Mobile's service is a good idea and would be great if I were one of their subscribers. I am not however which makes their HotSpot service far too expensive for me to use more than occassionally. AT&T's (my provider) GoPort service (which piggybacks Wayport in many locations) is no cheaper for their customers than it is for their non-customers. Their GPRS data services are also horribly priced. AT&T's coverage has always been superior to T-Mobile's in my experience, especially now after the Cingular buyout but their data plans WiFi and otherwise are absoltely horrible.
For me free WiFi hotspots aren't always an option though I take advantage of them whenever possible. When you're sitting in DFW or ATL there isn't exactly a plethora of free WiFi hotspots to connect to. The same goes for most of the Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores in southern California.
When $20 WiFi services become accessible to me and have connectivity in places useful to me I'll likely sign up for them. Until then they're priced horribly or are technically out of reach for me because I choose not to run Windows.
I wouldn't be surprised but would be disappointed if Cometa's network was bought up by Wayport and T-Mobile. After using both services I've been left with a bad taste in my mouth for fee-based WiFi access. Both groups charge exorbitant amounts of money for access. Wayport charges $6.95 at most airports for unlimited access from the time you purchase until midnight, T-Mobile wants $9.95 for 24 continuous hours of connectivity. For month-to-month access Wayport charges $49.95 and T-Mobile charges $39.95.
If you bought access for a large group of travelers or were somehow able to use the hotspots for all of your high-speed access needs the prices might not be so bad. For me and I'd assume a lot of other people that is way too much damn money. I might be willing to pay $12 a month for unlimited access but there is no way I'd fork over more than $20 a month. I've got WiFi access at my house with a faster connection than most hotspots I've come across.
I'd sign up for a month-to-month contract is a heartbeat if it offered wide coverage and a low monthly cost. As it is I rarely use WiFi hotspots because of the price and inconvenience. It is really nice to be able to use WiFi internet access but I'm fine just listening to shared iTunes playlists.
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I think a better approach to this situation is block the MAC addresses of people infected with viruses and such and notify them. Only then should the school's official AV packages and stuff be offered to the students. Some people have effective protections of their computers and aren't electronic Typhoid Marys. Requiring these people to potentially break their working systems with the school's software as a matter of policy is ridiculous. It should be optional and a well definied portion of the ResNet's TOS.
Eventually such a policy will lead to non-Windows systems being banned from the network. If some AV package is required by unavailable and not likely to be needed on MacOS or Linux some jackass will eventually rule that those OSes shouldn't be allowed to break the network policy. Linux and Mac users (along with savvy Windows users) should be punished because Windows is ubiquitous and insecure.
You're trying to shoehorn the wrong sort of application into Xgrid and for some reason expecting it to work. Problems that can't be solved in a loosely coupled parallel environment are not well suited to be run on something like Xgrid. In the case of your fax numbers a custom Xgrid plug-in would probably be the least efficient way of doing the work. It would likely take longer to distribute the list and binaries to agents than it would for one fast system to run through the program.
Xgrid isn't meant to solve all computational problems. It is designed to solve the ones involving long independent or at worst loosely coupled problems.
Feeding a remote process data is not as difficult as you're describing. If the program you're using doesn't support ranges in arguments it isn't too difficult to wrap a script around it that does understand input ranges. The Xgrid client makes it pretty simple to use ranges as arguments for programs. It's possible to use the likes of Blender and Xgrid to do distributed rendering. Ergo input control doesn't seem to be a terribly difficult hurdle to overcome with Xgrid.
I suspect the Allen Telescope Array will be providing quite a bit more data for SETI@Home to chew on. Not only will be it scanning a wider range of frequencies but an order of magnitude more stars. The extra data along with the enhanced processing taken from the 3.03 S@H client will likely keep the project plenty busy for a while longer. Optical SETI is also gaining some mindshare and research dollars. I don't think it will be too long before an optical scan tool is added to the new BOINC client.
Before the Cingular buyout, AT&T was implementing EDGE in several of their larger markets. IIRC it was released in the greater Chicago area, Los Angeles, and the Northeast Corridor. I assume but am not sure that the service is still in existance as AT&T's GPRS service hasn't changed since the buyout.
Actually with EDGE you're looking at maximum connection speeds of 384kbps with 48kbps per time slot. While a good EDGE connection won't compare to a high speed DSL or cable connection it doesn't necessarily have to in order to be useful. Web browsing and checking/sending e-mail doesn't exactly require a 4mbps internet connection. For many simply being able have an online presence is enough. Instant messaging, RSS feeds, and e-mail aren't necessarily technologies in need of überbandwidth.
The Mac platform is in a very strong position right now. It's taken several years but finally the Mac is a strong platform with lots of third party support and momentum in the computer market. Seven years ago people weren't even sure Apple would be around to honor three year AppleCare warranties; today people are building supercompuers with Apple logos. The Mac is making a comeback in niche markets it largely lost to Windows-based workstations in the late 90s. It's also entering the Enterprise market and making a big impression in the big iron Unix world.
What VARs and Apple Specialists need to do is turn themselves into support services for these markets. They can continue to sell Apple's hardware but they need to start focussing on the words in their titles. Selling a school some eMacs is one thing. Selling them some eMacs and setting them up a central directory, file, and mail server with a hardware support contract is something else entirely. These sorts of services they can bill by the hour and guarantee with contracts.
Many companies only stick with Windows PCs because they don't think there's anything else in the world that can possibly work. Part of the job of the Apple retail stores is to provide a place where people can come see their products in action. VARs and SPs should go a step beyond that and really show businesses that they could save money or make more money by switching away from Windows.
Likewise their focus on corporate deployments really hinders home/clueless users. There's too many parts of Windows that are needlessly complex and confusing and require a professional to really handle. That is ridiculous even in an OS intended for corporate deployments. Needless complexity only increases the possibility of something going wrong.
Hemp and Muastard seeds have very high oil and protein contents. They're both about 40% oil in the seeds. The leftover mash is high in protein and makes excellent animal feed.
Hey there's this awesome invention, maybe you've heard of it, it's called the Sun. At our distance from it we receive about 1kW/m^2 of energy at ground level. That is a lot of energy to collect. Photosynthetic organisms make excellent use of this energy and can do all sorts of cool things with it.
Oh yeah we can also convert this energy into other forms and store it for our own use chemically. Crop tenders, processing equipment, water pumps, and many other aspects of biodiesel manufacture can be performed by solar powered machinery.
Besides you seem to not understand the biofuel carbon cycle is closed. Any carbon released from burning biodiesel is carbon absorbed from the atmosphere during photosynthesis. If you've got an end-to-end solar-biodiesel system you're not releasing any extra carbon into the environment. Pumping fossil fuels out of the ground and burning them is releasing carbon into the environment that has been effectively removed from it for millions of years.
The real cool thing with this story is the fact the black holes were discovered using the Astronomical Virtual Observatory (AVO). The AVO is a giant database of images take from a variety of telescopes including Hubble, Chndra, and the VLT in Chile.
Hubble for instance aquires about a terabyte of data every year. Some projects under development now will collect that much data every single day. Virtual observatories let anyone grab some of this data to work with it. There's a lot of new information being collected or digitzed every day which means just that much more data to mine for every region of the sky.
An excellent example of this (besides this recent discovery) is the research done on the KBO 2001 KX76. A team of European astronomers used a program called Astrovirtel based out of the European Southern Observatory to better map the orbit of the KBO. They were able to parse over data going back to 1982 which means they were able to watch almost 20 years worth of the KBO's orbit. One of the researchers was even able to perform some of the processing work on his home computer. The orbital mapping of 2001 KX76 gives credence to the theory that it is actually larger than Ceres and thus the largest space rock discovered in the solar system thus far.
Virtual astronomy can easily find information on just about any observed object that varies by some bit over time. Examining old plates has been a hallmark of astronomy for years but these new virtual observatory projects take the concept to a higher level. The discoveries of these black holes is a testament to how useful it is to be able to mine through years of observations from entirely different types of observatories. For some types of research it makes telescope time, which is typically hard to come by, a bit less important. It also opens the door for anyone to do astronomical research.
Virtual astronomy is really open source astronomy. The collective work of hundreds of individuals can be leveraged by just about anyone. These same people can also contribute back to the VOs for other people down the road to work with.
You really need to get your fact straight before spouting off this sort of crap. In 1983 Steve Jobs began to court John Sculley, the president of Pepsi, to join Apple. By April of that year Sculley was working for Apple. Even though Sculley was a good businessman it became quite obvious he knew squat about the computer industry or computers altogether. In 1985 Jobs and Sculley were arguing like crazy. Jobs was convinced sculley was going to run Apple into the ground. He planned a boardroom coup while Sculley was on a business trip but somebody told Sculley before he left and him and Jobs got into it. The board sided unanimously with Sculley and Jobs resigned that day.
Ergo your mythical tale of Steve Jobs keeping the price of the Mac too high is far-fetched at best and outright stupid at worst. Sculley made a swath of ridiculous business descisions and was responsible for Apple's look-and-feel lawsuit loss against Microsoft. Sculley got Bill Gates to put in writing that Windows 1.0 wouldn't use any of the Mac's technologies. Gates' lawyers made sure the contract was airtight. The contract didn't mention any system besides Windows 1.0, Microsoft was contractually free to copy the Mac interface willy nilly in subsequent versions of Windows.
People love to blame Steve Jobs for all of Apple's problems but he was entirely absent from business descisions between 1985 and 1997. In the times Jobs has been present the Mac and Apple have done pretty well. Jobs has made tons of mistakes but he isn't responsible for many of Apple's problems in the past two decades.
I haven't seen a case where disabling swap actually increases performance. I have however seen lots of cases where disregard for logic involving swap space caused serious performance problems. The old 1.5x and 2x rules for swap space are outdated and even dangerous in today's systems with ooglebytes of memory.
With less than 128MB of RAM you practically need 2x your physical memory worth of swap space. Running a full GUI environment, even a relatively lightweight one, needs quite a bit of system memory. With 64MB of RAM and a 128MB of swap space you'll be able to run a light GUI environment but have a crappy filesystem cache. The system will crawl but it won't get constant OOM errors if you're not overzealous with your app usage.
The 2x RAM rule on a system with 512MB of physical RAM on the otherhand is excessive. With 1GB of swap space most of it will end up empty unless you're running programs needing huge amounts of allocated memory. With more than 512MB or more of physical memory on a single user workstation you're pretty unlikely to run into situations where active pages are swapped out to disk.
I've seen the runaway process situation crop up on more than one system with excessive amounts of swap space. Since swap is so slow it can be troublesome to kill a process that is using so much memory that it ends up having active pages swapped to disk. The system ends up spending 99% of its time trying to handle the disk IO from the heavy swapping which can make the system totally unresponsive for local and remote users. Because the systems had way more swap space than was logical the offending processes never got OOM errors even though they were using up almost all of the system's resources.
I've pretty much set 256MB as the upper limit for my systems with 256MB or more of physical memory. That is enough swap space to hold any dirty pages or unused processes but not so much that a runaway process is going to eat up all my disk IO for a couple of hours. Once a system hits the 256MB threshold I toss out the silly 2x RAM rules for something with a little more cognitive thought.
There's a few basics you need to consider for your project page. What your project is, what it is used for, where to get it, how to use it, and where to go if you need help. There's a lot of SF projects that totally fail to provide that information to potential users.
The first thing your project site needs to tell me is what the hell the project is. Acronyms are nice and all but without some real words somewhere it is going to make it exceedingly difficult to tell the difference between MyPBS, phpBB, CBS, NBC, and FBI. This part should be in relatively simple terms with lots of keywords so search engines can easily find and rank it.
Unless it is glaringly obvious tell me what I might do with this. Your project might be just the thing I'm looking for but it also might be almost what I need. I might be able to adapt it and fire off an e-mail to you informing you of my extentions and your project can grow a little bit. If I'm looking for some particular bit of information out of two billion plus pages indexed in Google I'd notice your project if you make it simple for me to find such information.
Next tell me where I can pick up the latest and past releases of the project. I loathe having to skim through SourceForge's project pages to find a particular link to the latest release of some project. A couple of direct links won't kill you and they'll make my life easier.
Once I've got the sucker downloaded let me know how to install and use it. Well written instructions can mean the difference between your project growing and being popular or being stagnant and overlooked. Your potential users shouldn't have to pour over your source code to figure out how to use your software. If you feel static documentation is a little too daunting of a task make a documentation Wiki. Write out your initial set of instructions and such and let your users and developers amend those instructions as needed. Users who couldn't code to save their lives might be able to contribute some clarified instructions or maybe provide usage examples from their own experiences.
Finally provide me with a couple different means of communicating with members of the project team. If you really want to build a nice bit of software make it easy to form a community out of your users. Mailing lists, bulletin boards, and newsgroups help turn groups of overwise disconnected users into a connected community. I personally feel OSS projects work much better when the developers and users have a lot of interaction. With OSS users can often times be unofficial developers which makes this interaction all the more important.
As was already mentioned, your project page doesn't need to be some big parade of multimedia. As long as it conveys the information it is supposed to and is clearly laid out it doesn't matter what you do stylistically to it. If you don't intend to update the page often don't under any circumstances put a contemporary news section. If you feel the need for "news" post the changelogs for your latest releases or maybe a project status section. Few things are worse on OSS project pages than seeing "news" that is more than six months old despite an aggressive release schedule. HTH.
Pixar is doing extremely well thus far because they've released hits, some of these were hits due in no small part to the Disney marketing machine. While I don't think Pixar's exactly on the losing end of the breakup a lot of their success has been tied to their partnership with Disney.
Disney's power comes from its ability to milk their franchises dry. They've got the Disney channel, their retail chain, third party retailers, and their theme parks to generate cash. They can start a media and retail blitz to hype their movies. A movie that doesn't do well at the box office might end up being a DVD darling or have a successful line of toys or collectibles. They've also got the media channel to do animated series or sequels based on their feature films.
Aladdin is an excellent example of their franchise machine. The movie was very successful in the box office and probably one of the better movies they had done in a long time. The movie was supported by a blitz of toys, video games, and collectibles. Following the success of the movie they made a rather popular television series based on the first film. The series was capped with two straight to video sequels, one featuring the return of Robin Williams as the voice of the Genie. Their one movie that might have made a few hundred million in the box office worldwide ended up making them tons more money as a franchise.
Toy Story has turned into the same sort of franchise. There's an animated series based around Buzz Lightyear, a huge line of toys and collectibles, and then a second movie that was more popular even than the first. Pixar sees only a small fraction of the TS franchise revenue.
Because Disney designs all their films to be franchise darlings is not necessarily a good thing. Pixar's strength lies in its ability to make good movies. Disney's films are just shiny enough to sucker little kids into building Disney themed Christmas lists. Pixar's films are entertaining to people of various ages and rarely give you the feeling you're being hypnotized into buying licensed products at your earliest convenience.
I think Pixar and the other non-Disney studios stand a pretty good chance of ending Disney's media reign in the near (10 yrs) future. Dreamwrosk in particular has been honing their art of sniping away at Disney's core audience. Shrek is friendly enough for the Disney core audience yet enticing enough to keep their parents interested. I don't have any doubt Pixar will be able to pull the same stunt once they're out from the Disney mantle. Neither has the marketing machine of Disney but they are both giving the artistic aspects of their companies more creative control than the suited bean counters. There's a huge market of people yearning for some entertainment that isn't the watered down uncreative crapfest that Disney's films have become.
I suppose you don't do real work on your computer. For many people their home directories store thousands of man-hours worth of work. Whether its uncommited code, customer databases, important e-mail, Photoshop files, iTunes music, or a master's thesis it is all stuff you're not getting back if it goes away. Someone doesn't have to get ahold of your bank account numbers to cause you financial harm either. If they can snag an e-mail with your Paypal information they can do all sorts of nasty stuff.
That is far worse than losing your system and application software with a root level exploit. You can reinstall your system and applications, you can't necessarily reinstall your personal files.
You can only modify /Applications if you're an admin user. Standard users don't have write privileges in /Applications. Though OSX doesn't do it by default it ought to make all new users Standard users. Panther will ask if to authenticate if you do try to drag something into /Applications.
There's quite a bit of hemp farming in eastern Europe (Romainia and Hungary) and Asia. There's also quite a bit of hemp farming going on in western Europe and a production base is growing slowly in Canada. The main import of hemp in the US is in the form of sterilized seeds used for animal feed. A good 20% of commercial bird feed is hemp seeds as they're extremely high in protein for their mass. Because hemp has had seventy years of bad press for various reasons it isn't nearly as popular in Western farming as it is elsewhere. China produces quite a few hemp textile products but you rarely find them in the US due to ridiculously high protective tariffs.
DuPont and Hearst attacking hemp production for their own ends isn't a conspiracy theory, it is what happened. From about 1000B.C. until after the American Civil War hemp was the world's largest crop. During the second World War farmers were innundated with incentives to grow hemp for various uses by the USDA. If you grew hemp on your farm you and your sons were exempt from military service. Up until 1920 all government documents were printed on hemp paper. Even Henery Ford was in on hemp production. He found that making plastics out of hemp oil and cellulose resulted in side panels for cars that were ten times the impact strength of steel panels.
Once the Marijuana Taxation Act passed it became too expensive and effectively illegal to grow hemp. The US government had to override the MTA to allow farmers to grow hemp during the war. In the 1920s the situation with DuPont and Hearst came about because a man named George Schlichten invented a decorticator which could strip fibers from any plant. It was the Witney cotton gin of the hemp industry. Until then processing hemp was an extremely labor intensive process and had fallen behind cotton as the number one textile crop after the abolition of slavery in the US. Schlichten's decorticator was set to revitalize the hemp industry before Hearst and his cohorts started their campaign.
What is worse than having your home directory deleted? I don't give two shakes about /System, all my important stuff is in ~/.
Using hemp to make paper is even better than you might realize (or maybe you do realize. Hemp can be bleached with relatively friendly hydrogen peroxide. The paper itself is naturally less acidic so it doesn't yellow or become brittle with age. Wood pulp paper on the other hand has to be bleached with chlorine-based bleach and the waste water of the process is a main source of the world's dioxin pollution. Also without additional processing wood pulp paper is fairly acidic and yellows and becomes brittle with age. Find an old newspaper for material evidense of this phenomenon. The processing of the hemp pulp also only uses 14-25% of the sulfer-based acids that the wood pulp process uses.
On the recycling front hemp paper is quite a bit more useful than wood pulp paper. Hemp paper can be easily recycled up to seven times while wood pulp paper is strained to be recycled three times. The various lengths of fiber in hemp plants are also well suited to different tasks. The long fibers work well in stationary and books while the shorter fibers are good for making newsprint, tissue paper, and packing material.
As to why hemp is not grown in the US look no further than big business. The short story is Lammont Du Pont's company figured out how to refine coal and oil into synthetic fibers of various trade names they also figured out a new (cheaper) method to make paper from wood pulp. William Hearst's Paper Manufacturing division, Kimberly Clark (USA), owned some 800,000 acres of forested land and wanted to use DuPont's process for making newsprint. Hemp's advantages over wood pulp paper were well known in the 1930s. Hearst's monopolistic control over the country's newspapers let him start a huge yellow journalism smear campaign against hemp. He attacked the marijuana plant which is a small shrub-like cousin of hemp. Good marijuana plants are about 7-11% THC where the typical hemp plant is only 0.9%, hemp is not going to get anyone high.
Hearst got a lackey of his, Herman Oliphant the general counsel of the Treasury Department, to draw up an anti-hemp bill. Oliphant did so by modeling the Marijuana Taxation Act after the National Firearms Act passed in 1934. The NFA was designed as anti-machinegun legistlation but instead of technically prohibiting them merely taxed them in preposterous ways making them virtually prohibited. The MTA was based on the same principle and had a legal leg to stand on when the NFA was uphelp by the Supreme Court in 1937, two weeks before the MTA was introduced. Later marijuana was attached to the Boggs act in 1951 which was a list of prohibited narcotic substances.
The disk: protocol is designed to automount images off the web, that is why it exists in the first place. Developers can offer up images off their sites users can mount directly so there's no need to download the image, install the app, and delete the image. Once the app is installed the user can just unmount it. It is a nice functionality but Apple needs to sandbox the process since an image mounted off the web should be untrusted.
You can also build one of these to do your cooking for you. They can be build by various means for a pretty low price. Combine some collectors and a lens and you'll have a nice little material heater.
AT&T and Cingular both charge $80 a month for unlimited GPRS data access. Only T-Mobile is offering $20/mo data service, that is not a trend. AT&T and Cingular might drop their rates tomorrow making my arguement invalid but as of right now they are only offer extremely expensive unlimited access.
WiFi hot spots aren't exactly lowering their prices either. Because Boingo has a subsidized network they're offering cheap but limited access to doesn't mean the core networks are lowering their prices. Boingo might be out of business next week. I think Boingo's situation is all the more sobering with Cometa calling it quits. Cometa was backed by companies with a good deal of money and they weren't able to offer unlimited cheap WiFi access. That does not really lend support to your assertion that prices are heading downward.
T-Mobile's service is a good idea and would be great if I were one of their subscribers. I am not however which makes their HotSpot service far too expensive for me to use more than occassionally. AT&T's (my provider) GoPort service (which piggybacks Wayport in many locations) is no cheaper for their customers than it is for their non-customers. Their GPRS data services are also horribly priced. AT&T's coverage has always been superior to T-Mobile's in my experience, especially now after the Cingular buyout but their data plans WiFi and otherwise are absoltely horrible.
For me free WiFi hotspots aren't always an option though I take advantage of them whenever possible. When you're sitting in DFW or ATL there isn't exactly a plethora of free WiFi hotspots to connect to. The same goes for most of the Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores in southern California.
When $20 WiFi services become accessible to me and have connectivity in places useful to me I'll likely sign up for them. Until then they're priced horribly or are technically out of reach for me because I choose not to run Windows.
I wouldn't be surprised but would be disappointed if Cometa's network was bought up by Wayport and T-Mobile. After using both services I've been left with a bad taste in my mouth for fee-based WiFi access. Both groups charge exorbitant amounts of money for access. Wayport charges $6.95 at most airports for unlimited access from the time you purchase until midnight, T-Mobile wants $9.95 for 24 continuous hours of connectivity. For month-to-month access Wayport charges $49.95 and T-Mobile charges $39.95.
If you bought access for a large group of travelers or were somehow able to use the hotspots for all of your high-speed access needs the prices might not be so bad. For me and I'd assume a lot of other people that is way too much damn money. I might be willing to pay $12 a month for unlimited access but there is no way I'd fork over more than $20 a month. I've got WiFi access at my house with a faster connection than most hotspots I've come across.
I'd sign up for a month-to-month contract is a heartbeat if it offered wide coverage and a low monthly cost. As it is I rarely use WiFi hotspots because of the price and inconvenience. It is really nice to be able to use WiFi internet access but I'm fine just listening to shared iTunes playlists.