100M is generally "good enough" for the average joe in his boat, who uses GPS as an aid to visual navigation. Hell it is even good enough to assist in flying an aircraft.
Yes, but I wouldn't want to be flying with you when your GPS receiver says you are less than 100M above the ground....:-).
Also GPS vertical accuracy is less than its horizontal precision due to satellite geometry; 100M horizontal accuracy translates into about 140M (100M * root 2) vertical accuracy.
Normally the signal degradation can be significantly improved by using one of the many forms of differential GPS, where a receiver in a known local location transmits error correction data to your unit. IIRC, such units are accurate to less than 1M.
does it really matter if I fly through the front door of the targeted embasy, or the front window on the left? Nope it doesn't make much difference which window of the Chinese embassy you fly your bomb through, it'll still be the wrong target!
Back on topic though, whilst it doesn't make much difference when hitting an embassy, 22 yards does make a difference if you are trying to kill a hard target such an ICBM silo or a nuclear-resistant bunker. When attacking such targets, you need pinpoint accuracy.
In practice it probably doesn't matter too much, even in the Gulf War (1991) the US was playing around with using an optical recognition system in conjunction with GPS. In those circumstances, the GPS gets you in the proximity of the target and the optical recognition system can drive you through the keyhole.....
I strongly wish that Mr. Garbus does succeed and wish him well. Whilst I am not a US citizen, US copyright law has a major influence on copyright (and trade) law in the rest of the world.
After the DMCA, I think the next targets should be longevity of copyright (95 years) and software patents (17-20 years?). There's not much dispute both need to exist, but the length of the timeframe is equally beyond dispute.
Individual system builders are still IMO unlikely to go for a Duron when for $50 more you can have a full Athlon system. Both are cheaper than an equivalent Celeron or Pentium III system.
With Athlons, you get the same or better performance than an equivalent Intel processor, so there's a reason to buy. A Duron, whilst it offers reasonable bang per buck, just does not seem to offer the same type of 'bang'. System upgraders probably see little point in upgrading to a Duron when the full T/Bird is within their price band.
...speaking as someone who supplied some patches to DeCSS, and writes telecoms network management software for money, I see little reason why people cannot be multi-disciplinary. Very few people nowadays are expert in all fields of software, and no one pretends to be, but we can be masters of many areas rather than just one.
His comments about Linux and Unixes were also off point - he fails to realise that the command line environment is an extremely efficient one for an experienced operator. Point and click environments are great for newbies, but I've yet to meet one that increases productivity for an operator who knows his onions. I do use GUIs and they're great when I'm not too familiar with what I'm doing, but when I know the area inside out its Shell Time.
I came away from this article feeling he just wanted to be inflammatory; if he'd posted this as a Slashdot comment he would've got so many (-1 Troll/Flamebait) mod points that his karma wouldn't have recovered till the fourth millenium!
...a full Athlon does not cost that much more. I think one problem of competing for low end business is that AMDs lowest end processor is being priced out of the market.
..used to be called Prestel, a Teletext type service received over the phone. A rather famous early hacking case arose when a couple of people hacked their way into the Duke of Edinburghs (the Queens husband, for any Yanks out there) postbox. IIRC, the two people (Gold and Schifreen?) hacked their way in, told BT how it was possible, got arrested, charged and imprisoned, and won on appeal. Another famous case of British justice in action!
Teletext itself actually is capable of a lot more things than 40x25 character displays, and ASCII art. There are (or used to be) various Teletext support levels, and displays which support higher levels can display higher resolution graphics. You also used to be able to download programs from them; UK owners of the BBC Micro (which together with the Sinclair ZX80/81/ Spectrum kick started personal computing in the UK) could download programs over air.
Also when costs of Internet access were sky high, many companies used teletext to multicast to their various offices using encrypted teletext ( Conditional Access). Ladbrokes, one of the largest UK betting concerns, used to do this (and may still do so).
In the US, I believe you sacrifice Teletext for Closed Captioning Subtitles, which teletext also supports in a more limited fashion.
I feel governments should be encouraged to adopt more Open Source software. $129,000 doesn't sound a lot, but that is for a mere 800 of 6000+ packages. Multiplying up means Virginia Beach Municipal government has spent $1,000,000 with Microsoft, and replicated across the States that is a huge figure. They aren't necessarily even getting great support for it since MS licenses are infamous for protecting them from everything and anything resembling responsibility.
If the appropriate Open Source software existed then their software expenditure would be for 1CD plus a few blanks, and then employing the requisite support staff [which they have to do anyway to run their Windows systems].
Slashdot posted an earlier article concerning setting up a company to markety Open Source software to government, and after reading and thinking about this I realise that it is a Good Thing (TM).
This kind of security and usability is fine for geeks and admins, but just isn't the kind of thing that my Grandma could use. Using chmod 644 is not necessary to set file permissions; for individual files I just do like any Windows user: right click on the file and access Properties. I'm running KDE, but you can do the same with Gnome or any other X Windows system.
I set up Unix accounts for visiting 8-10 year olds on my home network, so I'm sure your Granny would have no problem.
Even my girlfriend who:
a) has almost no computer experience
b) isn't intellectually the brightest tool in the box,
now understands what the root user on my system is for and can perform some limited admin tasks on my network.
Unix does require a little patience to explain novel concepts to Windows users like security, but after people have overcome the intimidation factor they understand the advantages.
With all due respect, but I still think a M$ network is easier to maintain than a *Nix one.
And as a previous poster already mentioned, we have to care for our Minesweeper-addicted public workers, don't we? There is little shortage of Minesweeper clones in the Unix world.
I'm not convinced a Unix network is harder to manage than a M$ one; the only area where I would agree that Unix is a bit lacking is in the quality and breadth of Office type software. KOffice is getting there but has a long way to catch up before it reaches the functionality of Office. [ Having said that though, how many people actually use anything like the full functionality of any Office package ?]. And whilst there is StarOffice, WordPerfect et el, none of them are quite up there with Office. and of course there is the external compatibility issues too.
I hardly see any reason for Linux fragmenting. About the only thing which might cause this is if Linus got run over by a bus tomorrow, where there might be a scrabble for control, and a divergence of opinion in which way the kernel ought to go. But I personally believe and hope the leading developers would be able to get it together enough for the kernel to go on.
There is plenty of scope for divergence in Linux already by making a different distribution. A mahor example of this happened with the formation of the Mandrake distro, which IIRC was specifically to incorporate KDE on top of a standard RH distro when there were arguments over KDE licensing. Distributions often attempt to emphasise different things, e.g. Bastille emmphasises security, Debian tries to stay as GPL as possible, RedHat tries to be as buggy as possible:-)....etc.
In summary, there is plenty of leeway for all sorts of Linux enthusiasts to make and get the exact type of Linux that they want or need.
It is true there are these things called IP addresses, with 32 (or 128 with v6) bits to allocate to servers, but one of the things about IP addresses is that they are meant not to convey any information about where you are or what area your company happens to service.
On reading this I thought this was a damn silly idea, but at least with these numbers you stand a chance of dealing with a local company. However, its simpler just to enter www.dominospizza.com in your browser and look search for the local shop.
He's since gone on to write a few more; maybe writing pays better than computing!
I agree though, that producing an autobiography at Linus' tender age is a bit ridiculous. A 'life' excerpt book sounds a much better idea. OTOH, if biographies of certain footballers get written when they are in their 20's, why shouldn't Linus jump on the bandwagon ?
I really enjoyed Stranger in a Strange Land, although the philosophy of the book does indeed reflect a sort of 60's true love ambiance that is wholly incredible in todays self serving and AIDs fearing world.
To say Heinlein is a terrible author on the strength of this book is almost incredible; the imagination and scope of this book is vast and in the main it carries it off with style and humour. There are indeed some books written by Heinlein which are awful, this is indeed a masterpiece in any science fiction library.
Whilst again not wishing to flame or troll, I was surprised that the previous/. commenter had gone so far as to read others written by Heinlein. I haven't read Starship Troopers, but I suspect the fascist tone is not intended in praise but is a p**s take of the first order. In terms of "Stranger...", in order to hate your enemy you have to first understand him so well that your hate is almost born out of love.
Harmless and beneficial? Maybe not!
on
Golden Rice
·
· Score: 3
Adding beta carotene may indeed have all the temporary benefits stated, but one has to remember that nature is famous for adapting to changed circumstances.
Even 20 years ago, the thought that nature would come up with resistances to almost all our antibiotics was regarded as almost unthinkable, yet here we are with strains of TB, malaria and E.Coli with just one or even no antibiotics which are effective against them.
My caveats against Golden rice, are that whilst it will be almost certainly effective in the short term, it will add several million people to the hungry nations of the world and 10 years or so later we will have to come up with something new. Even more importantly, introducing a single crop which most of the world will be critically dependent on introduces a single point of failure into the crop system, so anything which adversely affect that crop would devastate the Third World.
The Real Solution IMO, is to educate and encourage diversity in the eating habits of the rest of the world. This is a solution which doesn't have a problem with patents, but is obviously unpopular as no one is willing to fund it, whereas the GM companies are probably salivating at getting this idea as the 'foot in the door' to get GM products acceptable to the rest of the world.
Reuters: In a new twist to recent events, a GPL company has secured its first major government contract announced the Press Office for the Governor of Florida.
FreeDevelopers.net, a commercial software company which develops software distributed using an 'open' license, known as the GPL, which allows users to freely copy and distribute the software, won the contract against intense competition fromm IBM and Compaq.
The multimillion dollar contract, to develop a statewide foolproof voting system, attracted intense interest after the furore caused by vote counting in the US Presidential Elections.
"I'm extremely pleased that the company has shown that it can beat the best the commercial world has to offer" said Tony Stanco, president of FreeDevelopers.net.
I presume its going to make its money from supporting the said software.
It said in the article that the company is going to bid on government projects, but if all the government has to do is get one copy of the GPL software which it can then freely distribute according to the GPL, then isn't the revenue stream of the company going to be a bit limited ?
Slashdot Mirror
100M is generally "good enough" for the average joe in his boat, who uses GPS as an aid to visual navigation. Hell it is even good enough to assist in flying an aircraft.
:-).
Yes, but I wouldn't want to be flying with you when your GPS receiver says you are less than 100M above the ground....
Also GPS vertical accuracy is less than its horizontal precision due to satellite geometry; 100M horizontal accuracy translates into about 140M (100M * root 2) vertical accuracy.
Normally the signal degradation can be significantly improved by using one of the many forms of differential GPS, where a receiver in a known local location transmits error correction data to your unit. IIRC, such units are accurate to less than 1M.
Apropos GPS accuracy degradation...
does it really matter if I fly through the front door of the targeted embasy, or the front window on the left?
Nope it doesn't make much difference which window of the Chinese embassy you fly your bomb through, it'll still be the wrong target!
Back on topic though, whilst it doesn't make much difference when hitting an embassy, 22 yards does make a difference if you are trying to kill a hard target such an ICBM silo or a nuclear-resistant bunker. When attacking such targets, you need pinpoint accuracy.
In practice it probably doesn't matter too much, even in the Gulf War (1991) the US was playing around with using an optical recognition system in conjunction with GPS. In those circumstances, the GPS gets you in the proximity of the target and the optical recognition system can drive you through the keyhole.....
I strongly wish that Mr. Garbus does succeed and wish him well. Whilst I am not a US citizen, US copyright law has a major influence on copyright (and trade) law in the rest of the world.
After the DMCA, I think the next targets should be longevity of copyright (95 years) and software patents (17-20 years?). There's not much dispute both need to exist, but the length of the timeframe is equally beyond dispute.
Still, one hurdle at a time....
Please email me with your proper email address and site - I tried what I thought was your email address with no luck!
Why did you think this was silly?..
Individual system builders are still IMO unlikely to go for a Duron when for $50 more you can have a full Athlon system. Both are cheaper than an equivalent Celeron or Pentium III system.
With Athlons, you get the same or better performance than an equivalent Intel processor, so there's a reason to buy. A Duron, whilst it offers reasonable bang per buck, just does not seem to offer the same type of 'bang'. System upgraders probably see little point in upgrading to a Duron when the full T/Bird is within their price band.
...speaking as someone who supplied some patches to DeCSS, and writes telecoms network management software for money, I see little reason why people cannot be multi-disciplinary. Very few people nowadays are expert in all fields of software, and no one pretends to be, but we can be masters of many areas rather than just one.
His comments about Linux and Unixes were also off point - he fails to realise that the command line environment is an extremely efficient one for an experienced operator. Point and click environments are great for newbies, but I've yet to meet one that increases productivity for an operator who knows his onions. I do use GUIs and they're great when I'm not too familiar with what I'm doing, but when I know the area inside out its Shell Time.
I came away from this article feeling he just wanted to be inflammatory; if he'd posted this as a Slashdot comment he would've got so many (-1 Troll/Flamebait) mod points that his karma wouldn't have recovered till the fourth millenium!
...a full Athlon does not cost that much more. I think one problem of competing for low end business is that AMDs lowest end processor is being priced out of the market.
..used to be called Prestel, a Teletext type service received over the phone. A rather famous early hacking case arose when a couple of people hacked their way into the Duke of Edinburghs (the Queens husband, for any Yanks out there) postbox. IIRC, the two people (Gold and Schifreen?) hacked their way in, told BT how it was possible, got arrested, charged and imprisoned, and won on appeal. Another famous case of British justice in action!
Teletext itself actually is capable of a lot more things than 40x25 character displays, and ASCII art. There are (or used to be) various Teletext support levels, and displays which support higher levels can display higher resolution graphics. You also used to be able to download programs from them; UK owners of the BBC Micro (which together with the Sinclair ZX80/81/ Spectrum kick started personal computing in the UK) could download programs over air.
Also when costs of Internet access were sky high, many companies used teletext to multicast to their various offices using encrypted teletext ( Conditional Access). Ladbrokes, one of the largest UK betting concerns, used to do this (and may still do so).
In the US, I believe you sacrifice Teletext for Closed Captioning Subtitles, which teletext also supports in a more limited fashion.
I feel governments should be encouraged to adopt more Open Source software. $129,000 doesn't sound a lot, but that is for a mere 800 of 6000+ packages. Multiplying up means Virginia Beach Municipal government has spent $1,000,000 with Microsoft, and replicated across the States that is a huge figure. They aren't necessarily even getting great support for it since MS licenses are infamous for protecting them from everything and anything resembling responsibility.
If the appropriate Open Source software existed then their software expenditure would be for 1CD plus a few blanks, and then employing the requisite support staff [which they have to do anyway to run their Windows systems].
Slashdot posted an earlier article concerning setting up a company to markety Open Source software to government, and after reading and thinking about this I realise that it is a Good Thing (TM).
This kind of security and usability is fine for geeks and admins, but just isn't the kind of thing that my Grandma could use.
Using chmod 644 is not necessary to set file permissions; for individual files I just do like any Windows user: right click on the file and access Properties. I'm running KDE, but you can do the same with Gnome or any other X Windows system.
I set up Unix accounts for visiting 8-10 year olds on my home network, so I'm sure your Granny would have no problem.
Even my girlfriend who:
a) has almost no computer experience
b) isn't intellectually the brightest tool in the box,
now understands what the root user on my system is for and can perform some limited admin tasks on my network.
Unix does require a little patience to explain novel concepts to Windows users like security, but after people have overcome the intimidation factor they understand the advantages.
With all due respect, but I still think a M$ network is easier to maintain than a *Nix one.
And as a previous poster already mentioned, we have to care for our Minesweeper-addicted public workers, don't we?
There is little shortage of Minesweeper clones in the Unix world.
I'm not convinced a Unix network is harder to manage than a M$ one; the only area where I would agree that Unix is a bit lacking is in the quality and breadth of Office type software. KOffice is getting there but has a long way to catch up before it reaches the functionality of Office. [ Having said that though, how many people actually use anything like the full functionality of any Office package ?]. And whilst there is StarOffice, WordPerfect et el, none of them are quite up there with Office. and of course there is the external compatibility issues too.
Relocate your web server to somewhere more legislation friendly.
Support the bill to make legalise copying of music into electronic format for personal use.
Any others...
Thankyou!!
And it has a fairly early user ID.
Obviously my attempt at non-PC humour went over the earlier posters head....
The real Pac Man is much better IMO
Zander stated in the article:
:-)
/perv mode >
The thing with Linux today--I call it the bathtub.
< perv mode >
I prefer to think of it as a hottub with lots of compliant co-eds in there willing to perform my every whim!
<
I hardly see any reason for Linux fragmenting. About the only thing which might cause this is if Linus got run over by a bus tomorrow, where there might be a scrabble for control, and a divergence of opinion in which way the kernel ought to go. But I personally believe and hope the leading developers would be able to get it together enough for the kernel to go on.
:-) ....etc.
There is plenty of scope for divergence in Linux already by making a different distribution. A mahor example of this happened with the formation of the Mandrake distro, which IIRC was specifically to incorporate KDE on top of a standard RH distro when there were arguments over KDE licensing. Distributions often attempt to emphasise different things, e.g. Bastille emmphasises security, Debian tries to stay as GPL as possible, RedHat tries to be as buggy as possible
In summary, there is plenty of leeway for all sorts of Linux enthusiasts to make and get the exact type of Linux that they want or need.
It is true there are these things called IP addresses, with 32 (or 128 with v6) bits to allocate to servers, but one of the things about IP addresses is that they are meant not to convey any information about where you are or what area your company happens to service.
On reading this I thought this was a damn silly idea, but at least with these numbers you stand a chance of dealing with a local company. However, its simpler just to enter www.dominospizza.com in your browser and look search for the local shop.
That Clifford Stoll book you are referring to is 'The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage'.
He's since gone on to write a few more; maybe writing pays better than computing!
I agree though, that producing an autobiography at Linus' tender age is a bit ridiculous. A 'life' excerpt book sounds a much better idea. OTOH, if biographies of certain footballers get written when they are in their 20's, why shouldn't Linus jump on the bandwagon ?
...to enjoy a book.
/. commenter had gone so far as to read others written by Heinlein. I haven't read Starship Troopers, but I suspect the fascist tone is not intended in praise but is a p**s take of the first order. In terms of "Stranger...", in order to hate your enemy you have to first understand him so well that your hate is almost born out of love.
I really enjoyed Stranger in a Strange Land, although the philosophy of the book does indeed reflect a sort of 60's true love ambiance that is wholly incredible in todays self serving and AIDs fearing world.
To say Heinlein is a terrible author on the strength of this book is almost incredible; the imagination and scope of this book is vast and in the main it carries it off with style and humour. There are indeed some books written by Heinlein which are awful, this is indeed a masterpiece in any science fiction library.
Whilst again not wishing to flame or troll, I was surprised that the previous
Adding beta carotene may indeed have all the temporary benefits stated, but one has to remember that nature is famous for adapting to changed circumstances.
Even 20 years ago, the thought that nature would come up with resistances to almost all our antibiotics was regarded as almost unthinkable, yet here we are with strains of TB, malaria and E.Coli with just one or even no antibiotics which are effective against them.
My caveats against Golden rice, are that whilst it will be almost certainly effective in the short term, it will add several million people to the hungry nations of the world and 10 years or so later we will have to come up with something new. Even more importantly, introducing a single crop which most of the world will be critically dependent on introduces a single point of failure into the crop system, so anything which adversely affect that crop would devastate the Third World.
The Real Solution IMO, is to educate and encourage diversity in the eating habits of the rest of the world. This is a solution which doesn't have a problem with patents, but is obviously unpopular as no one is willing to fund it, whereas the GM companies are probably salivating at getting this idea as the 'foot in the door' to get GM products acceptable to the rest of the world.
...anything to do with aluminium (or aluminum)!!
[Think heatsinks]
Thought for the day:
Why do lots of people predecrement their names in sigs? Is it a sign they're feeling down.
I'd much rather be on the way up....
Instead of
--fred
how about
++fred
?
Some time in the near future, hot off the wire...
Reuters: In a new twist to recent events, a GPL company has secured its first major government contract announced the Press Office for the Governor of Florida.
FreeDevelopers.net, a commercial software company which develops software distributed using an 'open' license, known as the GPL, which allows users to freely copy and distribute the software, won the contract against intense competition fromm IBM and Compaq.
The multimillion dollar contract, to develop a statewide foolproof voting system, attracted intense interest after the furore caused by vote counting in the US Presidential Elections.
"I'm extremely pleased that the company has shown that it can beat the best the commercial world has to offer" said Tony Stanco, president of FreeDevelopers.net.
I presume its going to make its money from supporting the said software.
It said in the article that the company is going to bid on government projects, but if all the government has to do is get one copy of the GPL software which it can then freely distribute according to the GPL, then isn't the revenue stream of the company going to be a bit limited ?
In a recent test, groups of various nationalities on holiday were covertly monitored and asked to perform various tasks.
When it came to partying, the English consumption of alcohol was more than twice their nearest competitor (the Japanese IIRC! ).