I think that we're really holding ourselves back with this dogged belief in MPG, which, in the age of trying to green fuels is just irrelevant. The real question is, how many pounds of CO2 per mile at average highway speeds does the car emit? How many pounds per mile of NOx, or particulates? If the CO2 emissions are reduced even though the raw MPG of some alternative fuel goes down, then we've still come out ahead. Really the EPA is doing us all a disservice by having these MPG standards that really can't account for alternative fuels. Instead I think cars should have some kind of polution index. The higher the number the worse on the environment it is. Even better, have a split pollution index. One is cradle to grave pollution (including manufacturing and estimated shipping costs). The other would be your day-to-day net costs. I think a lot of Prius owners would be socked that their lifetime pollution index is going to be pretty high!
But basically any non-fossil fuel is going to have slightly less energy and require more gallons of fuel for the miles driven. Now of course we all know that ethanol in North America is a bust (I don't think it's good for the environment in Brazil either. They are really just running their cars on rainforest). But maybe something else will come along and will be good. But get used to lower MPG.
Off the topic, but he ironic part of the new high-mileage regulations will ultimately cause GM to import a lot of cheaper, more efficient vehicles from China. Shipping them on very dirty cargo ships. Probably releasing more CO2 and other emissions than our current, not-so-efficient cars do in their lifetimes.
Yes you should sue someone who's blatantly distributing unauthorized copies of your copyrighted work, at least if you can. I mean us OSS guys definitely would like to see people who violate the GPL prosecuted so that they either comply with the license, pay us to license it differently, or stop distributing it.
But while you can and should take action against copyright violators, that won't actually solve your core problem, which is how do you sell more copies of your work. To that problem, "pirates" don't do a whole lot to affect this underlying problem, although I believe they do worsen it somewhat. But after reading your blurb here on slashdot, I'm only mildly curious about your book, but not curious enough to drop $50 on it. I might see if my library has a copy. I'm certainly not interested enough right now to download it off of bittorrent to have a quick look.
So for me you'd have to sell the book for $1, or at most $10 with an online preview. But perhaps if I knew what the book could do for me, what kind of a quality reference it was that I must have, I'd cough up $50.
I recently paid over $30 a book for several O'Reilly books, on the other hand. I'll probably buy every release of Python in a Nutshell because it has a tremendous value to me. But I'm not likely to buy a Star Trek novel, even though I think there are some fantastic stories in that genre. I'll go to my library for that.
So I guess the trick is to find the people for whom your book has value and sell to them. It's a tricky thing, balancing good writing which takes ages, with marketing which is costly. Sometimes authors hit it by pure, dumb luck (Twilight, Harry Potter), when others who have just as engaging stories to tell, go absolutely nowhere. Is Twilight horrible writing? Absolutely. Is it well-marketed? Yes it is. Harry Potter is much better writing and it's well-marketed as well. On the other hand I've read fantasy novels from some local authors that I thought were as good as Harry Potter, but no one seems to know of them (and even I can't remember the authors!).
How could you live if all your money belonged to your corporation? You'd still be taxed on everything your spent. Like your house, your car, anything that had a personal use. In short anything that the company owns could not be used for any personal use, period (that'd have to be in the tax code). If it was used for personal purposes, then it would become personal property, and taxable. Or so the theory goes.
But yeah, people are prone to abuse absolutely every code out there, so without a lot of strict controls such a scheme could not work. But it's clear our current tax codes aren't working very well either. The very rich pay little income tax by claiming all kinds of bizarre exemptions. The very large companies pay very little tax too (based on percentage). This unfairly burdens the average middle class folks. It's a mess. The Obama plan to crack down on certain kinds of abuses will likely not work either.
The best solution I've ever heard to the tax problem in general is to eliminate corporate income taxes completely. Then close every last loophole in the personal income tax code. No more writing off cars as business expenses for personal use, or houses, or swimming pools. Either it's owned by the corporation or it's owned by an individual who happens to work for a corporation. If a CEO rewards himself with a new car that's paid for by the company, then he pays income taxes on that. This type of tax structure would cut down on abuses of the tax code by the very wealthy while at the same time encouraging companies to invest money back into themselves. In other words corporations would have an incentive to do something useful with their money rather, helping the national economy, rather than hiding it off-shore.
Not only would this scheme promote businesses right here in the US, it would even out the tax disparity between the extremes of personal income levels.
Sadly it will never happen. Not in a million years.
Actually they are not. Forums are really horrible collaboration mediums. They don't preserve any kind of conversational flow (forums are flat, usually in a straight chronological order within a topic). Additionally topics that might be of interest frequently fall off the front page and die rather quickly while other popular threads go on for thousands of posts and have to be split into new topics. These two flaws make it really really hard for someone to jump into an existing conversation. Having to go back and read hundreds of pages of posts trying to find relevant pieces of information is extremely time consuming. And half when you open a new topic people will say, "this has been discussed many times. Search the forum." But forums all have horrid search features. It's not so much that the algorithms are bad but rather there is a lot of noise (even relevant noise). Also I find forums to be very slow and cumbersome. Having to load a new page just to check to see if there are new posts is really bad, and it gets even worse when you are trying to follow many different forums on different sites.
Compare this to the various OSS mailing lists I'm on. It takes me about 15 seconds to fire up thunderbird and see all the different folders (filtered according to list) and where there are new messages. The threaded e-mail display makes it very easy for me to jump into conversations (lessons the problem of trying to get relevant background info). For example, in the GTK list I tend to look for posts from key developers in a thread and follow that section (branch) of the thread. I can see them right away without going through pages of posts. I follow probably a dozen lists this way. However I only follow forums occasionally because they are so awkward compared to this.
I think forums exist for several reasons, none of which are particularly good. I know in the case of rcgroups the forum is a an ad revenue vehicle, first and foremost. This is the case with many forums I know. Some people like forums because they don't want to clutter their inboxes. This really means they don't know how to effectively use e-mail and automatic filtering (gmail makes it very easy). Or maybe they are worried about spam (legitimate). In any case, these problems were solved years ago with NNTP. However NNTP doesn't do a great job of preventing spam (can't control membership like you can on e-mail lists). Many forums actually have e-mail and nntp gateway plugins, but few forum operators use them because they would reduce ad revenue.
For forums that I really do want to follow, I've gotten annoyed enough to actually write my own NNTP gateway that scrapes the posts off the forum and offers them as nntp to thunderbird. This almost works well, but is a bit wasteful of bandwidth (have to load an entire page of 10 posts even if only one is new). Hopefully I can figure out how to optimize it better and make it generic enough to adapt to other forums. Also it's fragile, needed work when page layout changes. But since most forums use specific forum engines, even if the style changes the underlying tag structure does not.
If you look at big companies like IBM who have really embraced OSS, they have done so precisely because of the GPL. The GPL is really the only license that makes a lot of business sense. The GPL has two major advantages over other licenses. First since you own the copyright you can dual license the code as proprietary and GPL if you wish, while making sure that code can continue to be developed by a community and protected from exploitation---the only caveat here being that you have to make sure copyrights are always assigned to you, something that many projects do. The second major advantage is that no company can use your code against you in a competitive manner. The playing field is completely level. If improving your code helps a competitor, it also helps you. Given all this, if I was a commercial company, wanted to have my projects be open source, and I owned all the copyrights, then it's a no brainer. the GPL is the only way to go. It seems like the only time people complain about the GPL is when they don't happen to have a natural copyright to the code and for some reason feel some sense of entitlement to code (if it's open source I should be able to use it how I want, dang it) just because it's OSS. It's very bizarre.
Frankly I'm surprised to hear of such blatant FUD coming from someone like ESR. I think the solution to FUD is to be a bit more vocal about defending what the GPL is actually about and how it protects users, developers, *and* commercial corporations. It's not public domain software. It's source code just like source code from any other source. If it's not yours and you don't want to abide by the license, buy rights to the code or stop complaining.
Nope. Wrong. Sigh. Same old FUD and misconception. Let's repeat. No GPL'd code cannot "infect" your own IP. If you are using GPL'd code without abiding by the license, you find yourself in a situation where you have these alternatives:
1. Keep the GPL'd code in your project and re-license your code to be in compliance with the GPL. 2. Remove the code in question, since you don't have any legal right to use it. 3. Negotiate licensing and royalty terms with the copyright holder to use their code in a way compatible with your own IP needs.
It's that simple, folks. Please don't spread this FUD anymore. It's untrue at best, very dishonest at worst.
The reality is that free and open source code is no different in *any* way from code from any other source. If it's not yours you cannot legally use it, _unless_ you abide by the licensing terms of the licensor.
It astounds me how many companies get trapped thinking that copyright is somehow different for free and open source software. Boggles the mind. It also boggles my mind that companies buy into the idea that things like the GPL can "infect" the company's IP. In a corporate world stuffed full of lawyers--IP lawyers even--how such basic misunderstandings of copyright law can be so widespread in industry is really disheartening.
If an app provides actual value at a price the market can actually bear (remember that "pirates" are part of the market too), then your app would do fine. But in my opinion, the market only has room for so many of these small, on-off apps that seem be cluttering the Apple app store, which are not worth the dollar that most people ask for. If you're so worried about your little app being pirated to the point that you can't make money on it, then you probably need to invest your efforts elsewhere on something that provides value to someone.
We can't just use DRM to enforce value on something that the market sees as having no value, especially in a market that is now commoditized. I would bet that for almost all the apps you have in store, if someone really felt it was of value to them, they could write their own version in fairly short order and undercut you.
So in the short term, you'll probably do pretty well developing on the iPhone. But the market there is not sustainable. Your market base will be saturated at some point, very quickly. And the lifespan of iPhone apps is pretty short I'd imagine, so unless you really come up with something imaginative with each iteration, you're unlikely to sell more than one copy to each person.
If I were developing on either platform, I'd be more worried about writing a program that could tie unto a useful service that worked with the phone's capabilities somehow. As long as people want a service I can sell, I don't think "download protection" matters at all. For example, developing a service that would integrate with a VPN (a la logmein.com) to your home computer to make your home computer documents available to you whenever you want and where ever you are, that would be worth far more in terms of income than an app.
The days of selling cute bouncy balls, simple book readers, or solitare games are pretty much past. (Where is Pocket Word, Pocket Excel, Pocket Powerpoint on the iPhone? Why aren't there any real apps yet?)
If IBM does buy Sun, this does bode well for the possibility of licensing ZFS under the GPL. The reason for this is that the license that IBM likes best and the license that actually serves IBM's interest better than any other license is, in fact, the GPL. Once you understand why IBM's self-interest is best served by the GPL, you have to wonder why any company who is serious about Open Source would use any other license. The reason that the GPL is the right license is simple. It creates a level playing field and prevents your own code from being used against you. It also guarantees that if a competitor betters your code, you benefit directly. It's a complete win-win. Contrast this to the BSD license, in which a company could take your code, extend it and close it up and sell it in direct competition with your own product. If you are a commercial company, you're better off not doing Open Source at all than releasing code under the BSD that's important to your products.
Could the CDDL benefit IBM in the same way? Sure. But IBM already has a huge stake in Linux and it would make sense for them to use ZFS to their advantage in all their applicable products. And if the end is the same for IBM, then switching from the CDDL to the GPL would make sense, business-wise. What better maneuver than to GPL ZFS, forcing Apple to pay to license the technology. Although the issue of the BSDs would be a valid one and I doubt IBM would cut them off. So we'll just have to see what happens.
Right. That makes sense. I read all of Teo's comments, but I'm not as up on how it all works as you. GP poster, however, clearly did not read the FA or the bug report, though. That much is clear. Simply having an open file doesn't result in files being truncated on reboot.
As for the cost of the phone system itself, GrandCentral's money-making plan was very simple, actually. All telcos charge you to make calls to numbers on their network. This is why so many networks have voice mail prompts that are so stinking long. "Press * if you want to page this person, or press 5 to leave them a message, or just wait for the tone." It's all designed to keep callers on the line longer so they can charge them more. Of course American cell companies double-dip, but that's another story.
So all google has to do is charge more to incoming calls than it spends on calling your other phones. By using voip and other cheap providers, Google can break even quite easily. Combine that with ad revenue and they should make a nice profit.
As for ads, I could see them forcing you to listen to an adwords ad before hearing your voice mail, or playing an ad before connecting a call from your address book to a phone (that's how I use grand central to call anywhere in north america for free). I think that'd be acceptable in general.
The privacy cost remains to be seen. I'm starting to think that, rather than porting my number to grandcentral someday, I'd rather port my number to sipphone.com and set up asterisk.
You need to actually read the bug report and the FA before you comment. It's not that open files become zero bytes merely because it is open. It's that badly behaved apps open an existing file with the O_TRUNC option (that's were the zero bytes comes from), then write to it, and then close the file (or not). If an power is lost before the write is synced to disk, then it's lost and the file is zero bytes. This is clearly bad programming anyway, because any sane programmer should know that it's better to make a new file and then, after checking for OS errors, rename it back over the original file if no error occurred. I should think this would be obvious to any programmer. I mean even if I didn't lose power, if something went wrong during the write (some OS error), then I've lost my original file and replaced it with garbage. This doesn't seem like a good practice to me.
On another note, I don't believe ZFS has this problem because if I opened a file and truncated it, I believe we get new blocks being allocated. After the write is committed, the old blocks are freed. IF a power failure happens before the metadata is written, then the newly written blocks are still unallocated technically, and the old blocks still in place.
Glad the mods rated that funny instead of insightful. Clearly you have never used an iPhone or an iPod Touch. While the screen is small, you can still fit a decent amount of text on it at 11 point size. If you read in landscape mode, that's almost as wide as a normal column of text in a paperback novel, or a newspaper column. So even at 12 points, you have the same text size as a standard newspaper column, albeit just a paragraph at a time. I typically don't worry about folks squinting at their newspaper columns. The screen on an iphone or ipod is high enough res that with a white background the text is pretty darn crisp, although it's an active, light-emitting screen, so it is harder on the eyes than a paper surface or a Kindle screen.
I've read several dozens of books (plain text ascii) on my iPod touch. I am tempted to buy a Kindle, though, if I can easily transfer ascii files or PDFs to it (without a service).
No it's not. Bad analogy. Actually horrid analogy. As bad as the famous ted stevens dump trucks and tubes idea.
Roads are considered "public" because they are paid for with public funds. If a company somehow was able to own 100 miles of land and build a nice freeway on it with their own money, they certainly could charge whatever they want to whoever they want. And subscriber-only lanes would be totally legal.
Certainly some network pipes are bought and paid for with taxpayer dollars. But a lot of trunks are real investments on the part of the telcos. Granted there is a certain amount of government-granted monopoly status going on here... there are only so many right of ways, etc.
The real issue involves dishonest double-dipping. ISPs and telcos want to charge you twice for everything you do, and charge companies like Google twice as well. They also want the right to sell you what purports to be connection you can transmit any kind of data on, and then turn around and intentionally slow certain kinds of traffic, or charge you more for certain kinds of data. Kickbacks from companies willing to pay to get their content delivered faster are then given an artificial advantage over others. This behavior might be barely legal, depending on racketeering laws, but certainly isn't ethical.
If you want to do DTV over the air right, you need to build yourself a Gray Hoverman Antenna. There are lots of plans for it on the net, including the hackaday sight. Takes most people a couple of hours to build and works very well. You can stick it in your attic, or just behind the telly.
However, like all the other broken composition managers out there, you get a nice desktop that can't run 3D applications.
I run X-plane all the time under Gnome and compiz-fusion. It's almost as fast as without compiz running (indirect rendering does take a hit), and it still gets a very reasonable frame rate. Maybe Kwin's compositor prevents #D apps, but in general composite managers should not and do not. Now I do prefer to turn off the effects when I do run a game. But yes, 3D apps certainly do work under compiz-fusion. Kind of fun to run X-Plane at 1920x1080 and then rotate the cube, or enable "expose" mode.
This will probably get me a troll mod, but I have to say that it doesn't matter how much faster Linux is than Windows in raw speed. All that matters is what the user perceives. And I have to say it doesn't look that great for Ubuntu or Fedora or any modern linux distro right now (but that's improving!). Right now I have Fedora 10 on a brand new dual core AMD 4550e (low-wattage, but still) with 4 GB of ram.
Let's start with the GUI since that is most visible. Without compiz, Fedora's Gnome GUI is quite fast, but to the user feels slow. You can see widgets redraw and reorder themselves. When you size a window you can see the contents adjusting. You can see tearing of the edges of window decorations. When moving the windows around you often get tearing. These artifacts actually make the desktop feel slower even though it really isn't at all.
With compiz-fusion on, things get a little bit better. But still resizing a window is very painful, especially one with a lot of widgets in it. Moving a window around is usually fast enough, though. I believe compiz's rendering engine is synced to screen refresh which helps a lot here (OS X did this for years). Still thought the system often just feels slow. Windows take some time to pop up some times. Sometimes I get a window of garbage (instead of a popup menu) and then the menu appears in it. Sometimes the effects (fade in, fade out), are delayed. Fancier effects like beam-in, beam-out (kind of cool and makes windows users take notice!) work well sometimes and then sometimes stutter or are delayed.
Maybe this is related to the recently-talked about I/O kernel bug, but my Fedora 10 box stutters all the time. My cron script that renders my background Earth picture with the proper clouds and day/night lighting will cause video and audio to halt for a complete second *every* time it is run. This never happened on my older, single processor Athlon with Fedora 8. PulseAudio also seems to cause audio to stutter at the slightest hint of any i/o. In this machine, anyway, with Fedora 10 and compiz-fusion, my Gnome desktop is very disappointing from the perception of performance pov. In raw speed I'm sure it beats Windows Vista or 7. But when you're frustrated with the inability to play back video and audio without skips, and the stuttering and delays in rendering GUI elements, none of that matters.
Now use a Vista computer with decent hardware with the effects turned on. Everything is silky smooth. Window resizes, moving windows (even with translucent blurring). Popups are timely and smooth. The system just feels more responsive than my Fedora Gnome desktop. Things like audio and video have a high priority and never stutter.
How can we improve this? Several ways. First GTK with client windows goes a long ways to solving the resize problem. Rather than having asynchronous messages being passed to each and every widget's window by X11, we only deal with events to the main window. Sub windows are all managed by GTK internally, eliminating the sync problem. This should hit mainstream soon when some corner cases are taken care of. From what I've read, KDE users might already enjoy this as Qt is supposed to already do client windows on X11. Then we need to get pulseaudio fixed somehow. And the kernel bug. Development on compiz after the merger with Beryl seems to be stalled as well. Seems like 80% of the work is done, but the last 20% always struggles to get done, especially in open source software. Finally I hope that issues regarding RGBA and ARGB in GTK in particular get addressed (if they still exist). Then hopefully more apps (KDE already can do this) will use ARGB visuals appropriately.
Something I've always wondered about with regards to Project Daedalus and the like is the effects of time dilation as the velocity increases. I suppose at 0.12 * C the time dilation on the probe relative to, say, observers on Earth and Barnard's star is probably minimal. But it seems to me that going faster and faster you reach a point where although it might only take the probe x number of years to reach the star, on Earth it takes significantly more time. Therefore in the case of an unmanned probe, since it's time passage on earth that matters, at a certain point it's not desired to have the probe go any faster.
This line of thought leads to some interesting, paradoxical situations. First, as an object approaches C the time dilation effect becomes such that from a frame of reference of the origin, the object never in fact can reach its destination. Would it not become in essence stuck in time? Secondly there must be some point at which if an object is travelling at x*C, there must be a speed y*C such that another object could reach its destination before the first object, even though the second object is travelling at a lower velocity relative to C. Or maybe not since both objects do experience time dilation.
Oops. Units got messed up a bit there. You're SWAG of 1/1000 results in 1000 hours, period. The variable, the capacity of the battery, drops off completely, leaving only hours behind. Hence the reciprocal of the fraction of the batteries capacity one is using is the number of hours one expects to draw that current. But average amp draw is 1/h * x where h is the number of hours you actually get from the battery (for simplicity we'll say at a constant draw meaning a certain cruising speed) and x is the capacity of the battery in amp hours.
Can't believe the mods let you get away with baseless assertions and misinformation. In fact a number of your assertions are wildly inaccurate.
First, it's a cold hard fact that the amps a battery can deliver (amps, not volts) goes down as temperature decreases. So even if the engine wasn't stiff and cold, the amount of amps available for cranking is much lower. The UPS simply cannot provide backup power nearly as long under very cold conditions as it can during warm conditions. True a battery warms up (pretty dramatically) as current is drawn, but if the temperatures are such that current is simply unavailable (witnessed by voltage drop), then it's going to have a problem getting warm since it can't enter operation, or takes longer to do so.
Your assertion than an electric car would draw only 1/1000 the capacity of the battery continuously is prove-ably absurd. Furthermore electric cars are probably much, much, harder on the battery duty-cycle-wise. Unlike cars which draw massive amps periodically and stay charged the rest of the time, an electric car is going to pull moderate to high amps continuously, and cycle the batteries much more deeply.
We can prove that your 1/1000 number is pulled out the air. Basically what you are saying is that if we take the batteries rating, say x Amp-hours, and divide it by 1/1000 amps, then we're left with a total runtime of 1000x hours of operation! Pretty impressive. Either a very very very small and efficient battery, or else the car is packing a couple of orders of magnitude more battery than it needs.
Coming at it from the other direction, if we expect a car that can operate continuously for 6 hours at some particular amp draw, then we end up with something like an expected amp draw of 1/6x amps. Quite a ways off of 1/1000x! So no. Sorry. The amp draw cannot possibly be as low as 1/1000x amps. I believe it more likely that current electric cars can probably only cruise for 4 hours, so the amp draw has to be even higher. We could probably take the current distance estimates and divide by speed to calculate that.
So please, before you accuse me of trying to be an expert and making baseless assertions that I apparently know nothing about, try to get your own facts straight. I am interested to know what cold weather testing auto makers have done on electric cars. So far I can't find any information on this.
Actually the standard ASCII tab is, and always will be, 8 characters. This is as it should be. I don't recommend you change that. If you program regularly in python, consider a special condition for python files (google for python and vim to see how most people do it). I have a python.vim that's invoked for all python files:
set sw=4 set ts=8 set softtabstop=4 set expandtab set ai
That way when I hit tab, I get 4 spaces (actually spaces, not tabs).
Before you give up, maybe spend some time actually trying things. You'll find that page up, page down, and the arrow keys all work in vim as you'd expect in any editor. Eventually you will want to know the weird ctrl keys. They are useful when working with vi over a serial terminal where extended keys on your keyboard don't work.
Learning VIm is very easy. Simply start with these few commands:
i - insert a - append A - append at the end of a line
Then learn a few cut and paste commands
yy - yank line P (shift-p) paste after current position dd - delete line
Then advance: y3 - yank the line and the following 3 lines d3 - same for delete (which puts it in the clipboard) v - enter visual mode for marking text, use y or d to yank or cut
Eventually you will want to learn key movement things like: gg - top of document GG - bottom of document $ - end of line ^ beginning of line
And of course:wq - save and quit
So no, really. ViM isn't as hard as you are making it to be. Once you program your fingers, you'll find these sequences to be fast and easy. And eventually you start to recognize a pattern in how vim commands work. Somehow I question your sincerity about learning vim when you spend at most an hour on it and then give up. Watching a vim expert create and edit code was enough to convince me to learn it. Honestly while I like other editors (including notepad++), what keeps me from using any of them is the lack of vim key bindings and editor modes. Even Eclipse, which has some psuedo vim-like bindings (that you have to pay for!) doesn't cut it either. I always come back to the real thing.
Batteries of any kind don't work well in the cold
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Progress On Electric Cars
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The simple fact is that electric vehicles will only ever be very practical in the southern part of the United States. Get north of Utah and the weather is simply too cold for lithium-based batteries to work well. Even lead acid batteries struggle in the cold. Certainly in Canada an electric vehicle is a no go 5-6 months out of the year. Even if you find a way to heat the batteries and keep them warm, that takes electric power that you can't use for actually driving. When stopped you'd obviously plug in your car to charge and warm it. Even still, on those 40 below mornings (yes parts of the US and Canada do experience them from time to time), as I coax my gasoline car to life (which will barely crank over when left unplugged), I am reminded as to some major flaws in the electric car idea.
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I think that we're really holding ourselves back with this dogged belief in MPG, which, in the age of trying to green fuels is just irrelevant. The real question is, how many pounds of CO2 per mile at average highway speeds does the car emit? How many pounds per mile of NOx, or particulates? If the CO2 emissions are reduced even though the raw MPG of some alternative fuel goes down, then we've still come out ahead. Really the EPA is doing us all a disservice by having these MPG standards that really can't account for alternative fuels. Instead I think cars should have some kind of polution index. The higher the number the worse on the environment it is. Even better, have a split pollution index. One is cradle to grave pollution (including manufacturing and estimated shipping costs). The other would be your day-to-day net costs. I think a lot of Prius owners would be socked that their lifetime pollution index is going to be pretty high!
But basically any non-fossil fuel is going to have slightly less energy and require more gallons of fuel for the miles driven. Now of course we all know that ethanol in North America is a bust (I don't think it's good for the environment in Brazil either. They are really just running their cars on rainforest). But maybe something else will come along and will be good. But get used to lower MPG.
Off the topic, but he ironic part of the new high-mileage regulations will ultimately cause GM to import a lot of cheaper, more efficient vehicles from China. Shipping them on very dirty cargo ships. Probably releasing more CO2 and other emissions than our current, not-so-efficient cars do in their lifetimes.
Yes you should sue someone who's blatantly distributing unauthorized copies of your copyrighted work, at least if you can. I mean us OSS guys definitely would like to see people who violate the GPL prosecuted so that they either comply with the license, pay us to license it differently, or stop distributing it.
But while you can and should take action against copyright violators, that won't actually solve your core problem, which is how do you sell more copies of your work. To that problem, "pirates" don't do a whole lot to affect this underlying problem, although I believe they do worsen it somewhat. But after reading your blurb here on slashdot, I'm only mildly curious about your book, but not curious enough to drop $50 on it. I might see if my library has a copy. I'm certainly not interested enough right now to download it off of bittorrent to have a quick look.
So for me you'd have to sell the book for $1, or at most $10 with an online preview. But perhaps if I knew what the book could do for me, what kind of a quality reference it was that I must have, I'd cough up $50.
I recently paid over $30 a book for several O'Reilly books, on the other hand. I'll probably buy every release of Python in a Nutshell because it has a tremendous value to me. But I'm not likely to buy a Star Trek novel, even though I think there are some fantastic stories in that genre. I'll go to my library for that.
So I guess the trick is to find the people for whom your book has value and sell to them. It's a tricky thing, balancing good writing which takes ages, with marketing which is costly. Sometimes authors hit it by pure, dumb luck (Twilight, Harry Potter), when others who have just as engaging stories to tell, go absolutely nowhere. Is Twilight horrible writing? Absolutely. Is it well-marketed? Yes it is. Harry Potter is much better writing and it's well-marketed as well. On the other hand I've read fantasy novels from some local authors that I thought were as good as Harry Potter, but no one seems to know of them (and even I can't remember the authors!).
How could you live if all your money belonged to your corporation? You'd still be taxed on everything your spent. Like your house, your car, anything that had a personal use. In short anything that the company owns could not be used for any personal use, period (that'd have to be in the tax code). If it was used for personal purposes, then it would become personal property, and taxable. Or so the theory goes.
But yeah, people are prone to abuse absolutely every code out there, so without a lot of strict controls such a scheme could not work. But it's clear our current tax codes aren't working very well either. The very rich pay little income tax by claiming all kinds of bizarre exemptions. The very large companies pay very little tax too (based on percentage). This unfairly burdens the average middle class folks. It's a mess. The Obama plan to crack down on certain kinds of abuses will likely not work either.
The best solution I've ever heard to the tax problem in general is to eliminate corporate income taxes completely. Then close every last loophole in the personal income tax code. No more writing off cars as business expenses for personal use, or houses, or swimming pools. Either it's owned by the corporation or it's owned by an individual who happens to work for a corporation. If a CEO rewards himself with a new car that's paid for by the company, then he pays income taxes on that. This type of tax structure would cut down on abuses of the tax code by the very wealthy while at the same time encouraging companies to invest money back into themselves. In other words corporations would have an incentive to do something useful with their money rather, helping the national economy, rather than hiding it off-shore.
Not only would this scheme promote businesses right here in the US, it would even out the tax disparity between the extremes of personal income levels.
Sadly it will never happen. Not in a million years.
Actually they are not. Forums are really horrible collaboration mediums. They don't preserve any kind of conversational flow (forums are flat, usually in a straight chronological order within a topic). Additionally topics that might be of interest frequently fall off the front page and die rather quickly while other popular threads go on for thousands of posts and have to be split into new topics. These two flaws make it really really hard for someone to jump into an existing conversation. Having to go back and read hundreds of pages of posts trying to find relevant pieces of information is extremely time consuming. And half when you open a new topic people will say, "this has been discussed many times. Search the forum." But forums all have horrid search features. It's not so much that the algorithms are bad but rather there is a lot of noise (even relevant noise). Also I find forums to be very slow and cumbersome. Having to load a new page just to check to see if there are new posts is really bad, and it gets even worse when you are trying to follow many different forums on different sites.
Compare this to the various OSS mailing lists I'm on. It takes me about 15 seconds to fire up thunderbird and see all the different folders (filtered according to list) and where there are new messages. The threaded e-mail display makes it very easy for me to jump into conversations (lessons the problem of trying to get relevant background info). For example, in the GTK list I tend to look for posts from key developers in a thread and follow that section (branch) of the thread. I can see them right away without going through pages of posts. I follow probably a dozen lists this way. However I only follow forums occasionally because they are so awkward compared to this.
I think forums exist for several reasons, none of which are particularly good. I know in the case of rcgroups the forum is a an ad revenue vehicle, first and foremost. This is the case with many forums I know. Some people like forums because they don't want to clutter their inboxes. This really means they don't know how to effectively use e-mail and automatic filtering (gmail makes it very easy). Or maybe they are worried about spam (legitimate). In any case, these problems were solved years ago with NNTP. However NNTP doesn't do a great job of preventing spam (can't control membership like you can on e-mail lists). Many forums actually have e-mail and nntp gateway plugins, but few forum operators use them because they would reduce ad revenue.
For forums that I really do want to follow, I've gotten annoyed enough to actually write my own NNTP gateway that scrapes the posts off the forum and offers them as nntp to thunderbird. This almost works well, but is a bit wasteful of bandwidth (have to load an entire page of 10 posts even if only one is new). Hopefully I can figure out how to optimize it better and make it generic enough to adapt to other forums. Also it's fragile, needed work when page layout changes. But since most forums use specific forum engines, even if the style changes the underlying tag structure does not.
If you look at big companies like IBM who have really embraced OSS, they have done so precisely because of the GPL. The GPL is really the only license that makes a lot of business sense. The GPL has two major advantages over other licenses. First since you own the copyright you can dual license the code as proprietary and GPL if you wish, while making sure that code can continue to be developed by a community and protected from exploitation---the only caveat here being that you have to make sure copyrights are always assigned to you, something that many projects do. The second major advantage is that no company can use your code against you in a competitive manner. The playing field is completely level. If improving your code helps a competitor, it also helps you. Given all this, if I was a commercial company, wanted to have my projects be open source, and I owned all the copyrights, then it's a no brainer. the GPL is the only way to go. It seems like the only time people complain about the GPL is when they don't happen to have a natural copyright to the code and for some reason feel some sense of entitlement to code (if it's open source I should be able to use it how I want, dang it) just because it's OSS. It's very bizarre.
Frankly I'm surprised to hear of such blatant FUD coming from someone like ESR. I think the solution to FUD is to be a bit more vocal about defending what the GPL is actually about and how it protects users, developers, *and* commercial corporations. It's not public domain software. It's source code just like source code from any other source. If it's not yours and you don't want to abide by the license, buy rights to the code or stop complaining.
Nope. Wrong. Sigh. Same old FUD and misconception. Let's repeat. No GPL'd code cannot "infect" your own IP. If you are using GPL'd code without abiding by the license, you find yourself in a situation where you have these alternatives:
1. Keep the GPL'd code in your project and re-license your code to be in compliance with the GPL.
2. Remove the code in question, since you don't have any legal right to use it.
3. Negotiate licensing and royalty terms with the copyright holder to use their code in a way compatible with your own IP needs.
It's that simple, folks. Please don't spread this FUD anymore. It's untrue at best, very dishonest at worst.
The reality is that free and open source code is no different in *any* way from code from any other source. If it's not yours you cannot legally use it, _unless_ you abide by the licensing terms of the licensor.
It astounds me how many companies get trapped thinking that copyright is somehow different for free and open source software. Boggles the mind. It also boggles my mind that companies buy into the idea that things like the GPL can "infect" the company's IP. In a corporate world stuffed full of lawyers--IP lawyers even--how such basic misunderstandings of copyright law can be so widespread in industry is really disheartening.
If an app provides actual value at a price the market can actually bear (remember that "pirates" are part of the market too), then your app would do fine. But in my opinion, the market only has room for so many of these small, on-off apps that seem be cluttering the Apple app store, which are not worth the dollar that most people ask for. If you're so worried about your little app being pirated to the point that you can't make money on it, then you probably need to invest your efforts elsewhere on something that provides value to someone.
We can't just use DRM to enforce value on something that the market sees as having no value, especially in a market that is now commoditized. I would bet that for almost all the apps you have in store, if someone really felt it was of value to them, they could write their own version in fairly short order and undercut you.
So in the short term, you'll probably do pretty well developing on the iPhone. But the market there is not sustainable. Your market base will be saturated at some point, very quickly. And the lifespan of iPhone apps is pretty short I'd imagine, so unless you really come up with something imaginative with each iteration, you're unlikely to sell more than one copy to each person.
If I were developing on either platform, I'd be more worried about writing a program that could tie unto a useful service that worked with the phone's capabilities somehow. As long as people want a service I can sell, I don't think "download protection" matters at all. For example, developing a service that would integrate with a VPN (a la logmein.com) to your home computer to make your home computer documents available to you whenever you want and where ever you are, that would be worth far more in terms of income than an app.
The days of selling cute bouncy balls, simple book readers, or solitare games are pretty much past. (Where is Pocket Word, Pocket Excel, Pocket Powerpoint on the iPhone? Why aren't there any real apps yet?)
If IBM does buy Sun, this does bode well for the possibility of licensing ZFS under the GPL. The reason for this is that the license that IBM likes best and the license that actually serves IBM's interest better than any other license is, in fact, the GPL. Once you understand why IBM's self-interest is best served by the GPL, you have to wonder why any company who is serious about Open Source would use any other license. The reason that the GPL is the right license is simple. It creates a level playing field and prevents your own code from being used against you. It also guarantees that if a competitor betters your code, you benefit directly. It's a complete win-win. Contrast this to the BSD license, in which a company could take your code, extend it and close it up and sell it in direct competition with your own product. If you are a commercial company, you're better off not doing Open Source at all than releasing code under the BSD that's important to your products.
Could the CDDL benefit IBM in the same way? Sure. But IBM already has a huge stake in Linux and it would make sense for them to use ZFS to their advantage in all their applicable products. And if the end is the same for IBM, then switching from the CDDL to the GPL would make sense, business-wise. What better maneuver than to GPL ZFS, forcing Apple to pay to license the technology. Although the issue of the BSDs would be a valid one and I doubt IBM would cut them off. So we'll just have to see what happens.
Right. That makes sense. I read all of Teo's comments, but I'm not as up on how it all works as you. GP poster, however, clearly did not read the FA or the bug report, though. That much is clear. Simply having an open file doesn't result in files being truncated on reboot.
Quite likely, actually.
As for the cost of the phone system itself, GrandCentral's money-making plan was very simple, actually. All telcos charge you to make calls to numbers on their network. This is why so many networks have voice mail prompts that are so stinking long. "Press * if you want to page this person, or press 5 to leave them a message, or just wait for the tone." It's all designed to keep callers on the line longer so they can charge them more. Of course American cell companies double-dip, but that's another story.
So all google has to do is charge more to incoming calls than it spends on calling your other phones. By using voip and other cheap providers, Google can break even quite easily. Combine that with ad revenue and they should make a nice profit.
As for ads, I could see them forcing you to listen to an adwords ad before hearing your voice mail, or playing an ad before connecting a call from your address book to a phone (that's how I use grand central to call anywhere in north america for free). I think that'd be acceptable in general.
The privacy cost remains to be seen. I'm starting to think that, rather than porting my number to grandcentral someday, I'd rather port my number to sipphone.com and set up asterisk.
You need to actually read the bug report and the FA before you comment. It's not that open files become zero bytes merely because it is open. It's that badly behaved apps open an existing file with the O_TRUNC option (that's were the zero bytes comes from), then write to it, and then close the file (or not). If an power is lost before the write is synced to disk, then it's lost and the file is zero bytes. This is clearly bad programming anyway, because any sane programmer should know that it's better to make a new file and then, after checking for OS errors, rename it back over the original file if no error occurred. I should think this would be obvious to any programmer. I mean even if I didn't lose power, if something went wrong during the write (some OS error), then I've lost my original file and replaced it with garbage. This doesn't seem like a good practice to me.
On another note, I don't believe ZFS has this problem because if I opened a file and truncated it, I believe we get new blocks being allocated. After the write is committed, the old blocks are freed. IF a power failure happens before the metadata is written, then the newly written blocks are still unallocated technically, and the old blocks still in place.
Glad the mods rated that funny instead of insightful. Clearly you have never used an iPhone or an iPod Touch. While the screen is small, you can still fit a decent amount of text on it at 11 point size. If you read in landscape mode, that's almost as wide as a normal column of text in a paperback novel, or a newspaper column. So even at 12 points, you have the same text size as a standard newspaper column, albeit just a paragraph at a time. I typically don't worry about folks squinting at their newspaper columns. The screen on an iphone or ipod is high enough res that with a white background the text is pretty darn crisp, although it's an active, light-emitting screen, so it is harder on the eyes than a paper surface or a Kindle screen.
I've read several dozens of books (plain text ascii) on my iPod touch. I am tempted to buy a Kindle, though, if I can easily transfer ascii files or PDFs to it (without a service).
No it's not. Bad analogy. Actually horrid analogy. As bad as the famous ted stevens dump trucks and tubes idea.
Roads are considered "public" because they are paid for with public funds. If a company somehow was able to own 100 miles of land and build a nice freeway on it with their own money, they certainly could charge whatever they want to whoever they want. And subscriber-only lanes would be totally legal.
Certainly some network pipes are bought and paid for with taxpayer dollars. But a lot of trunks are real investments on the part of the telcos. Granted there is a certain amount of government-granted monopoly status going on here... there are only so many right of ways, etc.
The real issue involves dishonest double-dipping. ISPs and telcos want to charge you twice for everything you do, and charge companies like Google twice as well. They also want the right to sell you what purports to be connection you can transmit any kind of data on, and then turn around and intentionally slow certain kinds of traffic, or charge you more for certain kinds of data. Kickbacks from companies willing to pay to get their content delivered faster are then given an artificial advantage over others. This behavior might be barely legal, depending on racketeering laws, but certainly isn't ethical.
If you want to do DTV over the air right, you need to build yourself a Gray Hoverman Antenna. There are lots of plans for it on the net, including the hackaday sight. Takes most people a couple of hours to build and works very well. You can stick it in your attic, or just behind the telly.
I installed the plugin, but every silverlight demo site I go to just shows me the little "please install silverlight" message.
I run X-plane all the time under Gnome and compiz-fusion. It's almost as fast as without compiz running (indirect rendering does take a hit), and it still gets a very reasonable frame rate. Maybe Kwin's compositor prevents #D apps, but in general composite managers should not and do not. Now I do prefer to turn off the effects when I do run a game. But yes, 3D apps certainly do work under compiz-fusion. Kind of fun to run X-Plane at 1920x1080 and then rotate the cube, or enable "expose" mode.
This will probably get me a troll mod, but I have to say that it doesn't matter how much faster Linux is than Windows in raw speed. All that matters is what the user perceives. And I have to say it doesn't look that great for Ubuntu or Fedora or any modern linux distro right now (but that's improving!). Right now I have Fedora 10 on a brand new dual core AMD 4550e (low-wattage, but still) with 4 GB of ram.
Let's start with the GUI since that is most visible. Without compiz, Fedora's Gnome GUI is quite fast, but to the user feels slow. You can see widgets redraw and reorder themselves. When you size a window you can see the contents adjusting. You can see tearing of the edges of window decorations. When moving the windows around you often get tearing. These artifacts actually make the desktop feel slower even though it really isn't at all.
With compiz-fusion on, things get a little bit better. But still resizing a window is very painful, especially one with a lot of widgets in it. Moving a window around is usually fast enough, though. I believe compiz's rendering engine is synced to screen refresh which helps a lot here (OS X did this for years). Still thought the system often just feels slow. Windows take some time to pop up some times. Sometimes I get a window of garbage (instead of a popup menu) and then the menu appears in it. Sometimes the effects (fade in, fade out), are delayed. Fancier effects like beam-in, beam-out (kind of cool and makes windows users take notice!) work well sometimes and then sometimes stutter or are delayed.
Maybe this is related to the recently-talked about I/O kernel bug, but my Fedora 10 box stutters all the time. My cron script that renders my background Earth picture with the proper clouds and day/night lighting will cause video and audio to halt for a complete second *every* time it is run. This never happened on my older, single processor Athlon with Fedora 8. PulseAudio also seems to cause audio to stutter at the slightest hint of any i/o. In this machine, anyway, with Fedora 10 and compiz-fusion, my Gnome desktop is very disappointing from the perception of performance pov. In raw speed I'm sure it beats Windows Vista or 7. But when you're frustrated with the inability to play back video and audio without skips, and the stuttering and delays in rendering GUI elements, none of that matters.
Now use a Vista computer with decent hardware with the effects turned on. Everything is silky smooth. Window resizes, moving windows (even with translucent blurring). Popups are timely and smooth. The system just feels more responsive than my Fedora Gnome desktop. Things like audio and video have a high priority and never stutter.
How can we improve this? Several ways. First GTK with client windows goes a long ways to solving the resize problem. Rather than having asynchronous messages being passed to each and every widget's window by X11, we only deal with events to the main window. Sub windows are all managed by GTK internally, eliminating the sync problem. This should hit mainstream soon when some corner cases are taken care of. From what I've read, KDE users might already enjoy this as Qt is supposed to already do client windows on X11. Then we need to get pulseaudio fixed somehow. And the kernel bug. Development on compiz after the merger with Beryl seems to be stalled as well. Seems like 80% of the work is done, but the last 20% always struggles to get done, especially in open source software. Finally I hope that issues regarding RGBA and ARGB in GTK in particular get addressed (if they still exist). Then hopefully more apps (KDE already can do this) will use ARGB visuals appropriately.
Something I've always wondered about with regards to Project Daedalus and the like is the effects of time dilation as the velocity increases. I suppose at 0.12 * C the time dilation on the probe relative to, say, observers on Earth and Barnard's star is probably minimal. But it seems to me that going faster and faster you reach a point where although it might only take the probe x number of years to reach the star, on Earth it takes significantly more time. Therefore in the case of an unmanned probe, since it's time passage on earth that matters, at a certain point it's not desired to have the probe go any faster.
This line of thought leads to some interesting, paradoxical situations. First, as an object approaches C the time dilation effect becomes such that from a frame of reference of the origin, the object never in fact can reach its destination. Would it not become in essence stuck in time? Secondly there must be some point at which if an object is travelling at x*C, there must be a speed y*C such that another object could reach its destination before the first object, even though the second object is travelling at a lower velocity relative to C. Or maybe not since both objects do experience time dilation.
Oops. Units got messed up a bit there. You're SWAG of 1/1000 results in 1000 hours, period. The variable, the capacity of the battery, drops off completely, leaving only hours behind. Hence the reciprocal of the fraction of the batteries capacity one is using is the number of hours one expects to draw that current. But average amp draw is 1/h * x where h is the number of hours you actually get from the battery (for simplicity we'll say at a constant draw meaning a certain cruising speed) and x is the capacity of the battery in amp hours.
Can't believe the mods let you get away with baseless assertions and misinformation. In fact a number of your assertions are wildly inaccurate.
First, it's a cold hard fact that the amps a battery can deliver (amps, not volts) goes down as temperature decreases. So even if the engine wasn't stiff and cold, the amount of amps available for cranking is much lower. The UPS simply cannot provide backup power nearly as long under very cold conditions as it can during warm conditions. True a battery warms up (pretty dramatically) as current is drawn, but if the temperatures are such that current is simply unavailable (witnessed by voltage drop), then it's going to have a problem getting warm since it can't enter operation, or takes longer to do so.
Your assertion than an electric car would draw only 1/1000 the capacity of the battery continuously is prove-ably absurd. Furthermore electric cars are probably much, much, harder on the battery duty-cycle-wise. Unlike cars which draw massive amps periodically and stay charged the rest of the time, an electric car is going to pull moderate to high amps continuously, and cycle the batteries much more deeply.
We can prove that your 1/1000 number is pulled out the air. Basically what you are saying is that if we take the batteries rating, say x Amp-hours, and divide it by 1/1000 amps, then we're left with a total runtime of 1000x hours of operation! Pretty impressive. Either a very very very small and efficient battery, or else the car is packing a couple of orders of magnitude more battery than it needs.
Coming at it from the other direction, if we expect a car that can operate continuously for 6 hours at some particular amp draw, then we end up with something like an expected amp draw of 1/6x amps. Quite a ways off of 1/1000x! So no. Sorry. The amp draw cannot possibly be as low as 1/1000x amps. I believe it more likely that current electric cars can probably only cruise for 4 hours, so the amp draw has to be even higher. We could probably take the current distance estimates and divide by speed to calculate that.
So please, before you accuse me of trying to be an expert and making baseless assertions that I apparently know nothing about, try to get your own facts straight. I am interested to know what cold weather testing auto makers have done on electric cars. So far I can't find any information on this.
Welcome! Let us know how it goes.
Actually the standard ASCII tab is, and always will be, 8 characters. This is as it should be. I don't recommend you change that. If you program regularly in python, consider a special condition for python files (google for python and vim to see how most people do it). I have a python.vim that's invoked for all python files:
set sw=4
set ts=8
set softtabstop=4
set expandtab
set ai
That way when I hit tab, I get 4 spaces (actually spaces, not tabs).
Before you give up, maybe spend some time actually trying things. You'll find that page up, page down, and the arrow keys all work in vim as you'd expect in any editor. Eventually you will want to know the weird ctrl keys. They are useful when working with vi over a serial terminal where extended keys on your keyboard don't work.
Learning VIm is very easy. Simply start with these few commands:
i - insert
a - append
A - append at the end of a line
Then learn a few cut and paste commands
yy - yank line
P (shift-p) paste after current position
dd - delete line
Then advance:
y3 - yank the line and the following 3 lines
d3 - same for delete (which puts it in the clipboard)
v - enter visual mode for marking text, use y or d to yank or cut
Eventually you will want to learn key movement things like:
gg - top of document
GG - bottom of document
$ - end of line
^ beginning of line
And of course :wq - save and quit
So no, really. ViM isn't as hard as you are making it to be. Once you program your fingers, you'll find these sequences to be fast and easy. And eventually you start to recognize a pattern in how vim commands work. Somehow I question your sincerity about learning vim when you spend at most an hour on it and then give up. Watching a vim expert create and edit code was enough to convince me to learn it. Honestly while I like other editors (including notepad++), what keeps me from using any of them is the lack of vim key bindings and editor modes. Even Eclipse, which has some psuedo vim-like bindings (that you have to pay for!) doesn't cut it either. I always come back to the real thing.
The simple fact is that electric vehicles will only ever be very practical in the southern part of the United States. Get north of Utah and the weather is simply too cold for lithium-based batteries to work well. Even lead acid batteries struggle in the cold. Certainly in Canada an electric vehicle is a no go 5-6 months out of the year. Even if you find a way to heat the batteries and keep them warm, that takes electric power that you can't use for actually driving. When stopped you'd obviously plug in your car to charge and warm it. Even still, on those 40 below mornings (yes parts of the US and Canada do experience them from time to time), as I coax my gasoline car to life (which will barely crank over when left unplugged), I am reminded as to some major flaws in the electric car idea.