To a certain point, this is exactly what is happening with Gnome and C#. Mono is a decent platform in and of itself if you remove winforms, asp.net, etc. In fact.Net really is superior to Java as a platform and development environment (language-wise) in many ways. As long as mono is positioned as a way of porting windows apps to other environments, it is doomed to fail, however.
As for my own cross-platform development, I did once use C# and GTK# for an app like you did, and it worked out well. Now I just use python, and use c/c++ for things that python is not so good at. I'd rather see more python apps in Gnome than C#.
"I am right everyone else is wrong" attitude, eh. Seems to categorize the majority of the posts on slashdot. Funny how people read so much into things.
The first few airlines that will fly this plane this fall are going to carry not many more people than the 747. I expect the inter-asia routes may pack them in, though.
QEMU is listed as fully supported on SPARC. Both the full hardware emulation (full machine requiring an OS) and Linux-on-Linux mode. The emulated CPU also does dynamic translation so the speed hit shouldn't be nearly as bad as bochs and this java emulator.
Still, though, your point is taken. This emulator could run x86 software anywhere the JVM is. Of course the primary purpose of it seem to be for research purposes (debugging rootkits, etc). Whether it will metamorphose into something practical remains to be seen.
I think that it's more worthwhile to spend time making Linux suspend and hibernate correctly. My PowerBook, for example, hasn't been booted or rebooted in quite a few months. For a desktop user boot time is important, but hitting a button and being ready to go, as should happen when you wake from sleep, is even better. I'm amused that Windows users are happy with their 15 second wake-from-sleep times. My PowerBook (and now MacBook) are ready to go in about a second or two. I think Linux on laptops and desktops should be this way.
If you read the forums on airliners.net, you find a *lot* of anti-airbus sentiment and blind pro-boeing supporters. There are a lot of legitimate grievances against the A380 and airbus. But I still think the A380 is a marvelous airplane. There's nothing wrong with a group of countries deciding they want to build a new airplane and deciding it is worth tax dollars. Even Boeing benefits from the US government's support.
One of the most common complaints about the Airbus seems be that it's an ugly bird. Everyone has their own sense of beauty. The A380 has grace and style of its own. Besides, although passengers might say to themselves as they board, "that's ungly bird," they are still going to get on and fly. I'm looking forward to flying the A380 because of the increased interior comfort (I hope -- we'll see) in cattle class, the increased cabin pressure, and the much reduced interior noise. Boeing's next planes will also follow suit. It's all good.
I think Sun should buy Apple and rename themselves as Apple. Then Mac OS X gets a much better kernel, and Sun gets all of Apple's nice unix userspace (Solaris 10's userspace is awful). Mac OS X server becomes Solaris 11 and all of apple's good ideas like OpenDirectory, their management GUIs for open source apps, etc become a part of solaris. Already technology transfer is happening. My local Apple rep said a lot of core technologies are being licensed from Sun including ZFS.
It would be a clear win for both companies. Apple gets instant access to the enterprise, and Sun will make sure the acquisition means that Apple's technologies will get the enterprise-level support they deserve. Currently Apple's so-called enterprise offerings are really not very serious, although they have improved their support with Tiger. Sun can finally sell desktop machines sporting an amazing OS and desktop (under the Apple Macintosh brand) and have a server OS that's powerful and easy to setup and administer and with the better BSD userspace that Apple has.
Ctrl-Insert, Shift-Insert are anachronistic old key combinations that are deprecated. Stop using them. The fact that they still work is mostly luck on your part.
I use gnome (never liked KDE) and I simply do not see the issues you see. I can copy and paste to and from Gnome-Terminal just fine. I have to right-click to get access to the standard clipboard, but that's expected. X11 copy and paste just works also. I can cut and paste between KDE and Gnome apps, as well as firefox and openoffice
Yes, for almost all compliant apps (almost all gnome apps these days), it indeed just works from what I and others can see. But do open a bug report on your issues (without the expletives). They can be fixed if they are reproduce-able. Gnome is far from perfect (still a steaming pile; it just smells better to me than KDE).
I keep hearing that the clipboard is broken but I have yet to see evidence of that. First of all, Terminal is a special case, and always is. That's because the standard cut/copy/paste shortcuts cannot be used directly as they are control keys meant to be received by whatever program you are running in the terminal. So of course you have to right-click and select "copy." For heaven's sake Mac OS X does the same thing.
Apparently you are confused by the traditional copy/paste X11 method, which still exists. But it is largely independent of the Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V shortcuts. I use X11-style copy and paste all the time and it works great. The thing you're mistakenly suggesting is that X11-style copy should automatically fill the Ctrl-X,Ctrl-C, and Ctrl-V -style clipboard buffer. This is wrong. It would lead to mass confusion among people migrating from windows if it did this. So we either need to keep X11-style copy and paste separate from the other, standard copy and paste (separate clipboards and everything), or eliminate X11-style altogether.
Joe sixpack typically isn't going to mess with the X11-style copy and paste because he won't know it's there. Instead he'll use the standard Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V shortcuts and everything will work fairly well. And what is this "shift-insert" thing? Any windows user can tell you such a shortcut hasn't been used (officially) since Windows 95. Everyone long ago settled on the Apple-style keys.
Thanks to freedesktop standards, standard cut, copy, and paste now "just works." The only flaw remaining is that when an app closes, the contents of the clipboard it was using are lost. Clipboard managers solve that one though.
Yes, and if if people on slashdot starting saying the earth was actually a giant cube, they owuld have the same results.
Before throwing your hat in with this guy, you might want to research his motivations. Also, he is a geographer, not a climatologist. Has written zero papers on climatology, has no experience in climatology.
You're making a classic ad hominem attack, just as the parent poster was claiming. There's no valid logical argument, scientific or otherwise, in your retort. You've just proved the parent poster's claims.
What is your experience in climatology? If, given that you are not a climatologist, and if your understandings and knowledge are valid, then so are his.
However, I offer some proof. China does not want there to be global warming, they want to have the same things the Western worlds has. With all ther political might, the best influance they had on the paper was some minor down grade in the language. This speaks volumes. If there was any strong scientific support against global warming China would have brought it up.
You've proved nothing, and your argument is logically fallacious. It's certainly not scientific. In fact, neither the parent nor the scientist has ever said global warming is not occurring. The debate is over what role humans play in that heating and if the heating is really a bad thing for the long run. If humans have little influence over the heating, then maybe we need to spend our time, money, and research in other areas of ecology, such as trying to adapt to a changing environment and how to best protect our health in ever-increasing urban jungles where pollutants are a real hazard to life (not just the climate).
I am not convinced that we have proof either way in this debate. And honestly, I'm far more concerned about the human health effects of air pollution than I am about general warming.
The biggest problem with the climate alarmists is that they offer not a single solution. They say things like, cut CO2 levels to 1980 levels. How do they plan to do this? What guarantee is there that this will have any effect at all? Anything that burns is somehow bad, some say. So what do they propose we do? All of the so-called green ideas come at a very high cost, environmentally. Even recycling (a very important and worth-while thing we need to do more of) can, if not properly thought out, cause more CO2 production. Buying a hybrid car right now also has a greater negative environmental impact than many domestic, conventional, CO2-belching cars.
Anyway, the parent's point is now well-proved by you, as is the concern of the scientist. Attack his science with science, but stop with the logical fallacies and personal attacks.
I have several samba servers that serve 3000 users and almost 1000 computers, from Windows 98 to XP. It works well and only ever gives us problems when LDAP (OpenLDAP is tempermental) has a problem. We've used Samba since the 2.2 days in production. We're looking forward to Samba 4 to get ActiveDirectory-style domains. NT domains work fine, but are clunky. Only our lab machines are on a domain. The rest of the machines either just have local accounts with network drives mapped, or have pGina logins that map the drives for the user.
For many enterprises, Samba isn't enough. They require the management aspects of ActiveDirectory. Fortunately Samba 4 will do all that. Plus I have yet to integrate Vista into our system. Promises to be a nightmare I think.
This stigma your VP has is quite common, and no amount of evidence or arguing will change his mind, likely. Stubborn ignorance. The world is slowly changing, but I think it's as the truly ignorant people die off.
There's nothing wrong with the technology as such. All of the problems mentioned in the article are not inherent to virtualization, nor are they flaws in the technology. Virtualization just requires some basic planning. What is the average disk utilization (disk bandwidth) of a server you want to virtualize? What about CPU? How about network bandwidth? You need to know this before you start throwing stuff into a VM. VMWare and Xen both allow you to take advantage of multiple hardware NICs in the host, multiple processing units, and also multiple physical disks and buses. Of course running multiple VMs on one host will have to share bandwidth and server throughput. The article is stating the obvious but making it sound like virtualization has an inherent fatal flaw and thus will fall out of favor, which makes the article rather lame.
If you'll read the article, you'll find that this is mentioned. In fact Retroweaver was around before this undocumented switch, and supports the same things plus a few additional features like the for-each loop, autoboxing, string concatenation, and enumerations. So you'll get a bit more mileage out of Retroweaver than just plain old -target jsr14.
On my FC6 box, I did yum install lucidlife, and found, to my surprise, that the turing machine pattern is in it, under "Math and CS." Now if only I could figure out what it is supposed to do!:)
Editors why did this get posted? There's not a single primary or even secondary link in that summary. Besides that, his blog is now slashdoted, so we can't even check to see if that has any primary sources. Note to the submitter, don't do this anymore. I don't mind people linking to their blogs in a passive way, but include some sources in your stories, please.
This can happen to any number of packaging systems, including your beloved Ubuntu or Debian. In fact, a few years back I tried to install Debian on a Sparc system, and ran into all kinds of dependency hell trying to get a somewhat modern version of Gnome. The problems aren't with any packaging system per se; they are in the repositories and systems of repositories.
And I love your assertion about "that should have *never* been allowed to happen." I believe certain people should *never* be allowed to touch a computer. But that's not going to happen. The software should be as robust as it can, but we can only do so much with heuristics against the forced actions of people. At a certain point the software has no alternative but to throw up its hands.
Anyway, people complain to no end about RPMs without ever suggesting any good uber system to replace it. With Debs? What does that buy us? Apt-get? Nope that's not a packaging format. Many be-all, end-all of packaging formats have been suggested over the years, but none of them have proved themselves to avoid all these problems that bring about the complaints in the first place.
and the guy was successful, too, well kind of. The story is that my at one workplace my boss was at a few years ago, there was a man fired for browsing porn while at work. This wasn't just a one-time thing. He was caught spending up to 6 hours a day surfing for it. After the man was fired, he sued the company saying that his porn surfing was the result of addiction for which he was seeking treatment, and thus he had been wrongfully terminated. His claim was that he was disabled and that the company had fired him because of his disability. The case never went all the way to trial, though. Instead the company settled with him, agreeing to take him back on as an employee if he agreed to not surf any porn at work, and to have his every internet use monitored while at work. The sad thing is that he lasted a week under this arrangement. After about 5 days or so, he was caught surfing porn again. This time his lawyers told him to just go quietly. It would almost be a funny story if it wasn't so pathetic. Some of these people really do need help with their addictions (sexual or whatever). Suing IBM is not something that is going to be helpful, however.
Well maybe in retribution to Belgium for their extreme copyright position, rather than delist things, they could just make sure this site is ranked up near number one for any searches with Belgium in the terms.
DRM on a disk doesn't actually prevent copying either. It only seems to because you cannot buy blank disks that allow you to write to certain sections of the disk. In theory I could clone the HD-DVD or blu-ray disk bit for bit and produce identical pressed copies en mass. All this DRM does is allow movie companies to continue their questionable practice of price discrimination using artificial region locks and allows the media conglomerates to govern how and when you watch the content, extending copyright artificially.
MPG is such a useless metric. What we need is some other metric that measures cost and pollution (net carbon is the main issue). If cars were suddenly rated in a metric that somehow combined the economics of fueling that car with the amount of net carbon output per mile, maybe we would think differently about things.
Right now people just care about what's cheaper to them at that moment with no thought of the future. The idea of greening our vehicles is farthest from most people's minds, other than casual talk about hybrids or electric cars, or some other thing--anything is okay as long as it doesn't affect me personally. All we seem to care about is horse power and convenience. If methanol can't give me the power I'm used to, then it's no good.
MPG is useless for the following reason. What if methanol gives 33% less MPG than gasoline? So if driving took 33% more ethanol but released less net carbon into the atmosphere (or no carbon ideally, if the methanol is finally produced in a carbon-neutral way), then that's really not an issue that it took more fuel. Of course that might mean we have to be willing to pay more overall for fuel. Are we willing to do that for the sake of our future? Are we willing to park the car at home right now and carpool even if it is not as convenient? Are we willing to plan our lives to avoid driving whenever possible? Are we willing to avoid accelerating rapidly off of a light? Seems to me that reducing CO2 output, reducing our dependency on fossil fuels is a matter of public will rather than technology or even tax incentives. Somehow we have to convince the collective public (all of us) that it is worth doing. That's the hard part.
NFS is easier, but until NFSv4 is widely deployed, SMB may actually be more flexible and more secure. Right now with NFSv3 (which was the default until the last year or two) if I wanted to export NFS shares to clients, I had to make sure I trusted those clients. Even with root squashing, all you have to do is masquerade the uidNumber and the NFSv3 server would happily give you full access. There were no user/password authentication and credentials at all. In fact at one time I was seriously looking at using a special pam module/daemon that would automount the user's home directory via cifs. In fact if you'll look at what Samba has done with CIFS (CIFS - an ironic name, no? What's common about it?) to add unix semantics including symlinks, you'll see that Samba is a possibility to replace NFS servers in some cases.
Even in the mac world, rather than mess with AFP (which isn't difficult to use or set up), we just tell our mac users to connect using smb to our servers to get shares when they are not logging into the Apple Domain. It just works and it can communicate with all our OSs.
That said, I feel that NFSv4 is likely a more secure, more open solution. Alas, though, I doubt we'll ever see Windows support it fully, including permission mappings.
Well electricity is not about energy storage per se so much as it is about potential difference. With mere physics alone we can show that by cooling off something to many degrees below the ambient temperature (and if we could keep it there at no cost), then we can extract energy out again (out of the ambient air) because there is a difference in temperature. Thus you can extract electricity out of the freezer from a certain point of view. Energy flows usefully in either direction. This is related to the entire field of geothermal energy production, which works in the winter so long as you have a heat sump (the earth). Of course none of this might have much to do with the original article. It's hard to know as Roland's blog adverts are often short on real details and facts. And being slashdot I can't possibly read the original article.
Slashdot Mirror
To a certain point, this is exactly what is happening with Gnome and C#. Mono is a decent platform in and of itself if you remove winforms, asp.net, etc. In fact .Net really is superior to Java as a platform and development environment (language-wise) in many ways. As long as mono is positioned as a way of porting windows apps to other environments, it is doomed to fail, however.
As for my own cross-platform development, I did once use C# and GTK# for an app like you did, and it worked out well. Now I just use python, and use c/c++ for things that python is not so good at. I'd rather see more python apps in Gnome than C#.
"I am right everyone else is wrong" attitude, eh. Seems to categorize the majority of the posts on slashdot. Funny how people read so much into things.
The first few airlines that will fly this plane this fall are going to carry not many more people than the 747. I expect the inter-asia routes may pack them in, though.
QEMU is listed as fully supported on SPARC. Both the full hardware emulation (full machine requiring an OS) and Linux-on-Linux mode. The emulated CPU also does dynamic translation so the speed hit shouldn't be nearly as bad as bochs and this java emulator.
Still, though, your point is taken. This emulator could run x86 software anywhere the JVM is. Of course the primary purpose of it seem to be for research purposes (debugging rootkits, etc). Whether it will metamorphose into something practical remains to be seen.
I think that it's more worthwhile to spend time making Linux suspend and hibernate correctly. My PowerBook, for example, hasn't been booted or rebooted in quite a few months. For a desktop user boot time is important, but hitting a button and being ready to go, as should happen when you wake from sleep, is even better. I'm amused that Windows users are happy with their 15 second wake-from-sleep times. My PowerBook (and now MacBook) are ready to go in about a second or two. I think Linux on laptops and desktops should be this way.
If you read the forums on airliners.net, you find a *lot* of anti-airbus sentiment and blind pro-boeing supporters. There are a lot of legitimate grievances against the A380 and airbus. But I still think the A380 is a marvelous airplane. There's nothing wrong with a group of countries deciding they want to build a new airplane and deciding it is worth tax dollars. Even Boeing benefits from the US government's support.
One of the most common complaints about the Airbus seems be that it's an ugly bird. Everyone has their own sense of beauty. The A380 has grace and style of its own. Besides, although passengers might say to themselves as they board, "that's ungly bird," they are still going to get on and fly. I'm looking forward to flying the A380 because of the increased interior comfort (I hope -- we'll see) in cattle class, the increased cabin pressure, and the much reduced interior noise. Boeing's next planes will also follow suit. It's all good.
Apple should buy Sun, then. Either way, the combined company could be in an incredible position.
I think Sun should buy Apple and rename themselves as Apple. Then Mac OS X gets a much better kernel, and Sun gets all of Apple's nice unix userspace (Solaris 10's userspace is awful). Mac OS X server becomes Solaris 11 and all of apple's good ideas like OpenDirectory, their management GUIs for open source apps, etc become a part of solaris. Already technology transfer is happening. My local Apple rep said a lot of core technologies are being licensed from Sun including ZFS.
It would be a clear win for both companies. Apple gets instant access to the enterprise, and Sun will make sure the acquisition means that Apple's technologies will get the enterprise-level support they deserve. Currently Apple's so-called enterprise offerings are really not very serious, although they have improved their support with Tiger. Sun can finally sell desktop machines sporting an amazing OS and desktop (under the Apple Macintosh brand) and have a server OS that's powerful and easy to setup and administer and with the better BSD userspace that Apple has.
Ctrl-Insert, Shift-Insert are anachronistic old key combinations that are deprecated. Stop using them. The fact that they still work is mostly luck on your part.
I use gnome (never liked KDE) and I simply do not see the issues you see. I can copy and paste to and from Gnome-Terminal just fine. I have to right-click to get access to the standard clipboard, but that's expected. X11 copy and paste just works also. I can cut and paste between KDE and Gnome apps, as well as firefox and openoffice
Yes, for almost all compliant apps (almost all gnome apps these days), it indeed just works from what I and others can see. But do open a bug report on your issues (without the expletives). They can be fixed if they are reproduce-able. Gnome is far from perfect (still a steaming pile; it just smells better to me than KDE).
I keep hearing that the clipboard is broken but I have yet to see evidence of that. First of all, Terminal is a special case, and always is. That's because the standard cut/copy/paste shortcuts cannot be used directly as they are control keys meant to be received by whatever program you are running in the terminal. So of course you have to right-click and select "copy." For heaven's sake Mac OS X does the same thing.
Apparently you are confused by the traditional copy/paste X11 method, which still exists. But it is largely independent of the Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V shortcuts. I use X11-style copy and paste all the time and it works great. The thing you're mistakenly suggesting is that X11-style copy should automatically fill the Ctrl-X,Ctrl-C, and Ctrl-V -style clipboard buffer. This is wrong. It would lead to mass confusion among people migrating from windows if it did this. So we either need to keep X11-style copy and paste separate from the other, standard copy and paste (separate clipboards and everything), or eliminate X11-style altogether.
Joe sixpack typically isn't going to mess with the X11-style copy and paste because he won't know it's there. Instead he'll use the standard Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V shortcuts and everything will work fairly well. And what is this "shift-insert" thing? Any windows user can tell you such a shortcut hasn't been used (officially) since Windows 95. Everyone long ago settled on the Apple-style keys.
Thanks to freedesktop standards, standard cut, copy, and paste now "just works." The only flaw remaining is that when an app closes, the contents of the clipboard it was using are lost. Clipboard managers solve that one though.
I made a mistake in calling your response and ad hominem attack; it was not. Questioning one's motivations is legitimate of course.
You're making a classic ad hominem attack, just as the parent poster was claiming. There's no valid logical argument, scientific or otherwise, in your retort. You've just proved the parent poster's claims.
What is your experience in climatology? If, given that you are not a climatologist, and if your understandings and knowledge are valid, then so are his.
You've proved nothing, and your argument is logically fallacious. It's certainly not scientific. In fact, neither the parent nor the scientist has ever said global warming is not occurring. The debate is over what role humans play in that heating and if the heating is really a bad thing for the long run. If humans have little influence over the heating, then maybe we need to spend our time, money, and research in other areas of ecology, such as trying to adapt to a changing environment and how to best protect our health in ever-increasing urban jungles where pollutants are a real hazard to life (not just the climate).
I am not convinced that we have proof either way in this debate. And honestly, I'm far more concerned about the human health effects of air pollution than I am about general warming.
The biggest problem with the climate alarmists is that they offer not a single solution. They say things like, cut CO2 levels to 1980 levels. How do they plan to do this? What guarantee is there that this will have any effect at all? Anything that burns is somehow bad, some say. So what do they propose we do? All of the so-called green ideas come at a very high cost, environmentally. Even recycling (a very important and worth-while thing we need to do more of) can, if not properly thought out, cause more CO2 production. Buying a hybrid car right now also has a greater negative environmental impact than many domestic, conventional, CO2-belching cars.
Anyway, the parent's point is now well-proved by you, as is the concern of the scientist. Attack his science with science, but stop with the logical fallacies and personal attacks.
I have several samba servers that serve 3000 users and almost 1000 computers, from Windows 98 to XP. It works well and only ever gives us problems when LDAP (OpenLDAP is tempermental) has a problem. We've used Samba since the 2.2 days in production. We're looking forward to Samba 4 to get ActiveDirectory-style domains. NT domains work fine, but are clunky. Only our lab machines are on a domain. The rest of the machines either just have local accounts with network drives mapped, or have pGina logins that map the drives for the user.
For many enterprises, Samba isn't enough. They require the management aspects of ActiveDirectory. Fortunately Samba 4 will do all that. Plus I have yet to integrate Vista into our system. Promises to be a nightmare I think.
This stigma your VP has is quite common, and no amount of evidence or arguing will change his mind, likely. Stubborn ignorance. The world is slowly changing, but I think it's as the truly ignorant people die off.
There's nothing wrong with the technology as such. All of the problems mentioned in the article are not inherent to virtualization, nor are they flaws in the technology. Virtualization just requires some basic planning. What is the average disk utilization (disk bandwidth) of a server you want to virtualize? What about CPU? How about network bandwidth? You need to know this before you start throwing stuff into a VM. VMWare and Xen both allow you to take advantage of multiple hardware NICs in the host, multiple processing units, and also multiple physical disks and buses. Of course running multiple VMs on one host will have to share bandwidth and server throughput. The article is stating the obvious but making it sound like virtualization has an inherent fatal flaw and thus will fall out of favor, which makes the article rather lame.
If you'll read the article, you'll find that this is mentioned. In fact Retroweaver was around before this undocumented switch, and supports the same things plus a few additional features like the for-each loop, autoboxing, string concatenation, and enumerations. So you'll get a bit more mileage out of Retroweaver than just plain old -target jsr14.
On my FC6 box, I did yum install lucidlife, and found, to my surprise, that the turing machine pattern is in it, under "Math and CS." Now if only I could figure out what it is supposed to do! :)
Editors why did this get posted? There's not a single primary or even secondary link in that summary. Besides that, his blog is now slashdoted, so we can't even check to see if that has any primary sources. Note to the submitter, don't do this anymore. I don't mind people linking to their blogs in a passive way, but include some sources in your stories, please.
This can happen to any number of packaging systems, including your beloved Ubuntu or Debian. In fact, a few years back I tried to install Debian on a Sparc system, and ran into all kinds of dependency hell trying to get a somewhat modern version of Gnome. The problems aren't with any packaging system per se; they are in the repositories and systems of repositories.
And I love your assertion about "that should have *never* been allowed to happen." I believe certain people should *never* be allowed to touch a computer. But that's not going to happen. The software should be as robust as it can, but we can only do so much with heuristics against the forced actions of people. At a certain point the software has no alternative but to throw up its hands.
Anyway, people complain to no end about RPMs without ever suggesting any good uber system to replace it. With Debs? What does that buy us? Apt-get? Nope that's not a packaging format. Many be-all, end-all of packaging formats have been suggested over the years, but none of them have proved themselves to avoid all these problems that bring about the complaints in the first place.
and the guy was successful, too, well kind of. The story is that my at one workplace my boss was at a few years ago, there was a man fired for browsing porn while at work. This wasn't just a one-time thing. He was caught spending up to 6 hours a day surfing for it. After the man was fired, he sued the company saying that his porn surfing was the result of addiction for which he was seeking treatment, and thus he had been wrongfully terminated. His claim was that he was disabled and that the company had fired him because of his disability. The case never went all the way to trial, though. Instead the company settled with him, agreeing to take him back on as an employee if he agreed to not surf any porn at work, and to have his every internet use monitored while at work. The sad thing is that he lasted a week under this arrangement. After about 5 days or so, he was caught surfing porn again. This time his lawyers told him to just go quietly. It would almost be a funny story if it wasn't so pathetic. Some of these people really do need help with their addictions (sexual or whatever). Suing IBM is not something that is going to be helpful, however.
that research causes cancer in rats.
Well maybe in retribution to Belgium for their extreme copyright position, rather than delist things, they could just make sure this site is ranked up near number one for any searches with Belgium in the terms.
DRM on a disk doesn't actually prevent copying either. It only seems to because you cannot buy blank disks that allow you to write to certain sections of the disk. In theory I could clone the HD-DVD or blu-ray disk bit for bit and produce identical pressed copies en mass. All this DRM does is allow movie companies to continue their questionable practice of price discrimination using artificial region locks and allows the media conglomerates to govern how and when you watch the content, extending copyright artificially.
MPG is such a useless metric. What we need is some other metric that measures cost and pollution (net carbon is the main issue). If cars were suddenly rated in a metric that somehow combined the economics of fueling that car with the amount of net carbon output per mile, maybe we would think differently about things.
Right now people just care about what's cheaper to them at that moment with no thought of the future. The idea of greening our vehicles is farthest from most people's minds, other than casual talk about hybrids or electric cars, or some other thing--anything is okay as long as it doesn't affect me personally. All we seem to care about is horse power and convenience. If methanol can't give me the power I'm used to, then it's no good.
MPG is useless for the following reason. What if methanol gives 33% less MPG than gasoline? So if driving took 33% more ethanol but released less net carbon into the atmosphere (or no carbon ideally, if the methanol is finally produced in a carbon-neutral way), then that's really not an issue that it took more fuel. Of course that might mean we have to be willing to pay more overall for fuel. Are we willing to do that for the sake of our future? Are we willing to park the car at home right now and carpool even if it is not as convenient? Are we willing to plan our lives to avoid driving whenever possible? Are we willing to avoid accelerating rapidly off of a light? Seems to me that reducing CO2 output, reducing our dependency on fossil fuels is a matter of public will rather than technology or even tax incentives. Somehow we have to convince the collective public (all of us) that it is worth doing. That's the hard part.
NFS is easier, but until NFSv4 is widely deployed, SMB may actually be more flexible and more secure. Right now with NFSv3 (which was the default until the last year or two) if I wanted to export NFS shares to clients, I had to make sure I trusted those clients. Even with root squashing, all you have to do is masquerade the uidNumber and the NFSv3 server would happily give you full access. There were no user/password authentication and credentials at all. In fact at one time I was seriously looking at using a special pam module/daemon that would automount the user's home directory via cifs. In fact if you'll look at what Samba has done with CIFS (CIFS - an ironic name, no? What's common about it?) to add unix semantics including symlinks, you'll see that Samba is a possibility to replace NFS servers in some cases.
Even in the mac world, rather than mess with AFP (which isn't difficult to use or set up), we just tell our mac users to connect using smb to our servers to get shares when they are not logging into the Apple Domain. It just works and it can communicate with all our OSs.
That said, I feel that NFSv4 is likely a more secure, more open solution. Alas, though, I doubt we'll ever see Windows support it fully, including permission mappings.
Well electricity is not about energy storage per se so much as it is about potential difference. With mere physics alone we can show that by cooling off something to many degrees below the ambient temperature (and if we could keep it there at no cost), then we can extract energy out again (out of the ambient air) because there is a difference in temperature. Thus you can extract electricity out of the freezer from a certain point of view. Energy flows usefully in either direction. This is related to the entire field of geothermal energy production, which works in the winter so long as you have a heat sump (the earth). Of course none of this might have much to do with the original article. It's hard to know as Roland's blog adverts are often short on real details and facts. And being slashdot I can't possibly read the original article.