since when did "dump a bunch of shit on it and hope that plugs it up" become a formal strategy?
About a week ago, if I recall correctly.
Before that, it was "let's slip a tube down in the middle of the hole so we can keep sucking some of the oil out of it, while we fill a couple of tankers and stall for time."
Before that, it was "let's put a funnel on top of it so we can keep sucking the oil out of it."
The "top kill" only became an option after all other options that allowed them to continue extracting at least a small portion of the oil from the well were utterly exhausted.
And, remember, the "top kill" option will probably require the fast drilling of a couple of "relief wells" nearby - and since they are "relief wells" there will be a great deal of push to exclude the same fucking safety features that would have prevented this disaster in the first place in the name of urgency this time rather than saving money. I wouldn't be at all surprised if some congresscritter managed to get the relief wells paid for with FEMA money.
Correct, at least that sounds correct based on my recollection of the dates. Patent portfolios are very complex, and the MP3 patent body encompasses a lot of patents, but I think the last of them should be expiring very soon.
That doesn't mean, of course, that music encoded in those formats suddenly becomes public domain, that's still covered by copyright and copyright is the one that we hate because it's ridiculously long (thanks to Disney and "Steamboat Willie", probably in perpetuity for any content starting in the early 1900s). But they cover specific works, so they're of a relatively narrow scope.
Patents are the ones we hate because they are so ridiculously broad (covering concepts and ideas). Fortunately, they don't last quite as long. Only as long as your career, not as long as your family bloodline. But career-length is still long enough to ensure that your children or grandchildren will be the first generation to be able to freely use something that is issued patent protection today.
Did you need a new copy of the Slashthink brochure?:)
Patents: Broad, relatively short-lived, stifle application of new technologies.
Copyright: Narrow, very long-lived, stifle creation of new entertainment content.
But do not assume that most people out on the street would KNOW this, or even be aware of the problems connected with it - the law needs to protect those people, too.
But a law cannot protect anyone from the data being intercepted by someone who intends harm. The only realistic way to protect someone from this is to teach them to protect themselves.
This should be controlled at the point of distribution, not the point of consumption.
Exactly. Joe user is distributing his signal to a public space on an unlicensed frequency, and this should be controlled at the point of distribution.
Look, Google collecting this data was wrong, I agree. They should have stuck to sniffing the MAC address and associated the MAC with the GPS coordinates where they read it, and leave it at that. Nothing else should have been written to a database.
But, what they collected was transmitted in the clear on a frequency that is for public use. US-FCC regulations list it as an unlicensed frequency, which means Joe user does not have an exclusive right to use it, it's a shared resource. I don't know about other countries, but if you want to limit the resource to licensed users, then Joe needs to apply for and receive a license. If Joe wants to use the frequency without a license, then he should expect others to be able to use the frequency as well.
If you get so angry at Google for collecting stuff you transmit in the clear, you should stop and carefully consider that other people, many with far more sinister motives than Google, can also intercept this data. No law on this planet can protect you from the consequences of transmitting data in the clear, because most people who want to use the data for evil won't obey the law. And they are not after demographic data, they are after your bank account.
Google deserves punishment (not legal punishment, but their behavior was impolite) for storing data they really shouldn't have, but WiFi users need to stop expecting some law to protect them from evildoers on their WiFi LANs. Licensing and technical issues aside, it's simply not going to protect them.
It's like standing on your porch shouting your social security number and debit card PIN, then suing anyone who stops on the sidewalk in front of your house to write it down. If you use an unlicensed frequency to transmit data in a way that everyone else can understand, and that signal reaches a public place, you have lost the right to tell everyone else to not receive it. Even if you get such a law passed, it's not going to help you when your bank account gets cleaned out.
You're confusing patent and copyright. The last of the h.264 patents should expire around 2025. Approximately 15 years from now.
I'm very much hoping (and it's very realistic to expect) that I will be alive at that point, and so will my parents. If you got a kitten today, it might not make it, though. Sorry.
Given my daughter's current age, it's likely that any potential grandchildren wouldn't even be born by then.
Converting a certain number of watts from AC to DC generates a certain amount of heat, and you can only improve the thermal efficiency of the inverter to a certain degree, then it starts getting more expensive very fast.
The smaller they make the power supply that provides a given wattage, the more problems you're going to have cooling it due to a smaller surface from which to radiate the heat.
Making it internal would be a nightmare, because then all that heat would be contained inside the case when you are trying to use it on AC power.
Ubuntu is supposed to have a shorter battery life on these specific units than Windows. The attached article on the subject claims just under 2.9 hours for Ubuntu and 4.2 hours for Windows 7.
So, if they put Ubuntu on it, they'd have to quote the Ubuntu battery life (they could probably call it a generous 3 hours and get away with a bit of market fluffery).
By not putting an Operating System at all on it, they can validly quote the Windows battery life numbers, and say the battery lasts "well over four hours!(*)" (*) When using Windows 7.
Note: I have an Asus eeePC (one of the ten-inch models) that came with Windows 7 Starter. It's currently running Linux Mint 8 and the battery life is pretty close to the claims they made with Windows. I had to use the Lucid backports to do it, but oddly enough the version of Ubuntu they used *is* Lucid for this review. It could be that Ubuntu is not properly identifying these units yet and isn't doing as good a job as it could be with the battery.
Yes, it's technically possible to overturn a patent, but an altruist would have to go through a lot of effort and a massive amount of money to gain access to their own invention only to give it away.
If you invent something, patent it immediately, whether you intend to profit from it or not. If you choose to freely share the invention, fine, at least with a patent on file you won't get some troll who jumps claim on you and starts barring you from using your own invention.
For small groups, it works fine. And maybe they've fixed the performance problems for larger public groups in the month since I last checked.
But, no, this was on a relatively modern machine with a decent connection to the Internet, running the latest Firefox. I thought it would be better with Chrome, but it wasn't. I thought it would be better with Firefox + GoogleGears, but it wasn't. Tried this on my corporate machine (Windows XP) and my home machine (recent Linux Mint) and it was still slow.
A lot of the problem appeared to be attaching GoogleBots or whatever they call those annoying-as-hell little automated posting shitboxes they had going for a while. You'd post something, one of the bots would reply to it, another 5 would reply to the first one, and the entire thread would become painfully slow.
But I had painful response times on larger threads long before the GoogleBots came on the scene.
I joined a few "public" waves to test it out, and in anything resembling a public forum it's useless, and the browser is irrelevant - they are all slow once you reach a certain threshold.
It appears that each keypress is sent to Wave so it can show up immediately for other people, and the browser waits for that keypress to be acknowledged before processing the next one. I think they are running a sort of session-based keylogger so the keys can be sent directly up rather than submitted via HTTP-POST.
But it scales very, very poorly. I've abandoned half-sentences on Wave because it's become too slow to type (I've seen upwards of 20-30 seconds per character, and deleting a character takes just as long).
But, yeah, for small Waves with a dozen participants and fewer than a couple hundred posts, it runs just fine. And it's a pretty neat tool.
I think the beauty, and problem, of Wave is that it's very unstructured. It can be exactly what you want it to be, but if you don't know what you want you'll just end up with a mess. People approach it like project management software, or Instant Messenger, or email, or some concept they are used to, and discover that the people they are collaborating with are using it based on another concept.
Wave is like a big box of Lego. You can build some really cool stuff with it, if you know what you want to build up front. It can build things more easily and conveniently than many other tools. But if you just start mashing pieces together without a shared vision of what you are doing, it's a complete clusterfuck.
Well, that, and once you get past a few hundred collaborators or a few hundred posts on a specific Wave, the software slows down to a bind-bogglingly-painful crawl. But for small collaboration projects, it's quite good. If all of you decide how you are going to use it up-front.
Well, for one, Buzz was the one they shoved down your throat and you had to opt out of, and was a bit of a privacy debacle.
Wave was the one that you not only had to go looking for, but you had to request an invite which took weeks to arrive (or you had to know someone who had a free invite they could give you).
So "opting out" of Wave is technically not possible. You have to go looking for it.
Buzz was largely considered "Wave Lite" by many of us who used Wave before Buzz came out. It's a bit more social network and a bit less collaboration, though there is significant overlap in the functions of the two.
Fast food restaurant employees in the US do not, to my knowledge, expect tips. Of course, I think I've been to a fast food restaurant twice in the past year, so maybe I've just never noticed it.
Tipping in restaurants is traditional in America to the point where waitstaff actually make a significant portion (even the majority) of their income from the tips. The minimum wage for waitstaff who get tips in the US is set significantly lower than the minimum wage for the rest of the working population.
Leaving a very tiny tip (a penny is more traditional than a dollar) shows that you didn't forget about the tip, but you put some thought into choosing an amount that really expressed your feelings on the quality of the service.
Slashdot Mirror
since when did "dump a bunch of shit on it and hope that plugs it up" become a formal strategy?
About a week ago, if I recall correctly.
Before that, it was "let's slip a tube down in the middle of the hole so we can keep sucking some of the oil out of it, while we fill a couple of tankers and stall for time."
Before that, it was "let's put a funnel on top of it so we can keep sucking the oil out of it."
The "top kill" only became an option after all other options that allowed them to continue extracting at least a small portion of the oil from the well were utterly exhausted.
And, remember, the "top kill" option will probably require the fast drilling of a couple of "relief wells" nearby - and since they are "relief wells" there will be a great deal of push to exclude the same fucking safety features that would have prevented this disaster in the first place in the name of urgency this time rather than saving money. I wouldn't be at all surprised if some congresscritter managed to get the relief wells paid for with FEMA money.
That's why I also own a shotgun, son. :)
Correct, at least that sounds correct based on my recollection of the dates. Patent portfolios are very complex, and the MP3 patent body encompasses a lot of patents, but I think the last of them should be expiring very soon.
That doesn't mean, of course, that music encoded in those formats suddenly becomes public domain, that's still covered by copyright and copyright is the one that we hate because it's ridiculously long (thanks to Disney and "Steamboat Willie", probably in perpetuity for any content starting in the early 1900s). But they cover specific works, so they're of a relatively narrow scope.
Patents are the ones we hate because they are so ridiculously broad (covering concepts and ideas). Fortunately, they don't last quite as long. Only as long as your career, not as long as your family bloodline. But career-length is still long enough to ensure that your children or grandchildren will be the first generation to be able to freely use something that is issued patent protection today.
Did you need a new copy of the Slashthink brochure? :)
Patents: Broad, relatively short-lived, stifle application of new technologies.
Copyright: Narrow, very long-lived, stifle creation of new entertainment content.
But do not assume that most people out on the street would KNOW this, or even be aware of the problems connected with it - the law needs to protect those people, too.
But a law cannot protect anyone from the data being intercepted by someone who intends harm. The only realistic way to protect someone from this is to teach them to protect themselves.
This should be controlled at the point of distribution, not the point of consumption.
Exactly. Joe user is distributing his signal to a public space on an unlicensed frequency, and this should be controlled at the point of distribution.
Look, Google collecting this data was wrong, I agree. They should have stuck to sniffing the MAC address and associated the MAC with the GPS coordinates where they read it, and leave it at that. Nothing else should have been written to a database.
But, what they collected was transmitted in the clear on a frequency that is for public use. US-FCC regulations list it as an unlicensed frequency, which means Joe user does not have an exclusive right to use it, it's a shared resource. I don't know about other countries, but if you want to limit the resource to licensed users, then Joe needs to apply for and receive a license. If Joe wants to use the frequency without a license, then he should expect others to be able to use the frequency as well.
If you get so angry at Google for collecting stuff you transmit in the clear, you should stop and carefully consider that other people, many with far more sinister motives than Google, can also intercept this data. No law on this planet can protect you from the consequences of transmitting data in the clear, because most people who want to use the data for evil won't obey the law. And they are not after demographic data, they are after your bank account.
Google deserves punishment (not legal punishment, but their behavior was impolite) for storing data they really shouldn't have, but WiFi users need to stop expecting some law to protect them from evildoers on their WiFi LANs. Licensing and technical issues aside, it's simply not going to protect them.
It's like standing on your porch shouting your social security number and debit card PIN, then suing anyone who stops on the sidewalk in front of your house to write it down. If you use an unlicensed frequency to transmit data in a way that everyone else can understand, and that signal reaches a public place, you have lost the right to tell everyone else to not receive it. Even if you get such a law passed, it's not going to help you when your bank account gets cleaned out.
She's a month shy of eight years old. Math is left as an exercise to the reader.
You're confusing patent and copyright. The last of the h.264 patents should expire around 2025. Approximately 15 years from now.
I'm very much hoping (and it's very realistic to expect) that I will be alive at that point, and so will my parents. If you got a kitten today, it might not make it, though. Sorry.
Given my daughter's current age, it's likely that any potential grandchildren wouldn't even be born by then.
had about as much bearing on accident rates as the price of butter in Bangladesh does.
Thanks, now I have to check the price of butter in Bangladesh to see whether it's safe to drive home, you insensitive clod!
Yes, giving the monks black robes with larger hoods and having them carry scythes was an excellent move.
Now get the hell off my LAN! :)
This is "Idle", which you can easily filter out of your news page if you don't like useless stories (which pretty much describes "idle").
I noticed that you somehow missed Windows ME in all of that.
I just wanted to thank you for that.
Beehive supports direct linking to both a topic and an individual post. It handles building the frame around the post quite nicely.
Yes, I know frames are the work of Satan, but they are done very well in BeeHive.
Exactly.
Converting a certain number of watts from AC to DC generates a certain amount of heat, and you can only improve the thermal efficiency of the inverter to a certain degree, then it starts getting more expensive very fast.
The smaller they make the power supply that provides a given wattage, the more problems you're going to have cooling it due to a smaller surface from which to radiate the heat.
Making it internal would be a nightmare, because then all that heat would be contained inside the case when you are trying to use it on AC power.
One possibility comes to mind.
Ubuntu is supposed to have a shorter battery life on these specific units than Windows. The attached article on the subject claims just under 2.9 hours for Ubuntu and 4.2 hours for Windows 7.
So, if they put Ubuntu on it, they'd have to quote the Ubuntu battery life (they could probably call it a generous 3 hours and get away with a bit of market fluffery).
By not putting an Operating System at all on it, they can validly quote the Windows battery life numbers, and say the battery lasts "well over four hours!(*)"
(*) When using Windows 7.
Note: I have an Asus eeePC (one of the ten-inch models) that came with Windows 7 Starter. It's currently running Linux Mint 8 and the battery life is pretty close to the claims they made with Windows. I had to use the Lucid backports to do it, but oddly enough the version of Ubuntu they used *is* Lucid for this review. It could be that Ubuntu is not properly identifying these units yet and isn't doing as good a job as it could be with the battery.
Yes, it's technically possible to overturn a patent, but an altruist would have to go through a lot of effort and a massive amount of money to gain access to their own invention only to give it away.
If you invent something, patent it immediately, whether you intend to profit from it or not. If you choose to freely share the invention, fine, at least with a patent on file you won't get some troll who jumps claim on you and starts barring you from using your own invention.
For small groups, it works fine. And maybe they've fixed the performance problems for larger public groups in the month since I last checked.
But, no, this was on a relatively modern machine with a decent connection to the Internet, running the latest Firefox. I thought it would be better with Chrome, but it wasn't. I thought it would be better with Firefox + GoogleGears, but it wasn't. Tried this on my corporate machine (Windows XP) and my home machine (recent Linux Mint) and it was still slow.
A lot of the problem appeared to be attaching GoogleBots or whatever they call those annoying-as-hell little automated posting shitboxes they had going for a while. You'd post something, one of the bots would reply to it, another 5 would reply to the first one, and the entire thread would become painfully slow.
But I had painful response times on larger threads long before the GoogleBots came on the scene.
Actually, even altruists frequently file for patents for their inventions, then they simply allow free and unfettered licensing of the product.
After all, if they don't patent it, someone will. And the control over the invention goes to the first patentholder, not the first inventor.
Damn! You beat me to it. :)
I joined a few "public" waves to test it out, and in anything resembling a public forum it's useless, and the browser is irrelevant - they are all slow once you reach a certain threshold.
It appears that each keypress is sent to Wave so it can show up immediately for other people, and the browser waits for that keypress to be acknowledged before processing the next one. I think they are running a sort of session-based keylogger so the keys can be sent directly up rather than submitted via HTTP-POST.
But it scales very, very poorly. I've abandoned half-sentences on Wave because it's become too slow to type (I've seen upwards of 20-30 seconds per character, and deleting a character takes just as long).
But, yeah, for small Waves with a dozen participants and fewer than a couple hundred posts, it runs just fine. And it's a pretty neat tool.
I think the beauty, and problem, of Wave is that it's very unstructured. It can be exactly what you want it to be, but if you don't know what you want you'll just end up with a mess. People approach it like project management software, or Instant Messenger, or email, or some concept they are used to, and discover that the people they are collaborating with are using it based on another concept.
Wave is like a big box of Lego. You can build some really cool stuff with it, if you know what you want to build up front. It can build things more easily and conveniently than many other tools. But if you just start mashing pieces together without a shared vision of what you are doing, it's a complete clusterfuck.
Well, that, and once you get past a few hundred collaborators or a few hundred posts on a specific Wave, the software slows down to a bind-bogglingly-painful crawl. But for small collaboration projects, it's quite good. If all of you decide how you are going to use it up-front.
Well, for one, Buzz was the one they shoved down your throat and you had to opt out of, and was a bit of a privacy debacle.
Wave was the one that you not only had to go looking for, but you had to request an invite which took weeks to arrive (or you had to know someone who had a free invite they could give you).
So "opting out" of Wave is technically not possible. You have to go looking for it.
Buzz was largely considered "Wave Lite" by many of us who used Wave before Buzz came out. It's a bit more social network and a bit less collaboration, though there is significant overlap in the functions of the two.
PS: If you want a good message-board system, try BeeHive ( http://beehiveforum.sourceforge.net/ )
No, it's not the same as Google Wave, but the threaded conversations are quite good.
Fast food restaurant employees in the US do not, to my knowledge, expect tips. Of course, I think I've been to a fast food restaurant twice in the past year, so maybe I've just never noticed it.
Tipping in restaurants is traditional in America to the point where waitstaff actually make a significant portion (even the majority) of their income from the tips. The minimum wage for waitstaff who get tips in the US is set significantly lower than the minimum wage for the rest of the working population.
Leaving a very tiny tip (a penny is more traditional than a dollar) shows that you didn't forget about the tip, but you put some thought into choosing an amount that really expressed your feelings on the quality of the service.