Sounds like it's powerful enough to do a Linux port.:)
Then we could program it sort of like LEGO Mindstorms. What it really needs, though, is wireless networking, so you can save what it sees and hears, or have it play arbitrary sounds. Talk about a portable MP3 player!
Forget about the geek aspect of the article, and it's not too bad. I remember back in my dating days that there was little that turned me off as much as a girl who had no self esteem. Women who have self confidence are more likely to be successful in many areas of life, including dating. Sure, there may be a few guys out there who get scared of confident women, but for the most part, those aren't the guys that women really want to end up with anyway.
Forget about lasic surgery--just make sure your children have perfect vision to begin with. Sure, we can eliminate various genetic disorders, but most of those are rare--that won't have a major effect on society. Fixing the common problems (most notably vision) can have a huge impact.
Now there's a fine line between that and controlling cosmetic features (hair/eye color) and personality features. And sometimes it gets very blury--is the tendency to be alcoholic a disorder that should be fixed or a personality trait?
And I'm sure governments around the world will react with fear and ban all human genetic alterations, dooming us to added generations plagued with poor vision.
So if you're using a dial-up account, then your IP address would generally be the same every time you dialed in. This is already often the case with cable modems and DSL. What we're really seeing is another step in the direction of ending dynamic IP addresses.
Currently, if someone connects through AOL, hangs up, and calls back in again, you have no good way of determining if it is the same person. With static IP numbers, it gets easy.
Of course, if you don't have an ethernet card, there's no MAC address to assign an IP number from. So if you're dialing in through a modem, you probably won't see much difference with IPv6.
Lack of dynamic IP addresses is, indeed, a privacy issue, but IPv6 isn't a major part of the problem.
I think copyright protection was recently extended to be consistent with EU law.
The patent protection extension was based on drugs that have to be approved by the FDA. Since drugs often take so long to be approved, the drug companies wanted to know that they would have a certain length of time during which they could use the patent. As I recall, the patent protection was to be 20 years or 15 years after FDA approval in the case of drugs.
So no, software patents have not been extended on us.
I bought a Sony DVP-S330 for $288 including shipping from a company I found on Pricewatch. Circuit City had some Divx-disabled players for under $200, but I wouldn't touch one of them.
One thing to watch out for with DVD players is that many (including my Sony) won't play CD-R media, so custom audio and video CDs are out. You'll need to be very careful in buying a DVD player if that matters to you.
I don't see why a Linux distribution wouldn't be considered a database. This could, indeed, have some nasty implications unless the law is written very narrowly (which would surprise me).
The big question here is how the copyright on the database relates to the copyright of an individual entry within the database. If the two are legally independent, then even if all the packages are covered by the GPL, a given distribution may be proprietary, requiring a separate license for each installation.
Maybe the individual packages can't be controlled by Corel, but the compilation may be an independently-copyrightable work. Hence, the distribution itself might be property of Corel, while the individual components are property of others.
Of course, with Corel's distribution based on Debian, the compilation is probably a derivative work of Debian, so Corel can't control a compilation copyright. However, in principle, I think a Linux distribution might be able to be restrictively copyrighted.
Keep in mind that we're talking about a government web site. That means no ads. Hence, there's not going to be nearly so much dynamic content. With static web pages, the server doesn't need to nearly as much work. I remember back in 1995 when www.dartmouth.edu came to life on a Mac, and stayed that way for a year or two.
Now the problems you're likely to see are when a server gets/.ed. Then the network isn't the issue--it's saturated with incoming requests, so forget about outgoing data. The server then has request after request queueing up. So how large can that queue get before problems show up? Will the software gracefully drop connections, or will the OS crash when some number of active connections is exceeded? Will the web server run out of memory and crash?
It looks like www.army.mil is learning about/. right now.
A lot of people are very intrigued by the idea of creating a clone of themselves and then doing a brain transplant so as to cure diseases and defeat aging.
What does this mean? This means that the clone might have different mtDNA, which generally doesn't matter. In a case where you care, you get an egg from someone with identical mtDNA (e.g., your sister).
Of course, there are a lot more issues here:
The ethics of the whole thing. Being able to grow a brainless clone (or being willing to kill the brain of the clone). Being able to transplant a brain without causing paralysis. Defeating aging of the brain.
Personally, I think this is the wrong approach to this sort of thing.
Aging can probably be defeated through much less drastic measures (e.g., gene theorapy) once the process is fully understood. Think of how long plants live--there's no fundamental reason why animals must age.
Genetic disorders, excluding those caused by mutations, can be eliminated through controlled reproduction. Consider that we all have far more reproductive cells than we need. Hence, if I carry both a good and bad gene for something, why not eliminate all of my reproductive cells that carry the bad gene?
Of course, all this genetic engineering stuff already has a bad feeling associated with it, based on the last major attempt to eliminate "bad" genes. (I'm referring to WWII, of course.)
Moderation is a public service, much like jury duty. Let's not drag everyone into it when we don't have to.
On the other hand, there could be a system whereby you would specify in your preferences to always have moderation buttons on. Then you could moderate even if you have no points, but the moderation wouldn't really do anything for normal users. For real moderators, though, they would see something like:
Non moderators recommend: -5 off topic -2 flamebait +4 funny
Then, using that example, a real moderator might use a point to lower the score of the post. This action would clear out all the recommendations, or at least those that said to move the score in the same direction.
This might also eliminate the need for M2, as it would allow anyone to attract the moderators to articles that have been miss-moderated.
So is there an easy way to upgrade a 6.0 system via FTP? I could manually download all the RPMs for the packages I have installed, and then upgrade them, but that's a pain. I want to be able to do something like:
A scan of the mirrors in the com/net/edu/gov/ca domains revealed that a handful have the Lorax release. Here's the list I compiled. Others might also have it, but are overloaded right now, so I can't check.
PC makers would love to do the same thing--I doubt the typical Windows system will have a floppy drive in a year or two.
If you want removable storage, the issue is Zip/Jazz/SuperDisk vs. CD-R/CD-RW/DVD-RAM/DVD-???. CD-R and CD-RW will be killed by DVD technology once that settles down in a year or two.
Of course, with everything being networked, who needs removable storage? And with the AirPort, everything should be networked. Long term, I don't see many people using removeable storage except for backups, if that. (Backups via cable modem to commercial data-storage companies may well take over.)
Even without SMP systems, Linux is faster in some real-world applications.
One good test is to set up a cross-platform compilation for a large software project under both systems. Because it is cross-compilation, it won't be depending on any local include files or libraries, making it a fair test.
The results the last time I saw this done were that Linux was 15% faster! It's possible we didn't have the latest BSD kernel.
Forget email. You'll find stupid chain letters and such, but not much porn. If you want to find porn, scan the web browser disk caches. Just write a script that cycles through all the jpeg images larger than 10K. You'll find lots of junk that way, and you can probably determine exactly when it was last viewed. You'll also be able to distinguish between someone who bumped into a porn site by mistyping a URL (e.g., xfree.com instead of xfree.org) and someone who spends a good part of their day hitting porn sites.
Of course, it's easier to configure the firewall to log all connections, and then crossreference with a list of known porn sites.
Of course, if they insist on scanning email, be sure to point out that you should set up filters to check for porn access via gopher.
I agree with many others that the X Files has run its course, and it is time to move on. However, it would make sense to do a related spinoff series focusing on some of the minor characters. Imagine having The Lone Gunmen every week!
So you want online kernel upgrades? Sounds like something we do with our systems at work: At EMC, we will upgrade the OS that runs inside our storage systems while the system is online and processing I/Os. (I haven't worked on the code that does the online upgrades, however.)
It's not easy to do, but it can be done.
The tricky part is not the replacing of the kernel code with new code, but migrating between changed data structures at the same time. In theory, you could do it with the facilities in place now:
1) Build the new kernel.
2) Build a program that understands all the differences in kernel data structures.
3) Load the new kernel into memory, but at a different address from the running kernel.
4) Load the translation program as a loadable module--it will need to do several steps: a) suspend interrupts b) translate the data strucutres c) relocate the new kernel to the proper place in memory (possibly using VM tricks) d) enable interrupts e) clean up any junk from the old kernel that is no longer in use f) transfer control to the new kernel
5) Unload the upgrade program
That would be a pain to code, but in theory is possible. For most applications, though, rebooting is acceptable. I doubt that anyone will code online kernel upgrades anytime soon.
Linux, like HP-UX, SCO Unixware, FreeBSD, Solaris, and many other operating systems, is an operating system designed to meet the POSIX and Unix standards. The history of the code is irrelevant--what it does is what matters. If you don't believe me, ask the company that holds the Unix trademark.
To receive the legal right to call Linux "Unix," all that would need to be done is pay some company to certify that it meets the latest Unix standard as published by The Open Group. This simply requires money to pay for the proceedure, and developers to fix any problems encountered in the certification process. (Unfortunately, the Unix branding would probably only apply to a particular release of a particular distribution.)
I haven't looked at the standard myself, but I doubt there's much there that Linux doesn't have. Oh, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of the commercial Unixes haven't bothered with actual Unix branding. Perhaps we should check to see if Solaris and HP-UX are really "Unix-like operating systems."
While I think you are correct that SCO owns some of the Unix source code, the trademark is held by The Open Group. TOG has been licensing Unix branding for several years.
Disclaimer: I am a former employee of The Open Group, back when it actually did things more interesting than branding and standards.
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Sounds like it's powerful enough to do a Linux port. :)
Then we could program it sort of like LEGO Mindstorms. What it really needs, though, is wireless networking, so you can save what it sees and hears, or have it play arbitrary sounds. Talk about a portable MP3 player!
Forget about the geek aspect of the article, and it's not too bad. I remember back in my dating days that there was little that turned me off as much as a girl who had no self esteem. Women who have self confidence are more likely to be successful in many areas of life, including dating. Sure, there may be a few guys out there who get scared of confident women, but for the most part, those aren't the guys that women really want to end up with anyway.
Forget about lasic surgery--just make sure your children have perfect vision to begin with. Sure, we can eliminate various genetic disorders, but most of those are rare--that won't have a major effect on society. Fixing the common problems (most notably vision) can have a huge impact.
Now there's a fine line between that and controlling cosmetic features (hair/eye color) and personality features. And sometimes it gets very blury--is the tendency to be alcoholic a disorder that should be fixed or a personality trait?
And I'm sure governments around the world will react with fear and ban all human genetic alterations, dooming us to added generations plagued with poor vision.
So if you're using a dial-up account, then your IP address would generally be the same every time you dialed in. This is already often the case with cable modems and DSL. What we're really seeing is another step in the direction of ending dynamic IP addresses.
Currently, if someone connects through AOL, hangs up, and calls back in again, you have no good way of determining if it is the same person. With static IP numbers, it gets easy.
Of course, if you don't have an ethernet card, there's no MAC address to assign an IP number from. So if you're dialing in through a modem, you probably won't see much difference with IPv6.
Lack of dynamic IP addresses is, indeed, a privacy issue, but IPv6 isn't a major part of the problem.
Let's keep this straight:
I think copyright protection was recently extended to be consistent with EU law.
The patent protection extension was based on drugs that have to be approved by the FDA. Since drugs often take so long to be approved, the drug companies wanted to know that they would have a certain length of time during which they could use the patent. As I recall, the patent protection was to be 20 years or 15 years after FDA approval in the case of drugs.
So no, software patents have not been extended on us.
I bought a Sony DVP-S330 for $288 including shipping from a company I found on Pricewatch. Circuit City had some Divx-disabled players for under $200, but I wouldn't touch one of them.
One thing to watch out for with DVD players is that many (including my Sony) won't play CD-R media, so custom audio and video CDs are out. You'll need to be very careful in buying a DVD player if that matters to you.
Just a nitpick, but saying that someone passed on is not a comment on their beliefs, but a comment on the beliefs of the person making the comment.
You may not believe in any sort of soul or afterlife, but that doesn't stop me from believing that despite your lack of faith, you will "pass on."
I don't see why a Linux distribution wouldn't be considered a database. This could, indeed, have some nasty implications unless the law is written very narrowly (which would surprise me).
The big question here is how the copyright on the database relates to the copyright of an individual entry within the database. If the two are legally independent, then even if all the packages are covered by the GPL, a given distribution may be proprietary, requiring a separate license for each installation.
Maybe the individual packages can't be controlled by Corel, but the compilation may be an independently-copyrightable work. Hence, the distribution itself might be property of Corel, while the individual components are property of others.
Of course, with Corel's distribution based on Debian, the compilation is probably a derivative work of Debian, so Corel can't control a compilation copyright. However, in principle, I think a Linux distribution might be able to be restrictively copyrighted.
Any lawyers wish to comment?
So just ignore the Corel license. Let's get a copy of it up on an FTP server. Hopefully CheapBytes will put it out on a CD
Keep in mind that we're talking about a government web site. That means no ads. Hence, there's not going to be nearly so much dynamic content. With static web pages, the server doesn't need to nearly as much work. I remember back in 1995 when www.dartmouth.edu came to life on a Mac, and stayed that way for a year or two.
/.ed. Then the network isn't the issue--it's saturated with incoming requests, so forget about outgoing data. The server then has request after request queueing up. So how large can that queue get before problems show up? Will the software gracefully drop connections, or will the OS crash when some number of active connections is exceeded? Will the web server run out of memory and crash?
/. right now.
Now the problems you're likely to see are when a server gets
It looks like www.army.mil is learning about
A lot of people are very intrigued by the idea of creating a clone of themselves and then doing a brain transplant so as to cure diseases and defeat aging.
What does this mean? This means that the clone might have different mtDNA, which generally doesn't matter. In a case where you care, you get an egg from someone with identical mtDNA (e.g., your sister).
Of course, there are a lot more issues here:
The ethics of the whole thing.
Being able to grow a brainless clone (or being willing to kill the brain of the clone).
Being able to transplant a brain without causing paralysis.
Defeating aging of the brain.
Personally, I think this is the wrong approach to this sort of thing.
Aging can probably be defeated through much less drastic measures (e.g., gene theorapy) once the process is fully understood. Think of how long plants live--there's no fundamental reason why animals must age.
Genetic disorders, excluding those caused by mutations, can be eliminated through controlled reproduction. Consider that we all have far more reproductive cells than we need. Hence, if I carry both a good and bad gene for something, why not eliminate all of my reproductive cells that carry the bad gene?
Of course, all this genetic engineering stuff already has a bad feeling associated with it, based on the last major attempt to eliminate "bad" genes. (I'm referring to WWII, of course.)
Moderation is a public service, much like jury duty. Let's not drag everyone into it when we don't have to.
On the other hand, there could be a system whereby you would specify in your preferences to always have moderation buttons on. Then you could moderate even if you have no points, but the moderation wouldn't really do anything for normal users. For real moderators, though, they would see something like:
Non moderators recommend:
-5 off topic
-2 flamebait
+4 funny
Then, using that example, a real moderator might use a point to lower the score of the post. This action would clear out all the recommendations, or at least those that said to move the score in the same direction.
This might also eliminate the need for M2, as it would allow anyone to attract the moderators to articles that have been miss-moderated.
So is there an easy way to upgrade a 6.0 system via FTP? I could manually download all the RPMs for the packages I have installed, and then upgrade them, but that's a pain. I want to be able to do something like:
% upgrade ftp://ftp.favoritemirror.com/.../RPMS/
A scan of the mirrors in the com/net/edu/gov/ca domains revealed that a handful have the Lorax release. Here's the list I compiled. Others might also have it, but are overloaded right now, so I can't check.
ftp://ftp.aklug.org/pub/redhat/mirror/ lorax/
ftp://cwrulug.cwru.edu/pub/ftp.red hat.com/lorax/
ftp://ftp.eecs.umic h.edu/pub/linux/redhat/ftp.redhat.com/lorax/
ftp://metalab.unc.edu/p ub/Linux/distributions/redhat/lorax/
ftp://csociety-ftp.ecn.purdue.e du/pub/redhat/lorax/
ftp://ftp.snoopy.net/pub/mirrors/red hat/lorax/
The floppies are dead.
PC makers would love to do the same thing--I doubt the typical Windows system will have a floppy drive in a year or two.
If you want removable storage, the issue is Zip/Jazz/SuperDisk vs. CD-R/CD-RW/DVD-RAM/DVD-???. CD-R and CD-RW will be killed by DVD technology once that settles down in a year or two.
Of course, with everything being networked, who needs removable storage? And with the AirPort, everything should be networked. Long term, I don't see many people using removeable storage except for backups, if that. (Backups via cable modem to commercial data-storage companies may well take over.)
We played with all the mount options. No matter how we looked at it, Linux as significantly faster than FreeBSD.
Even without SMP systems, Linux is faster in some real-world applications.
One good test is to set up a cross-platform compilation for a large software project under both systems. Because it is cross-compilation, it won't be depending on any local include files or libraries, making it a fair test.
The results the last time I saw this done were that Linux was 15% faster! It's possible we didn't have the latest BSD kernel.
Forget email. You'll find stupid chain letters and such, but not much porn. If you want to find porn, scan the web browser disk caches. Just write a script that cycles through all the jpeg images larger than 10K. You'll find lots of junk that way, and you can probably determine exactly when it was last viewed. You'll also be able to distinguish between someone who bumped into a porn site by mistyping a URL (e.g., xfree.com instead of xfree.org) and someone who spends a good part of their day hitting porn sites.
Of course, it's easier to configure the firewall to log all connections, and then crossreference with a list of known porn sites.
Of course, if they insist on scanning email, be sure to point out that you should set up filters to check for porn access via gopher.
I agree with many others that the X Files has run its course, and it is time to move on. However, it would make sense to do a related spinoff series focusing on some of the minor characters. Imagine having The Lone Gunmen every week!
Oh wow. That blood-cooling system would probably let me overclock my brain!
So you want online kernel upgrades? Sounds like something we do with our systems at work: At EMC, we will upgrade the OS that runs inside our storage systems while the system is online and processing I/Os. (I haven't worked on the code that does the online upgrades, however.)
It's not easy to do, but it can be done.
The tricky part is not the replacing of the kernel code with new code, but migrating between changed data structures at the same time. In theory, you could do it with the facilities in place now:
1) Build the new kernel.
2) Build a program that understands all the differences in kernel data structures.
3) Load the new kernel into memory, but at a different address from the running kernel.
4) Load the translation program as a loadable module--it will need to do several steps:
a) suspend interrupts
b) translate the data strucutres
c) relocate the new kernel to the proper place in memory (possibly using VM tricks)
d) enable interrupts
e) clean up any junk from the old kernel that is no longer in use
f) transfer control to the new kernel
5) Unload the upgrade program
That would be a pain to code, but in theory is possible. For most applications, though, rebooting is acceptable. I doubt that anyone will code online kernel upgrades anytime soon.
This sort of thing could easily be a scam to get some venture capital. If it were IBM saying it was five to ten years out, I would believe them.
It would be interesting to see who the people behind this are, and what they've done in the past.
Disclaimer: I have no evidence, only suspicions.
Linux, like HP-UX, SCO Unixware, FreeBSD, Solaris, and many other operating systems, is an operating system designed to meet the POSIX and Unix standards. The history of the code is irrelevant--what it does is what matters. If you don't believe me, ask the company that holds the Unix trademark.
To receive the legal right to call Linux "Unix," all that would need to be done is pay some company to certify that it meets the latest Unix standard as published by The Open Group. This simply requires money to pay for the proceedure, and developers to fix any problems encountered in the certification process. (Unfortunately, the Unix branding would probably only apply to a particular release of a particular distribution.)
I haven't looked at the standard myself, but I doubt there's much there that Linux doesn't have. Oh, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of the commercial Unixes haven't bothered with actual Unix branding. Perhaps we should check to see if Solaris and HP-UX are really "Unix-like operating systems."
While I think you are correct that SCO owns some of the Unix source code, the trademark is held by The Open Group. TOG has been licensing Unix branding for several years.
Disclaimer: I am a former employee of The Open Group, back when it actually did things more interesting than branding and standards.