Um, the whole goal and purpose is to create specific ecological effects.
It's the specific ecological effect (soaking up CO2) I'm worried about. It's the unintended ecological effects. Which for a project of this size would be massive and extremely unpredictable. For all you know, it could lead to some complicated chain reaction that could make CO2 levels rise. Never mind destroying fisheries, poluting the water, etc.
You seem to be infatuated with simple-minded solutions to complicated problems: cold fusion will fix the energy crisis, dumping iron ore in the ocean will fix the greenhouse effect. I hate to imagine how you'd solve the health care crisis...
Those figures assume that iron will never go up in price. In fact, it's already on the rise -- and if somebody starts buying 17 million tons of ore a year and dumping it in the ocean, it'll go up even faster.
And have you even stopped to consider the ecological effects?
Re:Dual boot? How about virtualization, too!
on
Going To Boot Camp
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Jeez, dude, get a life. This is second time you've made a lengthy, breathless post on this subject, and both of them covered pretty much the same ground. I appreciate some of the information you've provided, but you need to get a grip — this is a new product from a semi-major hardware company, not the return of Jesus.
Please consider this email a formal request from Microsoft. We, meaning our lawyers, have contacted you numerous times regarding your Microsoft. We've posted
comments on Slashdot stories covering GNOME. We've been very nice about it.
Please update the icon used for Microsoft stories on Slashdot. We have used this
logo since 1998. We have never used a logo that portrayed our chairman and founder as a Borg.
We'd really appreciate it if you updated the icon. It may not be a big deal
to you guys, but our logo is a mark of pride for our company. We'd like to
see it used.
Mail is indexed. My average search takes under a second in Gmail, but around 10 seconds in Pine. Ironically enough, Google also provides a tool that can index any mail client's files — Google Desktop. Out of the box, it only supports the biggies (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.), but it'd be easy to write a plugin for Pine.
I understand about making source code available helps in a secure system, but what if that code has evil code...made to look innocent upon inspection....written into it?
So this contest bothers you because you think it encourages people to write malicious code? Trust me, nobody needs encouragement. And doing it in a contest where the results are published helps educate people who need to review potentially malicious code.
You're right, the balance of influence tends to tip in favor of
private enterprise. But we're not talking about whether government
tends to undercut private business, we're talking about whether
it
can. And it certainly can, and does. The NO municipal WiFi cloud
will certainly take customers away from private providers.
But maintaining a free market isn't the only priority here. Having
affordable internet access for everybody is an important social
concern. (Or, in the case of New Orleans, any internet access at all.)
As an old 60s socialist, I have no problem subordinating the marketplace
to social priorities when the need arises. But economic libertarians
like you have to rationalize when they want to do the right thing, and
their free-market-uber-alles ideologies says they can't.
When I was younger, I poo-pooed the market economy and thought that
well-intentioned folks could just dispense with it. I've since
outgrown that naive believe in a simplistic principle. Now the fashionable thing
is to believe that the free market can solve all our problems. Equally
simplistic and naive.
Except that a municipal wifi cloud isn't free competition, because the city doesn't have to make a profit on it. Indeed, their price structure is set by political concerns, so they're likely to undercut anybody who has to make a profit — effectively locking them out.
That being said, I'm all in favor of projects like this. If a service is important enough, government should go ahead and provide it, not wait for somebody to figure out a way to make a profit selling this.
I even agree that the telecoms are being hypocritical. But semantically, they're being perfectly consistent.
All other social, moral, and legal issues aside, a heavy caliber handgun seems an impractical thing to carry along on a bike trip. And as for "security": I have to quote Heinlein, who once pointed out that a gun has a nasty way of making you feel safe when not feeling safe has more survival value.
I don't see the point in a strobe beacon for a bicyclist. If you're lost in the middle of the woods, sure. (Get a whistle too.) But if you're in trouble on a road, being found is the least of your problems.
Well, it is pretty logical if you add in the rest of the logic. Why do Sony formats always fail? Because they make them proprietary, DRM-encumbered, and thus less useful than competing formats.
Did Beta video tapes have DRM? I was unaware.
In any case, Blu Ray is not a "Sony format". Sony just happens to be one of several backers.
Actually, it's a myth that Philips simply wrote off licensing fees for the cassette. Probably originates in their PR department. I found that out after I posted the same myth on Slashdot and somebody called me on it. They were reasonably smart about making the license fees low and offering other incentives to get their competitors to adopt their format. But they've never done the "give it away and we'll all prosper" thing.
In any case, it's worth remembering that the cassette succeeded mainly on its merits — it had exactly the features consumers were looking for at time: easier to use than open-reel, more flexible than 8-track cartidge. Of course, Philips still could have killed it by handling it badly — something Sony has done with several excellent formats.
You're right, Philips dropped the ball on that one. But all in all, their track record is much better than Sony's. More to the point, they've had some very visible success, such as the original audio cassette. And Sony has had a lot of very visible failures.
Sony has presumably learned from its mistakes, and it's not like there's some kind of curse that makes their formats non-viable. Besides which, they don't even own the Blu-Ray format, they're just one of several backers. But that's not the perception of many people, including the author of TFA. So any format backed by Sony has a strike against it even before it hits the shelves, and the opposite is true of any format backed by Philips.
Isn't this kind of akin to saying that the CD format was dead in 1980?
The CD format, as I recall, never faced any serious competition, mainly because it was invented by Philips, which has always been good at getting its formats accepted by the industry. The Blu Ray format, by contrast, is facing a nasty format war, at least as bad as the one between VHS and Beta, even before its launch.
But although your comparison is wrong, you're still right — one shouldn't judge a race before it's over, never mind before it's started. I think a lot of folks are looking at the fact that Sony is a member of the Blu Ray consortium and saying, "That settles that! Sony formats always fail!" Hardly logical. But of course if enough people buy that theory, it doesn't have to be logical.
How do they know it will cost more then the Sun Enterprise 10000 that is sharing out MP3 files which are then decoded on a SunRay Thin Client and played for me at my desk?
Only portable players count.
A nitpick: a Sun Ray doesn't decode anything. All its software runs on the host. Like all of the current generation of "thin clients" it's not a client at all, just a kind of terminal.
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to be infatuated with simple-minded solutions to complicated problems: cold fusion will fix the energy crisis, dumping iron ore in the ocean will fix the greenhouse effect. I hate to imagine how you'd solve the health care crisis...
And have you even stopped to consider the ecological effects?
Jeez, dude, get a life. This is second time you've made a lengthy, breathless post on this subject, and both of them covered pretty much the same ground. I appreciate some of the information you've provided, but you need to get a grip — this is a new product from a semi-major hardware company, not the return of Jesus.
KW!
WTF is any Slashdotter qualified to decide who's qualified to run a corporation? Most of us can't even run a betting pool.
Actually, there is a Windows version of Pine. But you're right, Pine people are mostly Unix people. I stand corrected.
Please update the icon used for Microsoft stories on Slashdot. We have used this logo since 1998. We have never used a logo that portrayed our chairman and founder as a Borg.
We'd really appreciate it if you updated the icon. It may not be a big deal to you guys, but our logo is a mark of pride for our company. We'd like to see it used.
Betamax was not proprietary — you could buy non-Sony VCRs and camcorders that used it.
Mail is indexed. My average search takes under a second in Gmail, but around 10 seconds in Pine. Ironically enough, Google also provides a tool that can index any mail client's files — Google Desktop. Out of the box, it only supports the biggies (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.), but it'd be easy to write a plugin for Pine.
They wanted "subtly evil"!
What if we like the old logo better?
But maintaining a free market isn't the only priority here. Having affordable internet access for everybody is an important social concern. (Or, in the case of New Orleans, any internet access at all.) As an old 60s socialist, I have no problem subordinating the marketplace to social priorities when the need arises. But economic libertarians like you have to rationalize when they want to do the right thing, and their free-market-uber-alles ideologies says they can't.
When I was younger, I poo-pooed the market economy and thought that well-intentioned folks could just dispense with it. I've since outgrown that naive believe in a simplistic principle. Now the fashionable thing is to believe that the free market can solve all our problems. Equally simplistic and naive.
OK dude, go back and read beyond the first sentence.
Yes, my post was a joke. What's your point?
That being said, I'm all in favor of projects like this. If a service is important enough, government should go ahead and provide it, not wait for somebody to figure out a way to make a profit selling this.
I even agree that the telecoms are being hypocritical. But semantically, they're being perfectly consistent.
I don't see the point in a strobe beacon for a bicyclist. If you're lost in the middle of the woods, sure. (Get a whistle too.) But if you're in trouble on a road, being found is the least of your problems.
I used to have sources. I don't anymore. Being no relation to Sisyphus, I feel no particular inclination to fix factual errors in Wikipedia.
In any case, Blu Ray is not a "Sony format". Sony just happens to be one of several backers.
Why not? "Self-healing" doesn't mean "never catches fire".
In any case, it's worth remembering that the cassette succeeded mainly on its merits — it had exactly the features consumers were looking for at time: easier to use than open-reel, more flexible than 8-track cartidge. Of course, Philips still could have killed it by handling it badly — something Sony has done with several excellent formats.
Sony has presumably learned from its mistakes, and it's not like there's some kind of curse that makes their formats non-viable. Besides which, they don't even own the Blu-Ray format, they're just one of several backers. But that's not the perception of many people, including the author of TFA. So any format backed by Sony has a strike against it even before it hits the shelves, and the opposite is true of any format backed by Philips.
But although your comparison is wrong, you're still right — one shouldn't judge a race before it's over, never mind before it's started. I think a lot of folks are looking at the fact that Sony is a member of the Blu Ray consortium and saying, "That settles that! Sony formats always fail!" Hardly logical. But of course if enough people buy that theory, it doesn't have to be logical.
True, nobody will buy a gold-plated turd, for the same reason nobody will buy an unadorned turd. But people will buy gold-plated gadgets.
A nitpick: a Sun Ray doesn't decode anything. All its software runs on the host. Like all of the current generation of "thin clients" it's not a client at all, just a kind of terminal.
Ironically, I'm typing this on one...