If IDE is on the way out, what will the next generation of Compact Flash cards use for their interface so they are bootable? Currently, they do IDE. If they would do SATA, that could be very cool because there would be a lot fewer pins to break.
I boot from a Compact Flash card that is plugged into the IDE port via a small simple adapter. It's simple because the CF interface *is* an IDE interface, plug extra lines for power. So if the IDE port is not longer a bootable interface, how to boot from CF in the future? Will there be a SATA to CF interface?
BTW, booting from CF is nice. It's fast, and you don't have to worry that the OS won't come up due to some hard drive failure. It also provides a nice place to stick in some read-only filesystem stuff like/usr.
What might actually be really nice would be a motherboard with 8 SATA ports and 1 CF slot. But it still needs to be a bootable CF slot by whatever means they manage to translate it. I suspect the BIOS coder is going to have to find some space to put IDE drivers back in.
You can be sure those who want to make more laws that take guns away from everyone will not shut up about this for years. So unless you have a solution that will shut those morons up, we will be here to counter their stupidity.
First of all, the gun didn't do it. Almost certainly there are lots of whatever model it happened to be. Only in the hands of an idiot do people get killed. There are far far more guns than idiots (really... and a damned good thing, too).
You suggest "meaningful regulation of who gets guns". First of all, people like me are not fighting that at all. But there has been little or no real opportunity to fight such proposals because those generally do not get proposed very often. I do agree that keeping guns in the right hands is a good thing. The problem is all the gun control fanatics never propose such laws. They propose laws that take guns away from everyone (except law enforcement and military). So when they act stupid and propose dumb laws like that, of course we have to stand up and fight against them. Maybe you could suggest to them this time around that they should instead propose something that takes guns away from idiots, and not the rest of us. You think you can get them all (including all the Democrats in Congress) to do that?
... The BSA announces plans for a series of raids to be conducted on a million registered home users of Microsoft Windows Vista to check for violations of the user agreement not to run Vista under virtualization. The raids will begin shortly after the end of a 60 day amnesty period during which users may uninstall their BSD, Linux, or OS X systems and install Vista directly on their PC. "No one ever needs more than one operating system", said Bill Gates in a message left after inquiries for an interview.
I don't subscribe to the idea that skilled workers take American jobs, I believe they help companies grow and generate more jobs in the long-term.
To the extend that companies genuinely hire people for the skills that truly are not available domestically, I fully support the H-1B program. And I personally know some people who fit that definition (where unavailable can mean extremely hard to find or people unwilling to move to a less popular part of the USA). But I also know many companies just blindly seek people who they know will accept less than median pay, are willing to put in extra hours and work an extra day or two per week, and won't hop off to a better paying job in a couple years.
Skilled workers do take American jobs in the cases (that do exist) where there is an American worker who has the same skills and can do that job, but can't get it because he wants a pay level above his mortgage payments. At least H-1B does generally have pay levels at some significant percentage of the median (and in some companies, they are well paid). The problem is there are companies abusing the system, which itself is fundamentally broken with loopholes that let them do this legally.
FYI, you might actually be able to get your visa if this kind of abuse was not taking place.
One fundamental problem is the international economy is not a level playing field. People living in India can make a fraction of what is made in the USA, when figured on the exchange rate, yet be living in luxury in India, even by American standards. Aside from a few concentrated places in and around the booming tech centers, the cost of living in India is very low compared to the USA. Fix things to make the playing field level and the problem goes away. Of course the corporations would never let their Congressmen (American term for MP) do that.
You guys are still using run levels? When was the last time you actually used a run level different than the default run level, or changed the default, aside from doing emergency maintenance which can be done well enough with init=/bin/sh when needed?
but which controllers work in Linux
on
eSATA Connectors
·
· Score: 1
I've already been bitten by a SATA controller that didn't work in Linux (2.6.16 or so at the time). I got a list of chipsets that are supported by Linux (main source tree). But that doesn't help because I'm not buying chipsets... I want to by a few controller cards. And now they need to be ones with eSATA connectors.
Dell is just taking a neutral position with regard to Linux. They know that the majority of customers that would use Linux would not want to use whatever distribution they chose. This is actually a better response from Dell we are getting than we might get from some other business where they wear their ties a bit too tight and think that since the Linux community has not reached a concensus on "the one distribution", they can't go with Linux.
What Dell could do in this case, however, is include a CD/DVD of any distribution that the distribution maker wants to provide. Maybe Ubuntu could give an architecture-matching CD to each Dell customer to be included in with the machine as shipped?
Personally I would prefer Dell actually not install Linux pre-loaded. That way, they won't have to say to me "Please put the Redhat system back on so we can test the ethernet card you say is dead". Ideally, a live CD should be provided to handle all hardware diagnostics done from the software side, anyway.
Deleting a comment, though, is just a bit tacky (I would if it were spam).
If you know of a CFL that doesn't flicker, or a ballast for regular FL that doesn't flicker, by all means please point to a specific one, with specific engineering technical details to be sufficiently convincing to make it worth buying to try it. So far every single CFL or FL ballast I have ever bought has that annoying flickering.
But the biggest problem for me is the spectrum. It's not about the color... it's about the spectrum. There are these spikes in the spectrum that make it hard to focus on fine work. At least with incandescent it is a relatively smooth spectrum.
Incandescent bulbs are less efficient in Australia compared to the United States. That's because they don't burn as hot due to the need to run at a lower current since the electric voltage is higher there (240 volts) than in the USA (120 volts). Low voltage (12 volts) bulbs are more efficient. Of course fluorescent are better in any country in terms of efficiency. I wonder when they will have low voltage (12 volt) fluorescent replacement bulbs to plug into low voltage lighting systems that already exist.
When the driver is provided with the hardware, they also need to provide instructions on how to make that driver work on any given Linux system, or at least some popular distribution. In addition to that, they will need to provide some level of support, at least for the installation process. Linux's distribution-fracture nature makes that harder so many companies pick one distribution (hint: it isn't Debian, Gentoo, or Slackware).
Ideally, we should get the drivers into the distributed kernel tree as soon as possible so distributions can include it automatically in new versions. Then only those who drag their feet on upgrading need to do a driver install themselves.
One complication for many companies is that they don't want the product to be known to exist until the official release date, even if they have no issue with releasing the driver source and even the specs documents. Many don't mind releasing source, but might want the specs documents to stay closed (which doesn't really seem to conflict with GPL). So one idea is for developers to sign time constrained NDA's the restrict the disclosure of the existance of the device until the official release date. This way, Linux driver development can be ongoing behind the scenes and the driver source can be submitted to the kernel tree on the product release date, as well as drivers included in with the hard or on the manufacturer's web site for geeks living on the edge.
This gets us more supported devices, both directly and indirectly. The indirectly comes from manufacturers that would otherwise resist open source drivers being forced into it by their competition moving ahead with open source drivers because we make it a bit easier for them to do so (under the dated release constraints).
I don't personally have a goal of replacing Windows with Linux in the perspective of the whole market. For my own needs, Linux replaced Windows a long time ago. My goals are selfish: I want more drivers and applications on Linux that I can use. It is the commercial interest of developing only for larger markets that require that we have a larger Linux user base for them to proceed with that.
One requirement that could help is mandatory local area peering between all tier 1 internet providers in each of the largest 100 or so cities in the US, and the equivalent in other countries. Since we're talking about telecommuters that would be local to their employer, most of that traffic could stay local and away from the backbones by going over that peering exchange.
If this outbreak happens in the summer, I would worry about increased electrical usage from so many home air conditioners having to run in the occupied comfort zone, especially in southern regions of the US.
So what if it can't take a beating. It's probably so much cheaper that you just pull out another one. Maybe it won't work in the extreme 25% of cases. But if it saves at least SOME lives TODAY, then by all means deploy the fragile one while the durable one is designed and built. And then deploy the durable one while it gets all the official testing to make sure it really is durable enough to be run over 10 times by a tank while being toasted with a flame thrower (how many lives will that make a difference in, anyway?).
OK, I admit I don't know much about Tor. I know what its role is and what it does. I don't know anything about the protocol, such as what ports are used. But it seems to me that if the IT department network people know how to selectively log it (which means they know more about it than I do), then perhaps they can just block it at the firewall (if they believe any use of it whatsoever will somehow destroy the campus network... which is silly). If they are concerned that excessive use of Tor would somehow overload the campus network with traffic that they cannot determine is acceptable use or not, then why not just bandwidth throttle it to something like 2% of the connectivity bandwidth, which could allow the legitimate uses but effectively discourage the uses the policy is probably focused on (pirating copyrighted content and spewing out tons of spam).
The people that recieved it can not comply with the GPL by providing endemnification and therefore cannot redistribute it. Thus defeating the entire purpose of the GPL.
As long as the entirety of what was distributed is created only by Novell, then this is so. However, if any part of what Novell distributes consists of GPL components from others, then this is a violation by Novell because Novell does not have the rights to limit or restrict distribution of anything containing such parts. The entirety of the GPL must apply in whole to the whole thing being distributed (e.g. a Linux kernel... and other components like glibc) and that requires the distributor (Novell at that point) to grant all the rights of the GPL (which means anyone who gets it from Novell also has to have royalty-free patent rights, too).
Basically, Novell is losing its right to distribute the components it does not create that are covered by GPL because it is attaching something that cannot be redistributed. It's similar to linking in some piece of code they write and saying "You can distribute the rest of Linux but not this little part we wrote". The GPL does not allow that.
Novell could go write their own OS entirely themselves and distribute that under any terms they choose. But they can't distribute the pieces of Linux (as part of the whole) they did not develop unless they grant to the entire thing all the rights they have in it. If they add patent indemnification to it, they have to grant full free and infinite redistribution of those rights for the whole thing to be able to legally distribute that which contains the other parts (other parts being parts of Linux they did not distribute).
Do you have any spectrum graphs of the different phosphors? If there is a way to make a reasonably uniform and flat spectrum from fluorescent light (and eliminate the flicker with what is either DC or 25..40 kHz), then maybe we have a solution. I was looking at building a light made from 22 different narrow band LEDs and see if that would be close enough to flat. Right now, every fluorescent light I have seen still has that "tense focus" look to it (caused by multiple focus edges from separate spikes in the spectrum).
I also believe someone who gets all their power with a zero carbon footprint (e.g. off-grid solar panels, wind, waterfall) should be allowed to have whatever lights they want. Personally, I keep my home rather dark. I just light up work areas when I need it. I'm sure I use a lot fewer kWH/yr in incandescent than the typical bright home uses in just their FL lights. At the moment, I have two 4-watt night lights and one 15-watt lamp on... and three computers on one monitor.
You have to be unemployed for a certain period of time (I think it is 2 to 4 weeks in Texas) before you can qualify for unemployment. Starting a new job within a week means he/she is not going to be able to get it. OTOH, if he loses the new job over this, he should put down ThePlanet has his real employer as they are the ones responsible for losing both jobs.
I called up my credit card company a couple months ago to report some fraudulent transactions on my statement. They informed me that since identity theft is declining, they don't believe me, and so they were rejecting my claim that I was a victim of identity theft.
... well, maybe that could be the source of their figured?
I stood on the subway for a over an hour (normal ride time: 30 minutes or so) because of these dipshit "indie" artists that did this for Turner.
NO... you stood on the subway for over an hour because your city is run by a bunch of incompetent jackasses that only know how to overreact and create a panic over a bunch of blinking lights that had been there for days with no problems. You stood on the subway for over an hour because someone saw that one of these signs was flipping the bird and them and got pissed off and called in (on a payphone) to the city and claimed it was a bomb (this act being the hoax act).
You'll probably have a lot more of this in Boston in the future, too, if you don't admit that it is the fault of the city and do what it takes to get some major turnover to get some competent people running the place. Remember, it didn't cause a panic in any of the several other cities they showed up in. The rest of the country is laughing at Boston and all those headless chickens in police uniforms running around. The feeling you should have right now is one of embarassment and shame (if you're supporting those city people that did this).
Their stunt shut down 93 North, the orange line, several Charles River bridges (which are heavily trafficked.)
No it didn't. The devices were there for days. And they were in other cities, too. It was the stupid incompetent police/city officials that shut things down. The rest of us are laughing at Boston.
One of them is sitting in jail, as of about half an hour ago. Let's see how he likes being inconvenienced.
He should be there for trespassing and vandalism. That's the first crime that was done. The next crime was days later, and was done by some yet-unnamed incompetent city official who, unlike his counterparts in other cities, doesn't have a clue. The police really arrested this guy to try to cover up their own incompetence.
It's not a hoax device. The device is what it is, an advertisement. There is no hoax about it (unless he's the one who called in and claimed it was a bomb). But this is typical of incompetent government officials that need to generate FUD and cover up their own stupidity. The only crimes involved are trespassing and vandalism.
What they need to do is find out why it is that the panic did NOT occur in the many other cities these devices were placed in. Why is it that ONLY Boston officials went nuts and created a panic?
Well, now we know you can't have blinking lights in Boston.
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If IDE is on the way out, what will the next generation of Compact Flash cards use for their interface so they are bootable? Currently, they do IDE. If they would do SATA, that could be very cool because there would be a lot fewer pins to break.
I boot from a Compact Flash card that is plugged into the IDE port via a small simple adapter. It's simple because the CF interface *is* an IDE interface, plug extra lines for power. So if the IDE port is not longer a bootable interface, how to boot from CF in the future? Will there be a SATA to CF interface?
BTW, booting from CF is nice. It's fast, and you don't have to worry that the OS won't come up due to some hard drive failure. It also provides a nice place to stick in some read-only filesystem stuff like /usr.
What might actually be really nice would be a motherboard with 8 SATA ports and 1 CF slot. But it still needs to be a bootable CF slot by whatever means they manage to translate it. I suspect the BIOS coder is going to have to find some space to put IDE drivers back in.
You can be sure those who want to make more laws that take guns away from everyone will not shut up about this for years. So unless you have a solution that will shut those morons up, we will be here to counter their stupidity.
First of all, the gun didn't do it. Almost certainly there are lots of whatever model it happened to be. Only in the hands of an idiot do people get killed. There are far far more guns than idiots (really ... and a damned good thing, too).
You suggest "meaningful regulation of who gets guns". First of all, people like me are not fighting that at all. But there has been little or no real opportunity to fight such proposals because those generally do not get proposed very often. I do agree that keeping guns in the right hands is a good thing. The problem is all the gun control fanatics never propose such laws. They propose laws that take guns away from everyone (except law enforcement and military). So when they act stupid and propose dumb laws like that, of course we have to stand up and fight against them. Maybe you could suggest to them this time around that they should instead propose something that takes guns away from idiots, and not the rest of us. You think you can get them all (including all the Democrats in Congress) to do that?
... The BSA announces plans for a series of raids to be conducted on a million registered home users of Microsoft Windows Vista to check for violations of the user agreement not to run Vista under virtualization. The raids will begin shortly after the end of a 60 day amnesty period during which users may uninstall their BSD, Linux, or OS X systems and install Vista directly on their PC. "No one ever needs more than one operating system", said Bill Gates in a message left after inquiries for an interview.
More likely they wouldn't even ask, and would think a shell script is the starting point of a new movie and Rsync is some new parody band.
I don't see the average consumer being smart enough to lobby for multi-threaded software...
I don't see the average programmer experienced enough to write multi-threaded software...
I don't see why this isn't modded (Score:5, Insightful).
... they won't have to bathe every week.
To the extend that companies genuinely hire people for the skills that truly are not available domestically, I fully support the H-1B program. And I personally know some people who fit that definition (where unavailable can mean extremely hard to find or people unwilling to move to a less popular part of the USA). But I also know many companies just blindly seek people who they know will accept less than median pay, are willing to put in extra hours and work an extra day or two per week, and won't hop off to a better paying job in a couple years.
Skilled workers do take American jobs in the cases (that do exist) where there is an American worker who has the same skills and can do that job, but can't get it because he wants a pay level above his mortgage payments. At least H-1B does generally have pay levels at some significant percentage of the median (and in some companies, they are well paid). The problem is there are companies abusing the system, which itself is fundamentally broken with loopholes that let them do this legally.
FYI, you might actually be able to get your visa if this kind of abuse was not taking place.
One fundamental problem is the international economy is not a level playing field. People living in India can make a fraction of what is made in the USA, when figured on the exchange rate, yet be living in luxury in India, even by American standards. Aside from a few concentrated places in and around the booming tech centers, the cost of living in India is very low compared to the USA. Fix things to make the playing field level and the problem goes away. Of course the corporations would never let their Congressmen (American term for MP) do that.
K & L Gates is the combination of several law firms including Preston Gates & Ellis LLP, co-founded by William H. Gates, Sr, father of Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates.
You guys are still using run levels? When was the last time you actually used a run level different than the default run level, or changed the default, aside from doing emergency maintenance which can be done well enough with init=/bin/sh when needed?
I've already been bitten by a SATA controller that didn't work in Linux (2.6.16 or so at the time). I got a list of chipsets that are supported by Linux (main source tree). But that doesn't help because I'm not buying chipsets ... I want to by a few controller cards. And now they need to be ones with eSATA connectors.
Dell is just taking a neutral position with regard to Linux. They know that the majority of customers that would use Linux would not want to use whatever distribution they chose. This is actually a better response from Dell we are getting than we might get from some other business where they wear their ties a bit too tight and think that since the Linux community has not reached a concensus on "the one distribution", they can't go with Linux.
What Dell could do in this case, however, is include a CD/DVD of any distribution that the distribution maker wants to provide. Maybe Ubuntu could give an architecture-matching CD to each Dell customer to be included in with the machine as shipped?
Personally I would prefer Dell actually not install Linux pre-loaded. That way, they won't have to say to me "Please put the Redhat system back on so we can test the ethernet card you say is dead". Ideally, a live CD should be provided to handle all hardware diagnostics done from the software side, anyway.
Deleting a comment, though, is just a bit tacky (I would if it were spam).
If you know of a CFL that doesn't flicker, or a ballast for regular FL that doesn't flicker, by all means please point to a specific one, with specific engineering technical details to be sufficiently convincing to make it worth buying to try it. So far every single CFL or FL ballast I have ever bought has that annoying flickering.
But the biggest problem for me is the spectrum. It's not about the color ... it's about the spectrum. There are these spikes in the spectrum that make it hard to focus on fine work. At least with incandescent it is a relatively smooth spectrum.
Incandescent bulbs are less efficient in Australia compared to the United States. That's because they don't burn as hot due to the need to run at a lower current since the electric voltage is higher there (240 volts) than in the USA (120 volts). Low voltage (12 volts) bulbs are more efficient. Of course fluorescent are better in any country in terms of efficiency. I wonder when they will have low voltage (12 volt) fluorescent replacement bulbs to plug into low voltage lighting systems that already exist.
When the driver is provided with the hardware, they also need to provide instructions on how to make that driver work on any given Linux system, or at least some popular distribution. In addition to that, they will need to provide some level of support, at least for the installation process. Linux's distribution-fracture nature makes that harder so many companies pick one distribution (hint: it isn't Debian, Gentoo, or Slackware).
Ideally, we should get the drivers into the distributed kernel tree as soon as possible so distributions can include it automatically in new versions. Then only those who drag their feet on upgrading need to do a driver install themselves.
One complication for many companies is that they don't want the product to be known to exist until the official release date, even if they have no issue with releasing the driver source and even the specs documents. Many don't mind releasing source, but might want the specs documents to stay closed (which doesn't really seem to conflict with GPL). So one idea is for developers to sign time constrained NDA's the restrict the disclosure of the existance of the device until the official release date. This way, Linux driver development can be ongoing behind the scenes and the driver source can be submitted to the kernel tree on the product release date, as well as drivers included in with the hard or on the manufacturer's web site for geeks living on the edge.
This gets us more supported devices, both directly and indirectly. The indirectly comes from manufacturers that would otherwise resist open source drivers being forced into it by their competition moving ahead with open source drivers because we make it a bit easier for them to do so (under the dated release constraints).
I don't personally have a goal of replacing Windows with Linux in the perspective of the whole market. For my own needs, Linux replaced Windows a long time ago. My goals are selfish: I want more drivers and applications on Linux that I can use. It is the commercial interest of developing only for larger markets that require that we have a larger Linux user base for them to proceed with that.
One requirement that could help is mandatory local area peering between all tier 1 internet providers in each of the largest 100 or so cities in the US, and the equivalent in other countries. Since we're talking about telecommuters that would be local to their employer, most of that traffic could stay local and away from the backbones by going over that peering exchange.
If this outbreak happens in the summer, I would worry about increased electrical usage from so many home air conditioners having to run in the occupied comfort zone, especially in southern regions of the US.
So what if it can't take a beating. It's probably so much cheaper that you just pull out another one. Maybe it won't work in the extreme 25% of cases. But if it saves at least SOME lives TODAY, then by all means deploy the fragile one while the durable one is designed and built. And then deploy the durable one while it gets all the official testing to make sure it really is durable enough to be run over 10 times by a tank while being toasted with a flame thrower (how many lives will that make a difference in, anyway?).
OK, I admit I don't know much about Tor. I know what its role is and what it does. I don't know anything about the protocol, such as what ports are used. But it seems to me that if the IT department network people know how to selectively log it (which means they know more about it than I do), then perhaps they can just block it at the firewall (if they believe any use of it whatsoever will somehow destroy the campus network ... which is silly). If they are concerned that excessive use of Tor would somehow overload the campus network with traffic that they cannot determine is acceptable use or not, then why not just bandwidth throttle it to something like 2% of the connectivity bandwidth, which could allow the legitimate uses but effectively discourage the uses the policy is probably focused on (pirating copyrighted content and spewing out tons of spam).
As long as the entirety of what was distributed is created only by Novell, then this is so. However, if any part of what Novell distributes consists of GPL components from others, then this is a violation by Novell because Novell does not have the rights to limit or restrict distribution of anything containing such parts. The entirety of the GPL must apply in whole to the whole thing being distributed (e.g. a Linux kernel ... and other components like glibc) and that requires the distributor (Novell at that point) to grant all the rights of the GPL (which means anyone who gets it from Novell also has to have royalty-free patent rights, too).
Basically, Novell is losing its right to distribute the components it does not create that are covered by GPL because it is attaching something that cannot be redistributed. It's similar to linking in some piece of code they write and saying "You can distribute the rest of Linux but not this little part we wrote". The GPL does not allow that.
Novell could go write their own OS entirely themselves and distribute that under any terms they choose. But they can't distribute the pieces of Linux (as part of the whole) they did not develop unless they grant to the entire thing all the rights they have in it. If they add patent indemnification to it, they have to grant full free and infinite redistribution of those rights for the whole thing to be able to legally distribute that which contains the other parts (other parts being parts of Linux they did not distribute).
Do you have any spectrum graphs of the different phosphors? If there is a way to make a reasonably uniform and flat spectrum from fluorescent light (and eliminate the flicker with what is either DC or 25..40 kHz), then maybe we have a solution. I was looking at building a light made from 22 different narrow band LEDs and see if that would be close enough to flat. Right now, every fluorescent light I have seen still has that "tense focus" look to it (caused by multiple focus edges from separate spikes in the spectrum).
I also believe someone who gets all their power with a zero carbon footprint (e.g. off-grid solar panels, wind, waterfall) should be allowed to have whatever lights they want. Personally, I keep my home rather dark. I just light up work areas when I need it. I'm sure I use a lot fewer kWH/yr in incandescent than the typical bright home uses in just their FL lights. At the moment, I have two 4-watt night lights and one 15-watt lamp on ... and three computers on one monitor.
You have to be unemployed for a certain period of time (I think it is 2 to 4 weeks in Texas) before you can qualify for unemployment. Starting a new job within a week means he/she is not going to be able to get it. OTOH, if he loses the new job over this, he should put down ThePlanet has his real employer as they are the ones responsible for losing both jobs.
I called up my credit card company a couple months ago to report some fraudulent transactions on my statement. They informed me that since identity theft is declining, they don't believe me, and so they were rejecting my claim that I was a victim of identity theft.
... well, maybe that could be the source of their figured?
... police terrorize you.
NO ... you stood on the subway for over an hour because your city is run by a bunch of incompetent jackasses that only know how to overreact and create a panic over a bunch of blinking lights that had been there for days with no problems. You stood on the subway for over an hour because someone saw that one of these signs was flipping the bird and them and got pissed off and called in (on a payphone) to the city and claimed it was a bomb (this act being the hoax act).
You'll probably have a lot more of this in Boston in the future, too, if you don't admit that it is the fault of the city and do what it takes to get some major turnover to get some competent people running the place. Remember, it didn't cause a panic in any of the several other cities they showed up in. The rest of the country is laughing at Boston and all those headless chickens in police uniforms running around. The feeling you should have right now is one of embarassment and shame (if you're supporting those city people that did this).
No it didn't. The devices were there for days. And they were in other cities, too. It was the stupid incompetent police/city officials that shut things down. The rest of us are laughing at Boston.
He should be there for trespassing and vandalism. That's the first crime that was done. The next crime was days later, and was done by some yet-unnamed incompetent city official who, unlike his counterparts in other cities, doesn't have a clue. The police really arrested this guy to try to cover up their own incompetence.
It's not a hoax device. The device is what it is, an advertisement. There is no hoax about it (unless he's the one who called in and claimed it was a bomb). But this is typical of incompetent government officials that need to generate FUD and cover up their own stupidity. The only crimes involved are trespassing and vandalism.
What they need to do is find out why it is that the panic did NOT occur in the many other cities these devices were placed in. Why is it that ONLY Boston officials went nuts and created a panic?
Well, now we know you can't have blinking lights in Boston.