OSS doesn't have the luxury that closed-source does of being able to hide its kitty litter
That, and the bit where if you buy closed-source software, and it turns out to have some form of dodgy encumberance, then there is someone to.. ah.. how-you-Americans-say-in-your-language?..ah-yes... point the lawyers at. You generally don't get left holding the bag all on your own.
As the saying goes, if OSS software breaks, you get to keep both pieces (however in this context, the patent holder may well like to have his piece back:-(
If they also kept a running total of, say, the people who downloaded something, used it, and DIDN'T buy it, then this would be more useful.
No, it wouldn't be more usefull. I dunno about you, but in those earlier days where getting any new game or software package to run on your DOS-based 286 or 386 PC was a week-long exercise that often ended up in a sub-standard result, or a game just out-right refusing to run on your hardware (nicely complimented by a vendor or retailer outright refusing to accept any responsibility for the fubar), I think it's safe to say that many many people go so thoroughly burned that they swore off ever paying money for software again. Not 'cos they want to be thieves, but because they'd already been robbed too many times.
To some extent, those times have returned (or perhaps they're just continuing). I've been burned a few times in recent years where, in particular, graphic subsystem requirements for games and other high-end software moved faster than the hardware upgrades I installed in my machines, and so I have often ended up with the same old story - expensive software that just won't run on my hardware unless I spend maybe 2-3 times of the price of the software, again, on new hardware. Now I set out to buy a $100 game, for example, if I get home and find it's gonna cost me $200-$300-$400 to get it running, then screw them. I'll bin the nice new game, learn from the lesson, and stop buying software all over again.
Now I've just made a couple of entries in this new database. They all cite the same reasoning. I downloaded full versions of late-model games that I really wanted to own/play. I tested them out for gameplay and outright functionality (you need full versions, because often the demo versions are coded to run on a much broader range of hardware, just to get the punters in). In all cases, once I was happy with the software, and its compatibility with me and my hardware, I turned right around abd bought full retail versions.
This argument that vendors are losing money to the people who didn't buy because they downloaded is pure and unmitigated hogwash in my book. Sure, there's a lot of stuff I downloaded and did not subsequently buy. Guess why? Becase it was CRAP. It either didn't run on my hardware, was just poorly thought out software with a gameplay life of five minutes, pushed out the door to grab some quick cash. The software vendor didn't lose in those situations, 'cos I didn't 'use' their software. They actually gained, 'cos I didn't pay a buttload of money for their crap, get bitten, then spend every change I coule slagging them out to anyone who would listen, and I didn't gain, 'cos I got nothing - I lost some hours wasted.
Downloading is win win win for everyone, any other POV is just plain flawed!
You got that in one! As I said in an earlier post, I tinkered with it a bit last weekend. I got it up and running with an Intel Centrino b/g wireless (8022?) and a Broadcom gigabit ethernet card, simultaneously (tho that bit required a little bit of hacking) with no particular dramas at all. It just worked!
A little short on doco, but I'd be happy to help out with some pointers if you get stuck with it.
Yup, FreeBSD is fully userland ready, has been for, lets see, the last 6-8-ish years that I've been using it!
On the subject of RTFA, as the article says, 5.2.1-RELEASE is a little jumpy in some parts, and if you need solid stability, stick with 4.10-RELEASE for the time being.
I've used FreeBSD in production environments for years and years and years. Right now, I'm running 4.9-RELEASE and 4.10-RELEASE on production servers both at work and at home.
I'm tinkering with 5.2.1-RELEASE on a new Dell X300 laptop and a P4 desktop at the moment. They're both working pretty well, and surprisingly, I've got almost everything on the (very screwed up hardware-wise) X300 working! I have managed to break 5.2.1 several times, but it was mostly by doing really wacky things with the Project Evil code, upping and downing and kldloading and kldunloading different drivers on different interfaces with not enough kernel memory allocated for the bloated third party windows code!!!
Having said that, Project Evil is nothing short of a *GODSEND*, and Bill Paul is god! It's pretty amazing to be pinching windows NDIS drivers and compiling them into FreeBSD kernel modules - opens doors for all kinds of obscure hardware that couldn't be used before!
It's still too early for me to make any definitive comment on whether 5.x.x is good on desktops as yet, but if it's anything like the FreeBSDs that came before it, it will be nothing short of excellent when it hits -STABLE.
"up-to-the-second" information isn't really all that vital.
With respect, I disagree. I too have been playing with a PVR for a few months, but I did the sums in my head (2 x PCI DVB-T tuners, big HDD, fast Pentium 4, motherboard, ram, case, tv-out card, remote control) and went for a commercial product. The Topfield (Toppy) TF5000PVRt cost me just AUD$900, and I couldn't come close to buying the abovementioned hardware for that, even before I got to thinking about the weeks/months of screwing about with an OS and software to make it all work (and probably never, ever get it working just so).
The commercial product was a pretty easy decision for me. A quick explanation along the lines of "2 x PCI DVB-T tuners at AUD$200 each..." got the spending approval from She Who Must Be Obeyed pretty quickly too!
Now, I love the Toppy, it works really really well. The standard 80Gb disk is just enough to keep a lot of content while still being small enough to force you to clean up once a week and not letting you accumulate gigs of content you'll never get around to watching (OK, so I'm waiting for the warranty to expire then I'm putting a 300+Gb ATA drive in there!!!). Two digital tuners on board means that you can cat two streams to disk, and watch another pre-recorded stream all at the same time.
The real problem lies in catching content. The Toppy can synch time to the broadcast time signal from the TV stations, or it can run on your own 'manual' time setting. 'Manual' means that if you have a power failure, you don't recover too well, (until you come home and reset the clock). 'Automatic' puts you very much at the mercy of the TV stations. Toppy owners Australia wide recently suffered when one of the TV stations (allegedly ch10) put the time signal forward three weeks for a little while, then reverted to their version of 'normal'. All the Toppy boxes in the land marked the next three weeks worth or cron jobs as 'done', and didn't record anything for three weeks!
If you set the time manually, you still get the TV stations starting content 5-10 minutes before or after the published time, so they still manage to make you miss the beginning or the end of your program (and that really sucks with something like Laura Norder or NCSI! (yup, we get all the same programming you Americans do!)). So you set the machine to record +/- 5 minutes of everything. Waste disk space, but you can ffwd through ads, etc of course, don't start watching until 20 mins after the content started, and time shift - all those wonderful things.
Anyhoo, long story short, I'm with the ICE man (pun!). I think that the two most important things in PVR land *are* knowing when to start and stop cat'ing content to disk, and (less important, but nice) when to pause for advertisements.
We're starting to get a lot of pay content in various forms here in Australia (presumably the stuff you Seppos have had for years, only ours can't be bypassed with two capacitors and an inductor using these nifty plans for only $9.95!). Most of it just isn't worth the ridiculous prices they're charging for it. This one though, if he's really going to sell it for $10-$12/month, is good - I'm there. If he comes up with a module that runs on my existing Toppy box (this machine does have a bit of third party freeware floating around, upload/install with usb, etc, etc), then I'm there with bells on. Best of luck to 'im!
This is an obvious silly marketerring ploy. You'd only not pick that up after the first two sentences if you were mentally deficient. For me, the (brief) site visit went "Loads... Oh look, those silly new HTML layer things... hmmm, marketeers have been at this site. Bastards. Nothing to see here, move along. Closed site, and clicked off to something else in another tab". No mystery about it!
They're all over Tokyo already! I have quite a collection actually. Post-it note style advertisements for young ladies who, I presume, offer 'massages'.
I wonder what will happen when analog TV transmission goes away.
It's an equally significant concern here in Oz... Apparently large parts of Australia will miss out on TV *altogether* once Australia goes digital and drops analogue.
Still, the same threat loomed when the Vodafone-dodgy-deal-with-the-government forced GSM telephones on us all, the AMPS telephone network got extended for a few years once folks in the country figured out that GSM wasn't fit for a big country like this, and that the shutdown of the AMPS network was gonna cut a *lot* of people off, and they kicked up a very appropriate stink.
One wonders (one hopes like hell) that the same thing will happen with digital TV here in Oz...
Funny you should say that... When I was a boy... growing up in the Australian countryside (interestingly enough, the town that Russell Crowe (actor) now calls home), we only had two channels. The 'ABC' (aka 'Australian Broadcasting Corporation') that everyone gets, and the local 'commercial' channel.
Much as I'd like to throw in a "we were so poor..." line, it wasn't like that. We simply got two channels in that bit of the world.
Of course, when we didn't like what was on either channel, then we were so poor that we had to poke each other with sticks for amusement....
And I thought all this time I was surfing the 'World Wide' Web:/
The definition of 'world wide' varies depending on whether you're from the USA or someplace else. Who was it, the Monty Python folks perhaps?, who remarked that the key difference between the US and England is that when England hosts an international sporting event, they invite other countries. Could the same be said for the "world" wide web?:-)
Take it from me... Internet Cafes do not cost USD$7.50 per hour here in Australia - they don't even cost AUD$7.50! Even if there are one or two of them that are that greedy, there's no way you'd come up with an average price anywhere near that high. I question therefore, how reliable the rest of the numbers on that map can be?
I can't believe it! Three pages of slashdot discussion, and not a single mention of the geek's favourite cunning linguist Larry Wall!
Having had a quick RTFA, it's clear that there's plenty of substance in this research. On the other hand, I'm a perl geek, and I wanna hear what Larry has to say on the subject! He is *the* man where languages and linguistics are concerned after all, and there's probably More Than One Way To Do It In Music!
The Austraian Bureau of Meteorology had this little dilemma with it's Weather RADAR product several years ago. They apparently had a very small number (as in less than 20) of customers who paid rather a lot of money for access to the service. Someone wised up and figured out that the cost of collecting the money from such a small customer base wasn't cost effective, so they opened the product to all and sundry.
It's a really really useful tool. I use it at least a couple of times a week - basically anytime the weather seems a bit sus and I need to decide if to do a bolt from the office on my bike before a storm front hits, or to wait until it passes. The last four images thing lets you get a feel for which way the weather is blowing, etc, etc.
On Tuesday nights, when the Sydney Knights do their Tuesday Night Ride (TNR), we're all hitting the bom.gov.au site to see what the weather is looking like. If you ride a motorcycle and live in Sydney, Australia then you need to come on a TNR!.
Now Australia didn't seem to have the problem with the commercial weather services wanting to continue to charge customers for something that they already paid the government for... that's a whole new ball game. Still, I'm all for the gummint opening up public access to weather data in any jurisdiction - it's a really really really good thing. Let the snake oil sellers find a new flavour of snake oil - I've heard that the penis enlargement pill market is a good one.
This isn't just a maybe or maybe not, the law says that I didn't read the terms and conditions. Enter English/Australian Contract Law 101 - first year undergraduate law.... Thornton v Shoe Lane Parking [1971] 1 All ER 686. Some guy called Thornton tripped over in a car park owned by Shoe Lane Parking Ltd, injured himself, and proceeded to claim against Shoelane Parking for his injury.
Shoe Lane said "No, piss off! Our terms and conditions, displayed on the ticket and at the entrance to the parking station say that it's not our problem if you are injured on our premises. Your entry into the car park implies acceptance of our terms".
My Thornton says "No, you piss off" and proceeds to brief a brief. (English legal joke, prolly won't work in America, although the concept of sueing people at the drop of a hat probably will!!
Anyhoo, it eventually made it all the way to the English High Court. After much careful consideration, Lord Justice Denning MR found for the plaintiff (Thornton). Held that Shoe Lane couldn't avoid responsibility because they couldn't show that Thornton knew of and understood the conditions. Lord Denning said...
"No customer in a thousand ever read the conditions"
Because it was the High Court, and on a matter of law that hadn't been thoroughly considered in that context before, the finding passed into England's common law. It it adopted by Australia and other Commonwealth countries in lieu of any other more binding statute or common law.
That little tid-bit is maybe the only thing I ever remembered from first year Law, but it stuck with me. I happily click "OK" at EULAs and take tickets presented by parking machines without ever considering the contents of the conditions (I actually make a point of looking the other way!!!) because I know that the law says that I didn't read the conditions!:-)
I'll show my colours up front: I've been worshipping the Daemon since somewhere around version 1.1 - practically since forever!.
The thing that sells me for FreeBSD in corporate environments is that FreeBSD is an operating system. The same group of people do the kernel *and* the OS. I've put a lot of FreeBSD boxes in production corporate environments, and I've never been bitten by the choice of OS, so I've become a pretty loyal punter. On the other hand, I just can't bring myself to put any OS that uses the linux *kernel* (there isn't an OS called 'linux' as best as I can tell) on a production enviroment - I've always had the impression that the Linuxes are all terribly fragmented, incoherent, and you never know what you're getting.
(by about now, all the script kids with mod points have cluelessly clicked the 'flamebait' button already... should I bother going on?!!!:-) )
In other news, I've become a really big fan of Gentoo Linux... it's just brilliant. I'm using it all kinds of non-production environments, and loving every minute of it. Bottom line though, it's too hard to sell something that is just a kernel as stable, reliable, and suitable for business.
There was a write up on slashdot a while back, don't remember enough to search it, but someone did a bunch of tests on a range of *nix OSes and, interestingly, *BSD got pretty well pasted (by a flavour of Linux) in some of the tests. That surprised me, because Linux is not something that I've ever regarded as being reliable, stable, or up to taking a beating (though my regard (or lack thereof) for Linux is probably more religous than factual - I've been a Daemon worshipper since the beginning of time).
The tests were more 'tests' than 'real world'... create a million files and delete them, generate a million big numbers, shuffle great gobs of stuff around in memory, spawn/fork a million processes, etc, etc, etc. The BSDs took a shocking beating.
On the other hand, the BSDs, and FreeBSD in particular shows up in a *lot* of large and heavy duty installations, so maybe the tests weren't representative of the real world?
This isn't new. Hong Kong has 'Octopus' already...
on
Casio's Credit Card Watch
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· Score: 2, Informative
From the article Casio is very big on the fact that you now don't have to root around in your bag for a credit card or cellphone in order to pay for things or get in and out of the office.
It would also appear that Casio are very big on conveniently ignoring the fact that this isn't anything new. The Hong Kong public transport system has been running on an RFID card called 'Octopus' for several years now. I've used it lots of times, and it works really really well. The Octopus system used a credit-card sized card with an embedded RFID chip by default, but there are also wristwatches and wear-around-your-neck-on-a-lanyard-watches that perform the same function.
The system is, by default, largely anonymous. There's nothing to stop them putting a camera near a reader I guess, but I've never been asked to prove who I am when purchasing an Octopus card. The company acknowledges customer fears in respect of anonimity in various ways, they offer a 'personalised' octopus card with your photo on it if you want it, but there doesn't seem to be any pressure to adopt the personalised version.
Clearly, it would be trivial to extend the Octopus system to access control. In fact, it wouldn't actually require any 'extension' of the system, just get your own RFID readers that speak the same frequencies and 'language' as Octopus uses (RFID is still very 'unstandardised', there's a lot of 'standards' to choose from), and make them respond appropriately to the unique IDs in the Octopus cards/watches you happen to own.
I'm from Australia. A friend of mine is sending me my first Octopus watch next week. I already have a handfull of Octopus *cards* here to play with. Where can I get the RFID kit I wonder!
Too right it won't happen! I hadn't even gotten a quarter of the way through the article before scenes from 'Fight Club' came to mind...
Narrator: So when the snoody cat, and the courageous dog, with the celebrity voices meet for the first time in reel three, that's when you'll catch a flash of Tyler's contribution to the film. [the audience is watching the film, the pornography flashes for a split second] Narrator: Nobody knows that they saw it, but they did... Tyler Durden: A nice, big, cock... [several audience members look rattled, a little girl is crying] Narrator: Even a hummingbird couldn't catch Tyler at work.
IMDBTHAT is why they'll render their own frames, thanks very much:-)
Also why do you put your email address on slashdot if you don't accept unsolicited email?
'cos there's an RFC somewhere that says faking email addresses in headers is a bad thing, mmmkay. Admittedly, the RFC I have in mind is 820 or 821 or one of the nntp ones, but it's still bad, mmmkay!:-)
Slashdot Mirror
That, and the bit where if you buy closed-source software, and it turns out to have some form of dodgy encumberance, then there is someone to.. ah.. how-you-Americans-say-in-your-language?..ah-yes... point the lawyers at. You generally don't get left holding the bag all on your own.
As the saying goes, if OSS software breaks, you get to keep both pieces (however in this context, the patent holder may well like to have his piece back :-(
All together now... "software patents are evil".
No, it wouldn't be more usefull. I dunno about you, but in those earlier days where getting any new game or software package to run on your DOS-based 286 or 386 PC was a week-long exercise that often ended up in a sub-standard result, or a game just out-right refusing to run on your hardware (nicely complimented by a vendor or retailer outright refusing to accept any responsibility for the fubar), I think it's safe to say that many many people go so thoroughly burned that they swore off ever paying money for software again. Not 'cos they want to be thieves, but because they'd already been robbed too many times.
To some extent, those times have returned (or perhaps they're just continuing). I've been burned a few times in recent years where, in particular, graphic subsystem requirements for games and other high-end software moved faster than the hardware upgrades I installed in my machines, and so I have often ended up with the same old story - expensive software that just won't run on my hardware unless I spend maybe 2-3 times of the price of the software, again, on new hardware. Now I set out to buy a $100 game, for example, if I get home and find it's gonna cost me $200-$300-$400 to get it running, then screw them. I'll bin the nice new game, learn from the lesson, and stop buying software all over again.
Now I've just made a couple of entries in this new database. They all cite the same reasoning. I downloaded full versions of late-model games that I really wanted to own/play. I tested them out for gameplay and outright functionality (you need full versions, because often the demo versions are coded to run on a much broader range of hardware, just to get the punters in). In all cases, once I was happy with the software, and its compatibility with me and my hardware, I turned right around abd bought full retail versions.
This argument that vendors are losing money to the people who didn't buy because they downloaded is pure and unmitigated hogwash in my book. Sure, there's a lot of stuff I downloaded and did not subsequently buy. Guess why? Becase it was CRAP. It either didn't run on my hardware, was just poorly thought out software with a gameplay life of five minutes, pushed out the door to grab some quick cash. The software vendor didn't lose in those situations, 'cos I didn't 'use' their software. They actually gained, 'cos I didn't pay a buttload of money for their crap, get bitten, then spend every change I coule slagging them out to anyone who would listen, and I didn't gain, 'cos I got nothing - I lost some hours wasted.
Downloading is win win win for everyone, any other POV is just plain flawed!
You got that in one! As I said in an earlier post, I tinkered with it a bit last weekend. I got it up and running with an Intel Centrino b/g wireless (8022?) and a Broadcom gigabit ethernet card, simultaneously (tho that bit required a little bit of hacking) with no particular dramas at all. It just worked!
A little short on doco, but I'd be happy to help out with some pointers if you get stuck with it.
ITYM ROFL! :-)
Yup, FreeBSD is fully userland ready, has been for, lets see, the last 6-8-ish years that I've been using it!
On the subject of RTFA, as the article says, 5.2.1-RELEASE is a little jumpy in some parts, and if you need solid stability, stick with 4.10-RELEASE for the time being.
I've used FreeBSD in production environments for years and years and years. Right now, I'm running 4.9-RELEASE and 4.10-RELEASE on production servers both at work and at home.
I'm tinkering with 5.2.1-RELEASE on a new Dell X300 laptop and a P4 desktop at the moment. They're both working pretty well, and surprisingly, I've got almost everything on the (very screwed up hardware-wise) X300 working! I have managed to break 5.2.1 several times, but it was mostly by doing really wacky things with the Project Evil code, upping and downing and kldloading and kldunloading different drivers on different interfaces with not enough kernel memory allocated for the bloated third party windows code!!!
Having said that, Project Evil is nothing short of a *GODSEND*, and Bill Paul is god! It's pretty amazing to be pinching windows NDIS drivers and compiling them into FreeBSD kernel modules - opens doors for all kinds of obscure hardware that couldn't be used before!
It's still too early for me to make any definitive comment on whether 5.x.x is good on desktops as yet, but if it's anything like the FreeBSDs that came before it, it will be nothing short of excellent when it hits -STABLE.
I think that's pretty much the point, isn't it.
With respect, I disagree. I too have been playing with a PVR for a few months, but I did the sums in my head (2 x PCI DVB-T tuners, big HDD, fast Pentium 4, motherboard, ram, case, tv-out card, remote control) and went for a commercial product. The Topfield (Toppy) TF5000PVRt cost me just AUD$900, and I couldn't come close to buying the abovementioned hardware for that, even before I got to thinking about the weeks/months of screwing about with an OS and software to make it all work (and probably never, ever get it working just so).
The commercial product was a pretty easy decision for me. A quick explanation along the lines of "2 x PCI DVB-T tuners at AUD$200 each..." got the spending approval from She Who Must Be Obeyed pretty quickly too!
Now, I love the Toppy, it works really really well. The standard 80Gb disk is just enough to keep a lot of content while still being small enough to force you to clean up once a week and not letting you accumulate gigs of content you'll never get around to watching (OK, so I'm waiting for the warranty to expire then I'm putting a 300+Gb ATA drive in there!!!). Two digital tuners on board means that you can cat two streams to disk, and watch another pre-recorded stream all at the same time.
The real problem lies in catching content. The Toppy can synch time to the broadcast time signal from the TV stations, or it can run on your own 'manual' time setting. 'Manual' means that if you have a power failure, you don't recover too well, (until you come home and reset the clock). 'Automatic' puts you very much at the mercy of the TV stations. Toppy owners Australia wide recently suffered when one of the TV stations (allegedly ch10) put the time signal forward three weeks for a little while, then reverted to their version of 'normal'. All the Toppy boxes in the land marked the next three weeks worth or cron jobs as 'done', and didn't record anything for three weeks!
If you set the time manually, you still get the TV stations starting content 5-10 minutes before or after the published time, so they still manage to make you miss the beginning or the end of your program (and that really sucks with something like Laura Norder or NCSI! (yup, we get all the same programming you Americans do!)). So you set the machine to record +/- 5 minutes of everything. Waste disk space, but you can ffwd through ads, etc of course, don't start watching until 20 mins after the content started, and time shift - all those wonderful things.
Anyhoo, long story short, I'm with the ICE man (pun!). I think that the two most important things in PVR land *are* knowing when to start and stop cat'ing content to disk, and (less important, but nice) when to pause for advertisements.
We're starting to get a lot of pay content in various forms here in Australia (presumably the stuff you Seppos have had for years, only ours can't be bypassed with two capacitors and an inductor using these nifty plans for only $9.95!). Most of it just isn't worth the ridiculous prices they're charging for it. This one though, if he's really going to sell it for $10-$12/month, is good - I'm there. If he comes up with a module that runs on my existing Toppy box (this machine does have a bit of third party freeware floating around, upload/install with usb, etc, etc), then I'm there with bells on. Best of luck to 'im!
This is an obvious silly marketerring ploy. You'd only not pick that up after the first two sentences if you were mentally deficient. For me, the (brief) site visit went "Loads... Oh look, those silly new HTML layer things... hmmm, marketeers have been at this site. Bastards. Nothing to see here, move along. Closed site, and clicked off to something else in another tab". No mystery about it!
'Getting' IM wouldn't help you here. That's not IM-speak, that's 'tard speak.
Must be a bloody big dog if he leaves 50 pound 'rewards' around the place!
They're all over Tokyo already! I have quite a collection actually. Post-it note style advertisements for young ladies who, I presume, offer 'massages'.
It's an equally significant concern here in Oz... Apparently large parts of Australia will miss out on TV *altogether* once Australia goes digital and drops analogue.
Still, the same threat loomed when the Vodafone-dodgy-deal-with-the-government forced GSM telephones on us all, the AMPS telephone network got extended for a few years once folks in the country figured out that GSM wasn't fit for a big country like this, and that the shutdown of the AMPS network was gonna cut a *lot* of people off, and they kicked up a very appropriate stink.
One wonders (one hopes like hell) that the same thing will happen with digital TV here in Oz...
Funny you should say that... When I was a boy... growing up in the Australian countryside (interestingly enough, the town that Russell Crowe (actor) now calls home), we only had two channels. The 'ABC' (aka 'Australian Broadcasting Corporation') that everyone gets, and the local 'commercial' channel.
Much as I'd like to throw in a "we were so poor..." line, it wasn't like that. We simply got two channels in that bit of the world.
Of course, when we didn't like what was on either channel, then we were so poor that we had to poke each other with sticks for amusement....
The definition of 'world wide' varies depending on whether you're from the USA or someplace else. Who was it, the Monty Python folks perhaps?, who remarked that the key difference between the US and England is that when England hosts an international sporting event, they invite other countries. Could the same be said for the "world" wide web? :-)
Take it from me... Internet Cafes do not cost USD$7.50 per hour here in Australia - they don't even cost AUD$7.50! Even if there are one or two of them that are that greedy, there's no way you'd come up with an average price anywhere near that high. I question therefore, how reliable the rest of the numbers on that map can be?
Having had a quick RTFA, it's clear that there's plenty of substance in this research. On the other hand, I'm a perl geek, and I wanna hear what Larry has to say on the subject! He is *the* man where languages and linguistics are concerned after all, and there's probably More Than One Way To Do It In Music!
It's a really really useful tool. I use it at least a couple of times a week - basically anytime the weather seems a bit sus and I need to decide if to do a bolt from the office on my bike before a storm front hits, or to wait until it passes. The last four images thing lets you get a feel for which way the weather is blowing, etc, etc.
On Tuesday nights, when the Sydney Knights do their Tuesday Night Ride (TNR), we're all hitting the bom.gov.au site to see what the weather is looking like. If you ride a motorcycle and live in Sydney, Australia then you need to come on a TNR!.
Now Australia didn't seem to have the problem with the commercial weather services wanting to continue to charge customers for something that they already paid the government for... that's a whole new ball game. Still, I'm all for the gummint opening up public access to weather data in any jurisdiction - it's a really really really good thing. Let the snake oil sellers find a new flavour of snake oil - I've heard that the penis enlargement pill market is a good one.
Sheep no good. Sheep leave those little black jelly beans all over your lawn.
Shoe Lane said "No, piss off! Our terms and conditions, displayed on the ticket and at the entrance to the parking station say that it's not our problem if you are injured on our premises. Your entry into the car park implies acceptance of our terms".
My Thornton says "No, you piss off" and proceeds to brief a brief. (English legal joke, prolly won't work in America, although the concept of sueing people at the drop of a hat probably will!!
Anyhoo, it eventually made it all the way to the English High Court. After much careful consideration, Lord Justice Denning MR found for the plaintiff (Thornton). Held that Shoe Lane couldn't avoid responsibility because they couldn't show that Thornton knew of and understood the conditions. Lord Denning said...
"No customer in a thousand ever read the conditions"
Because it was the High Court, and on a matter of law that hadn't been thoroughly considered in that context before, the finding passed into England's common law. It it adopted by Australia and other Commonwealth countries in lieu of any other more binding statute or common law.
That little tid-bit is maybe the only thing I ever remembered from first year Law, but it stuck with me. I happily click "OK" at EULAs and take tickets presented by parking machines without ever considering the contents of the conditions (I actually make a point of looking the other way!!!) because I know that the law says that I didn't read the conditions! :-)
The thing that sells me for FreeBSD in corporate environments is that FreeBSD is an operating system. The same group of people do the kernel *and* the OS. I've put a lot of FreeBSD boxes in production corporate environments, and I've never been bitten by the choice of OS, so I've become a pretty loyal punter. On the other hand, I just can't bring myself to put any OS that uses the linux *kernel* (there isn't an OS called 'linux' as best as I can tell) on a production enviroment - I've always had the impression that the Linuxes are all terribly fragmented, incoherent, and you never know what you're getting.
(by about now, all the script kids with mod points have cluelessly clicked the 'flamebait' button already... should I bother going on?!!! :-) )
In other news, I've become a really big fan of Gentoo Linux... it's just brilliant. I'm using it all kinds of non-production environments, and loving every minute of it. Bottom line though, it's too hard to sell something that is just a kernel as stable, reliable, and suitable for business.
The tests were more 'tests' than 'real world'... create a million files and delete them, generate a million big numbers, shuffle great gobs of stuff around in memory, spawn/fork a million processes, etc, etc, etc. The BSDs took a shocking beating.
On the other hand, the BSDs, and FreeBSD in particular shows up in a *lot* of large and heavy duty installations, so maybe the tests weren't representative of the real world?
It would also appear that Casio are very big on conveniently ignoring the fact that this isn't anything new. The Hong Kong public transport system has been running on an RFID card called 'Octopus' for several years now. I've used it lots of times, and it works really really well. The Octopus system used a credit-card sized card with an embedded RFID chip by default, but there are also wristwatches and wear-around-your-neck-on-a-lanyard-watches that perform the same function.
You can pay for bus and train (MTR) trips using the Octopus card, make purchases at 7-Eleven, and top up the card at railway stations and 7-Elevens, and make purchases from an increasing array of other stores, vending machines, parking, ferries, cabs, supermarkets, even school tuck shops!!!. The system works really really well - despite the potential privacy issues, I'm a BIG fan of HK's Octopus.
The system is, by default, largely anonymous. There's nothing to stop them putting a camera near a reader I guess, but I've never been asked to prove who I am when purchasing an Octopus card. The company acknowledges customer fears in respect of anonimity in various ways, they offer a 'personalised' octopus card with your photo on it if you want it, but there doesn't seem to be any pressure to adopt the personalised version.
Clearly, it would be trivial to extend the Octopus system to access control. In fact, it wouldn't actually require any 'extension' of the system, just get your own RFID readers that speak the same frequencies and 'language' as Octopus uses (RFID is still very 'unstandardised', there's a lot of 'standards' to choose from), and make them respond appropriately to the unique IDs in the Octopus cards/watches you happen to own.
I'm from Australia. A friend of mine is sending me my first Octopus watch next week. I already have a handfull of Octopus *cards* here to play with. Where can I get the RFID kit I wonder!
Thanks, that looks excellent, just what the doctor ordered. I love slashdot, it's every bit as helpful as usenet, but faster! :-)
... is there, for example, a 'free' and/or 'free' antivirus tool that will run on *BSD and scan filesystems for PC/Windows virii? .
IMDB THAT is why they'll render their own frames, thanks very much :-)
'cos there's an RFC somewhere that says faking email addresses in headers is a bad thing, mmmkay. Admittedly, the RFC I have in mind is 820 or 821 or one of the nntp ones, but it's still bad, mmmkay! :-)