But the real bug is license enforcement in the first place. Why would you run the risk of making your business depend on the whims of someone else's IP policies and enforcement?
Now, I'm somewhat realistic. I know that there isn't (yet) an adequate replacement for every piece of closed proprietary software out there. But for my own business (admittedly small) I am building with nothing but GPL/BSD/Apache license code. And it is working. I don't trust closed code. Of course my software will have bugs, some of them serious. But I won't have stuff shutting down because of "license" issues. Why do people go quietly into enforced licenses? Why do people accept remote kill switches on their servers? Why doesn't this strike everyone as a crazy thing to do?
I'm all for this, as long as you drive down fertility at the same time. All of the really serious problems we face right now (peak oil, peak copper, peak phosphorous, unstable food supply, global warming, international terrorism, imperial foreign wars) are either directly caused or directly exacerbated by having ~6 billion people on this planet.
If, right now, the human population fell to 1 billion many of the aforementioned problems would be eliminated and those that remain would become much more manageable. Even if the "window" of fertility remains the same (the age of menopause), a dramatic increase in lifespan still means a dramatic increase in population.
Let's get the whole world on board with birth control before we go after longer life. I'd love to live in a world with a stable human population of about 1 billion people who live for 500 years.
Certificate key signatures can prevent MITM attacks. Provided someone doesn't MITM the signature exchange...
CAs are good, but, as I point out in another comment, most of us treat them magically. We don't do anything to verify our trusted cert lists. Can you tell me right now *with certainty* where your trusted CA list came from and that it hans't been modified by someone hostile or by hostile code?
If you can't tell me that for sure, then you are *less* secure than someone using unsigned certs who has personally verified key signatures face-to-face.
I find a self-signed certificate is useful on many occasions. I use it for my own squirrelmail service. I have set them up for "extranet" applications for small business clients.
This is just fine. I give them a hard copy of the key signature and tell them to verify it before the accept it.
Someone above says the a CA adds nothing. I don't agree with that. They add identity verification *to the extent* that site visitors actually *read* the certificates and evaluate their level of trust in the CA.
Quick: Tell me right now how many CAs are in your browser's trusted certs list. Now tell me where that list came from. Tell me why you trust it.
In other words, the signed certificate system can provide excellent security, but most of us simply trust our browsers when they don't complain. That isn't security. You really should check certificates every time. View the details, check the signatures, verify the integrity of your trusted CA list. But who bothers?
So while I don't agree that CA signed certs "add nothing," I do agree that hardly any users (including me who theoretically knows better) do their due diligence that would make that system truly work.
If the free tool cost more in productivity that the "commercial" tool was priced, people would not choose the "free" tool.
To me, closed source creates an artificial code shortage.
Programs, in and of themselves, don't have much value. They are hammers. You don't buy a new hammer every time you need to drive a nail. You don't think much about what you paid for a hammer when you need to drive a nail. It isn't the hammer and the nail that are expensive. It's the carpenter. It is the *skilled practitioner* that has real value, not the hammer or the nail.
All the open source does is to drive the price of *commodity* software down to where it is a commodity. I work almost exclusively with open source tools and I am making more money now than ever before in my career, using those tools to make *new software* that meets the specific needs of businesses.
Nobody, and I mean nobody, thinks "I am going to design a hammer, build a plant, and GET RICH!!" No one should think that about word processors, editors, or even operating systems either.
I am an old fart programmer (anything past 40 is WAY old in technology) so gaming long since left me behind. Face it, asteroids was as advanced as I got.
That said, I would hope the industry would LEARN from the failure of music DRM and the HD DVD stuff (note how Blu-Ray is failing to fly off the shelves -- it was the format war, not DRM that kept it from selling, right? RIGHT!?!?)
I am sick and tired of being treated like a criminal. And that's what all this technology does. I don't share the optimism that every solution will be defeated. Impenetrable control is possible. But luckily the industry hasn't been very good at this so far. But compare the ease of defeating CSS with the difficulty of defeating ACCS and you see they are learning.
The best way to defeat this is to refuse to buy hardware that has the controls. I sincerely hope Blu-Ray dies an ignimonious death. As much as I want an HD video format (and as long as I only have 1MBit bandwidth), DVD is good enough.
Stop treating me like a criminal and I'll buy your crap. Until then, get bent.
In all seriousness, what's the half life of this compound in the mice? I realize this is a long way from human use, but this seems like a damned foolish invention. You might think, for example, that you want soldiers without fear, but I would argue that a fearless soldier is soon a dead soldier. And I think even in everyday life this would be a dangerous state. Fear is a very primitive emotion and all creatures (well, certainly all mammals) seem to have it in varying degrees. In so many places it has a clear survival function. I'm not sure I'm keen to see a population messing about with such fundamental emotions.
I was around for the dawn of commercial software. I was around for the first homebrewed personal computers. Let me assure you, things did NOT start out the way they are now.
Look, all I am saying is that I will not buy in to the new formats. I won't even if the "protection" is circumvented. I won't buy a product that assumes I am a thief. That's what I use FOSS. That's why I started doing so back in 1994.
No, I think they need to let the content go on the 'net and sell it cheap. Make it so people are happy to live within the law and they will.
I just bought an iPhone. All the songs on it so far are ones I ripped from my extensive (and ancient) CD collection (bought my first CD in 1984). But because the music industry has finally made downloadable content available at a cheap price and they are starting to offer DRM-less content, I'll probably be downloading my first songs. (I never joined in the first round of Napster-like stuff -- it clearly broke the law -- but I happily bought CDs and ripped 'em).
(Beware the crusty old farts -- they are still here on/.)
You can all me a hypocrite if you wish. But the CSS was never anything but a means to enforce cartel pricing. The CSS region codes are what CSS is all about. DVDs never had anything that prevented the recording of the analog signal (well, they did use Macrovision, but that is little more than signal distortion and good equipment never had a problem with it). You can say I'm a hypocrite because "they" "intended" CSS to be "copy protection," but it really never was. Now with HDCP and so on, there is a clear intention to lock it down all the way.
Frankly, I believe they would prevent you from thinking about "their" movie if they could.
I'm a published author. Both of my books are under copyright. One with traditional "licensing," the other under an open document license. I've got code in a couple of open source projects (the most significant one being jSyncManager) and that uses Copyright to back LGPL. I'm not against legal protections for authors and publishers. I just think they have got way out of whack. They are turning "intellectual property" into real estate.
I would like to see a roll back of terms to 14 years for Copyright (as it originally was) and I'll offer this "bone:" It can be extended, say, 10 years at a time for a small renewal fee. This way, works that really have economic value can be protected for ridiculous terms, but the huge amount of material that is simply unavailable because the rights are locked up but no one will print or publish it would become available. I don't think, when the "copyright clause" was written that it was ever intended that a work could be locked up for generations.
When I stream a DVD, I believe that philosophically I am well within "fair use." I've paid my sheckels.
Yeah, but in spite of the fact that I have two good sized HDTVs, the DVD format is good enough for me. I won't buy this kind of "protection." I'll just keep buying DVDs. I hope both formats crash and burn. It is time the industry started making it easy for its customers to *use* their products as they like (and I don't mean indiscriminate copying -- I just mean I should be able to stream a movie I've bought to any TV, computer, or webpad in my house without having to move the media) and they should make it easy and painless for me to pay for it.
The desire to have tangible media encrypted to shit is most annoying.
I've *bought* my movies on DVD. I've got better things to do than wait two weeks for a high def movie to download. And even when the last mile problem is solved, if they keep it free of DRM crap and sell it *at a reasonable price* (and, btw, I think a few bucks is a reasonable price when they don't have to print, press, package, or distribute anything). If you could download a HD movie in a few minutes for a few bucks and store it as long as you want it, why wouldn't you? I would.
The content people make me nuts. I won't buy *either* HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. Not. Gonna. Duuut.
B) The text version took 33 bytes plus packet overhead. Still way more efficient.
Another commenter who took me far too seriously points out (correctly) that it is packet rate that will be a problem. I would add that latency will also be a serious issue. I use Vonage on a 1Mbit wireless broadband connection and sometimes latency kills me. The delay messes up the codecs, which take time to resynch. I have to ask people to repeat themselves a lot because my network has highly variable RTT and highly variable packet loss rates (due to the hidden station problem, which still exists with DSSS wireless networks).
So, lighten up. Mine was meant to be a humorous gripe, but with just a little truth to it.
This will work less well than you think. I promise it will.
Mr. Wizard not only was an intro to science for us 40+ year olds, he was also the figure being satirized by Dr. Science ("Remember, he's not a real doctor!" "I have a Master's Degree" "In SCIENCE!") so he is, in a sense, two pop-culture icons for the price of one!
I agree with those who say "show me the patents or shut up." Microsoft is barking up the wrong tree here, it seems to me. Given that IBM and DEC probably have either previous patents or can show prior art for virtually anything Microsoft can cough up, and also given that the developers of open source tools can code around any actual remaining patents in short order, I think this is just a load.
Nobody knows everything there is to know about anything. But, to lay claim to my renaissance man credentials, I have completely disassembled and reassembled a 4-cylinder volkswagen/audi engine from a 1980 Plymouth Whoreizon (Horizon), I know how the magnetron in my Microwave oven works and while I haven't built one, I have built an FM transceiver from parts using someone else's schematic. I haven't built a TV, but a simple analog TV that can receive off-the-air NTSC TV broadcast signals isn't that hard to make. Today's devices are vastly more complex than that, but, yeah, I do know how those things work.
I'm not comfortable taking anything on faith. The complexity of the modern world forces me to, but I don't have to like it and I don't have to like the willfully ignorant. I'm forced to tolerate them, but I don't have to like them. I'm forced to accept the limits of my knowledge, but I don't have to like it and I can choose to go on learning instead of saying "I don't want to know." I may be forced by mortality to pick and choose, but I won't stop trying to learn all I can. And when I don't know how something works, I try to learn something about it.
HTH.
BTW, I'm not flaming you or anything. People who don't want to know how things work are just fine. I just don't like those people.
And even though I really dislike people who say things "I have no idea what it did, but that's the way I like it," The review is favorable and correct. I tend to use Ubuntu and Fedora the most these days, and the article (I think) correctly shows that Ubuntu is a very good distro for the user's user, someone who doesn't really care to learn their operating system, let alone to learn programming. (Ubuntu is plently good for techies too, make no mistake).
What I can't figure out is why the reviewer discusses Ubuntu *installation* when they claimed that the reason they decided to check was Dell's announcement that they were *preloading* Ubuntu on PCs and laptops.
Ubuntu desktop Linux is undoubtedly a great distro for end users. And it shows why Microsoft is pulling out the patent crap now. Linux distros are now at a point where, for most users, there is no reason to prefer Windows. Only hardcore gamers have a reason to stick with Windows at this point.
TD's efficiency is terrible compared with more direct solar energy extraction methods such as solar and wind. That said, it is still one of the interesting processes for production of stable, energy dense fuels. Based on my reading, however, both ethanol from grasses and biodiesel are more efficient than TD (that "thermal" part is a very large energy input). Also intersting is sodium borohydride as a hydrogen carrier for fuel cells.
So while I wouldn't dismiss TD, it isn't "the answer." I would contend that there is no "the answer" and that virtually all remotely efficient means of energy recovery from carbon-neutral sources are important. We will have to have a much more diverse energy base if we hope to maintain and enlarge a high-tech culture and economy.
High-tech doesn't have to be high entropy. We need diversity and efficiency. Not necessarily in that order...
Yes, but we aren't talking about "running out of oil." We will never run out. We are talking about the economics of oil. You have to look at the "Q" (quality -- in economic terms -- how much energy you put in to get at the oil set against the amount of energy you produce when you consume the oil) of the oil produced. Light, sweet crude has a Q of about 20 (you get 20 units of energy out for each energy unit you use to extract). High sulphur oil returns substantially less. Oil shale returns (this is distant hearsay, don't quote me) something like 5. At this point (depending on which loud voice you believe) ethanol gives you a Q of 4.
The real reason people are worried about "peak oil" is that global demand for oil rises about 3%/year. But when we pass the peak, production will *shrink* each year. Guess what this does to the price? Guess what this motivates for countries with guns, bombs, and tanks?
The point is that our present economy is doomed. Not that the human race is doomed. Our economy will change radically. It must do. Maybe with technology and cleverness it can change to something better and comething sustainable and something clean. Maybe it can do this smoothly with minimal distruption to lifestyle. But it may not be so. It may collapse horribly abruptly as energy prices spike suddenly and at such a rate that markets cannot adapt.
I don't pretend to know which will happen. But this I do know: Complacency is a fool's hedge. We must invest in sustainable alternatives NOW. Even if Deffeyes is way off and the peak is 60 years in the future (as DOE-EIA by way of Cambridge Energy Associates seems to believe), we still need to act now.
I don't disagree with you at all about the philisophical and moral dissonance between a shrink-wrap EULA and the GPL. I completely support the GPL and I also support the FSF's stated goals of reforming the IP regime in the US (and elsewhere). The law is insanely out of control. That said, it is the law, and the GPL uses that law to create a license that expands freedom. I too would like to see the law changed such that such licensure convolutions would not be necessary.
So all I am saying is that I would no more copy "illegally" a closed, proprietary product than I would violate the GPL.
I also see your point that EULAs are legally untested in most jurisdictions. But I'm not sure that I want to see that tested, since I believe they might well hold up (although I've often heard it said that no click-through is likely to be interpreted as consent to enter into a contract -- but then we'll see "software closings" before you know it.)
So I don't think my position is quite so far away from yours.
I prefer to avoid the issue by using Free Software almost exclusively.
You know, I have to agree with this. I'm a bgi supporter and advocate for Free Software and Open Source Software. As such, I feel I have to be particularly careful about respect for IP and IP laws (even as I advocate for the change of those laws). Those same laws underpin the GPL, LGPL, BSD, and other licenses out there.
Violating a shrink-wrap EULA is just as egregious as violating the GPL. If we wish to be strict about the one, we have to be strict about the other. I think with the increasing "DRM" and activiation models that the shrink-wrap software world is finally going to drive people to F/OSS. Why? Because they are starting to hassle and annoy their customers. Every time I am forced to use "that side" of the software world (when I get a.NET development contract for instance), I am amazed at how annoying activation, keys, etc. are. I show everyone I can the alternatives and how hassle free they are.
While I'm personally "dogmatic" about Free Software, I am not professionally. While the Free aspect may be the most important issue to me, it most often is not to a business. But I do evangelize. Where the Free option is as good or better, or even nearly as good, I try to make the case for it because of the "hidden" benefits of no BSA audit, keys, activation hassles.
There's some stuff for team development on the new Visual Studio that, in a sense, is little more than a neat bundling of the kinds of collaboration tools we've had in F/OSS for some time. But they've put in stuff for project management that I haven't seen in the Free world because we don't worry so much about resources and deadlines. (BTW, if people here know of such tools, I'd love to hear about them). This is an area where I think MS has jumped ahead in appealig to business. But I would expect to see similar features in platforms like Eclipse before much time goes by.
I'm not sure that that last isn't off-topic, but I offer it as an example of why a business might make the "wrong" choice for the right reasons...
I disagree with this. Using modern VMs with JIT compilation I see speeds that are comparable to C++ programs. Some things, like tight integer loops, are at parity (after the first execution anyways).
Where VMs do absolutely *suck* is in any kind of scripted context (such as a Java-based CLI utility invoked repeatedly in a shell script). The overhead of starting the VM is horribly huge. This is the bane of any VM based language/API. And it is why these are great in web/app server land.
You are a sole proprietorship. Your income will be reported on your personal income tax. You should get a 1099-MISC from your ad agencies.
As others have said, you can talk to a lawyer and/or an accountant to see if you could save money by doing something more "advanced," but I do the above. It adds two forms to your 1040: Schedule C and Schedule SE. About half your income from the blog will go to taxes.
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But the real bug is license enforcement in the first place. Why would you run the risk of making your business depend on the whims of someone else's IP policies and enforcement?
Now, I'm somewhat realistic. I know that there isn't (yet) an adequate replacement for every piece of closed proprietary software out there. But for my own business (admittedly small) I am building with nothing but GPL/BSD/Apache license code. And it is working. I don't trust closed code. Of course my software will have bugs, some of them serious. But I won't have stuff shutting down because of "license" issues. Why do people go quietly into enforced licenses? Why do people accept remote kill switches on their servers? Why doesn't this strike everyone as a crazy thing to do?
I'm all for this, as long as you drive down fertility at the same time. All of the really serious problems we face right now (peak oil, peak copper, peak phosphorous, unstable food supply, global warming, international terrorism, imperial foreign wars) are either directly caused or directly exacerbated by having ~6 billion people on this planet.
If, right now, the human population fell to 1 billion many of the aforementioned problems would be eliminated and those that remain would become much more manageable. Even if the "window" of fertility remains the same (the age of menopause), a dramatic increase in lifespan still means a dramatic increase in population.
Let's get the whole world on board with birth control before we go after longer life. I'd love to live in a world with a stable human population of about 1 billion people who live for 500 years.
Certificate key signatures can prevent MITM attacks. Provided someone doesn't MITM the signature exchange...
CAs are good, but, as I point out in another comment, most of us treat them magically. We don't do anything to verify our trusted cert lists. Can you tell me right now *with certainty* where your trusted CA list came from and that it hans't been modified by someone hostile or by hostile code?
If you can't tell me that for sure, then you are *less* secure than someone using unsigned certs who has personally verified key signatures face-to-face.
I find a self-signed certificate is useful on many occasions. I use it for my own squirrelmail service. I have set them up for "extranet" applications for small business clients.
This is just fine. I give them a hard copy of the key signature and tell them to verify it before the accept it.
Someone above says the a CA adds nothing. I don't agree with that. They add identity verification *to the extent* that site visitors actually *read* the certificates and evaluate their level of trust in the CA.
Quick: Tell me right now how many CAs are in your browser's trusted certs list. Now tell me where that list came from. Tell me why you trust it.
In other words, the signed certificate system can provide excellent security, but most of us simply trust our browsers when they don't complain. That isn't security. You really should check certificates every time. View the details, check the signatures, verify the integrity of your trusted CA list. But who bothers?
So while I don't agree that CA signed certs "add nothing," I do agree that hardly any users (including me who theoretically knows better) do their due diligence that would make that system truly work.
Then, by definition, it is not "cost free."
Bad economics, buddy.
If the free tool cost more in productivity that the "commercial" tool was priced, people would not choose the "free" tool.
To me, closed source creates an artificial code shortage.
Programs, in and of themselves, don't have much value. They are hammers. You don't buy a new hammer every time you need to drive a nail. You don't think much about what you paid for a hammer when you need to drive a nail. It isn't the hammer and the nail that are expensive. It's the carpenter. It is the *skilled practitioner* that has real value, not the hammer or the nail.
All the open source does is to drive the price of *commodity* software down to where it is a commodity. I work almost exclusively with open source tools and I am making more money now than ever before in my career, using those tools to make *new software* that meets the specific needs of businesses.
Nobody, and I mean nobody, thinks "I am going to design a hammer, build a plant, and GET RICH!!" No one should think that about word processors, editors, or even operating systems either.
I am an old fart programmer (anything past 40 is WAY old in technology) so gaming long since left me behind. Face it, asteroids was as advanced as I got.
That said, I would hope the industry would LEARN from the failure of music DRM and the HD DVD stuff (note how Blu-Ray is failing to fly off the shelves -- it was the format war, not DRM that kept it from selling, right? RIGHT!?!?)
I am sick and tired of being treated like a criminal. And that's what all this technology does. I don't share the optimism that every solution will be defeated. Impenetrable control is possible. But luckily the industry hasn't been very good at this so far. But compare the ease of defeating CSS with the difficulty of defeating ACCS and you see they are learning.
The best way to defeat this is to refuse to buy hardware that has the controls. I sincerely hope Blu-Ray dies an ignimonious death. As much as I want an HD video format (and as long as I only have 1MBit bandwidth), DVD is good enough.
Stop treating me like a criminal and I'll buy your crap. Until then, get bent.
...as charged. Did not RTFA.
Just a knee-jerk reaction to the concept.
In all seriousness, what's the half life of this compound in the mice? I realize this is a long way from human use, but this seems like a damned foolish invention. You might think, for example, that you want soldiers without fear, but I would argue that a fearless soldier is soon a dead soldier. And I think even in everyday life this would be a dangerous state. Fear is a very primitive emotion and all creatures (well, certainly all mammals) seem to have it in varying degrees. In so many places it has a clear survival function. I'm not sure I'm keen to see a population messing about with such fundamental emotions.
I was around for the dawn of commercial software. I was around for the first homebrewed personal computers. Let me assure you, things did NOT start out the way they are now.
/.)
Look, all I am saying is that I will not buy in to the new formats. I won't even if the "protection" is circumvented. I won't buy a product that assumes I am a thief. That's what I use FOSS. That's why I started doing so back in 1994.
No, I think they need to let the content go on the 'net and sell it cheap. Make it so people are happy to live within the law and they will.
I just bought an iPhone. All the songs on it so far are ones I ripped from my extensive (and ancient) CD collection (bought my first CD in 1984). But because the music industry has finally made downloadable content available at a cheap price and they are starting to offer DRM-less content, I'll probably be downloading my first songs. (I never joined in the first round of Napster-like stuff -- it clearly broke the law -- but I happily bought CDs and ripped 'em).
(Beware the crusty old farts -- they are still here on
You can all me a hypocrite if you wish. But the CSS was never anything but a means to enforce cartel pricing. The CSS region codes are what CSS is all about. DVDs never had anything that prevented the recording of the analog signal (well, they did use Macrovision, but that is little more than signal distortion and good equipment never had a problem with it). You can say I'm a hypocrite because "they" "intended" CSS to be "copy protection," but it really never was. Now with HDCP and so on, there is a clear intention to lock it down all the way.
Frankly, I believe they would prevent you from thinking about "their" movie if they could.
I'm a published author. Both of my books are under copyright. One with traditional "licensing," the other under an open document license. I've got code in a couple of open source projects (the most significant one being jSyncManager) and that uses Copyright to back LGPL. I'm not against legal protections for authors and publishers. I just think they have got way out of whack. They are turning "intellectual property" into real estate.
I would like to see a roll back of terms to 14 years for Copyright (as it originally was) and I'll offer this "bone:" It can be extended, say, 10 years at a time for a small renewal fee. This way, works that really have economic value can be protected for ridiculous terms, but the huge amount of material that is simply unavailable because the rights are locked up but no one will print or publish it would become available. I don't think, when the "copyright clause" was written that it was ever intended that a work could be locked up for generations.
When I stream a DVD, I believe that philosophically I am well within "fair use." I've paid my sheckels.
Yeah, but in spite of the fact that I have two good sized HDTVs, the DVD format is good enough for me. I won't buy this kind of "protection." I'll just keep buying DVDs. I hope both formats crash and burn. It is time the industry started making it easy for its customers to *use* their products as they like (and I don't mean indiscriminate copying -- I just mean I should be able to stream a movie I've bought to any TV, computer, or webpad in my house without having to move the media) and they should make it easy and painless for me to pay for it.
The desire to have tangible media encrypted to shit is most annoying.
I've *bought* my movies on DVD. I've got better things to do than wait two weeks for a high def movie to download. And even when the last mile problem is solved, if they keep it free of DRM crap and sell it *at a reasonable price* (and, btw, I think a few bucks is a reasonable price when they don't have to print, press, package, or distribute anything). If you could download a HD movie in a few minutes for a few bucks and store it as long as you want it, why wouldn't you? I would.
The content people make me nuts. I won't buy *either* HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. Not. Gonna. Duuut.
A) I was joking, and
B) The text version took 33 bytes plus packet overhead. Still way more efficient.
Another commenter who took me far too seriously points out (correctly) that it is packet rate that will be a problem. I would add that latency will also be a serious issue. I use Vonage on a 1Mbit wireless broadband connection and sometimes latency kills me. The delay messes up the codecs, which take time to resynch. I have to ask people to repeat themselves a lot because my network has highly variable RTT and highly variable packet loss rates (due to the hidden station problem, which still exists with DSSS wireless networks).
So, lighten up. Mine was meant to be a humorous gripe, but with just a little truth to it.
This will work less well than you think. I promise it will.
Now "I'm in the coffee shop. Where RU?" will take 10000 times the bandwidth it took on ICQ.
So much for Wi-Fi hotspots being useful for telecommuting...
Mr. Wizard not only was an intro to science for us 40+ year olds, he was also the figure being satirized by Dr. Science ("Remember, he's not a real doctor!" "I have a Master's Degree" "In SCIENCE!") so he is, in a sense, two pop-culture icons for the price of one!
I agree with those who say "show me the patents or shut up." Microsoft is barking up the wrong tree here, it seems to me. Given that IBM and DEC probably have either previous patents or can show prior art for virtually anything Microsoft can cough up, and also given that the developers of open source tools can code around any actual remaining patents in short order, I think this is just a load.
Nobody knows everything there is to know about anything. But, to lay claim to my renaissance man credentials, I have completely disassembled and reassembled a 4-cylinder volkswagen/audi engine from a 1980 Plymouth Whoreizon (Horizon), I know how the magnetron in my Microwave oven works and while I haven't built one, I have built an FM transceiver from parts using someone else's schematic. I haven't built a TV, but a simple analog TV that can receive off-the-air NTSC TV broadcast signals isn't that hard to make. Today's devices are vastly more complex than that, but, yeah, I do know how those things work.
I'm not comfortable taking anything on faith. The complexity of the modern world forces me to, but I don't have to like it and I don't have to like the willfully ignorant. I'm forced to tolerate them, but I don't have to like them. I'm forced to accept the limits of my knowledge, but I don't have to like it and I can choose to go on learning instead of saying "I don't want to know." I may be forced by mortality to pick and choose, but I won't stop trying to learn all I can. And when I don't know how something works, I try to learn something about it.
HTH.
BTW, I'm not flaming you or anything. People who don't want to know how things work are just fine. I just don't like those people.
And even though I really dislike people who say things "I have no idea what it did, but that's the way I like it," The review is favorable and correct. I tend to use Ubuntu and Fedora the most these days, and the article (I think) correctly shows that Ubuntu is a very good distro for the user's user, someone who doesn't really care to learn their operating system, let alone to learn programming. (Ubuntu is plently good for techies too, make no mistake).
What I can't figure out is why the reviewer discusses Ubuntu *installation* when they claimed that the reason they decided to check was Dell's announcement that they were *preloading* Ubuntu on PCs and laptops.
Ubuntu desktop Linux is undoubtedly a great distro for end users. And it shows why Microsoft is pulling out the patent crap now. Linux distros are now at a point where, for most users, there is no reason to prefer Windows. Only hardcore gamers have a reason to stick with Windows at this point.
TD's efficiency is terrible compared with more direct solar energy extraction methods such as solar and wind. That said, it is still one of the interesting processes for production of stable, energy dense fuels. Based on my reading, however, both ethanol from grasses and biodiesel are more efficient than TD (that "thermal" part is a very large energy input). Also intersting is sodium borohydride as a hydrogen carrier for fuel cells.
So while I wouldn't dismiss TD, it isn't "the answer." I would contend that there is no "the answer" and that virtually all remotely efficient means of energy recovery from carbon-neutral sources are important. We will have to have a much more diverse energy base if we hope to maintain and enlarge a high-tech culture and economy.
High-tech doesn't have to be high entropy. We need diversity and efficiency. Not necessarily in that order...
Yes, but we aren't talking about "running out of oil." We will never run out. We are talking about the economics of oil. You have to look at the "Q" (quality -- in economic terms -- how much energy you put in to get at the oil set against the amount of energy you produce when you consume the oil) of the oil produced. Light, sweet crude has a Q of about 20 (you get 20 units of energy out for each energy unit you use to extract). High sulphur oil returns substantially less. Oil shale returns (this is distant hearsay, don't quote me) something like 5. At this point (depending on which loud voice you believe) ethanol gives you a Q of 4.
The real reason people are worried about "peak oil" is that global demand for oil rises about 3%/year. But when we pass the peak, production will *shrink* each year. Guess what this does to the price? Guess what this motivates for countries with guns, bombs, and tanks?
The point is that our present economy is doomed. Not that the human race is doomed. Our economy will change radically. It must do. Maybe with technology and cleverness it can change to something better and comething sustainable and something clean. Maybe it can do this smoothly with minimal distruption to lifestyle. But it may not be so. It may collapse horribly abruptly as energy prices spike suddenly and at such a rate that markets cannot adapt.
I don't pretend to know which will happen. But this I do know: Complacency is a fool's hedge. We must invest in sustainable alternatives NOW. Even if Deffeyes is way off and the peak is 60 years in the future (as DOE-EIA by way of Cambridge Energy Associates seems to believe), we still need to act now.
I don't disagree with you at all about the philisophical and moral dissonance between a shrink-wrap EULA and the GPL. I completely support the GPL and I also support the FSF's stated goals of reforming the IP regime in the US (and elsewhere). The law is insanely out of control. That said, it is the law, and the GPL uses that law to create a license that expands freedom. I too would like to see the law changed such that such licensure convolutions would not be necessary.
So all I am saying is that I would no more copy "illegally" a closed, proprietary product than I would violate the GPL.
I also see your point that EULAs are legally untested in most jurisdictions. But I'm not sure that I want to see that tested, since I believe they might well hold up (although I've often heard it said that no click-through is likely to be interpreted as consent to enter into a contract -- but then we'll see "software closings" before you know it.)
So I don't think my position is quite so far away from yours.
I prefer to avoid the issue by using Free Software almost exclusively.
Yes, but what if your opponent attacks you with fresh fruit instead of a pointed stick?
You know, I have to agree with this. I'm a bgi supporter and advocate for Free Software and Open Source Software. As such, I feel I have to be particularly careful about respect for IP and IP laws (even as I advocate for the change of those laws). Those same laws underpin the GPL, LGPL, BSD, and other licenses out there.
.NET development contract for instance), I am amazed at how annoying activation, keys, etc. are. I show everyone I can the alternatives and how hassle free they are.
Violating a shrink-wrap EULA is just as egregious as violating the GPL. If we wish to be strict about the one, we have to be strict about the other. I think with the increasing "DRM" and activiation models that the shrink-wrap software world is finally going to drive people to F/OSS. Why? Because they are starting to hassle and annoy their customers. Every time I am forced to use "that side" of the software world (when I get a
While I'm personally "dogmatic" about Free Software, I am not professionally. While the Free aspect may be the most important issue to me, it most often is not to a business. But I do evangelize. Where the Free option is as good or better, or even nearly as good, I try to make the case for it because of the "hidden" benefits of no BSA audit, keys, activation hassles.
There's some stuff for team development on the new Visual Studio that, in a sense, is little more than a neat bundling of the kinds of collaboration tools we've had in F/OSS for some time. But they've put in stuff for project management that I haven't seen in the Free world because we don't worry so much about resources and deadlines. (BTW, if people here know of such tools, I'd love to hear about them). This is an area where I think MS has jumped ahead in appealig to business. But I would expect to see similar features in platforms like Eclipse before much time goes by.
I'm not sure that that last isn't off-topic, but I offer it as an example of why a business might make the "wrong" choice for the right reasons...
Hmm... I'd awlays heard that a platypus was a swan put together by a comittee...
I disagree with this. Using modern VMs with JIT compilation I see speeds that are comparable to C++ programs. Some things, like tight integer loops, are at parity (after the first execution anyways).
Where VMs do absolutely *suck* is in any kind of scripted context (such as a Java-based CLI utility invoked repeatedly in a shell script). The overhead of starting the VM is horribly huge. This is the bane of any VM based language/API. And it is why these are great in web/app server land.
You are a sole proprietorship. Your income will be reported on your personal income tax. You should get a 1099-MISC from your ad agencies.
As others have said, you can talk to a lawyer and/or an accountant to see if you could save money by doing something more "advanced," but I do the above. It adds two forms to your 1040: Schedule C and Schedule SE. About half your income from the blog will go to taxes.