What I'm confused about is the assertion that your wires can be lighter gauge.
It's about the power lost in the wire: P = I^2 * R.
To reduce the resistance of the wire (R) you can make it wider [1] - or the other way round, if you keep P constant (P being the acceptable power loss) you can use a thinner wire.
Let's say you double the voltage, so you can half the current. If your current is half, then the power lost in the wire will be a quarter. Alternatively you can use a thinner wire to maintain the same amount of lost power - you'd save three quarters of the material of the wire.
I think for most of the wiring the concern is less about the lost power, but more that it will get too warm - burning through the insulation and breaking, or setting things on fire. P is converted into heat after all.
[1] R = ro * lenght / Area, so the resistance of the wire is proportional to the length (can't do much there) the specific resistance of the material (that wouldn't change here) and inversely proportional to the area of the cross section.
Additionally, now that one city goes for Linux, they put pressure on MS, too. They now have to compete, and that means they'll also have to offer better prices. So many city administrations might now get better deals - even if they stay with Windows.
That's fair, but part of the discussions was also that Microsoft is a "Munich company" i.e. has large offices near Munich and employs people there. As opposed to SuSE which is "far away" in Nuernberg.
Anyway, some Linux supporters were certainly pushing the city administrators to go for a "German product" but of course their real interest
was Linux and they were merely trying to pull the politican's strings.:-)
Well, the dive computer (assuming it works) will give a more accurate representation of the amount of nitrogen absorbed. So if you go to depth A remaining there for time T1 and then depth B with time T2 (dive 1) it will register that differently than staying at depth A for time T1+T2 (dive 2).
For the following I'm assuming here that A is deeper than B.
If you use the table for dive 2, you'd pretend it was dive 1. In this case you'd have a greater saftey margin.
However if you dive dive 1, your saftey margin
would theoretically the T1+T2be the same, using both methods.
If you were to use a dive computer which provides a greater saftey margin, but based on your actual dive profile, your saftey margin for dive 1 could actually be greater.
Having said that, I admit that a dive where you spend only a part of the time at the max depth is a lot more likely. I think that dive computers will do a better job with a slow descent though (diving in groups can cause waiting time), so there might be another potential saftey advantage.
Actually, it were the Communists (I think they merged with Social Democrats) who formed the government with NSDAP.
No, both statements are wrong. The coalition was formed with the DNVP, and the SPD never merged voluntarily with the Communists.
What you may be thinking of is the so-called "negative coalition", which described the situation when the government was democratic (SPD + Zentrum), but didn't have enough votes in the Reichstag to pass laws. Together NSDAP and KPD (=Communists) would block everything regardless what the laws where about - just to hinder the democrats.
The SPD was merged with the Communist party after the war, and in East-Germany only. This merge was forced onto them, it was never their choice.
As for the motives of the Communists - both Nazis and Communists thought that as soon as the democrats were discredited they would be able to take over in the resulting chaos.
You have a point about the libraries, but I don't see the compiler angle at all.
If I interpret the license correctly, code generated by gcc is not considered a derivative work of it. A derivative work would only be generated by modifying the source code of the compiler itself. The way I read it, the GNU license doesn't reserve naming rights either, no matter whether a work is derivative or not.
GNU deserves lots of credit, but they should stand by their license, and respect it. They freely made the decision to give up their naming rights, now they should accept that they don't have them anymore.
It's really the best rescue disk I know. My dad had a problem with his Windows system recently (the old "system not readable" bug which screws
up the entire OS). He had a Knoppix CD available
(was included in c't magazine recently) and with this was able to boot.
It automatically detected all the hardware, came up with X-Window had KDE icons for all the Windows partitions.
Right-Click on the CD-Burner icon brought up the KDE CD-Burner, and he was able to burn all his data
on a backup CD. (Ok, this will only work if
you have a CD drive and a separate burner.)
In comparision: the Windows rescue CD provides
a DOS-like shell, and that's it. No CD burner,
nothing.
The one thing I'm missing is an option to grab a partition from Knopix, transfer the installation to there and install a boot manager (on floppy would be sufficient...). Is that possible at all?
Might not be what it's intended for, I guess.:-)
Well, how likely is that? Someone will update, then he'll produce some unreadable files, and since the next guy wants to read the files he'll have to upgrade. Maybe he'll hold out for a while, but he'll get fed-up having to complain to people about this pretty soon.
That tactic has always worked for MS before - for the vast majority of users, there isn't a single feature in the last three "updates" which they actually want to use...
really a big win for the Open Source
movement, or is it just governments taking free stuff?
Doesn't matter, I think. Any software user is a win for the OSS community. It means more data will be in OSS accessible formats, more websites will be browsable with OSS browsers etc. It's marketshare, which breaks the monopoly, that the important point, and the benefit for us all.
In addition such a decision will earn at least some money for OSS companies, and in turn to OSS developers. It also give OSS developers a better job market, etc.
Well, in evaluating this, you have to consider that the Swiss system works somewhat different from the US system. Their democracy has some more direct elements. In addition to electing the government, they can also vote on certain issues directly.
So for the Swiss this technology is more interesting, as they could organize more of these direct polls.
What worries me though, is the possibility of someone writing viruses which would infect voters' PCs, and then tamper with the vote. These sort of programs are already in circulation, currently used to dial expensive phone numbers and the like.
PCs are just not save enough for this sort of use.
What do you do for music, then? I'd actually like to see slashdot having a review section for music - entirely for music which can be bought from the artist online, and with full fair-use rights, obviously.
There must be a lot of interesting stuff out there, it would be good if it could be demonstrated that you can make a living selling music in a fair way.
Reducing the population of the earth, in my opinion, is the only way out of this hole.
Well, it seems that very few people on earth
contribute anything noticeable to pollution.
Fine, there is methane (from cow herding) and
the like, but basically it's a problem industrialized countries cause. It can't be solved by reducing the population in other countries.
As for public transport: it works reasonably in some cases in the US (e.g. PATH train in NYC/NJ area) and is generally working fine in Europe.
Part of the problem is, that fuel in the US is so heavily subsidized - i.e. car owners don't pay for the environmental damage, which burning fuel causes.
I'm getting more and more
convinced that overpopulation, more than anything else, is the source of all of our problems.:)
While that contributes, you have to remember that most of the pollution is caused by a very small percentage of the people (25% by the US, I seem to recall). So really we could get a handle on this problem by just cutting down a little, being just a little more efficient. We don't need to get pollution down to 0, just make it manageable.
It wouldn't take all that much effort, and we could still live well...
If SCO publish the source files for linux complete with the original GPL licence files then surely that
constitutes acceptance of that licence.
I'm not a lawyer either, but I doubt this is the way it works. The law treats patents like property, and deliberate violation of patents would then be similar to theft. (I'm skipping the moral side of this...) You can't really gain ownership of something stolen - legally it remains the property of the person it was stolen from.
If you accept a ride from someone in a car, which was stolen from you a few years earlier, you do not lose the rights to that car. So similarly SCO would assert to not have realized that there was a patent violation up till now.
I don't think the GPL helps in this case either - if the code was violating patents, then the person writing the code would not have had the right to license it. The GPL license would have been void, right from start.
However, once you accept patents to be property, then trivial patents do morally constitute theft. They steal from the public domain. If someone readily finds the same solution to a certain problem, without having read the patent, then the patent is probably an invalid one.
Like many here, I feel that the decision of the US to make software patentable was wrong in the first place.
How can they claim IP infrigement in Linux if Linux was all about
writing a UNIX-like OS *FROM SCRATCH* in the first place ?
That doesn't matter. A patent would cover a specific way of writing code. So if you were to write your code in the same way - no matter whether you know of the patent - you violate the patent and owe license fees.
Of course, coming up with the same solution independently is a good indicator that the patent was not actually valid.
One of the differences between fields like auto repair, hair dressing etc and computers, is the pace of change. There is of course change in all these fields, but if you've been trained as an auto mechanic 5 years ago, you should still have the required skills today. (Even though you may have to read up on some things.)
For a computer tech that's probably no longer the case. Unless he stayed in the field and continued his training, his knowledge is now up to date.
Also for car repair or hair dressing you need motoric skills (welding, cutting precisely etc) - once learned they can probably be adapted for new styles, or new tools fairly quickly.
For the computer field that's usually not the case - unless you want to get deep into using soldering irons, the motoric side is trivial - what's important is to be able to pick up new knowledge quickly and to understand complex systems. Something which is very difficult to measure with certifications. They are only checking a snapshot of current (and soon out of date) knowledge.
Setting up a certification body, which then has to continually update the skill set measured is going to
be a lot more difficult, in this case.
The best computer techs are often students, who know a lot of about computers and are quick to pick up new knowledge. They are good in that field because of these skills, and because they have these skills they will not stay in that field. They are training for other professions, and won't have time for getting these certifications.
So what I'm worried about, is that these certifications will effectively preclude the best suited people from actually working in the field, removing a good job for students to earn money for their tuition, and will not noticeably raise the minimum standards either.
Ok, obviously tastes vary, and if you don't like this band, paying for their music doesn't make sense.
Having said this: this is exactly the way to escape RIA - you have to find musicians which will sell you their music without infringing on you fair-use rights.
I don't think it's ok to just "share" mainstream music.
If we don't like the terms the music industry offers, we should look around and find other bands who are *willing* to offer their music in reasonable formats, and then pay them appropriately.
This might have the side effect of more variety returning to music, instead of having some cartell deciding which music we are supposed.
Ok, sorry for the rant, but how about slashdot providing some "music review" section to complement the book reviews? The reviews would have to be about new artists, who are willing to sell mp3s (or some format like that) of their music.
(to a multi-national open source is a joke, don't go there).
I think your assessment just doesn't reflect
reality anymore - open source is way past that stage. These days when I ask vendors for Chip-design tools, I get "of course we support
Linux". In many other fields it's the same.
I am working for a multi-national, and we are using open-source.
Uhm - are you really talking to MS when something doesn't work in your webbrowser?
I'm a bit flabbergasted by that argument.
Is that support free? What do they do to help?
Can you cite an example of a problem they fixed?
Do you seriously need help to control the settings in IE?
I've never walked into a Fortune 500 company and seen Mozilla running on a PC. Never.
Or how about properly running the Java plugin so Yahoo! Chat doesn't crash after a few minutes. I'm not making this up. This happens everytime.
That's true, but AFAIK the same thing happens
with newer versions of IE - the only browser which seems to work properly with the Yahoo-Chat
seems to be Netscape 4.7.
I don't really understand why that is, but it seems IE and Mozilla are on par there.... unfortunately.:-/
Well, censorship is always dangerous. The problem is, once censorship exists - even if you agree with the selection criteria - how do you
you verify that they are just censoring that?
You have no means of control.
Censorware is already censoring stuff which does not match the topics which it claims to be censoring. In some cases due to incompetence, in others due to malice.
The other objection I have is: developing ways to censor information is dangerous in itself. This technology will find their way into the hands of repressive regimes eventually, and be used to prevent their citizens from having access to free information. Stabilizing these regimes has a very real cost in human life, too.
I don't want these sites operating either - but wouldn't it have made a lot more sense to contact the authorities in Spain and Russia, and get those servers shut down?
The topic is a very difficult one, but I very much doubt the point you are making there.
Of course the writers of the US constitution did never consider the internet and photographs, but I don't think your argument is focussed on that.
I think it comes down to whether "speech" could possibly be as offensive as that, and whether the writers of the constitution did realize that.
I'm pretty sure they did. In medieval Europe sometimes beliefs were perceived to be so offensive that people were burned at the
stake for voicing their "heretic" ideas.
Many of the early colonists came to the US for religous reasons, so this must have been very well known.
Of course there is a difference here, since posting pictures of kiddie porn requires committing another crime somewhere along the line, but I just wanted to focus on that one point in this post.
Sorry, but that's crap - just because someone does not buy into your philosphy doesn't entitle you to claim they are doing something which they are clearly not.
And you are quite right, most contributors to Opensource don't buy into RMS' philosophie. If you can't accept other people having other ideas and their own philosophies, then you shouldn't even talk about freedom.
What GNU software calls for is what's stated in the license - asking for stuff which is not covered in there is cheating.
> That they don't contribute to Linux is simply not true.
No one said that.
Well sorry, but that is the implication by calling someone a free rider.
As for the fragmenting: that's one area where proprietary or not, does not matter at all. The fragmentation is caused by a variety of different tools to do the same thing. Nobody is picking up one of the free tools, and makes it standard. Debian is not going to use rpms any time soon, neither will others switch to Debian management tools.
Slashdot Mirror
It's about the power lost in the wire: P = I^2 * R. To reduce the resistance of the wire (R) you can make it wider [1] - or the other way round, if you keep P constant (P being the acceptable power loss) you can use a thinner wire.
Let's say you double the voltage, so you can half the current. If your current is half, then the power lost in the wire will be a quarter. Alternatively you can use a thinner wire to maintain the same amount of lost power - you'd save three quarters of the material of the wire.
I think for most of the wiring the concern is less about the lost power, but more that it will get too warm - burning through the insulation and breaking, or setting things on fire. P is converted into heat after all.
[1] R = ro * lenght / Area, so the resistance of the wire is proportional to the length (can't do much there) the specific resistance of the material (that wouldn't change here) and inversely proportional to the area of the cross section.
Additionally, now that one city goes for Linux, they put pressure on MS, too. They now have to compete, and that means they'll also have to offer better prices. So many city administrations might now get better deals - even if they stay with Windows.
That's fair, but part of the discussions was also that Microsoft is a "Munich company" i.e. has large offices near Munich and employs people there. As opposed to SuSE which is "far away" in Nuernberg.
Anyway, some Linux supporters were certainly pushing the city administrators to go for a "German product" but of course their real interest was Linux and they were merely trying to pull the politican's strings. :-)
For the following I'm assuming here that A is deeper than B.
If you use the table for dive 2, you'd pretend it was dive 1. In this case you'd have a greater saftey margin.
However if you dive dive 1, your saftey margin would theoretically the T1+T2be the same, using both methods.
If you were to use a dive computer which provides a greater saftey margin, but based on your actual dive profile, your saftey margin for dive 1 could actually be greater.
Having said that, I admit that a dive where you spend only a part of the time at the max depth is a lot more likely. I think that dive computers will do a better job with a slow descent though (diving in groups can cause waiting time), so there might be another potential saftey advantage.
No, both statements are wrong. The coalition was formed with the DNVP, and the SPD never merged voluntarily with the Communists.
What you may be thinking of is the so-called "negative coalition", which described the situation when the government was democratic (SPD + Zentrum), but didn't have enough votes in the Reichstag to pass laws. Together NSDAP and KPD (=Communists) would block everything regardless what the laws where about - just to hinder the democrats.
The SPD was merged with the Communist party after the war, and in East-Germany only. This merge was forced onto them, it was never their choice.
As for the motives of the Communists - both Nazis and Communists thought that as soon as the democrats were discredited they would be able to take over in the resulting chaos.
If I interpret the license correctly, code generated by gcc is not considered a derivative work of it. A derivative work would only be generated by modifying the source code of the compiler itself. The way I read it, the GNU license doesn't reserve naming rights either, no matter whether a work is derivative or not.
GNU deserves lots of credit, but they should stand by their license, and respect it. They freely made the decision to give up their naming rights, now they should accept that they don't have them anymore.
It automatically detected all the hardware, came up with X-Window had KDE icons for all the Windows partitions.
Right-Click on the CD-Burner icon brought up the KDE CD-Burner, and he was able to burn all his data on a backup CD. (Ok, this will only work if you have a CD drive and a separate burner.)
In comparision: the Windows rescue CD provides a DOS-like shell, and that's it. No CD burner, nothing.
The one thing I'm missing is an option to grab a partition from Knopix, transfer the installation to there and install a boot manager (on floppy would be sufficient...). Is that possible at all? Might not be what it's intended for, I guess. :-)
Well, how likely is that? Someone will update, then he'll produce some unreadable files, and since the next guy wants to read the files he'll have to upgrade. Maybe he'll hold out for a while, but he'll get fed-up having to complain to people about this pretty soon.
That tactic has always worked for MS before - for the vast majority of users, there isn't a single feature in the last three "updates" which they actually want to use...
Doesn't matter, I think. Any software user is a win for the OSS community. It means more data will be in OSS accessible formats, more websites will be browsable with OSS browsers etc. It's marketshare, which breaks the monopoly, that the important point, and the benefit for us all.
In addition such a decision will earn at least some money for OSS companies, and in turn to OSS developers. It also give OSS developers a better job market, etc.
Really I think we can't lose with this. :-)
So for the Swiss this technology is more interesting, as they could organize more of these direct polls.
What worries me though, is the possibility of someone writing viruses which would infect voters' PCs, and then tamper with the vote. These sort of programs are already in circulation, currently used to dial expensive phone numbers and the like. PCs are just not save enough for this sort of use.
There must be a lot of interesting stuff out there, it would be good if it could be demonstrated that you can make a living selling music in a fair way.
Well, it seems that very few people on earth contribute anything noticeable to pollution. Fine, there is methane (from cow herding) and the like, but basically it's a problem industrialized countries cause. It can't be solved by reducing the population in other countries.
As for public transport: it works reasonably in some cases in the US (e.g. PATH train in NYC/NJ area) and is generally working fine in Europe.
Part of the problem is, that fuel in the US is so heavily subsidized - i.e. car owners don't pay for the environmental damage, which burning fuel causes.
While that contributes, you have to remember that most of the pollution is caused by a very small percentage of the people (25% by the US, I seem to recall). So really we could get a handle on this problem by just cutting down a little, being just a little more efficient. We don't need to get pollution down to 0, just make it manageable. It wouldn't take all that much effort, and we could still live well...
I'm not a lawyer either, but I doubt this is the way it works. The law treats patents like property, and deliberate violation of patents would then be similar to theft. (I'm skipping the moral side of this...) You can't really gain ownership of something stolen - legally it remains the property of the person it was stolen from.
If you accept a ride from someone in a car, which was stolen from you a few years earlier, you do not lose the rights to that car. So similarly SCO would assert to not have realized that there was a patent violation up till now.
I don't think the GPL helps in this case either - if the code was violating patents, then the person writing the code would not have had the right to license it. The GPL license would have been void, right from start.
However, once you accept patents to be property, then trivial patents do morally constitute theft. They steal from the public domain. If someone readily finds the same solution to a certain problem, without having read the patent, then the patent is probably an invalid one.
Like many here, I feel that the decision of the US to make software patentable was wrong in the first place.
That doesn't matter. A patent would cover a specific way of writing code. So if you were to write your code in the same way - no matter whether you know of the patent - you violate the patent and owe license fees.
Of course, coming up with the same solution independently is a good indicator that the patent was not actually valid.
For a computer tech that's probably no longer the case. Unless he stayed in the field and continued his training, his knowledge is now up to date.
Also for car repair or hair dressing you need motoric skills (welding, cutting precisely etc) - once learned they can probably be adapted for new styles, or new tools fairly quickly. For the computer field that's usually not the case - unless you want to get deep into using soldering irons, the motoric side is trivial - what's important is to be able to pick up new knowledge quickly and to understand complex systems. Something which is very difficult to measure with certifications. They are only checking a snapshot of current (and soon out of date) knowledge.
Setting up a certification body, which then has to continually update the skill set measured is going to be a lot more difficult, in this case.
The best computer techs are often students, who know a lot of about computers and are quick to pick up new knowledge. They are good in that field because of these skills, and because they have these skills they will not stay in that field. They are training for other professions, and won't have time for getting these certifications.
So what I'm worried about, is that these certifications will effectively preclude the best suited people from actually working in the field, removing a good job for students to earn money for their tuition, and will not noticeably raise the minimum standards either.
I don't think it's ok to just "share" mainstream music. If we don't like the terms the music industry offers, we should look around and find other bands who are *willing* to offer their music in reasonable formats, and then pay them appropriately.
This might have the side effect of more variety returning to music, instead of having some cartell deciding which music we are supposed.
Ok, sorry for the rant, but how about slashdot providing some "music review" section to complement the book reviews? The reviews would have to be about new artists, who are willing to sell mp3s (or some format like that) of their music.
Just my 0.02 Euros.
I think your assessment just doesn't reflect reality anymore - open source is way past that stage. These days when I ask vendors for Chip-design tools, I get "of course we support Linux". In many other fields it's the same.
I am working for a multi-national, and we are using open-source.
I'm a bit flabbergasted by that argument. Is that support free? What do they do to help? Can you cite an example of a problem they fixed? Do you seriously need help to control the settings in IE?
I've never walked into a Fortune 500 company and seen Mozilla running on a PC. Never.
Fine. I have though, now what? :-)
That's true, but AFAIK the same thing happens with newer versions of IE - the only browser which seems to work properly with the Yahoo-Chat seems to be Netscape 4.7.
I don't really understand why that is, but it seems IE and Mozilla are on par there.... unfortunately. :-/
Censorware is already censoring stuff which does not match the topics which it claims to be censoring. In some cases due to incompetence, in others due to malice.
The other objection I have is: developing ways to censor information is dangerous in itself. This technology will find their way into the hands of repressive regimes eventually, and be used to prevent their citizens from having access to free information. Stabilizing these regimes has a very real cost in human life, too.
I don't want these sites operating either - but wouldn't it have made a lot more sense to contact the authorities in Spain and Russia, and get those servers shut down?
I think it comes down to whether "speech" could possibly be as offensive as that, and whether the writers of the constitution did realize that.
I'm pretty sure they did. In medieval Europe sometimes beliefs were perceived to be so offensive that people were burned at the stake for voicing their "heretic" ideas. Many of the early colonists came to the US for religous reasons, so this must have been very well known.
Of course there is a difference here, since posting pictures of kiddie porn requires committing another crime somewhere along the line, but I just wanted to focus on that one point in this post.
And you are quite right, most contributors to Opensource don't buy into RMS' philosophie. If you can't accept other people having other ideas and their own philosophies, then you shouldn't even talk about freedom.
What GNU software calls for is what's stated in the license - asking for stuff which is not covered in there is cheating.
Agree - and that's a lie, so why call them free riders, when they are clearly not?
No one said that.
Well sorry, but that is the implication by calling someone a free rider.
As for the fragmenting: that's one area where proprietary or not, does not matter at all. The fragmentation is caused by a variety of different tools to do the same thing. Nobody is picking up one of the free tools, and makes it standard. Debian is not going to use rpms any time soon, neither will others switch to Debian management tools.