Until you can say how to do it better (and I'd love it if you would, since I don't claim to "like" Flash except as the best of a sorry lot).
How 'bout the way it was done for the DOZEN YEARS before youtube played videos? You have the webserver spew out MPEG data and it plays in the user's video player of choice? IT is SO much better to have somtheing like VLC embeded in your browser than some crufty substandard, 32-bit-only CPU hogger like FLASH player. It is less resource intensive, uses all 64 bits of power in your 64-bit OS, and is potimised to play video, unlike flash which is optimised to deliver "punch the monkey" banner ads.
Here is another peeve: financial sites that use flash to show stock charts. THEY'RE FRIGGEN LINES! USE SVG MAN! Google, shame on you, you say you strive to do no evil, then you do evil by using flash on your google finance site! And web page designers...it's 2008! Learn some friggen javascript and CSS people! Stop animating your buttons and menus with flash! I don't need 30 second load times so you can emply fading fukken menus...I want to navigate your site not sit ald watch a progress bar!
'kay, there are some alternatives. I know, I Know, VLC "isn't flash", SVG "isn't flash", AJAX "isn't flash". But, each serves a purpose that fat-arse lazy deb devs mistakenly use FLASH to do, and use in combination can completely replace flash, and do everything BETTER too.
...well, in a way anyways. 64-bit Windows users must have a 32-bit browser installed and running under the WoW Win32 emulator. Under 64-bit Linux you can use nspluginwrapper as an alternative to a 32-bit browser.
A Flash crash using a 32-bit browser may crash the entire browser (on Wndows, perhaps even the whole WoW process). On Linux, nspluginwrapper, apart from encapsulating the 32-bit exceution within the realm of the plugin instead of the browesr, seems to run the plugin in a separate process (or a well-isolated thread at least). So, that nasty Flash object that crashes in Windows or any other 32 bit browser simply kills the flash object--you get a blank square but at least you can continue browsing relatively uninterrupted. A page reload, or at worst a restart of the browser at your leisure, will restore the flash operation.
I've heard that you can even use nspluginwrapper on 32-bit Liux--even if you don't need it for compatibility it will add stability.
Poor Windows users have to suffer with browser crashes as nspluginwrapper doesn't seem to be available (and of course it wouldn't work at all with IE anyways, if that is your browser preference).
FYI, flash was designed, developed and continues to be maintained by a dozen stoned chimpanzees. For some unspecified "technical design" reasons they insist that migration to 64 bit is exremely challenging--so much so that Adobe's "TechNote" about it has said "Adobe is working on Flash Player support for 64-bit platforms as part of our ongoing commitment to the cross-platform compatibility of Flash Player. We have not yet announced timing or release dates." for at least THREE YEARS now.
I might add that these stoned chimps only convene to do Flash player development part time, when they aren't busy trying to finish Duke Nukem Forever. I suspect that 64-bit flash release will be shortly after release of their main preoccupation.
...proprietary "de-facto" standards are evil. Flash is a "standard" much too closely held by one company, and even if it caters to multiple platforms it insists on being the only developer of a closed client to support the data format and actively discourages community or other third party development, open OR closed.
Your wife isn't alone in suffering from unstable Flash on Windows XP. It isn't a problem with any particular version of the OS ot even the browser for that matter (flash performance on IE is also substandard in my opinion). The problam is that the developers responsible for ALL flash player development at Adobe vomit out the some pretty wretched, barely-beta-quality code.
I think there has to be some insistence on conformance to *real* standards by major players on the 'net. So much of what is on-line that uses Flash could be done with actual standards. It was quite the brain fart to come up with using flash player to transport video when a non-vendor-specific standard practice could've been picked with little additional effort. It annoys me that something like SVG or even a Java applet could've been used to show stock charts on Google finance and the like but instead we are stuck with some senile flash object.
I'm generally averse to government regulation, but I do think governments can play a role here: When awarding web development contract, make it a stipulation that properly vettted, vendor-independent standards must be used exclusevely, perhaps specifically mentioning that the use of flash player is completely banned until (if ever) the standard is made open. I hate to day it, but even MSFT's Siverlight is mmore open than Flash (at least it lets others make interoperable client software with Moonlight--not obly if they'd let a community-developed Moonlight client run on Windows to provide competition).
Perhaps large corporate users could set good examples too and ban flash from all external and internal web apps in their enterprise: our employer has a "reference client" on which such apps must run without the need to download dependencies from the 'net. If only that reference client did not contain the flash player...
There are a lot of complaints bout artsy-fartsy "web page artists" who love to load up pages with nothing but flash objects. Well, people are lazy by nature, and if you can wow a PHB with flaming, rotating logos and animated, fading, translucent menus most easily by using flash that is what they'll use. If only PHBs would grab sone sense ad see that the whole WWW is sick because of bandwidth hogging, unstable proprietary crap that adds literally zero REAL value to the web experience that other established technologies can't do just as well.
As distasteful as is may be to the FOSS community, I think the ability to walk into a store and buy a piece of software that works with basically any linux distro is the key to wider adoption and marketshare.
The thing is, FOSS devotees see that model as the future for software and really don't grok the need of walking into a store and buying a piece of software on a little plastic disc in a big cardboard box from the nerdy-looking-but-still-clueless sales associate in Best Buy.
FOSS advocates tend to be both quite technical and libertarian-minded (not socialist or communist as chair-throwing executives would like you to believe). To such a person (such as myself), it seems like such an antiquated notion to buy a collection of bits encoded on a piece of plastic when they can technically flow freely over the internet, and the thought of needlessly exerting control over an individual's liberty to do what is technically trivial through product activation and DRM offends their libertarian sensibilities.
The thoughts that run through a technical-and-libertarian FOSS fan's head might be along the lines of "well, the market will decide what gets packaged" or "if the makers of a distro want it to be popular they'll make sure to build good packages for it" or "it's not such a big deal to build your own package--if you want to use it so bad RTFM and do it yourself".
This is what goes through my head at times--why put the effort into making it easier for software companies based upon an antiquated and restrictive business model to distribute their wares? FOSS is the future and worthy software should be FOSS, in which case there is nothing preventing distro maintainers from providing packages that are perfectly optimised for their needs, and such a model actually realises the vision MSFT seems to have for ite own platform: the OS and apps are "bundled" in a sense and software maintenance of both are handled seamlessly through the same mechanism (to the point that I think Ubuntu is much easier to manage than Windows--everything is updated through the same service, you install/update/remove EVERYTHING the same exact way...not the case with Windows).
As powerful as FOSS/GPL can be, you have to allow companies to make money if you want them on board and developing, especially when market share is as small as it is currently.
Though I'm a FOSS advocate I'm also pragmatic, and know that reality is different from the above ideal: Inertia means that closed-software business models will fade only very slowly, and people by nature are lazy and thus not many will volunteer to make dozens of packages of the same piece of software, so the lack of compatibility has a limiting effect on Linux. MSFT and games publishers aren't about to release their sources to the community to package and won't invest the resources to make multiple packages themselves. If you cannot maintain at least a few packages yourself your app will not gain acceptance because of "laziness"--if something else works good enough there is no motivation to package it. Distros suffer "chicken and egg" effect (small repository no users/no users no interest in growing repository), so there is less competition and more consolidation. As such, new distros end up being derivatives of a couple big popular ones or very innovative "built from bare metal" ones are overlooked due to lack of a repository.
So as a result I really hold out hope that efforts like LSB end up being successful. I find it really disheartening that FOSS advocates shoot it full of holes because of technical shortcomings or disagreements and make no effort at all to help solve them because they believe the LSB is just set up in the interests of big vendors who want a vehicle to distribute closed software. The LSB and other interoperability efforts are a lot like copyright law:/.ers hold great derision of both, both are concepts that can be used to aid the "dark side" (MSFT, RIAA et al)...and
"zero configuration" so linux for the people that miss the whole point of running linux desktop?
You seem to imply the point of Linux on the desktop is the ability to configure it without limitation. I don't recall that being the motivation behind the creation of Linux-based OSes or Linux desktops.
My first Linux desktop was a Slakware installation I loaded over the WfW 3.11/MS-DOS 6.22 setup on my 486DX. Believe me, it was NOT configuration abilities that motivated me to to try it out. WfW 3.11 and MS-DOS were simple and familiar to me from a configuration/administration perspective. I was already familiar with CP/M and MS-DOS seemed like a work-alike when I first tried it and once I got into Grade VII we "graduated" from the Apple II and C64s to the shiny new Commodore PC10 XT-clones that had replaced the PETs. By the 1990s MS-DOS fit like a comfortable pair of old jeans.
Though MSFT was trying to be an Apple wanna-be in terms of user-friendliness in its GUI, they did not try to "weld the hood shut" the way Apple did with the Mac. I learned all sorts of tricks with autoexec.bat and config.sys, how to do "stupid pet tricks" with Windows 3.x, tried out alternative shells to the normal Windows desktop and so on. I wasn't lacking in configuration abilities when I decided to try Linux.
The immediate reason to try it was that it was free (gratis) and that is always good for a poor student to be able to use it without spending money--legally at that. I was not all that well versed in UNIX-style OSes and found the commands arcane (ls instead of dir, cat to list a text file and so on) and the FVWM desktop (still Rob Nation's verison IIRC) wasn't configurable in a meaningful way though its own GUI like windows was (configuration was almost exclusively through the command line or Slakware's text-based manuing system). If ease-of-configurability was what I was after I wouldn't have stuck with Linux at all.
After not much time using Linux I started coming to the realisation that it was Linux being Free (libre) that was its main appeal to me. It became more familiar to me to the point I could manage it just as well as DOS but I don't thing it ever EXCEEDED DOS on that front. I liked that no one company controlled Linux--I could try Slackware and Red Hat and Debian and choose what I liked best, and each distro could borrow and improve off each other and advance the platform faster. This was a time in personal computing that was exciting and frustrating--when a fragmented home PC market was giving way to a standard multi-vendor PC platform, yet innovation was being held back by intellectual-property-pissing-matches (Apple suing MSFT for "look and feel" issues and so on). Here was this Linux project that let anyone cobble together and offer up their own take on what the best OS was, and nobody was going to demand royalties or sue you because GNU protected you.
When I was tired of tinkering I replaced Slackware with Mandrake. Choice isn't about configuration. sometimes you make the CHOICE to eliminate configurability and "go Mac-style". Some people want a Vista-like experience, just without activation and DRM, and will never touch gConf or files in/etc, and some people are old-school and want to use EMACS on a text terminal and tweak kernel module parameters and everything else. User-configuration ability is just one choice of many--it isn't the definition of choice.
Bad drivers can crash any system using a monolithic kernel.
They can crash microkernel based systems severley too--microkernel systems like Microsoft Windows NT/2k/XP/Vista. The quality of the system architecture overall is far more important than the kernel architecture chosen.
Only low level problems can cause a Windows BSOD
Not true. Driver issues are the main reason, but user-level software can behave badly too. You cite anti-virus and firewall software, which aren't exactly "low level". Developer tools are usually the worst user-level offenders.
XP these days is stable (it only took 7 years but they made it) and you won't see a blue screen using signed drivers and hardware that isn't malfunctioning.
The thing is it can be difficult to find signed drivers for your system. If you want them for Vista you're SOL unless you have a very recent system (by and large, upgrading to Vista is a really dumb idea--everyone should stay with XP until they are willing to get a completely new machine), and if you have XP or 2K the opposite is true (the latest hardware ain't ever gonna have drivers, and its all closed software so no option to backport). I still run into a LOT of hardware with bad, unsigned drivers that is essential to some application yet behaves badly.
I'd guess the picture is in any case a fake.
Given the PRC's track record and the fact that they used "performance enhancing" technology on the official opening ceremonies broadcast I do not regard ANY media out of these olympics as trustworthy. To me, it is just as likely that the official Chinese broadcast digitally erased BSODs from the feed as it is that someone doctored a photo to ADD the BSOD and embarrass the Chinese olympic organisers.
I'm sorry, do you know of an operating system where talking to hardware cannot cause a panic?
[...]
If you can name one system ready for general purpose for which this isn't true I would love to hear about it.
I haven't worked with QNX lately, but it has historically been a very tolerant OS in my experience. You are correct that at some point the OS MUST access hardware directly, and that faulty hardware will cause a software crash...but there are degrees of vulnerability here.
Microkernel OSes, especially those like QNX that are used in embedded and/or real-time applications, are extremely fault tolerant. Because hardware subsystems are each accessed by separate, self-contained low-level processes, a hardware fault in fact will NOT cause a systemic software failure as you assert. You DO in fact have to "try" to "bring down a whole system" through hardware faults in such architectures.
Nothing will stop systemic hardware faults from causing systemic software crashes, but the fact is that when it comes to Windows (and to a lesser but still significant degree, Linux and Mac OSX) hardware fault tolerance is absolutely wretched compared to what it COULD be. Microkernel architecture helps but isn't the magic bullet either--remember that MacOS X AND Windows are BOTH technically "microkernel architectures" and that doesn't keep them from falling over due to a hardware fault or bad driver.
There's a basic design flaw in how normal computers operate that requires this sort of behavior from kernels
Linux is very stable relative to Windows even though it is a monolithic kernel architecture because it is a better engineered platform overall, both in terms of security AND because drivers are much better written (owing to the fact that the bulk of drivers are community-written and/or open source instead of supported by an overworked small team of programmers employed by a hardware company that chronically under-invests in software development for its revenue-generating hardware products). In all but TWO cases (one case being a total hard drive failure where the system continued to run without HD access until a page swap was required, and another where several cheap Chinese capacitors dried out and popped in another system, which also would boot and run for hours to days nonetheless) my 11 years of extensively using Linux ALL kernel panics have been due to SOFTWARE bugs in drivers, and in most of those cases they were CLOSED drivers (I'm talking to you NVidia!).
Even with the problems I've had with closed drivers in Linux, the problems are very small in number and severity in comparison with Windows. NVidia drivers still are relatively unreliable however when there is a problem in Windows it can make the system BSOD. A similar bug in Linux is most likely to cause a fault in X but the rest of the subsystems are unharmed--in fact the latest NVidia drivers haven't caused me a single kernel panic yet. There is no "basic design flaw" in modern hardware systems that cannot be kept to a very small minimum without proper SOFTWARE design.
Am I wrong in thinking I knew an old lady who swallowed a fly? Someone weigh in on this please.
No you're quite right, but not quite for the same reason. Concrete and asphalt already used in the roads are the result of intensive mining, drilling and refining processes already, and titanium can be recoverer/reused, so I'd venture to say that though there would be an added environmental impact to include this "air scrubber" additive that it isn't the biggest factor offseting the benefits to air quality.
I'd say a more immediate concern is that this doesn't reduce pollution--it only converts it into anouther type of pollution. Smog-causing Nitrous oxides are certainly bad for our health, but nitrates are far from "harmless". I'd like to know what is done with the nitrates. Can they be recovered and used in a more controlled way (to fertilise crops and what not) or are they just left to be absorbed by the environment (dissolved in runoff, etc)?
Though proper amounts of nitrates are natural and beneficial in ecosystems, excess nitrates in the environment can destroy wetlands and other bodies of water by causing excess algae growth. Nitrates are also bad for animal life, from fish and amphibians to livestock. Nitrates can infiltrate well-basede drinking water supplies as well, creating health problems in people ranging from thyroid problems and vitamin deficiencies to low birth weights.
If there is some way to contain the nitrates as well as enjoy less smog I'd say it is promising, but we still have to work on more efficiently using fuels and not driving personal vehicles as much when there isn't a need to.
companies charge more for products in europe because they can
They can and do because they must. The cost of doing business in Europe is much higher than in the US, shareholders expect profit margins to be at a certain level and WTO frowns upon the practice of favouring certain markets over others for no good reason.
The same sort of price differentials are apparent in Canada, where it seems unjustified to pay 20 percent more for a product made in California than people pay in New York, when Vancouver is closer to the source and transportation costs are cheaper. Before the US dollar devaluation this price difference was obscured because the CA$ was only worth US$0.70 to 0.85 and fluctuated enough to be an excuse.
Now the CA$ and US$ have been within a couple of percent of equal for most of a year, and though imported goods have come down in price, the retail numbers have settled at around 20 percent higher overall to what they are in the US. People have complained, the government has voiced its concern to retailers, but in the end it comes down to one thing: TAXES. Despite the fact stored charge 20% more in Canada, Canadian retail margins are actually LOWER than the US--they charge more and STILL make less profit.
Taxes are at the root of almost the entire discrepancy in prices between any two developed nations, because taxes accumulate in the price of everything. Manufacturers pay those same higher taxes and pass costs onto retailers. The retail stores pay more corporate taxes and municipal property taxes and pass those on to customers, along with the costs that manufacturers passed onto them.
Everybody pays more for everything here because everyone passes on the cost of fuel too. In Alberta, Canada right now gasoline in US units costs more than US$4.95 per US gallon. You can drive just across the border into Montana and suddenly you only have to pay $3.99, and here is the kicker: it is the EXACT SAME GAS from the SAME CANADIAN REFINERY, but we pay so much more for our own gas. The reason? Literally 100 percent of the difference is TAX. Companies can only partially write off the added expense too, so the cost goes all the way up the chain.
Anyways, I'm not sure why Europeans are whining about the prices. They have embraced a more socialist-oriented system for years and with added taxes come the benefits of the socialist infrastructure they wanted and are comfortable with. You want cheap gas and cheap computer toys and cheap software like the US? Then you have to settle for getting (another) mortgage on your house for that operation, or paying six figures to send your children to top-level universities. Otherwise, stop whining and live with it. You already live with paying 100 percent more than Canadians do (and we pay 20 percent more than the US remember) when you buy petrol, movie tickets, DVDs and CDs, clothing and much more. Video games are no different at all.
Internet connections in reasonably developed cities (Beijing, Shanghai [shanghaiist.com], Chongqing, [thechonx.com]Dalian [daliandalian.com], run around 600 RMB for 512kbps for a year, around 1100 for 1Mbps. Not too bad.
That is true, but the price for freedom is not included in the rates you mention like it is in the Olympic village. "Normal Folk" technically aren't getting internet access for that much smaller price--they are getting "official Chinese network" access, which is not a free network.
The original article comments on how surprising it is that they have no free internet in the olympic village. The thing is, it is probably the only legally free internet in China.
This is like Free software--people get confused between "gratis" free and "libre" free. Just like rolling out Linux in a large enterprise, there is a cost associated with "libre" freedom. The global media demands proper access to the internet (not the national Chinese network that is filtered) so the dictatorship relented and allowed internet access to visiting delegates. It is deliberately priced very high so only those traveling from the Free world with generous corporate expense accounts can afford it, and "Normal Folk" in China are still shut out.
Sometimes, as is the case with Linux, the price of freedom is lower than the alternative, but in most cases, in much of the world, there price paid for freedom is very high. The price could be worse than paying a 1500% premium to freely interact online. Some people pay for freedom with their lives.
This is an ancient (but wise) practice. It started in on dial-up BBS forums in the 1980s on Citadel-powered BBSes, and it was called the "Twit Room". Banning users or blocking posting abilities was frowned upon as it is censorship, however freedom of speech does not mean good online citizens have to tolerate pests. So, if a certain user's only goal in life seems to be to make a pest of himself the sysop could change his access level to "Twit".
Twits still had access and could post, but their posts would be routed to the Twit Room regardless of the room they tried to post in. There were any variants of Citadel out there, and the Twit Room was a pretty standard capability amongst all of them. The Unix version is still in active development today as a thoroughly modern and internet based groupware platform now, and it still employs the concept and terminology.
Citadel was often forked and customised, and if I recall some developers had fun with the concept. For example, Twits being ignorant by nature, it made sense to some sysops to have them be ignorant of the fact that they were twits. When any twit logged in they'd see all the postings of all the twits in the rooms where they were intended to be posted, they could have normal access to all the floors and rooms, and there was no visible indication they were twits. Anyone who was not marked as a twit would have to go to the Twit Room to see a twit's posts, and was thus spared having to endure troublemakers and censorship would be kept to a minimum. I'm not sure if this idea of "ignorant twit" ever bacame widespread, but it's a mischievously fun idea.
Twit rooms could be fun, because regular users could read and post in them too. That way, you could "feed the trolls" in a forum isolated from legitimate discussion. This led to legions of "counter troll" posts meant to goad the twit into an argument just like the twit liked to do with everyone else.
...or so it seems. I've never been very keen on voting for lawyer candidates running for office. To me, it seems like hiring the inmates to be in charge of the asylum, or at best a bit of a conflict of interest.
Nonetheless, most of those who we elect to make the law are lawyers. This means that laws are purposefully designed to make more business for lawyers. I think patent reform is not happening largely because a patent system that worked would mean far less litigation, and thus less work for lawyers.
There needs to be an awful lot more lobbying by players in high-innovation industries to counter this inertia. Even evil MSFT has been burned by patent trolls and many within MSFT contend their patents are often "defensive". Lawyers tell their clients that it is important to protect their IP and file defensive patents even if they are trivial, just in case a troll slithers in to make a parasite of itself off your business operations. Do you think lawyers in DC are really keen on stopping a gravy train like that? You'd think the victims of patent trolling ranging from MSFT to RIM would be sick of the expense.
This latest case of a troll wielding a clearly illegitimate patent for using computers to manage a gift registry is simply another example of how patents have been perverted into a weapon to block innovation. The thing was filed at the end of 2001 and sites no patent older than 1999. Come on! All online gift registries could be read to violate this patent, and putting a gift registry in a computer database predates the WWW. This application should've been rejected on the first day of its review on the grounds it lacks novelty, but instead it was rubber-stamp-approved because there is no accountability in the patent office. Perhaps if a patent is struck down the patent office should be made to pay or be held accountable, then perhaps they'd be more careful in granting patents.
Well, considering that the race is in the summer, and in the summer it gets light well before 6AM and doesn't get dark until after 10PM a solar race is very appropriate.
By the way, southern Saskatchewan--in Canada and within a few hours driving distance from Calgary--gets the MOST sunlight of anywhere on the continent (in the summer in the far north is is continuously daylight for many days, but the light isn't as bright/intense as it is in the southern Prairies).
How often do servers move anyways? They're not notebook PCs, they are big heavy iron boxes, often bolted into a chassis in a room visited by no-one but sys-admins. If a server is physically relocated it is generally regarded as a significant event. Might as well give it a new hostname as well. If you think that is a hassle to users, well that is what CNAME records are for. Nobody said the hostname of a server has to be the only name that can be used to find a server.
General guidelines say you shouldn't put the computers location in the name.
What general guidelines are these? I've not seen anything forbidding the practice, and in fact it has been requested by some outfits I've worked with that hosts be named based at least partly upon location, especially when the site is large and in separate buildings. It is really a pain to have to get out a network architecture drawing to figure out where an errant server is because it is named solely for its function, and it is impractical to go searching for it because it could be down the hall or it could be in a building on the other side of a site that is 3 km long.
How 'bout making full use of DNS capabilities and subscribing to one system of naming hosts and use CNAME records to provide preferred names for users to use?
If a server is named after building/room/rack it can be easy to track down problems and you need physical access to the server to resolve them. CNAME entries like WWW, FTP, MAIL and so on can be used to give them functional names.
Cutesy theme names might be confusing to some, but there can also be issues with badly chosen functional hostnames of any type that make them about as useless as IP addresses for remembering what hosts are what. To get around various Windows networking shortcomings hostnames sometimes have to be short, and too much info gets crammed into them to the point they become meaningless. What the hell is VAN01AP5B anyways, besides hard to type or remember? That is where properly using DNS subdomains could be better used too. AcctPay-5B.Admin.Vancouver.example.com is much more descriptive and the hostname is easier to type and remember (AcctPay-5B). Computers local to the server in question (the most likely users) could type only the hostname and not the FQDN, and of course CNAMEs can be used to assign more concise names.
There is no danger if you have nothing to hide obviously. If you live on cash then you truly have nothing to hide, because you leave nothing behind to find.
Not only do I never carry a balance on credit cards, I use my credit cards on business trips, to hold a hotel room or to rent a car (which, for all but a couple of times per year, is for business), and that is literally all I use them for. When on business and your expenses are covered the paper trail is beneficial--it IS on behalf of your employer and you SHOULDN'T hide that stuff.
However, in my personal life, I ALWAYS use cash. I leave the credit card in the wallet and use my debit card at the ATM in the bank to withdraw cash once or twice a week (I NEVER use ATM's not in a bank branch, nor do I use point-of-sale debit terminals).
I have done point-of-sale projects in the past and have first-hand knowledge about how antiquated and crackable the technology is, which was bad enough, but three years ago I had the PIN and magstripe data skimmed from myu debit card when I used the card to pay for a fuel purchase using a doctored terminal. I now view point-of-sale debit card technology as insufficiently trustworthy for my financial needs.
Since that incident I only use my cards at bank branches (at the teller or the ATM) to get cash, then I live on paper cash purchases. There was an unexpected side benefit too: I spent a good 20 percent LESS than when I lived on plastic cards..without even trying. This is because you can do your budgeting right in your wallet--no need to wait for the statement in them ail or log into a website or whatever to figure out how much you spent and how much you can spend for the rest of the week without depleting your savings. When you don't have much cash left in your wallet and it is habit to just use cash you just start spending less.
Now, you've got nosy little congresscritters wanting to mine your purchasing records data..in the name of "keeping you safe", but it can conveniently flag people with unreported income. I guess there is another benefit to my method of living on cash now: you have nothing to hide because you show next to nothing. The gov't can oly see how much you're withdrawing and has no idea (or proof) of your spending habits (for all they know you're putting the money you withdoraw in your mattress).
It's pretty much the same way with most of the American media.
Well, media is ultimately run and owned by human beings and it is human nature to hold those people who subscribe most closely to your values system in higher regard.
Speaking as an "outsider" (Canadian), American politics seems dominated by two parties that operate by the very same principles (only the logistics/details differ), i.e. the Republicans and Democrats are two different piles of the same stinky, steamy old crap. Republicans are beholden to Big Oil and big corporate conglomerate manufacturers, especially those with rich defense contracts (Boeing, and so forth). This all leads to the perception of the Republicans as neo-imperialist war-mongers out to secure oil-producing colonies to feed the machines of big oil and military, since the political donations/kickbacks there are the richest. The "Farenheit 911" movie plays this up to almost ridiculous levels whilst Republican loyalists deny it all, but the truth is somewhere in the middle: Bushites aren't out to take over the world and set up an evil empire, but their affiliations with oil and heavy industry corporations do have some degree of undue influence on their policies.
Democrats, however, should not sit smug and superior because they behave every bit as distastefully as Republicans. Democrats, to me, are the "Hollywood party". Big Media is owned by Democrat supporters, and as such Democrats can most easily control the message. Yean yeah, I know there is Fox News and characters like Glenn Beck on CNN and the more "left" Democrats always trot out those examples, however for every Fox there are several New Your Timeses out there. Democrats get to control the mainstream message/tone and get more Hollywood campaign dollars and in exchange the big media conglomerates get more of their agenda through into law.
Rather depressing choice you have in the US it seems. Vote for the Elephants and you get four more years of sending soldiers out to "keep Iraq free" and wiretaps and tracking electronic purchases and all sorts of "war on terror" laws to protect us all--supposedly. Vote for the Asses and you can bet that they'll ensure the path to RIAA/MPAA/Hollywood obsolete-business-model-protection legislation is smooth and paved with gold.
Perhaps y'all should try voting for other parties or independents...
...but there might be some insight in this post too.
The "192.168.1.101" thing might be a funny joke, but NAT routing and proxies along the way do indeed interfere with geolocation. This can happen even if you have a proper public IP address that by all appearances comes from a local netblock.
For example, when I use my work computer at home, geolocation correctly identifies me as being in Alberta, Canada. Though my office is also in Alberta, when I use the very same notebook there it days I am in Wisconsin, USA. This is the case even though the public-facing internet addresses in our office are very obviously Canadian.
It isn't good enough to do "ifconfig" or "ipconfig" and figure out the IP address you have locally--it isn't even good enough to get the IP address of your gateway or the public IP address of your NAT router, because there may in fact be proxies, VPNs and the like. In my case we are a branch office in Canada for a parent company with its network operations centred in Wisconsin. Though local tools indicate local IP addresses, a proxy address different from anything on our local systems shows up when you go to a page that reports your IP address or hostname. This even happens when I log into the Citadel server in my home from my office--the "who's online" returns me with the hostname of a proxy server.
I wonder if this person has tried going to one of those sites that shows your hostname or IP address as its servers can determine. If you are using a small wi-fi ISP in that quite sparsely populated "4 corners" region of the US then there could be one or two levels of service providers above them yet, with all sorts of proxies and virtual networks and traffic-shaping gateways in between you and the 'net.
There is no law against that. Yes there is. It is breach of contract. You don't buy Windows, you buy a little plastic disc with a copy of the binary code, accompanied by a contract stipulating the terms of use. When you get an OEM copy, the terms of use restrict your right to use Microsoft's code to the computer it came with, whether or not you can technically use it elsewhere.
Possibly it violates the terms of a EULA the original purchaser may or may not be bound by. In almost the entire of North America and western Europe, you are indeed bound to the EULA. The only part of the EULA that doesn't apply universally is with respect to warranty limitations (which is why you will see statements regarding warranty in the EULA prefaced by "where not prohibited by law" or some such weasel phrase).
The MSFT OEM EULA expressly prohibits transferability, and that part of the EULA is not in legal dispute in North America. MSFT is legally within its right to take legal action against anyone who uses an OEM license of Windows previously attached to an old machine on a new machine, or selling install media with OEM agreements without an accompanying system.
It makes sense that Dell would charge $50 to put on XP. Don't you remember the TV announcement, with the two gentlemen, one Mr. Ahpeecee and another Mr. Ahmack, discussing with the lovely P.R. lady that it is "an upgrade to a more familiar experience"?
Upgrade == adding value == added cost. Makes sense to me...
You are right, the most promising ethanol production processes are by and large bench scale or pilot projects, but even using heat distillation to isolate the ethanol provides for positive net energy availability. It's not like we don't already use energy intensive distillation techniques to produce gasoline or produce synthetic crude from oil sand deposits (frac towers and the like). The main reason I think biodiesel is a more efficinet alternative is that I'm sure it takes a LOT less energy to cold-press oilseeds than it does to go through some intensive fermentation/distillation process.
I think the biggest flaw in the Cornell study many people refer to regarding ethanol's non-viability is that it includes capital/infrastructure energy expenditures in the equation when only material and operational expenditures should be included. For example, the energy required to clear land to grow the corn (which only needs to happen in the first year), and even invludes the energy it takes to manufacture harvesting equipemnt and ethanol refineries (again, once those items are built they are used for many years). What this means is that to TRULY conclude that ethanol took more energy to make than it provides that producers would have to be replacing their tractors and other equipment every 2 to 3 years, that a given field wouldn't be used for crops more than a few times, that ethanol production facilities would have to be built at such a rate that production capacity would double every few years, etc. To replace petroleum, such an intensive growth rate over a number of years would indeed have to take place, meaning that oil is around to stay for a long time to come..but it always helps to have some smarter choices out there.
Like you say though, all these sources are, indirectly, forms of solar energy, being all biofuels and oil, coal and natural gas, started out at some point as solar energy captured and stored in plants.
What kind of moron goes to the trouble of setting up and registering and licensing a full-blow business and the sells counterfeit software? It isn't as brazen as that, with obvious counterfeit packages in storefronts with $5 price tags on them. The "pirating" that MSFT is going after is much more subtle--in fact it involves activity that many people wouldn't think of as pirating, thus the reason they target REPEAT offenders (because first-time offenders are very often ignorant of what violates the EULA).
"Career pirates" here are typically the hole-in-the-wall computer repair shop located in the plaza next to the pawn shop (they don't always look seedy, but they are typically small and not affiliated with any corporate franchise). There are also "computer rental" places and used/consignment stores. The primary business is by and large legitimate--they sell genuine new or used computer parts and systems, do computer repairs, etc. However, they might offer to "bundle" (at no extra charge or for a nominal fee) MSFT software. The software is even genuine in most cases, but it is OEM instead of retail (and may have been used to install the OS on other machines), or corporate/volume or upgrade license or some other non-transferable license.
There is (or has been) a "system builders" for such little shops that affords them the opportunity to include Windows with their computers, however there are specific rules (that change with every Windows release unfortunately) on what qualifies as a valid "system builder's" sale. You can sell it with a motherboard for example, but some shops interpreted the agreement to mean ANY hardware sale, so they'd offer you OEM Windows if you only bought a mouse for example (that is--at least now--considered piracy).
Other common but subtle "acts of piracy" that MSFT will crack down on:
* Selling used software: They'd LIKE to be able to prevent ALL used sales, but at the very least they can crack down on you if you're selling OEM or volume licensed software which have restrictions on resale and transfer--for example, once OEM is installed on a computer it is actually illegal to ever install it on another computer again, even if the computer is broken beyond repair.
* Related to the previous point, Volume License software cannot be on any machine not owned by the volume license holder who possesses the product key. If the computer is sold/disposed of the software installed with a VLK MUST BE REMOVED and a new license must be purchased. Used/consignment computer shops often get dinged with this one by selling old corporate machines with a corporate image installed. Used shops should do due diligence and make sure that corporate images are wiped. To avoid extra cost you don't have to repurchase the OS if you can obtain a "rescue disk" from the PC manufacturer for that exact model (which would be the proper OEM license), however if the computer originally came with Win 2000 or ME THAT would have to go on, not XP, unless you have a retail upgrade license to go with it.
It is in fact a very small minority of "career pirates" that actually sel COUNTERFEIT packaged software, and it is basically unheard of in "bick and mortar stores" in the past 10 years-what does happen The biggest outright counterfeit piracy in N America by far happens over the 'net (eBay, etc). So, to answer your question, pretty much NO kind of moron literally, physically sets up a counterfeit software shop anymore.
The reason is simple , it takes more energy to produce a gallon of ethanol then you get by burning it. That is actually incorrect. It is a myth based upon misleading studies from a researcher at Cornell university. Using his equations it takes more energy to make a gallon of GASOLINE than is contained in that gallon produced. Furthermore, the study is based upon the use of Corn and traditional processing to make ethanol (the lest efficient means of production--sugar cane is much more efficient, as are the use of non-feedstock cellulosic sources). Plus, he assumes that the equiplent used to grow the corn is running on petroleum-based fules, when it could easily run on biodiesel (also more efficiently produced and energy dense than ethanol).
Since ALL fuels using the exceedingly complex formulae will result in more than 100% energy used to make the fuel, all the Cornell study proved is that with the most common growing and processing techniques used to make ethanol in the US that ethanol is half as efficient as gasoline, but a lot of studies have shown that, and newer technology has brought ethanol production close to the efficiency of gasoline production.
I agree that it isn't the optimal, final solution, but I happen to think that biodiesel technology is a better idea, as crops like canola and soybean can produce oil readily (using only a fractino of energy required for fermentation) that can be poured into the tanks of existing diesel engines with little to no modification. Furthermore, once the oil is extracted the meal left over is still recoverable for feedstock, whereas there is much less left to use as feed when corn is made into fuel.
One problem is that the US currently has uranium reserves equal to 7% of the total world's reserves. If you think our dependence on foreign oil is a bad thing now, wait until our infrastructure is converted to electricity use and we need to start buying nuclear fuel from Australia and Kazakhstan Why in the world would the US have to do something as stupid as import Uranium from Australia and Kazakhstan, when the country with the single biggest Uranium production in the world is Canada? Canada has more than twice as much proven Uranium reserves and produces one third of all of Uranium made in the world! If exploited properly, the known reserves on the continent would meet the needs of the world for centuries.
Seems to me that depending on your quiet, polite, sharing-and-caring next door neighbour is infinitely better than depending on despotic regimes half-way around the world that think of you as "infidels".
and you've baked your brain.
solar power -> through existing electric infrastructure -> to the battery of your electric car/mower/series of tubes Over here we literally haven't had a sunny day in 3 weeks (all this rain and cold...there was SNOW 300km south of here! WTF happened to global WARMING already!). Could you tell me where I can find a battery that will store enough energy to drive more than 1000 km over the course of three weeks?
What about in the far north, where it is dark for several weeks every winter? You'd need MASSIVE electrical storage that won't leak its charge over time.
Also, do you KNOW what goes into a battery? Pretty toxic stuff. Most of it is recyclable, but it still takes quite a bit more energy to build a Prius than it does a Hummer (you have to drive the Prius for a few months before you make up the difference and start saving energy over the Hummer--interesting eh?). Also, the engine that runs on "controlled explosions of hydrocarbons" is usable easily 4 times as long as the batteries in current hybrid/electric vehicles.
Also, when I am running out of fuel, I can fill the tank in 5 minutes. If my battery goes flat I have to charge it for an hour or more if I want to get anywhere on the charge.
Solar's a great idea for renewable energy source, but the technology is just not there yet for us to dismiss alternatives, and biomass as an energy source is a pretty attractive alternative to coal and oil, being it is renewable, in many cases requires less energy to process and has a relatively low carbon footprint.
Solar should continue to be developed, but at the moment it is best used in stationary applications. Until more generation is deployed, and storage (battery) technology is drastically improved, we must look at new hydrocarbon technologies to meet our energy demands--and even more than that, we have to reduce our demand by improving efficiency and conserving.
Slashdot Mirror
Until you can say how to do it better (and I'd love it if you would, since I don't claim to "like" Flash except as the best of a sorry lot).
How 'bout the way it was done for the DOZEN YEARS before youtube played videos? You have the webserver spew out MPEG data and it plays in the user's video player of choice? IT is SO much better to have somtheing like VLC embeded in your browser than some crufty substandard, 32-bit-only CPU hogger like FLASH player. It is less resource intensive, uses all 64 bits of power in your 64-bit OS, and is potimised to play video, unlike flash which is optimised to deliver "punch the monkey" banner ads.
Here is another peeve: financial sites that use flash to show stock charts. THEY'RE FRIGGEN LINES! USE SVG MAN! Google, shame on you, you say you strive to do no evil, then you do evil by using flash on your google finance site! And web page designers...it's 2008! Learn some friggen javascript and CSS people! Stop animating your buttons and menus with flash! I don't need 30 second load times so you can emply fading fukken menus...I want to navigate your site not sit ald watch a progress bar!
'kay, there are some alternatives. I know, I Know, VLC "isn't flash", SVG "isn't flash", AJAX "isn't flash". But, each serves a purpose that fat-arse lazy deb devs mistakenly use FLASH to do, and use in combination can completely replace flash, and do everything BETTER too.
...well, in a way anyways. 64-bit Windows users must have a 32-bit browser installed and running under the WoW Win32 emulator. Under 64-bit Linux you can use nspluginwrapper as an alternative to a 32-bit browser.
A Flash crash using a 32-bit browser may crash the entire browser (on Wndows, perhaps even the whole WoW process). On Linux, nspluginwrapper, apart from encapsulating the 32-bit exceution within the realm of the plugin instead of the browesr, seems to run the plugin in a separate process (or a well-isolated thread at least). So, that nasty Flash object that crashes in Windows or any other 32 bit browser simply kills the flash object--you get a blank square but at least you can continue browsing relatively uninterrupted. A page reload, or at worst a restart of the browser at your leisure, will restore the flash operation.
I've heard that you can even use nspluginwrapper on 32-bit Liux--even if you don't need it for compatibility it will add stability.
Poor Windows users have to suffer with browser crashes as nspluginwrapper doesn't seem to be available (and of course it wouldn't work at all with IE anyways, if that is your browser preference).
FYI, flash was designed, developed and continues to be maintained by a dozen stoned chimpanzees. For some unspecified "technical design" reasons they insist that migration to 64 bit is exremely challenging--so much so that Adobe's "TechNote" about it has said "Adobe is working on Flash Player support for 64-bit platforms as part of our ongoing commitment to the cross-platform compatibility of Flash Player. We have not yet announced timing or release dates." for at least THREE YEARS now.
I might add that these stoned chimps only convene to do Flash player development part time, when they aren't busy trying to finish Duke Nukem Forever. I suspect that 64-bit flash release will be shortly after release of their main preoccupation.
...proprietary "de-facto" standards are evil. Flash is a "standard" much too closely held by one company, and even if it caters to multiple platforms it insists on being the only developer of a closed client to support the data format and actively discourages community or other third party development, open OR closed.
Your wife isn't alone in suffering from unstable Flash on Windows XP. It isn't a problem with any particular version of the OS ot even the browser for that matter (flash performance on IE is also substandard in my opinion). The problam is that the developers responsible for ALL flash player development at Adobe vomit out the some pretty wretched, barely-beta-quality code.
I think there has to be some insistence on conformance to *real* standards by major players on the 'net. So much of what is on-line that uses Flash could be done with actual standards. It was quite the brain fart to come up with using flash player to transport video when a non-vendor-specific standard practice could've been picked with little additional effort. It annoys me that something like SVG or even a Java applet could've been used to show stock charts on Google finance and the like but instead we are stuck with some senile flash object.
I'm generally averse to government regulation, but I do think governments can play a role here: When awarding web development contract, make it a stipulation that properly vettted, vendor-independent standards must be used exclusevely, perhaps specifically mentioning that the use of flash player is completely banned until (if ever) the standard is made open. I hate to day it, but even MSFT's Siverlight is mmore open than Flash (at least it lets others make interoperable client software with Moonlight--not obly if they'd let a community-developed Moonlight client run on Windows to provide competition).
Perhaps large corporate users could set good examples too and ban flash from all external and internal web apps in their enterprise: our employer has a "reference client" on which such apps must run without the need to download dependencies from the 'net. If only that reference client did not contain the flash player...
There are a lot of complaints bout artsy-fartsy "web page artists" who love to load up pages with nothing but flash objects. Well, people are lazy by nature, and if you can wow a PHB with flaming, rotating logos and animated, fading, translucent menus most easily by using flash that is what they'll use. If only PHBs would grab sone sense ad see that the whole WWW is sick because of bandwidth hogging, unstable proprietary crap that adds literally zero REAL value to the web experience that other established technologies can't do just as well.
As distasteful as is may be to the FOSS community, I think the ability to walk into a store and buy a piece of software that works with basically any linux distro is the key to wider adoption and marketshare.
The thing is, FOSS devotees see that model as the future for software and really don't grok the need of walking into a store and buying a piece of software on a little plastic disc in a big cardboard box from the nerdy-looking-but-still-clueless sales associate in Best Buy.
FOSS advocates tend to be both quite technical and libertarian-minded (not socialist or communist as chair-throwing executives would like you to believe). To such a person (such as myself), it seems like such an antiquated notion to buy a collection of bits encoded on a piece of plastic when they can technically flow freely over the internet, and the thought of needlessly exerting control over an individual's liberty to do what is technically trivial through product activation and DRM offends their libertarian sensibilities.
The thoughts that run through a technical-and-libertarian FOSS fan's head might be along the lines of "well, the market will decide what gets packaged" or "if the makers of a distro want it to be popular they'll make sure to build good packages for it" or "it's not such a big deal to build your own package--if you want to use it so bad RTFM and do it yourself".
This is what goes through my head at times--why put the effort into making it easier for software companies based upon an antiquated and restrictive business model to distribute their wares? FOSS is the future and worthy software should be FOSS, in which case there is nothing preventing distro maintainers from providing packages that are perfectly optimised for their needs, and such a model actually realises the vision MSFT seems to have for ite own platform: the OS and apps are "bundled" in a sense and software maintenance of both are handled seamlessly through the same mechanism (to the point that I think Ubuntu is much easier to manage than Windows--everything is updated through the same service, you install/update/remove EVERYTHING the same exact way...not the case with Windows).
As powerful as FOSS/GPL can be, you have to allow companies to make money if you want them on board and developing, especially when market share is as small as it is currently.
Though I'm a FOSS advocate I'm also pragmatic, and know that reality is different from the above ideal: Inertia means that closed-software business models will fade only very slowly, and people by nature are lazy and thus not many will volunteer to make dozens of packages of the same piece of software, so the lack of compatibility has a limiting effect on Linux. MSFT and games publishers aren't about to release their sources to the community to package and won't invest the resources to make multiple packages themselves. If you cannot maintain at least a few packages yourself your app will not gain acceptance because of "laziness"--if something else works good enough there is no motivation to package it. Distros suffer "chicken and egg" effect (small repository no users/no users no interest in growing repository), so there is less competition and more consolidation. As such, new distros end up being derivatives of a couple big popular ones or very innovative "built from bare metal" ones are overlooked due to lack of a repository.
So as a result I really hold out hope that efforts like LSB end up being successful. I find it really disheartening that FOSS advocates shoot it full of holes because of technical shortcomings or disagreements and make no effort at all to help solve them because they believe the LSB is just set up in the interests of big vendors who want a vehicle to distribute closed software. The LSB and other interoperability efforts are a lot like copyright law: /.ers hold great derision of both, both are concepts that can be used to aid the "dark side" (MSFT, RIAA et al)...and
"zero configuration" so linux for the people that miss the whole point of running linux desktop?
You seem to imply the point of Linux on the desktop is the ability to configure it without limitation. I don't recall that being the motivation behind the creation of Linux-based OSes or Linux desktops.
My first Linux desktop was a Slakware installation I loaded over the WfW 3.11/MS-DOS 6.22 setup on my 486DX. Believe me, it was NOT configuration abilities that motivated me to to try it out. WfW 3.11 and MS-DOS were simple and familiar to me from a configuration/administration perspective. I was already familiar with CP/M and MS-DOS seemed like a work-alike when I first tried it and once I got into Grade VII we "graduated" from the Apple II and C64s to the shiny new Commodore PC10 XT-clones that had replaced the PETs. By the 1990s MS-DOS fit like a comfortable pair of old jeans.
Though MSFT was trying to be an Apple wanna-be in terms of user-friendliness in its GUI, they did not try to "weld the hood shut" the way Apple did with the Mac. I learned all sorts of tricks with autoexec.bat and config.sys, how to do "stupid pet tricks" with Windows 3.x, tried out alternative shells to the normal Windows desktop and so on. I wasn't lacking in configuration abilities when I decided to try Linux.
The immediate reason to try it was that it was free (gratis) and that is always good for a poor student to be able to use it without spending money--legally at that. I was not all that well versed in UNIX-style OSes and found the commands arcane (ls instead of dir, cat to list a text file and so on) and the FVWM desktop (still Rob Nation's verison IIRC) wasn't configurable in a meaningful way though its own GUI like windows was (configuration was almost exclusively through the command line or Slakware's text-based manuing system). If ease-of-configurability was what I was after I wouldn't have stuck with Linux at all.
After not much time using Linux I started coming to the realisation that it was Linux being Free (libre) that was its main appeal to me. It became more familiar to me to the point I could manage it just as well as DOS but I don't thing it ever EXCEEDED DOS on that front. I liked that no one company controlled Linux--I could try Slackware and Red Hat and Debian and choose what I liked best, and each distro could borrow and improve off each other and advance the platform faster. This was a time in personal computing that was exciting and frustrating--when a fragmented home PC market was giving way to a standard multi-vendor PC platform, yet innovation was being held back by intellectual-property-pissing-matches (Apple suing MSFT for "look and feel" issues and so on). Here was this Linux project that let anyone cobble together and offer up their own take on what the best OS was, and nobody was going to demand royalties or sue you because GNU protected you.
When I was tired of tinkering I replaced Slackware with Mandrake. Choice isn't about configuration. sometimes you make the CHOICE to eliminate configurability and "go Mac-style". Some people want a Vista-like experience, just without activation and DRM, and will never touch gConf or files in /etc, and some people are old-school and want to use EMACS on a text terminal and tweak kernel module parameters and everything else. User-configuration ability is just one choice of many--it isn't the definition of choice.
Bad drivers can crash any system using a monolithic kernel.
They can crash microkernel based systems severley too--microkernel systems like Microsoft Windows NT/2k/XP/Vista. The quality of the system architecture overall is far more important than the kernel architecture chosen.
Only low level problems can cause a Windows BSOD
Not true. Driver issues are the main reason, but user-level software can behave badly too. You cite anti-virus and firewall software, which aren't exactly "low level". Developer tools are usually the worst user-level offenders.
XP these days is stable (it only took 7 years but they made it) and you won't see a blue screen using signed drivers and hardware that isn't malfunctioning.
The thing is it can be difficult to find signed drivers for your system. If you want them for Vista you're SOL unless you have a very recent system (by and large, upgrading to Vista is a really dumb idea--everyone should stay with XP until they are willing to get a completely new machine), and if you have XP or 2K the opposite is true (the latest hardware ain't ever gonna have drivers, and its all closed software so no option to backport). I still run into a LOT of hardware with bad, unsigned drivers that is essential to some application yet behaves badly.
I'd guess the picture is in any case a fake.
Given the PRC's track record and the fact that they used "performance enhancing" technology on the official opening ceremonies broadcast I do not regard ANY media out of these olympics as trustworthy. To me, it is just as likely that the official Chinese broadcast digitally erased BSODs from the feed as it is that someone doctored a photo to ADD the BSOD and embarrass the Chinese olympic organisers.
I'm sorry, do you know of an operating system where talking to hardware cannot cause a panic?
[...]
If you can name one system ready for general purpose for which this isn't true I would love to hear about it.
I haven't worked with QNX lately, but it has historically been a very tolerant OS in my experience. You are correct that at some point the OS MUST access hardware directly, and that faulty hardware will cause a software crash...but there are degrees of vulnerability here.
Microkernel OSes, especially those like QNX that are used in embedded and/or real-time applications, are extremely fault tolerant. Because hardware subsystems are each accessed by separate, self-contained low-level processes, a hardware fault in fact will NOT cause a systemic software failure as you assert. You DO in fact have to "try" to "bring down a whole system" through hardware faults in such architectures.
Nothing will stop systemic hardware faults from causing systemic software crashes, but the fact is that when it comes to Windows (and to a lesser but still significant degree, Linux and Mac OSX) hardware fault tolerance is absolutely wretched compared to what it COULD be. Microkernel architecture helps but isn't the magic bullet either--remember that MacOS X AND Windows are BOTH technically "microkernel architectures" and that doesn't keep them from falling over due to a hardware fault or bad driver.
There's a basic design flaw in how normal computers operate that requires this sort of behavior from kernels
Linux is very stable relative to Windows even though it is a monolithic kernel architecture because it is a better engineered platform overall, both in terms of security AND because drivers are much better written (owing to the fact that the bulk of drivers are community-written and/or open source instead of supported by an overworked small team of programmers employed by a hardware company that chronically under-invests in software development for its revenue-generating hardware products). In all but TWO cases (one case being a total hard drive failure where the system continued to run without HD access until a page swap was required, and another where several cheap Chinese capacitors dried out and popped in another system, which also would boot and run for hours to days nonetheless) my 11 years of extensively using Linux ALL kernel panics have been due to SOFTWARE bugs in drivers, and in most of those cases they were CLOSED drivers (I'm talking to you NVidia!).
Even with the problems I've had with closed drivers in Linux, the problems are very small in number and severity in comparison with Windows. NVidia drivers still are relatively unreliable however when there is a problem in Windows it can make the system BSOD. A similar bug in Linux is most likely to cause a fault in X but the rest of the subsystems are unharmed--in fact the latest NVidia drivers haven't caused me a single kernel panic yet. There is no "basic design flaw" in modern hardware systems that cannot be kept to a very small minimum without proper SOFTWARE design.
Am I wrong in thinking I knew an old lady who swallowed a fly? Someone weigh in on this please.
No you're quite right, but not quite for the same reason. Concrete and asphalt already used in the roads are the result of intensive mining, drilling and refining processes already, and titanium can be recoverer/reused, so I'd venture to say that though there would be an added environmental impact to include this "air scrubber" additive that it isn't the biggest factor offseting the benefits to air quality.
I'd say a more immediate concern is that this doesn't reduce pollution--it only converts it into anouther type of pollution. Smog-causing Nitrous oxides are certainly bad for our health, but nitrates are far from "harmless". I'd like to know what is done with the nitrates. Can they be recovered and used in a more controlled way (to fertilise crops and what not) or are they just left to be absorbed by the environment (dissolved in runoff, etc)?
Though proper amounts of nitrates are natural and beneficial in ecosystems, excess nitrates in the environment can destroy wetlands and other bodies of water by causing excess algae growth. Nitrates are also bad for animal life, from fish and amphibians to livestock. Nitrates can infiltrate well-basede drinking water supplies as well, creating health problems in people ranging from thyroid problems and vitamin deficiencies to low birth weights.
If there is some way to contain the nitrates as well as enjoy less smog I'd say it is promising, but we still have to work on more efficiently using fuels and not driving personal vehicles as much when there isn't a need to.
companies charge more for products in europe because they can
They can and do because they must. The cost of doing business in Europe is much higher than in the US, shareholders expect profit margins to be at a certain level and WTO frowns upon the practice of favouring certain markets over others for no good reason.
The same sort of price differentials are apparent in Canada, where it seems unjustified to pay 20 percent more for a product made in California than people pay in New York, when Vancouver is closer to the source and transportation costs are cheaper. Before the US dollar devaluation this price difference was obscured because the CA$ was only worth US$0.70 to 0.85 and fluctuated enough to be an excuse.
Now the CA$ and US$ have been within a couple of percent of equal for most of a year, and though imported goods have come down in price, the retail numbers have settled at around 20 percent higher overall to what they are in the US. People have complained, the government has voiced its concern to retailers, but in the end it comes down to one thing: TAXES. Despite the fact stored charge 20% more in Canada, Canadian retail margins are actually LOWER than the US--they charge more and STILL make less profit.
Taxes are at the root of almost the entire discrepancy in prices between any two developed nations, because taxes accumulate in the price of everything. Manufacturers pay those same higher taxes and pass costs onto retailers. The retail stores pay more corporate taxes and municipal property taxes and pass those on to customers, along with the costs that manufacturers passed onto them.
Everybody pays more for everything here because everyone passes on the cost of fuel too. In Alberta, Canada right now gasoline in US units costs more than US$4.95 per US gallon. You can drive just across the border into Montana and suddenly you only have to pay $3.99, and here is the kicker: it is the EXACT SAME GAS from the SAME CANADIAN REFINERY, but we pay so much more for our own gas. The reason? Literally 100 percent of the difference is TAX. Companies can only partially write off the added expense too, so the cost goes all the way up the chain.
Anyways, I'm not sure why Europeans are whining about the prices. They have embraced a more socialist-oriented system for years and with added taxes come the benefits of the socialist infrastructure they wanted and are comfortable with. You want cheap gas and cheap computer toys and cheap software like the US? Then you have to settle for getting (another) mortgage on your house for that operation, or paying six figures to send your children to top-level universities. Otherwise, stop whining and live with it. You already live with paying 100 percent more than Canadians do (and we pay 20 percent more than the US remember) when you buy petrol, movie tickets, DVDs and CDs, clothing and much more. Video games are no different at all.
Internet connections in reasonably developed cities (Beijing, Shanghai [shanghaiist.com], Chongqing, [thechonx.com]Dalian [daliandalian.com], run around 600 RMB for 512kbps for a year, around 1100 for 1Mbps. Not too bad.
That is true, but the price for freedom is not included in the rates you mention like it is in the Olympic village. "Normal Folk" technically aren't getting internet access for that much smaller price--they are getting "official Chinese network" access, which is not a free network.
The original article comments on how surprising it is that they have no free internet in the olympic village. The thing is, it is probably the only legally free internet in China.
This is like Free software--people get confused between "gratis" free and "libre" free. Just like rolling out Linux in a large enterprise, there is a cost associated with "libre" freedom. The global media demands proper access to the internet (not the national Chinese network that is filtered) so the dictatorship relented and allowed internet access to visiting delegates. It is deliberately priced very high so only those traveling from the Free world with generous corporate expense accounts can afford it, and "Normal Folk" in China are still shut out.
Sometimes, as is the case with Linux, the price of freedom is lower than the alternative, but in most cases, in much of the world, there price paid for freedom is very high. The price could be worse than paying a 1500% premium to freely interact online. Some people pay for freedom with their lives.
why not give them their own little sandbox
This is an ancient (but wise) practice. It started in on dial-up BBS forums in the 1980s on Citadel-powered BBSes, and it was called the "Twit Room". Banning users or blocking posting abilities was frowned upon as it is censorship, however freedom of speech does not mean good online citizens have to tolerate pests. So, if a certain user's only goal in life seems to be to make a pest of himself the sysop could change his access level to "Twit".
Twits still had access and could post, but their posts would be routed to the Twit Room regardless of the room they tried to post in. There were any variants of Citadel out there, and the Twit Room was a pretty standard capability amongst all of them. The Unix version is still in active development today as a thoroughly modern and internet based groupware platform now, and it still employs the concept and terminology.
Citadel was often forked and customised, and if I recall some developers had fun with the concept. For example, Twits being ignorant by nature, it made sense to some sysops to have them be ignorant of the fact that they were twits. When any twit logged in they'd see all the postings of all the twits in the rooms where they were intended to be posted, they could have normal access to all the floors and rooms, and there was no visible indication they were twits. Anyone who was not marked as a twit would have to go to the Twit Room to see a twit's posts, and was thus spared having to endure troublemakers and censorship would be kept to a minimum. I'm not sure if this idea of "ignorant twit" ever bacame widespread, but it's a mischievously fun idea.
Twit rooms could be fun, because regular users could read and post in them too. That way, you could "feed the trolls" in a forum isolated from legitimate discussion. This led to legions of "counter troll" posts meant to goad the twit into an argument just like the twit liked to do with everyone else.
...or so it seems. I've never been very keen on voting for lawyer candidates running for office. To me, it seems like hiring the inmates to be in charge of the asylum, or at best a bit of a conflict of interest.
Nonetheless, most of those who we elect to make the law are lawyers. This means that laws are purposefully designed to make more business for lawyers. I think patent reform is not happening largely because a patent system that worked would mean far less litigation, and thus less work for lawyers.
There needs to be an awful lot more lobbying by players in high-innovation industries to counter this inertia. Even evil MSFT has been burned by patent trolls and many within MSFT contend their patents are often "defensive". Lawyers tell their clients that it is important to protect their IP and file defensive patents even if they are trivial, just in case a troll slithers in to make a parasite of itself off your business operations. Do you think lawyers in DC are really keen on stopping a gravy train like that? You'd think the victims of patent trolling ranging from MSFT to RIM would be sick of the expense.
This latest case of a troll wielding a clearly illegitimate patent for using computers to manage a gift registry is simply another example of how patents have been perverted into a weapon to block innovation. The thing was filed at the end of 2001 and sites no patent older than 1999. Come on! All online gift registries could be read to violate this patent, and putting a gift registry in a computer database predates the WWW. This application should've been rejected on the first day of its review on the grounds it lacks novelty, but instead it was rubber-stamp-approved because there is no accountability in the patent office. Perhaps if a patent is struck down the patent office should be made to pay or be held accountable, then perhaps they'd be more careful in granting patents.
As long as the stay away from Quebec
Wouldn't driving from Dallas to Calgary be something akin to flying from New York to London with a layover in Beijing?
Seems to me if you are in a contest to get from point a to point b in the shortest time, you'd, well, take the shortcuts right?
Well, considering that the race is in the summer, and in the summer it gets light well before 6AM and doesn't get dark until after 10PM a solar race is very appropriate.
By the way, southern Saskatchewan--in Canada and within a few hours driving distance from Calgary--gets the MOST sunlight of anywhere on the continent (in the summer in the far north is is continuously daylight for many days, but the light isn't as bright/intense as it is in the southern Prairies).
What do you do when a server moves?
How often do servers move anyways? They're not notebook PCs, they are big heavy iron boxes, often bolted into a chassis in a room visited by no-one but sys-admins. If a server is physically relocated it is generally regarded as a significant event. Might as well give it a new hostname as well. If you think that is a hassle to users, well that is what CNAME records are for. Nobody said the hostname of a server has to be the only name that can be used to find a server.
General guidelines say you shouldn't put the computers location in the name.
What general guidelines are these? I've not seen anything forbidding the practice, and in fact it has been requested by some outfits I've worked with that hosts be named based at least partly upon location, especially when the site is large and in separate buildings. It is really a pain to have to get out a network architecture drawing to figure out where an errant server is because it is named solely for its function, and it is impractical to go searching for it because it could be down the hall or it could be in a building on the other side of a site that is 3 km long.
How 'bout making full use of DNS capabilities and subscribing to one system of naming hosts and use CNAME records to provide preferred names for users to use?
If a server is named after building/room/rack it can be easy to track down problems and you need physical access to the server to resolve them. CNAME entries like WWW, FTP, MAIL and so on can be used to give them functional names.
Cutesy theme names might be confusing to some, but there can also be issues with badly chosen functional hostnames of any type that make them about as useless as IP addresses for remembering what hosts are what. To get around various Windows networking shortcomings hostnames sometimes have to be short, and too much info gets crammed into them to the point they become meaningless. What the hell is VAN01AP5B anyways, besides hard to type or remember? That is where properly using DNS subdomains could be better used too. AcctPay-5B.Admin.Vancouver.example.com is much more descriptive and the hostname is easier to type and remember (AcctPay-5B). Computers local to the server in question (the most likely users) could type only the hostname and not the FQDN, and of course CNAMEs can be used to assign more concise names.
Not only do I never carry a balance on credit cards, I use my credit cards on business trips, to hold a hotel room or to rent a car (which, for all but a couple of times per year, is for business), and that is literally all I use them for. When on business and your expenses are covered the paper trail is beneficial--it IS on behalf of your employer and you SHOULDN'T hide that stuff.
However, in my personal life, I ALWAYS use cash. I leave the credit card in the wallet and use my debit card at the ATM in the bank to withdraw cash once or twice a week (I NEVER use ATM's not in a bank branch, nor do I use point-of-sale debit terminals).
I have done point-of-sale projects in the past and have first-hand knowledge about how antiquated and crackable the technology is, which was bad enough, but three years ago I had the PIN and magstripe data skimmed from myu debit card when I used the card to pay for a fuel purchase using a doctored terminal. I now view point-of-sale debit card technology as insufficiently trustworthy for my financial needs.
Since that incident I only use my cards at bank branches (at the teller or the ATM) to get cash, then I live on paper cash purchases. There was an unexpected side benefit too: I spent a good 20 percent LESS than when I lived on plastic cards..without even trying. This is because you can do your budgeting right in your wallet--no need to wait for the statement in them ail or log into a website or whatever to figure out how much you spent and how much you can spend for the rest of the week without depleting your savings. When you don't have much cash left in your wallet and it is habit to just use cash you just start spending less.
Now, you've got nosy little congresscritters wanting to mine your purchasing records data..in the name of "keeping you safe", but it can conveniently flag people with unreported income. I guess there is another benefit to my method of living on cash now: you have nothing to hide because you show next to nothing. The gov't can oly see how much you're withdrawing and has no idea (or proof) of your spending habits (for all they know you're putting the money you withdoraw in your mattress).
It's pretty much the same way with most of the American media.
Well, media is ultimately run and owned by human beings and it is human nature to hold those people who subscribe most closely to your values system in higher regard.
Speaking as an "outsider" (Canadian), American politics seems dominated by two parties that operate by the very same principles (only the logistics/details differ), i.e. the Republicans and Democrats are two different piles of the same stinky, steamy old crap. Republicans are beholden to Big Oil and big corporate conglomerate manufacturers, especially those with rich defense contracts (Boeing, and so forth). This all leads to the perception of the Republicans as neo-imperialist war-mongers out to secure oil-producing colonies to feed the machines of big oil and military, since the political donations/kickbacks there are the richest. The "Farenheit 911" movie plays this up to almost ridiculous levels whilst Republican loyalists deny it all, but the truth is somewhere in the middle: Bushites aren't out to take over the world and set up an evil empire, but their affiliations with oil and heavy industry corporations do have some degree of undue influence on their policies.
Democrats, however, should not sit smug and superior because they behave every bit as distastefully as Republicans. Democrats, to me, are the "Hollywood party". Big Media is owned by Democrat supporters, and as such Democrats can most easily control the message. Yean yeah, I know there is Fox News and characters like Glenn Beck on CNN and the more "left" Democrats always trot out those examples, however for every Fox there are several New Your Timeses out there. Democrats get to control the mainstream message/tone and get more Hollywood campaign dollars and in exchange the big media conglomerates get more of their agenda through into law.
Rather depressing choice you have in the US it seems. Vote for the Elephants and you get four more years of sending soldiers out to "keep Iraq free" and wiretaps and tracking electronic purchases and all sorts of "war on terror" laws to protect us all--supposedly. Vote for the Asses and you can bet that they'll ensure the path to RIAA/MPAA/Hollywood obsolete-business-model-protection legislation is smooth and paved with gold.
Perhaps y'all should try voting for other parties or independents...
...but there might be some insight in this post too.
The "192.168.1.101" thing might be a funny joke, but NAT routing and proxies along the way do indeed interfere with geolocation. This can happen even if you have a proper public IP address that by all appearances comes from a local netblock.
For example, when I use my work computer at home, geolocation correctly identifies me as being in Alberta, Canada. Though my office is also in Alberta, when I use the very same notebook there it days I am in Wisconsin, USA. This is the case even though the public-facing internet addresses in our office are very obviously Canadian.
It isn't good enough to do "ifconfig" or "ipconfig" and figure out the IP address you have locally--it isn't even good enough to get the IP address of your gateway or the public IP address of your NAT router, because there may in fact be proxies, VPNs and the like. In my case we are a branch office in Canada for a parent company with its network operations centred in Wisconsin. Though local tools indicate local IP addresses, a proxy address different from anything on our local systems shows up when you go to a page that reports your IP address or hostname. This even happens when I log into the Citadel server in my home from my office--the "who's online" returns me with the hostname of a proxy server.
I wonder if this person has tried going to one of those sites that shows your hostname or IP address as its servers can determine. If you are using a small wi-fi ISP in that quite sparsely populated "4 corners" region of the US then there could be one or two levels of service providers above them yet, with all sorts of proxies and virtual networks and traffic-shaping gateways in between you and the 'net.
The MSFT OEM EULA expressly prohibits transferability, and that part of the EULA is not in legal dispute in North America. MSFT is legally within its right to take legal action against anyone who uses an OEM license of Windows previously attached to an old machine on a new machine, or selling install media with OEM agreements without an accompanying system.
It makes sense that Dell would charge $50 to put on XP. Don't you remember the TV announcement, with the two gentlemen, one Mr. Ahpeecee and another Mr. Ahmack, discussing with the lovely P.R. lady that it is "an upgrade to a more familiar experience"?
Upgrade == adding value == added cost. Makes sense to me...
You are right, the most promising ethanol production processes are by and large bench scale or pilot projects, but even using heat distillation to isolate the ethanol provides for positive net energy availability. It's not like we don't already use energy intensive distillation techniques to produce gasoline or produce synthetic crude from oil sand deposits (frac towers and the like). The main reason I think biodiesel is a more efficinet alternative is that I'm sure it takes a LOT less energy to cold-press oilseeds than it does to go through some intensive fermentation/distillation process.
I think the biggest flaw in the Cornell study many people refer to regarding ethanol's non-viability is that it includes capital/infrastructure energy expenditures in the equation when only material and operational expenditures should be included. For example, the energy required to clear land to grow the corn (which only needs to happen in the first year), and even invludes the energy it takes to manufacture harvesting equipemnt and ethanol refineries (again, once those items are built they are used for many years). What this means is that to TRULY conclude that ethanol took more energy to make than it provides that producers would have to be replacing their tractors and other equipment every 2 to 3 years, that a given field wouldn't be used for crops more than a few times, that ethanol production facilities would have to be built at such a rate that production capacity would double every few years, etc. To replace petroleum, such an intensive growth rate over a number of years would indeed have to take place, meaning that oil is around to stay for a long time to come..but it always helps to have some smarter choices out there.
Like you say though, all these sources are, indirectly, forms of solar energy, being all biofuels and oil, coal and natural gas, started out at some point as solar energy captured and stored in plants.
"Career pirates" here are typically the hole-in-the-wall computer repair shop located in the plaza next to the pawn shop (they don't always look seedy, but they are typically small and not affiliated with any corporate franchise). There are also "computer rental" places and used/consignment stores. The primary business is by and large legitimate--they sell genuine new or used computer parts and systems, do computer repairs, etc. However, they might offer to "bundle" (at no extra charge or for a nominal fee) MSFT software. The software is even genuine in most cases, but it is OEM instead of retail (and may have been used to install the OS on other machines), or corporate/volume or upgrade license or some other non-transferable license.
There is (or has been) a "system builders" for such little shops that affords them the opportunity to include Windows with their computers, however there are specific rules (that change with every Windows release unfortunately) on what qualifies as a valid "system builder's" sale. You can sell it with a motherboard for example, but some shops interpreted the agreement to mean ANY hardware sale, so they'd offer you OEM Windows if you only bought a mouse for example (that is--at least now--considered piracy).
Other common but subtle "acts of piracy" that MSFT will crack down on:
* Selling used software: They'd LIKE to be able to prevent ALL used sales, but at the very least they can crack down on you if you're selling OEM or volume licensed software which have restrictions on resale and transfer--for example, once OEM is installed on a computer it is actually illegal to ever install it on another computer again, even if the computer is broken beyond repair.
* Related to the previous point, Volume License software cannot be on any machine not owned by the volume license holder who possesses the product key. If the computer is sold/disposed of the software installed with a VLK MUST BE REMOVED and a new license must be purchased. Used/consignment computer shops often get dinged with this one by selling old corporate machines with a corporate image installed. Used shops should do due diligence and make sure that corporate images are wiped. To avoid extra cost you don't have to repurchase the OS if you can obtain a "rescue disk" from the PC manufacturer for that exact model (which would be the proper OEM license), however if the computer originally came with Win 2000 or ME THAT would have to go on, not XP, unless you have a retail upgrade license to go with it.
It is in fact a very small minority of "career pirates" that actually sel COUNTERFEIT packaged software, and it is basically unheard of in "bick and mortar stores" in the past 10 years-what does happen The biggest outright counterfeit piracy in N America by far happens over the 'net (eBay, etc). So, to answer your question, pretty much NO kind of moron literally, physically sets up a counterfeit software shop anymore.
Since ALL fuels using the exceedingly complex formulae will result in more than 100% energy used to make the fuel, all the Cornell study proved is that with the most common growing and processing techniques used to make ethanol in the US that ethanol is half as efficient as gasoline, but a lot of studies have shown that, and newer technology has brought ethanol production close to the efficiency of gasoline production.
I agree that it isn't the optimal, final solution, but I happen to think that biodiesel technology is a better idea, as crops like canola and soybean can produce oil readily (using only a fractino of energy required for fermentation) that can be poured into the tanks of existing diesel engines with little to no modification. Furthermore, once the oil is extracted the meal left over is still recoverable for feedstock, whereas there is much less left to use as feed when corn is made into fuel.
Seems to me that depending on your quiet, polite, sharing-and-caring next door neighbour is infinitely better than depending on despotic regimes half-way around the world that think of you as "infidels".
What about in the far north, where it is dark for several weeks every winter? You'd need MASSIVE electrical storage that won't leak its charge over time.
Also, do you KNOW what goes into a battery? Pretty toxic stuff. Most of it is recyclable, but it still takes quite a bit more energy to build a Prius than it does a Hummer (you have to drive the Prius for a few months before you make up the difference and start saving energy over the Hummer--interesting eh?). Also, the engine that runs on "controlled explosions of hydrocarbons" is usable easily 4 times as long as the batteries in current hybrid/electric vehicles.
Also, when I am running out of fuel, I can fill the tank in 5 minutes. If my battery goes flat I have to charge it for an hour or more if I want to get anywhere on the charge.
Solar's a great idea for renewable energy source, but the technology is just not there yet for us to dismiss alternatives, and biomass as an energy source is a pretty attractive alternative to coal and oil, being it is renewable, in many cases requires less energy to process and has a relatively low carbon footprint.
Solar should continue to be developed, but at the moment it is best used in stationary applications. Until more generation is deployed, and storage (battery) technology is drastically improved, we must look at new hydrocarbon technologies to meet our energy demands--and even more than that, we have to reduce our demand by improving efficiency and conserving.