When I want to mount a USB stick in my Linux workstation (either the CentOS 4 one at work, the Ubuntu laptop or the Fedora Core machine at home), I just plug it in. It shows up on the desktop. I don't think that requires any training for a Windows user to get.
To burn a DVD or CD, I just put a blank in the drive. The CD burner just comes up. I drag the files I want into the burner window and hit burn. It's hardly rocket science. Works the same way in CentOS 4, FC5 or Ubuntu. Just stick a blank disk in the drive. I think most Windows users can handle that too.
I've not had the XServer go down in quite a while (at least a year, I reckon). But when it did on Fedora Core 2, it just returns you to the login screen.
THere's no such thing as "standard point of sale hardware". They *all* have different protocols. Commercial POS software tends to only support a tiny fraction of the hardware on the market, so generally when buying a POS system - you'll look at the software that does what you want THEN select hardware that works with it.
The nearest thing there is to a standard for the hardware is at the signalling level - it's generally all still RS-232, or if it's USB, it's USB set up as an RS-232 USB device (or if you're unlucky, USB set up as a HID generating keyboard input). The protocols used by the hardware are pretty simple though - for example, most barcode scanners just spit out the data in ASCII and that's that. Cash drawers are often not directly connected to the computer, but connected to the receipt printer - and you tell the printer to pop the draw open.
The UK has NO nuclear silos. Not a single one. The *entire* British nuclear arsenal is submarine based. The whole point of subs is that you can't take them out with a pre-emptive strike - it's probably what held the peace during the cold war since each side knew the other had enough subs to annihilate even if you got all their ICBM silos.
The USPTO knows it, too. A couple of years ago (unfortunately I can't find the article), someone from the USPTO said that they had a name for actually innovative patents - "pioneer patents". They said only 5% were "pioneer patents" - the rest were really not worth much in terms of innovation. Perhaps if the USPTO would only grant patents to these top 5% we'd be in a lot better shape.
It's not really obviousness - it's got to be something that someone "ordinarily skilled in the art" wouldn't come up with. While how multitasking on a modern PC might not be obvious to the majority of people (possibly including yourself - applications on a modern OS do not give control back to the OS, the OS takes control back, that's why it's called pre-emptive multitasking), the idea of multitasking is probably pretty straightforward to anyone ordinarily skilled in the art of kernel development, or indeed anyone ordinarily skilled in the art of low-level programming on the machine architecture they are using (I'm hardly Super Programmer, but even I managed to make a simple pre-emptive multitasker on my Sinclair Spectrum as a teenager - once you understand IM2 on a Z80, and how the Spectrum hardware raises interrupts, then it's really not that much of a leap to make a simple multitasker. And looking back on it, my Z80 asm skills were actually very poor at the time, yet I could still concoct something that could time share a couple of programs).
The trouble is (I think) that possibly patent examiners are considering software as just one field, so if it's not something that (for instance) an 'ordinarily skilled' web developer would come up with then it's something outside the ken of all 'ordinarily skilled in the art' software developers. The reality of modern software is completely different - there are many, many specialist fields. Many software patents are indeed obvious to those ordinarily skilled in the art for whatever specialization they do - but to someone with only general knowledge, look very innovative when they aren't.
- where he's from - what the background check turns up
If he's from a US allied country, and the background check doesn't turn up anything bad, he'll get a clearance just like any other US citizen who doesn't have something in their past that makes them look dodgy for clearance.
It is widely accepted in the Engineering community that the recent ban of lead in solders for use in electronics in Europe is not only erroneous, but will actually lead to a worsening situation on the environment with the replacements being in general use from July '06 having a GREATER environmental impact.
My source? - The US Environmental protection agency. The EPA report on Solders in Electronics: A Life-Cycle Assessment (472 pages) published August 2005 has some very interesting data. It shows that the replacements for "leaded" solder generally referred to as "SAC alloy" has a higher impact than tin lead solder in a number of areas such as:
Non-renewable resource use Energy use Global warming Ozone depletion Water Quality
It's a bit wider than computers. Washing machines, microwaves, TVs - this affects any appliance we might use. I still have my first TV - it's perfectly good, and although I've gone all digital - well, it's fed through a satellite receiver anyway. The TV is 13 years old now (I bought a decent quality Sony with a Trinitron tube - it still has a nicer picture than most LCD TVs I see for sale).
Washing machines - I've had terrible trouble with them recently. Who knows if it's the lead-free solder that's fracturing - washing machines do tend to heat up and vibrate, but I've had two die in the last year, and my Dad's new machine also died. In all instances it was the washing machine's computer that had failed and needed replacing. My last one failed _twice_.
Ironically, the EU regulation RoHS (which is intended to cut down on hazardous materials in electronics) is likely to make the waste problem worse - since it bans solder with lead in it. Lead free solder is quite inferior to leaded solder - it tends to be more brittle, and tin whiskers are more likely to form. This means electronics using lead-free solder will fail more frequently and earlier, and therefore need to be replaced more frequently, increasing the volume of waste - and probably more than negating the intended effect of RoHS in the first place.
Look this is Slashdot, not Cee Colon Backslash Dot. Of course this site has a pro-Unixey/open source stance. If you don't like it, you can always start your own site to cheer on closed source software and Microsoft.
It depends how you define 'success'. I'd say Gnome is a very successful desktop for me - it does what it says on the tin, makes my workstation work and be easy to interact with, and is stable. It's successful at doing what a desktop is supposed to achieve. It enables me to have a desktop workstation at home for which I don't have to pay Microsoft any money to use.
I think it succeeds admirably at the task of being a general purpose desktop OS. Until I bought my Dad a Mac, he used to use it on one of my old PCs - and if my Dad can use it, well, I think it can't be all that hard to use!
Not with Po-210 - it is EXTREMELY radioactive (only has a half life of 139 days), and only tiny quantites are needed. A radioactive source INSIDE the body is far more dangerous than one outside - it sits in the body, irradiating everything. A normal alpha emitter outside of the body wouldn't even penetrate the skin with alphas. Inside the body is a completely different matter. It's entirely feasable that someone can die in three weeks from radiation sickness from being slipped some Po-210.
Sliding back? It's been totalitarian ever since Putin came to power.
I find Putin's denials of involvement unconvincing - Po-210 has a short half life and is made in a nuclear reactor. Hardly the stuff of a private assassin. I'd say the balance of probability is that this assassin was a government supported one - the choice of poison is a hell of a smoking gun.
Even the USPTO admit that most of the patents suck. They even have a term for good patents - they call them "Pioneer patents". Unfortunately, I can't find the article where they said this - but apparently, the USPTO say that only 5% of patents are truly novel "pioneer patents" - and the other 95% or pretty mundane.
I think the USPTO's direction should be changed so that ONLY pioneer patents (as they call them now) are awarded a patent - and the other 95% get rejected.
There aren't really any "big oil" companies. They all call themselves ENERGY companies. Several of the big "oil" companies do things like manufacture photovoltaic solar cells.
The "big oil" companies will be the ones who would be putting up the fusion plants, manufacturing parts for the fusion plants, providing maintenance etc.
The thing is no renewable energy (aside from hydroelectric in its various forms) has the utility - because they are all intermittent. We can't live on renewable power alone with any technology that's likely to be available in the next 50 years because it's intermittent. The wind stops blowing, and the sun goes down at night. Fusion would be able to produce continuous power - indeed, for long term energy needs (looking out further than 50 years) fusion will be essential to back renewable power - so the lights don't go out on a calm summer's evening.
Circling the drain? That's wishful thinking if I ever heard it. If Microsoft are circling the drain, I wish _I_ could circle the drain in the same way!
Sadly, it doesn't. Ballmer can behave how he wants - it won't change things. For Microsoft to be successful with Vista is about as hard as falling off a log. It'll be shipped with every new PC. You may have said "I wish I had $5 for every $FOO, then I'd be rich." Well, for Microsoft, it's literally true. They are paid around $35 for nearly every PC shipped on planet Earth. Microsoft can't help but win.
Phishing attacks can be prevented with some simple rules:
com/org/net/edu/mil etc. are Latin-1 only
Unicode characters can only be used within the country code top level domain where that character set is used - for example, cyrillic can only be used in.ru/.ua/.su (and all the other cyrillic using countries) - and not.com/.uk/.org/.us etc.
Granted, the man (he is NOT a kid - he's 23, 23 is a fully grown man) was pretty stupid to not comply with very reasonable rules of the library that he must have known in the first place.
However, his own country *is* the United States - he's a US citizen, born in the United States.
Secondly, while the rent-a-cop was justified in perhaps tazing him once and handcuffing him, there was absolutely NO justification in shocking him further times AFTER he was handcuffed and being dragged away. The other four times were police (well, rent-a-cop) brutality.
The rent-a-cop doing the brutality had also: - been fired from a real police force (Long Beach) for being essentially an illiterate and unable to learn the geography of a tiny place like Long Beach - had already been fired (reduced to suspension on appeal) once for beating someone up while on the job in the past
The rent-a-cop was hardly a shining example of what a police officer should be. Indeed, the rent-a-cop is an exemplar of someone who should never, ever be allowed to wear uniform. As soon as he fired the tazer the second time, this was yet again reinforced.
The man was a jackass. But the rent-a-cop was a bigger jackass.
Giving away all of their IP? What are you somking? This is about a handful of COMMUNICATION PROTOCOLS - not copyrighted code, source code or anything else. Things like a specification so others can implement something that interoperates with Active Directory without needing to reverse engineer Active Directory.
Slashdot Mirror
Really?
When I want to mount a USB stick in my Linux workstation (either the CentOS 4 one at work, the Ubuntu laptop or the Fedora Core machine at home), I just plug it in. It shows up on the desktop. I don't think that requires any training for a Windows user to get.
To burn a DVD or CD, I just put a blank in the drive. The CD burner just comes up. I drag the files I want into the burner window and hit burn. It's hardly rocket science. Works the same way in CentOS 4, FC5 or Ubuntu. Just stick a blank disk in the drive. I think most Windows users can handle that too.
I've not had the XServer go down in quite a while (at least a year, I reckon). But when it did on Fedora Core 2, it just returns you to the login screen.
THere's no such thing as "standard point of sale hardware". They *all* have different protocols. Commercial POS software tends to only support a tiny fraction of the hardware on the market, so generally when buying a POS system - you'll look at the software that does what you want THEN select hardware that works with it.
The nearest thing there is to a standard for the hardware is at the signalling level - it's generally all still RS-232, or if it's USB, it's USB set up as an RS-232 USB device (or if you're unlucky, USB set up as a HID generating keyboard input). The protocols used by the hardware are pretty simple though - for example, most barcode scanners just spit out the data in ASCII and that's that. Cash drawers are often not directly connected to the computer, but connected to the receipt printer - and you tell the printer to pop the draw open.
Huh? Where do you get your information from?
The UK has NO nuclear silos. Not a single one. The *entire* British nuclear arsenal is submarine based. The whole point of subs is that you can't take them out with a pre-emptive strike - it's probably what held the peace during the cold war since each side knew the other had enough subs to annihilate even if you got all their ICBM silos.
The USPTO knows it, too. A couple of years ago (unfortunately I can't find the article), someone from the USPTO said that they had a name for actually innovative patents - "pioneer patents". They said only 5% were "pioneer patents" - the rest were really not worth much in terms of innovation. Perhaps if the USPTO would only grant patents to these top 5% we'd be in a lot better shape.
It's not really obviousness - it's got to be something that someone "ordinarily skilled in the art" wouldn't come up with. While how multitasking on a modern PC might not be obvious to the majority of people (possibly including yourself - applications on a modern OS do not give control back to the OS, the OS takes control back, that's why it's called pre-emptive multitasking), the idea of multitasking is probably pretty straightforward to anyone ordinarily skilled in the art of kernel development, or indeed anyone ordinarily skilled in the art of low-level programming on the machine architecture they are using (I'm hardly Super Programmer, but even I managed to make a simple pre-emptive multitasker on my Sinclair Spectrum as a teenager - once you understand IM2 on a Z80, and how the Spectrum hardware raises interrupts, then it's really not that much of a leap to make a simple multitasker. And looking back on it, my Z80 asm skills were actually very poor at the time, yet I could still concoct something that could time share a couple of programs).
The trouble is (I think) that possibly patent examiners are considering software as just one field, so if it's not something that (for instance) an 'ordinarily skilled' web developer would come up with then it's something outside the ken of all 'ordinarily skilled in the art' software developers. The reality of modern software is completely different - there are many, many specialist fields. Many software patents are indeed obvious to those ordinarily skilled in the art for whatever specialization they do - but to someone with only general knowledge, look very innovative when they aren't.
That's stupid. It depends:
- where he's from
- what the background check turns up
If he's from a US allied country, and the background check doesn't turn up anything bad, he'll get a clearance just like any other US citizen who doesn't have something in their past that makes them look dodgy for clearance.
Solder always has had tin in it (it's traditionally tin/lead alloy). But you can always http://justfuckinggoogleit.com/
Here's a handy link, off the first page of Google results: http://www.rohsusa.com/
Quote:
It's a bit wider than computers. Washing machines, microwaves, TVs - this affects any appliance we might use. I still have my first TV - it's perfectly good, and although I've gone all digital - well, it's fed through a satellite receiver anyway. The TV is 13 years old now (I bought a decent quality Sony with a Trinitron tube - it still has a nicer picture than most LCD TVs I see for sale).
Washing machines - I've had terrible trouble with them recently. Who knows if it's the lead-free solder that's fracturing - washing machines do tend to heat up and vibrate, but I've had two die in the last year, and my Dad's new machine also died. In all instances it was the washing machine's computer that had failed and needed replacing. My last one failed _twice_.
Ironically, the EU regulation RoHS (which is intended to cut down on hazardous materials in electronics) is likely to make the waste problem worse - since it bans solder with lead in it. Lead free solder is quite inferior to leaded solder - it tends to be more brittle, and tin whiskers are more likely to form. This means electronics using lead-free solder will fail more frequently and earlier, and therefore need to be replaced more frequently, increasing the volume of waste - and probably more than negating the intended effect of RoHS in the first place.
That's why we call ND "Target Ground Zero" :-)
I wonder how many large Soviet nukes were targeted on ND back in the cold war.
Look this is Slashdot, not Cee Colon Backslash Dot. Of course this site has a pro-Unixey/open source stance. If you don't like it, you can always start your own site to cheer on closed source software and Microsoft.
It depends how you define 'success'. I'd say Gnome is a very successful desktop for me - it does what it says on the tin, makes my workstation work and be easy to interact with, and is stable. It's successful at doing what a desktop is supposed to achieve. It enables me to have a desktop workstation at home for which I don't have to pay Microsoft any money to use.
I think it succeeds admirably at the task of being a general purpose desktop OS. Until I bought my Dad a Mac, he used to use it on one of my old PCs - and if my Dad can use it, well, I think it can't be all that hard to use!
Since when was sushi British cuisine? They could have hidden it in the wasabi - you can hide anything in wasabi!
Not with Po-210 - it is EXTREMELY radioactive (only has a half life of 139 days), and only tiny quantites are needed. A radioactive source INSIDE the body is far more dangerous than one outside - it sits in the body, irradiating everything. A normal alpha emitter outside of the body wouldn't even penetrate the skin with alphas. Inside the body is a completely different matter. It's entirely feasable that someone can die in three weeks from radiation sickness from being slipped some Po-210.
Sliding back? It's been totalitarian ever since Putin came to power.
I find Putin's denials of involvement unconvincing - Po-210 has a short half life and is made in a nuclear reactor. Hardly the stuff of a private assassin. I'd say the balance of probability is that this assassin was a government supported one - the choice of poison is a hell of a smoking gun.
It's odd how online poker is illegal in the United States, but the stock market (which is largely just gambling) is not.
What kind of boarders are they getting across? Surf-boarders? Skate-boarders? What have they done to deserve being squashed by Micros~1?
Even the USPTO admit that most of the patents suck. They even have a term for good patents - they call them "Pioneer patents". Unfortunately, I can't find the article where they said this - but apparently, the USPTO say that only 5% of patents are truly novel "pioneer patents" - and the other 95% or pretty mundane.
I think the USPTO's direction should be changed so that ONLY pioneer patents (as they call them now) are awarded a patent - and the other 95% get rejected.
There aren't really any "big oil" companies. They all call themselves ENERGY companies. Several of the big "oil" companies do things like manufacture photovoltaic solar cells.
The "big oil" companies will be the ones who would be putting up the fusion plants, manufacturing parts for the fusion plants, providing maintenance etc.
The thing is no renewable energy (aside from hydroelectric in its various forms) has the utility - because they are all intermittent. We can't live on renewable power alone with any technology that's likely to be available in the next 50 years because it's intermittent. The wind stops blowing, and the sun goes down at night. Fusion would be able to produce continuous power - indeed, for long term energy needs (looking out further than 50 years) fusion will be essential to back renewable power - so the lights don't go out on a calm summer's evening.
Circling the drain? That's wishful thinking if I ever heard it. If Microsoft are circling the drain, I wish _I_ could circle the drain in the same way!
Sadly, it doesn't. Ballmer can behave how he wants - it won't change things. For Microsoft to be successful with Vista is about as hard as falling off a log. It'll be shipped with every new PC. You may have said "I wish I had $5 for every $FOO, then I'd be rich." Well, for Microsoft, it's literally true. They are paid around $35 for nearly every PC shipped on planet Earth. Microsoft can't help but win.
Phishing attacks can be prevented with some simple rules:
.ru/.ua/.su (and all the other cyrillic using countries) - and not .com/.uk/.org/.us etc.
com/org/net/edu/mil etc. are Latin-1 only
Unicode characters can only be used within the country code top level domain where that character set is used - for example, cyrillic can only be used in
Granted, the man (he is NOT a kid - he's 23, 23 is a fully grown man) was pretty stupid to not comply with very reasonable rules of the library that he must have known in the first place.
However, his own country *is* the United States - he's a US citizen, born in the United States.
Secondly, while the rent-a-cop was justified in perhaps tazing him once and handcuffing him, there was absolutely NO justification in shocking him further times AFTER he was handcuffed and being dragged away. The other four times were police (well, rent-a-cop) brutality.
The rent-a-cop doing the brutality had also:
- been fired from a real police force (Long Beach) for being essentially an illiterate and unable to learn the geography of a tiny place like Long Beach
- had already been fired (reduced to suspension on appeal) once for beating someone up while on the job in the past
The rent-a-cop was hardly a shining example of what a police officer should be. Indeed, the rent-a-cop is an exemplar of someone who should never, ever be allowed to wear uniform. As soon as he fired the tazer the second time, this was yet again reinforced.
The man was a jackass. But the rent-a-cop was a bigger jackass.
Giving away all of their IP? What are you somking? This is about a handful of COMMUNICATION PROTOCOLS - not copyrighted code, source code or anything else. Things like a specification so others can implement something that interoperates with Active Directory without needing to reverse engineer Active Directory.