Ethanol from corn is pretty stupid when you consider the fertilizers etc. you need. Instead, ethanol from cellulose would be a much better bet - you don't need to grow specific crops for ethanol, you process farm waste, weeds - pretty much anything containing cellulose. It's one of the most promising ways of getting ethanol in the future - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulose_ethanol
It depends how the front end is made. Is the front end linked to cdrecord?
If the front end is NOT linked (and invokes the tool via something like system()) then it doesn't matter what license the tool is written under - a GPL front end can still use it and be GPL, just as you can write non-GPL software that works on Linux.
But you don't need DRM to do ANY of that. eMusic is the second largest seller of music online (second only to iTMS) and it doesn't use DRM nor do the record labels that sell through eMusic require them to have DRM. The vast majority of people, if they can easily buy the music they want rather than pirate it WILL buy it. Those who don't will still find a pirated copy, DRM notwithstanding. I personally do not pirate music - I use both eMusic and iTMS - although as soon as I get a track from iTMS it gets the DRM stripped off by jHymn because I want to be able to listen to the song while I work on my Linux workstation, too.
In all it boils down to DRM being a pointless and expensive waste of time. Of course, the software vendors who sell DRM technology love it.
In any case, for every band that the record companies promote, there are perhaps 50 bands that are just as good and worth paying for. A good band hoping to make money really is a lottery - a lottery on which get noticed and which have the prettiest faces that the record companies think can sell music.
The insidious part of DRM is the record companies next tack (and companies like Apple and Microsoft will be very happy to go along with this, because it increases lock-in) is that eventually, music players such as what will be formerly known as MP3 players, and computer based players will BY LAW only play DRM content. Non-DRM content won't be a valid file format. That way, record companies can regain their own lock-in on artists before things such as bands selling directly through MySpace, their own websites or eMusic make them irrelevant. Already, there has been a very high profile case of a band "making it" without a traditional record company (The Arctic Monkeys) and THAT is what terrifies the record companies and is what is driving them to insist on DRM - because if they hold the DRM keys, they can nip this dangerous development in the bud!
Some things change easily, and some don't. The disappearance of Microsoft's monopoly is something that will be very hard to change, and probably won't for decades - and when it does, there's a good probability that something *not* open will replace it, too.
The Windows+Office hegemony is only likely to change if people owning PCs goes out of favour AND Microsoft doesn't gain dominance on whatever the replacement is.
Judging by Microsofts >90% market share on desktop operating systems and office suites, I would say that yes - Microsoft can argue against "open" and win, and has been winning for years, and is likely to continue winning against "open" for decades to come.
My father _did_ back the teacher up 100% as it happens, and yes, I had a blazing row with him over it too.
My interest quite clearly from about age 8 was writing programs. It was really quite obvious by the time I was 16 that software development was going to be my career path. I wasn't playing games or otherwise wasting time, the teacher was almost certainly complaining that I was learning how to program. With no computer related courses offered at my school, the ONLY way I would get into the university degree course that I wanted to do was to learn how computers work off my own back. It wasn't like I was trying to do that in his class time either - this teacher was just frustrated that I didn't seem very interested in his subject. It was hardly surprising, I wasn't really interested in his subject but was forced to do it because I felt at the time that it was the least bad choice.
Judging by where I am now, I still think not backing down over that and having that row with my Dad was the right thing to do.
That's always been the case though: the vast majority of teachers and schools not only don't encourage students to experiment with computers, they actively discourage (and sometimes punish) for it. It's been that way for years and will probably continue to be that way. The only students who do learn to use a computer as something more than a glorified typewriter-cum-calculator-cum-overhead-projector is to do it through their own initiative.
I remember a school report I got, I was furious about it at the time and I'm still annoyed by what the teacher wrote -- "books must be opened, not computers turned on". The teacher simply couldn't recognise I was actually learning lots of useful things - genuinely useful things - (and given the fact that I was and still am very lazy) was a GOOD thing. I may not have been learning his irrelevant subject - but I'm glad I ignored that school report because I much prefer my career in computing compared to what he'd rather have me do. My school refused to teach any computer science subjects on the completely crackheaded argument that "computer science was for failed mathematicians." WTF? (The still don't teach any computer science subjects even now).
The trouble with basing teacher criteria on test results is that it results in teachers who instead of trying to teach a good understanding of the material, teach to the test instead to get the highest results; a case of the tail wagging the dog.
You've got to have qualitative measures as well as looking at the tests. Test results, while a good performance mesurement - in isolation paint a very incomplete picture, and you need a way to make sure that you don't just end up with a system that rewards teaching to the test because then the cure is worse than the disease.
NetBSD already forked on this issue - it did this 10 years ago. The guy who forked it is called Theo deRaadt, and he started the OpenBSD project, a fork of NetBSD. You might have heard of it:-)
Will tar preserve Windows ACLs and permissions, though? I suspect not - it doesn't even preserve ACLs on Linux (which are needed for SElinux). On Linux I now use 'star' to back up to DLT tape since it's designed to preserve ACLs (and therefore SElinux metadata on files).
We've found DLT and LTO to be extremely reliable - much more reliable than any other kind of removable media (especially considering the odd one gets dropped when it gets moved offsite - the LTO cartridge is unharmed, but it's doubtful that a hard drive would survive a 5 foot fall onto concrete).
However, DLT and LTO are very, very expensive - and still not capacious enough.
Windows has 'at' jobs. Not as convenient to set up and not as flexible as cron, but does pretty much the same job as cron. Unfortunately, unlike cron, you won't get mailed when something wrote to stderr (i.e. broke).
A daily backup job could be set up with at as such:
at 01:00/every:m,t,w,th,f,s,su c:\scripts\backup.bat
It is indeed never in darkness. You can SEE the moon during a lunar eclipse - it appears as a deep reddish colour. It may be dimmed light, but it's not in darkness.
What a silly analogy. Cars are not a lock in solution at all - you can change your car tomorrow without huge retraining costs or fuel compatibility problems.
Linux also has a "knob" to control how agressive it pages out bits of physical RAM - see/proc/sys/vm/swappiness . The values can be between 0 (try to never swap) and 100 (agressively move pages out of RAM to swap). The default is 60.
In terms of music that's actually sold and created from scratch, we aren't talking about classical musicians. Most classical musicians don't compose - they just play stuff other people wrote (often hundreds of years ago) and then only to live audiences.
The kind of kit used to make recorded music is relatively cheap. I have a Roland A-90 keyboard, a nice hammer action "portable" (for arm stretching values of portable) keyboard. It's very nice. It cost US $2000, and I've now had it for 9 years I think. Amortized over that time, that's a little over $200/year even if I gave it away for free tomorrow, but I'm likely to still have it in 10 years time. My keyboard is at the expensive end of the kind of instruments that the majority of us buy - most guitars are much cheaper than this.
Notwithstanding the very high price of some ancient violin, music IS cheap to make. Also, the ability to make music is very common amongst the human population - Britney Spears and co are largely a product of the cult of personality and marketing - their talent is pretty common.
Also emusic http://www.emusic.com/ seem to make plenty of money, and are the no.2 online music store only after iTMS. They sell music in unencrypted MP3 files. They may not have Britney Spears, but they have a lot of labels and artists with chart music - people like the White Stripes, Paul Weller etc.
That's why I think it'll probably not work. What will people do - they'll queue up a few downloads and walk away from the computer, or minimize the window or whatever, so they won't see the ads.
The idea sounded very much like a lot of the 'dot bomb' ideas. That and the music won't work on 90% of the music players out there (i.e. the iPod, which currently if you want to sell music is the only mp3 player that matters. The number 1 and number 2 online music shops are ones that have music that play on the iPod - of course iTMS in number 1, and eMusic which sells MP3 files without any DRM, which of course play fine on the iPod).
Time needs to be factored in...but how much monetary value? Building a PC, for me, is something I find that's fun to do - it's a hobby. I don't price the time of any other of my hobbies, and I'm not going to when I build a PC because it's just part of the enjoyment of the project.
Sure, if you're getting a PC because you just want a machine, build time may be a consideration. However, if you're building your own to save money you're more than likely cash poor but time rich anyway...and with most professionals in the IT world, it's unlikely they could get paid for that time anyway having no paid overtime to do at work.
Oh come on, how is the heavily subsidised agriculture in the USA and Europe *capitalism*? Agriculture in the US and EU is a warped attempt at socialism on a grand scale. I'd agree that it was capitalism if there were NO farming subsidies, but price fixing and socialized farming are rampant in the US and EU.
It's not the technology that's the problem - it's the patenting of basic foodstuffs that's the problem. I cheered when Monsanto decided to pull out of the British market altogether. Monsanto have sued farmers who were *neighbours* of other farmers who used Monsanto seed when the Monsanto stuff contaminated their crops - there's a well-known Canadian case about it. I don't want my food supply owned by a small number of giant corporations.
Well, in the middle of the north Irish Sea, we didn't have a Spring either - it went straight from winter to summer in about Feburary. You can't really state a trend from one year's conditions.
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Ethanol from corn is pretty stupid when you consider the fertilizers etc. you need. Instead, ethanol from cellulose would be a much better bet - you don't need to grow specific crops for ethanol, you process farm waste, weeds - pretty much anything containing cellulose. It's one of the most promising ways of getting ethanol in the future - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulose_ethanol
It depends how the front end is made. Is the front end linked to cdrecord?
If the front end is NOT linked (and invokes the tool via something like system()) then it doesn't matter what license the tool is written under - a GPL front end can still use it and be GPL, just as you can write non-GPL software that works on Linux.
But you don't need DRM to do ANY of that. eMusic is the second largest seller of music online (second only to iTMS) and it doesn't use DRM nor do the record labels that sell through eMusic require them to have DRM. The vast majority of people, if they can easily buy the music they want rather than pirate it WILL buy it. Those who don't will still find a pirated copy, DRM notwithstanding. I personally do not pirate music - I use both eMusic and iTMS - although as soon as I get a track from iTMS it gets the DRM stripped off by jHymn because I want to be able to listen to the song while I work on my Linux workstation, too.
In all it boils down to DRM being a pointless and expensive waste of time. Of course, the software vendors who sell DRM technology love it.
In any case, for every band that the record companies promote, there are perhaps 50 bands that are just as good and worth paying for. A good band hoping to make money really is a lottery - a lottery on which get noticed and which have the prettiest faces that the record companies think can sell music.
The insidious part of DRM is the record companies next tack (and companies like Apple and Microsoft will be very happy to go along with this, because it increases lock-in) is that eventually, music players such as what will be formerly known as MP3 players, and computer based players will BY LAW only play DRM content. Non-DRM content won't be a valid file format. That way, record companies can regain their own lock-in on artists before things such as bands selling directly through MySpace, their own websites or eMusic make them irrelevant. Already, there has been a very high profile case of a band "making it" without a traditional record company (The Arctic Monkeys) and THAT is what terrifies the record companies and is what is driving them to insist on DRM - because if they hold the DRM keys, they can nip this dangerous development in the bud!
Some things change easily, and some don't. The disappearance of Microsoft's monopoly is something that will be very hard to change, and probably won't for decades - and when it does, there's a good probability that something *not* open will replace it, too.
The Windows+Office hegemony is only likely to change if people owning PCs goes out of favour AND Microsoft doesn't gain dominance on whatever the replacement is.
I didn't mention the word "best" (although arguably, MS Office is currently the best office package).
Judging by Microsofts >90% market share on desktop operating systems and office suites, I would say that yes - Microsoft can argue against "open" and win, and has been winning for years, and is likely to continue winning against "open" for decades to come.
My father _did_ back the teacher up 100% as it happens, and yes, I had a blazing row with him over it too.
My interest quite clearly from about age 8 was writing programs. It was really quite obvious by the time I was 16 that software development was going to be my career path. I wasn't playing games or otherwise wasting time, the teacher was almost certainly complaining that I was learning how to program. With no computer related courses offered at my school, the ONLY way I would get into the university degree course that I wanted to do was to learn how computers work off my own back. It wasn't like I was trying to do that in his class time either - this teacher was just frustrated that I didn't seem very interested in his subject. It was hardly surprising, I wasn't really interested in his subject but was forced to do it because I felt at the time that it was the least bad choice.
Judging by where I am now, I still think not backing down over that and having that row with my Dad was the right thing to do.
That's always been the case though: the vast majority of teachers and schools not only don't encourage students to experiment with computers, they actively discourage (and sometimes punish) for it. It's been that way for years and will probably continue to be that way. The only students who do learn to use a computer as something more than a glorified typewriter-cum-calculator-cum-overhead-projector is to do it through their own initiative.
I remember a school report I got, I was furious about it at the time and I'm still annoyed by what the teacher wrote -- "books must be opened, not computers turned on". The teacher simply couldn't recognise I was actually learning lots of useful things - genuinely useful things - (and given the fact that I was and still am very lazy) was a GOOD thing. I may not have been learning his irrelevant subject - but I'm glad I ignored that school report because I much prefer my career in computing compared to what he'd rather have me do. My school refused to teach any computer science subjects on the completely crackheaded argument that "computer science was for failed mathematicians." WTF? (The still don't teach any computer science subjects even now).
The trouble with basing teacher criteria on test results is that it results in teachers who instead of trying to teach a good understanding of the material, teach to the test instead to get the highest results; a case of the tail wagging the dog.
You've got to have qualitative measures as well as looking at the tests. Test results, while a good performance mesurement - in isolation paint a very incomplete picture, and you need a way to make sure that you don't just end up with a system that rewards teaching to the test because then the cure is worse than the disease.
NetBSD already forked on this issue - it did this 10 years ago. The guy who forked it is called Theo deRaadt, and he started the OpenBSD project, a fork of NetBSD. You might have heard of it :-)
Will tar preserve Windows ACLs and permissions, though? I suspect not - it doesn't even preserve ACLs on Linux (which are needed for SElinux). On Linux I now use 'star' to back up to DLT tape since it's designed to preserve ACLs (and therefore SElinux metadata on files).
We've found DLT and LTO to be extremely reliable - much more reliable than any other kind of removable media (especially considering the odd one gets dropped when it gets moved offsite - the LTO cartridge is unharmed, but it's doubtful that a hard drive would survive a 5 foot fall onto concrete).
However, DLT and LTO are very, very expensive - and still not capacious enough.
Windows has 'at' jobs. Not as convenient to set up and not as flexible as cron, but does pretty much the same job as cron. Unfortunately, unlike cron, you won't get mailed when something wrote to stderr (i.e. broke).
/every:m,t,w,th,f,s,su c:\scripts\backup.bat
A daily backup job could be set up with at as such:
at 01:00
It is indeed never in darkness. You can SEE the moon during a lunar eclipse - it appears as a deep reddish colour. It may be dimmed light, but it's not in darkness.
What a silly analogy. Cars are not a lock in solution at all - you can change your car tomorrow without huge retraining costs or fuel compatibility problems.
Linux also has a "knob" to control how agressive it pages out bits of physical RAM - see /proc/sys/vm/swappiness . The values can be between 0 (try to never swap) and 100 (agressively move pages out of RAM to swap). The default is 60.
In terms of music that's actually sold and created from scratch, we aren't talking about classical musicians. Most classical musicians don't compose - they just play stuff other people wrote (often hundreds of years ago) and then only to live audiences.
The kind of kit used to make recorded music is relatively cheap. I have a Roland A-90 keyboard, a nice hammer action "portable" (for arm stretching values of portable) keyboard. It's very nice. It cost US $2000, and I've now had it for 9 years I think. Amortized over that time, that's a little over $200/year even if I gave it away for free tomorrow, but I'm likely to still have it in 10 years time. My keyboard is at the expensive end of the kind of instruments that the majority of us buy - most guitars are much cheaper than this.
Notwithstanding the very high price of some ancient violin, music IS cheap to make. Also, the ability to make music is very common amongst the human population - Britney Spears and co are largely a product of the cult of personality and marketing - their talent is pretty common.
Also emusic http://www.emusic.com/ seem to make plenty of money, and are the no.2 online music store only after iTMS. They sell music in unencrypted MP3 files. They may not have Britney Spears, but they have a lot of labels and artists with chart music - people like the White Stripes, Paul Weller etc.
That's why I think it'll probably not work. What will people do - they'll queue up a few downloads and walk away from the computer, or minimize the window or whatever, so they won't see the ads.
The idea sounded very much like a lot of the 'dot bomb' ideas. That and the music won't work on 90% of the music players out there (i.e. the iPod, which currently if you want to sell music is the only mp3 player that matters. The number 1 and number 2 online music shops are ones that have music that play on the iPod - of course iTMS in number 1, and eMusic which sells MP3 files without any DRM, which of course play fine on the iPod).
Funny, my Linux system plays AAC just fine, and friends who use Windows can also play AAC fine. It ain't Apple only. (Hint: AAC's other name is .mp4)
Time needs to be factored in...but how much monetary value? Building a PC, for me, is something I find that's fun to do - it's a hobby. I don't price the time of any other of my hobbies, and I'm not going to when I build a PC because it's just part of the enjoyment of the project.
Sure, if you're getting a PC because you just want a machine, build time may be a consideration. However, if you're building your own to save money you're more than likely cash poor but time rich anyway...and with most professionals in the IT world, it's unlikely they could get paid for that time anyway having no paid overtime to do at work.
Oh come on, how is the heavily subsidised agriculture in the USA and Europe *capitalism*? Agriculture in the US and EU is a warped attempt at socialism on a grand scale. I'd agree that it was capitalism if there were NO farming subsidies, but price fixing and socialized farming are rampant in the US and EU.
It's not the technology that's the problem - it's the patenting of basic foodstuffs that's the problem. I cheered when Monsanto decided to pull out of the British market altogether. Monsanto have sued farmers who were *neighbours* of other farmers who used Monsanto seed when the Monsanto stuff contaminated their crops - there's a well-known Canadian case about it. I don't want my food supply owned by a small number of giant corporations.
Too many people like the heat of jalapenos. Try habaneros instead.
Well, in the middle of the north Irish Sea, we didn't have a Spring either - it went straight from winter to summer in about Feburary. You can't really state a trend from one year's conditions.