Signal to Noise Ratio is not just a phrase made up to complain about Slashdot trolls. All radio frequencies have natural noise that will destroy any possibly of getting useful information out of the signal. Enough my remain to show that the signal is artificial but at a thousand light-years you are not going to be able to watch any kind of TV from Earth. Just too may natural noise sources exist against that weak of a signal.
If you ask me more data should be destroyed, too much is spend backing up useless crap. Human memory is great because a lot is forgotten leaving only what is really important.
I always thought the deal was the government give a monopoly to a creator in exchange for the creator doing the enforcement of the monopoly. Now government is extending the term (already done) and proposing to take on the role of enforcement also. What is government getting in return for taking on this extra burden? A small increase in filing fees and nothing else? If government is becoming a larger partner in IP enforcement shouldn't they get a larger cut of the IP profits? Somehow I don't think that the Hollywood accounting that goes on in IP companies will ever give government a larger cut.
I always found it odd that this post gets protection of my live time plus seventy years but a new drug only gets seventeen years plus a few extra months the lawyers cheat out of the system at the end of the seventeen years. If something that reduces suffering is only worth 17 years maybe the founding fathers were right to put the copyright term at 28 years.
As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?
I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up, or has a suggestion or comment. Just write to me at 1180 Alvarado SE, #114, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87108. Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software.
Some things just don't change, Bill still can't get enough programmers to get his OS out on time.
I miss the cold war, at least then we defined what was good by doing the opposite of with the Soviet Union did. They had internal passports but any American could go anywhere in America. Since then we have put police in schools, expanded searches, and done lots of things that my teachers in the 60's (yea I am that old) said that only the Soviets would do.
Somehow we won the war and are loosing our freedom. Instead of rejecting our enemies we are becoming our enemies.
This is a sad comment. For thousands of years people have struggled to gain their freedom from tyrants. Only within the last few hundred years have people been able to take part in running a country. And what do you choose to do with that power? Stand aside and let professional politicians hand the power right back to the ruling class. I guess when you choose to let others make your decisions for you, you get the government you deserve. Unfortunately I also get the government you deserve.
You make a good point, but I don't see the internet doing much to change the system. The internet can inform and maybe help a few people to "meet up" but the system is still rigged against them. I live in a state that last went to a Democrat president in 1964 (remember that Dubya came in second in the popular vote so only the state's outcome counts). That means that nobody is politically active, both sides don't want to waste time here.
The state level of government is is just as bad. The joke is that there are three parties, the Democrates, the Republicans, and the other Republican Party. The game is in the Republican Party and therefore the debate is behind close doors where it is out of the TV eye.
So we are out the the loop for national politics and the power struggles at the state level are hidden. There isn't a good newspaper, TV or radio station covering politics. I think the message is sit down and shut up, we will tell you when to vote and who to vote for.
Others are making the decision about government, there is little I can do about it except to move. Then there is that little thing of liking my family and community. What are you going to do, the majority spoke. Why waste my time or money on something that I can not change?
I am of two minds on that, if people are really looking for facts and views they can find them quicker. The rise of Fox News and talk radio shows that there is another group that is just looking for a filter that reinforces their viewpoint without any disturbing debate entering without being spun.
I think most people are like me. We know that the pol are lying, if it isn't about not having sex it is about overthrowing another country's government. Go ahead and play your games just leave us out of it. The pol like it like that and most Americans like it like that. Democracy is fairly dead when only 45% of the registered voters vote and only 50% of the people register to vote.
Let the political class and those who like politics play their game. All I ask is that you don't screw up the economy for the rest of us so we can enjoy our family and community. The pols just don't seem to get that little fact.
Hey it is free software in all senses of the word. It is Saturday so take off your tie change out of your suit and leave the corporate "Mindshare" marking speak at the office. Some things are not markets, somethings are fun. A quick hack that pokes fun at the naming mistakes of the Mozilla team is just fun.
I thought Linux was about choice! Oops there is a Windows version, I guess you could take it out the Windows version and keep it in for the rest of us.
If you want to talk about precedent you should ask why has the US government has been running from nation to nation getting an exemption to US nationals from appearing before the International Criminal Court for jurisdiction over genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.
The US government wants to keep their nationals, especially government officials, out of any courts no in their control. Of course private citizens and government leaders of other nations are fair game.
It doesn't look like precedent to me, it looks more like the US is doing it because they can.
I volunteered to teach an intro to the internet class at the local public school back in 1999/2000. The students were mostly the parents of the kids that went their during the day. In six two hour classes we took them from the basics to using email and search engines.
If you could not get your students to understand downloading a file maybe you just are a bad teacher. I am sure that you have other talents but teaching is not one of them.
As a person who is a lot closer to fifty than to forty I think you need to loose your age bias and learn to take each person as in individual. Grouping people together and dismissing them has lead too much pain.
I could live with Microsoft bundling the media player, if I did have to put up with dumb web sites that insist that I download it and install into my Konqueror bowser running on Linux. Closed minds and lost opportunity for the web site and Microsoft. Oh well.
The only good use for that damn paper clip would be to annoy the hell out anyone running as administrator. If it kept poping up and say you are a fool for running as root maybe it would drive the user to set up a proper account and use runas as needed.
Instead we will get a second-rate anti-virus program that will probably never get updated by the average user.
The only vote that you thow away is one where you vote for someone because they could win. If you don't think that he or she is the best, you are only encouraging policies that you don't believe in.
The whole point of electronic voting is to get around the recount mess. The election officials don't want to wind up on TV like they did in Florida in 2000. So they devise a system that can't be recounted. They get the people that sells it to clam it is perfect, why would anybody need to recount?
They will not wind up on TV and the same people who have faked votes over history (LBJ in Texas, Daily in Chicago, etc.) can keep doing their thing. There is a long history of vote fraud in the USA. Those in charge just don't want it to wind up on TV and embarrassing themselfs.
There are also brakes on the law of accelerating returns. True within 65 years of first flight man walked on the moon. Then 30 years later Fox TV says it was faked.
There appears to be developing a speed limit on change. The is only so much change that can be forced into the system. There is a serious counter reaction going on to biotech, GM foods, etc. So far we have only had one "toxic spill" of GM foods, Starlink corn, and it doesn't appear to have caused any real harm to human health. It will only take one spill that harms a few thousand to close off large portions of research maybe including nanotech. The USA does not appear to accecpt risk at any level. We have gone to war on two nations over 9/11 and the end of shuttle fights is in sight. The question is will resistance also develop in China and other future high technology hot spots.
I think that you missed my point! Waiting twenty minues for gimp or blender to install is that last thing that Joe Average want to do.
Yes too many disros are bad but that is a call to improve the disto. If you are pulling random rpms off freshmeat you are asking for trouble. The distro should have the tools to install a tested version and all that it needs. Apt-get is probably the bet one out there, mainly because a lot of people work very hard to make it happen. That is the kind of effort that is going to be need to get linux onto the desktop.
Make it easy for the user to get what he wants and he isn't going to downlaod random rpms off freshmeat. Then it will work correctly. Asking Joe Average to compile it from the source and waiting for minutes for it to install is the wrong way to go!
No short cuts I am afraid, just a lot of work that just isn't being done by the current distros.
I bet that the hardware was built in a factory owned by someone in Taiwan that setup shop back on the mainland to exploit the cheap labor there. The mainland goverment then ties to censor web sites about Taiwan. Isn't globalizaion great, screw whoever wherever to save a a few pennies at the local Wal*Mart.
RPM's are shitty and are the cause of more problems than they are worth. RPM's should have been done away with long ago. I remember as a noob, same problems. Could never install RPM's because of dependencys. I think distro's should adopt a portage style package system. Compiling from source takes longer, but it takes care of idiotic linking issues that RPM's create.
Oh yea, waiting 12 hours for KDE should really make a great impression on that new user! Ok if you install bins of KDE your Joe Average finds out about blender, gimp, or whatever, it will only take twenty or thirty minutes to compile!
Portage and Gentoo should be kept far away from most users. If there ever was one group that should not use Portage it is new users. If the Debian team would spilt off the x86 platform from the reset so that they could keep the stable releases coming out every six months or so it would be ideal. That is the idea behind Fedora but when I tried it I found missing dependencies. Maybe the knock on rpm hell is based on that, maybe they can get their act together with core 2.
Debian unstable is a pain to install but it is the most current and complete bin based distro. If you find a something missing or broked and file a bug report it is fixed within days. They are great. If they were not always waiting to fix up bugs in the lesser used platforms and was eaiser to install.
The major problem in using Windows drivers is what do you do if you are not running a 386/686 box? The 686 is in the process of being pushed out of the server role in 2004 and will be pushed down to the cheapest desktops by the end of 2005. Then there is all those low power/samll/embedded boxs. They don't use Intel and would not be able to run windows drivers.
Sure you might get get your box running but it is bad for plenty of others. You would think that venders would learn that it is cheaper for them to let others write the driver for them just by releasing a few specs. There really few things that their competition doesn't already know. Do you really think that ATI is in the dark about how nVidia does it thing?
The corporation is just a tool, the officers of a corporation can be amoral, they are to often in the USA. I an ideal world when the officers are screwing their customers or share holders they would get called on it and throw out. In our wold too many people listen to corporate whores that excuse the mess that they make.
If you can't make money doing good maybe you should not make money, at least don't make it so bad that nobody can do the right thing. It is too bad that misbehaving coropration have captured the law makers and dispensors of justace. The logical outcome of the the current trend is collapse.
With the current prediction of a world human population of 9 billion by 2050 there will not be any habitat left anyway. You have to grow the food for 9 billion and that will destroy the habitat even if gobal warming doesn't destroy the habitat.
Something tells me that something is going to give long before 2050, but as they say in the long run we are all dead anyway.
The only ISOs you could download for free of SuSE have been live CDs. They have done it for years, long before Knoppix existed.
I have been using SuSE for the past couple of years but I didn't like some of the things I have read about the interface to their tools in SuSE 9. I have even started to look at Fedora, but there is the stupid Blue Curve which has influenced SuSE 9. It maybe time to go fully free and use Debian Sid on my main PC, or Gentoo.
The Phone companies in the USA have mostly been privately funded. The exception was rural telephone companies started during the depression (1930's), they got loans at rates that were backed by the US goverment.
The Bell system was formed about a hundred years ago by merging and buying out of other private phone companies. AT&T agreed to regulation in return for buying out their competition. The US goverment changed their mind in the 1980's and that lead to the mess we have in today's US phone system.
US Cable systems have fought hard to keep out both comptition and all levels of goverment controls.
Slashdot Mirror
Signal to Noise Ratio is not just a phrase made up to complain about Slashdot trolls. All radio frequencies have natural noise that will destroy any possibly of getting useful information out of the signal. Enough my remain to show that the signal is artificial but at a thousand light-years you are not going to be able to watch any kind of TV from Earth. Just too may natural noise sources exist against that weak of a signal.
If you ask me more data should be destroyed, too much is spend backing up useless crap. Human memory is great because a lot is forgotten leaving only what is really important.
I always thought the deal was the government give a monopoly to a creator in exchange for the creator doing the enforcement of the monopoly. Now government is extending the term (already done) and proposing to take on the role of enforcement also. What is government getting in return for taking on this extra burden? A small increase in filing fees and nothing else? If government is becoming a larger partner in IP enforcement shouldn't they get a larger cut of the IP profits? Somehow I don't think that the Hollywood accounting that goes on in IP companies will ever give government a larger cut.
I always found it odd that this post gets protection of my live time plus seventy years but a new drug only gets seventeen years plus a few extra months the lawyers cheat out of the system at the end of the seventeen years. If something that reduces suffering is only worth 17 years maybe the founding fathers were right to put the copyright term at 28 years.
The quote I remember from Bill Gates is:
As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?
I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up, or has a suggestion or comment. Just write to me at 1180 Alvarado SE, #114, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87108. Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software.
Some things just don't change, Bill still can't get enough programmers to get his OS out on time.
I miss the cold war, at least then we defined what was good by doing the opposite of with the Soviet Union did. They had internal passports but any American could go anywhere in America. Since then we have put police in schools, expanded searches, and done lots of things that my teachers in the 60's (yea I am that old) said that only the Soviets would do.
Somehow we won the war and are loosing our freedom. Instead of rejecting our enemies we are becoming our enemies.
Well the Konqueror 3.2.1 in Debian Sid already has in-form spell checking. See not all of Debian is out of date!
This is a sad comment. For thousands of years people have struggled to gain their freedom from tyrants. Only within the last few hundred years have people been able to take part in running a country. And what do you choose to do with that power? Stand aside and let professional politicians hand the power right back to the ruling class. I guess when you choose to let others make your decisions for you, you get the government you deserve. Unfortunately I also get the government you deserve.
You make a good point, but I don't see the internet doing much to change the system. The internet can inform and maybe help a few people to "meet up" but the system is still rigged against them. I live in a state that last went to a Democrat president in 1964 (remember that Dubya came in second in the popular vote so only the state's outcome counts). That means that nobody is politically active, both sides don't want to waste time here.
The state level of government is is just as bad. The joke is that there are three parties, the Democrates, the Republicans, and the other Republican Party. The game is in the Republican Party and therefore the debate is behind close doors where it is out of the TV eye.
So we are out the the loop for national politics and the power struggles at the state level are hidden. There isn't a good newspaper, TV or radio station covering politics. I think the message is sit down and shut up, we will tell you when to vote and who to vote for.
Others are making the decision about government, there is little I can do about it except to move. Then there is that little thing of liking my family and community. What are you going to do, the majority spoke. Why waste my time or money on something that I can not change?
I am of two minds on that, if people are really looking for facts and views they can find them quicker. The rise of Fox News and talk radio shows that there is another group that is just looking for a filter that reinforces their viewpoint without any disturbing debate entering without being spun.
I think most people are like me. We know that the pol are lying, if it isn't about not having sex it is about overthrowing another country's government. Go ahead and play your games just leave us out of it. The pol like it like that and most Americans like it like that. Democracy is fairly dead when only 45% of the registered voters vote and only 50% of the people register to vote.
Let the political class and those who like politics play their game. All I ask is that you don't screw up the economy for the rest of us so we can enjoy our family and community. The pols just don't seem to get that little fact.
Hey it is free software in all senses of the word. It is Saturday so take off your tie change out of your suit and leave the corporate "Mindshare" marking speak at the office. Some things are not markets, somethings are fun. A quick hack that pokes fun at the naming mistakes of the Mozilla team is just fun.
I thought Linux was about choice! Oops there is a Windows version, I guess you could take it out the Windows version and keep it in for the rest of us.
If you want to talk about precedent you should ask why has the US government has been running from nation to nation getting an exemption to US nationals from appearing before the International Criminal Court for jurisdiction over genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.
The US government wants to keep their nationals, especially government officials, out of any courts no in their control. Of course private citizens and government leaders of other nations are fair game.
It doesn't look like precedent to me, it looks more like the US is doing it because they can.
I volunteered to teach an intro to the internet class at the local public school back in 1999/2000. The students were mostly the parents of the kids that went their during the day. In six two hour classes we took them from the basics to using email and search engines.
If you could not get your students to understand downloading a file maybe you just are a bad teacher. I am sure that you have other talents but teaching is not one of them.
As a person who is a lot closer to fifty than to forty I think you need to loose your age bias and learn to take each person as in individual. Grouping people together and dismissing them has lead too much pain.
I could live with Microsoft bundling the media player, if I did have to put up with dumb web sites that insist that I download it and install into my Konqueror bowser running on Linux. Closed minds and lost opportunity for the web site and Microsoft. Oh well.
The only good use for that damn paper clip would be to annoy the hell out anyone running as administrator. If it kept poping up and say you are a fool for running as root maybe it would drive the user to set up a proper account and use runas as needed.
Instead we will get a second-rate anti-virus program that will probably never get updated by the average user.
The only vote that you thow away is one where you vote for someone because they could win. If you don't think that he or she is the best, you are only encouraging policies that you don't believe in.
The lesser of two evils is still evil.
The whole point of electronic voting is to get around the recount mess. The election officials don't want to wind up on TV like they did in Florida in 2000. So they devise a system that can't be recounted. They get the people that sells it to clam it is perfect, why would anybody need to recount?
They will not wind up on TV and the same people who have faked votes over history (LBJ in Texas, Daily in Chicago, etc.) can keep doing their thing. There is a long history of vote fraud in the USA. Those in charge just don't want it to wind up on TV and embarrassing themselfs.
Accounting going off shore? Great the next Enron or Worldcom can get their books faked at a lower cost! More money to the bottom line!
I am sure that the SEC will out source their enforcement when it collapses.
There are also brakes on the law of accelerating returns. True within 65 years of first flight man walked on the moon. Then 30 years later Fox TV says it was faked.
There appears to be developing a speed limit on change. The is only so much change that can be forced into the system. There is a serious counter reaction going on to biotech, GM foods, etc. So far we have only had one "toxic spill" of GM foods, Starlink corn, and it doesn't appear to have caused any real harm to human health. It will only take one spill that harms a few thousand to close off large portions of research maybe including nanotech. The USA does not appear to accecpt risk at any level. We have gone to war on two nations over 9/11 and the end of shuttle fights is in sight. The question is will resistance also develop in China and other future high technology hot spots.
Who knows.
I think that you missed my point! Waiting twenty minues for gimp or blender to install is that last thing that Joe Average want to do.
Yes too many disros are bad but that is a call to improve the disto. If you are pulling random rpms off freshmeat you are asking for trouble. The distro should have the tools to install a tested version and all that it needs. Apt-get is probably the bet one out there, mainly because a lot of people work very hard to make it happen. That is the kind of effort that is going to be need to get linux onto the desktop.
Make it easy for the user to get what he wants and he isn't going to downlaod random rpms off freshmeat. Then it will work correctly. Asking Joe Average to compile it from the source and waiting for minutes for it to install is the wrong way to go!
No short cuts I am afraid, just a lot of work that just isn't being done by the current distros.
I bet that the hardware was built in a factory owned by someone in Taiwan that setup shop back on the mainland to exploit the cheap labor there. The mainland goverment then ties to censor web sites about Taiwan. Isn't globalizaion great, screw whoever wherever to save a a few pennies at the local Wal*Mart.
RPM's are shitty and are the cause of more problems than they are worth. RPM's should have been done away with long ago. I remember as a noob, same problems. Could never install RPM's because of dependencys. I think distro's should adopt a portage style package system. Compiling from source takes longer, but it takes care of idiotic linking issues that RPM's create.
Oh yea, waiting 12 hours for KDE should really make a great impression on that new user! Ok if you install bins of KDE your Joe Average finds out about blender, gimp, or whatever, it will only take twenty or thirty minutes to compile!
Portage and Gentoo should be kept far away from most users. If there ever was one group that should not use Portage it is new users. If the Debian team would spilt off the x86 platform from the reset so that they could keep the stable releases coming out every six months or so it would be ideal. That is the idea behind Fedora but when I tried it I found missing dependencies. Maybe the knock on rpm hell is based on that, maybe they can get their act together with core 2.
Debian unstable is a pain to install but it is the most current and complete bin based distro. If you find a something missing or broked and file a bug report it is fixed within days. They are great. If they were not always waiting to fix up bugs in the lesser used platforms and was eaiser to install.
The major problem in using Windows drivers is what do you do if you are not running a 386/686 box? The 686 is in the process of being pushed out of the server role in 2004 and will be pushed down to the cheapest desktops by the end of 2005. Then there is all those low power/samll/embedded boxs. They don't use Intel and would not be able to run windows drivers.
Sure you might get get your box running but it is bad for plenty of others. You would think that venders would learn that it is cheaper for them to let others write the driver for them just by releasing a few specs. There really few things that their competition doesn't already know. Do you really think that ATI is in the dark about how nVidia does it thing?
The corporation is just a tool, the officers of a corporation can be amoral, they are to often in the USA. I an ideal world when the officers are screwing their customers or share holders they would get called on it and throw out. In our wold too many people listen to corporate whores that excuse the mess that they make.
If you can't make money doing good maybe you should not make money, at least don't make it so bad that nobody can do the right thing. It is too bad that misbehaving coropration have captured the law makers and dispensors of justace. The logical outcome of the the current trend is collapse.
With the current prediction of a world human population of 9 billion by 2050 there will not be any habitat left anyway. You have to grow the food for 9 billion and that will destroy the habitat even if gobal warming doesn't destroy the habitat.
Something tells me that something is going to give long before 2050, but as they say in the long run we are all dead anyway.
The only ISOs you could download for free of SuSE have been live CDs. They have done it for years, long before Knoppix existed.
I have been using SuSE for the past couple of years but I didn't like some of the things I have read about the interface to their tools in SuSE 9. I have even started to look at Fedora, but there is the stupid Blue Curve which has influenced SuSE 9. It maybe time to go fully free and use Debian Sid on my main PC, or Gentoo.
The Phone companies in the USA have mostly been privately funded. The exception was rural telephone companies started during the depression (1930's), they got loans at rates that were backed by the US goverment.
The Bell system was formed about a hundred years ago by merging and buying out of other private phone companies. AT&T agreed to regulation in return for buying out their competition. The US goverment changed their mind in the 1980's and that lead to the mess we have in today's US phone system.
US Cable systems have fought hard to keep out both comptition and all levels of goverment controls.
I haven't found a list of notebooks but I did find a list of wireless cards and their chipsets at: linux-wlan.org
$70 I thought it was $30