... all of the people in China were to jump off of a ten foot high platform ten feet out into the sea, how big would the tidal wave that hit North and South America be?
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
the patent office has a very simple agenda... to let companies based in the United States rape the international patent treaties by patenting everything up to (or sometimes including) the kitchen sink, so if a foreign company actually does come up with something nifty and novel they can't use it in the United States. Since the Internet is global, future laws COULD set precedents that make the offending site have to block United States of Americans from accessing the site, or make the offender subject to extradition or something silly like that. Unfortunately allowing for patents on things like "one click shopping" (linking via cookie id to a database), Network Address Translation (rewriting the addressing part of a TCP/IP Packet), and others are simply ridiculous. IMHO, if one can implement something without looking at someone else's source code, then they should be able to LEAGALLY do it. This bullshit of patenting an extremely black-box concept is stupid. I'm surprised someone hasn't tried to patent the biological ATP to ADP conversion for respiration or something else like that.
</rant>
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
Why is project gutenberg using only.zip format and the Microsoft DOS style linefeeds, when most of the patrons (from what I can tell) are using some form of UN*X?
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
But, it's going to be a helluva lot harder to do this to stuff that is already in the public domain, like classical fiction, because there are groups that are willing to stand up and defend their rights to these. Also, if it gets too bad, we'll just end up seeing more people driving large explosive filled semi trucks into buildings like what happened at the california state building a little bit ago...
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
Okay, I generally HATE Compaq, I will acknowledge several truths about them and their products:
Presario == much suckage
Prolinea == suckage
Deskpro == borderline suckage
Proliant == not that bad, actually
the reason they're not that bad is that the methods to maintain the systems are well documented, and they do actually seem to work. I once was upgrading from a PII-400 to a PIII-550 in a Proliant 1600-R, and the steps were very simple... download a new ROM image floppy, boot the server with the floppy, burn the ROM, power down the box, and swap the processor/fix jumpers. It worked. the old bios was something out of 1997 or 1998, and the new one was from late December 2000, and it didn't fail. I'd imagine that a new image will let me put any non-XEON PIII in the case, without having to make drastic parts changes.
This may sound a little roundabout, but when one has to support 50+ of these, having a working method is a godsend...
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
... and so far I've been quite nicely surprised with the Proliants. I had one ML/370 that had problems with a power outage that fried the mainboard, but that was all that has gone wrong. We deal with about 50 or so of these beasties.
We do have one of those paranoid service contracts from hell where the Compaq paid technician will come out the next day and fix it...
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
Of course! If Mars were a planet, wouldn't it be travelling in those epicycles that (I think) Tycho Brahe was talking about? I mean, how else do you account for that darned retrograde motion!
when they excommunicated Galileo, they did right!
</sarcasm>
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
I have a friend who works at the Arizona State University geology department, Planetary Sciences, Space Photography Labratory, named Dr. David Williams (who by the way is an avid Star Trek Fan, but that's beside the point). A club that I'm in was given a tour by him of the lab, and I asked him about pluto, and he said something to the effect that Pluto's moon is NOT ROUND. Most of the tour was spent on Mars stuff, so I didn't think of getting into details, but I'm fairly confident that I am remembering properly that he said that Pluto's moon is not round...
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
"I can live with paying for my content as I view it. Particularly if it contains no advertising. "
So can I, it's called "not watching television". It's quite simple. There is this thing called "outdoors" that I discovered a few months ago (wow, I wonder if I can patent it?) that has things called trees and birds and sidewalks and parks and grass and stuff in it... it's amazing! If I'm not collecting movies on (non-region non macrovision!) LaserDisc, IRCing, or reading stuff I'm usually outdoors. It's done wonders for my physique, I'm actually losing weight, gaining strength and stamina, and my vision isn't going bad as fast as it was from CRT radiation!
Rant aside, if this Television/Movie industry wants to make content harder and harder to enjoy I'll just do without. As is, I mainly watch PBS and listen to NPR, so I'm not exposed to nearly as many advertisements as most other people. I get ads from the banner at the top of Slashdot (for geek stuff pretty much only), billboards and signs on the streets, and the shameless plugs in the occasional movie that I go see. I'm the marketer's greatest bane, or at least my type is, for I do not conform. Hell, the movies that I actually DO buy are almost ALL on LaserDisc, (currently 75 titles) and are generally movies that have stood the test of time. This consumerism culture that I am subjected to in the United States is bullshit.
Well, enough of my rant...
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
I don't think that genes should be able to be copyrighted. Gene sequences either. it's all naturally occurring, or COULD BE naturally occurring. We need to petition our senators (or whatever representative body you have to deal with) to make genetic (end result, not necessarily the process, that all depends on many things) patents void!
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
and if you look at the quality of newsprint and how much the newspaper costs, it's no wonder that they don't charge more than 50 cents for most daily papers...
I want my processor to actually have functioning intricate fine detail, not offset printing...
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
If you go, and if once you are comfortable, take some with you! Where I work at, four or five people (at one time even more) had all come from one other company. They were good at working together, now the only thing holding them all back is the management *grin*. It can work, and if the current place is dying, and if you like the coworkers, do what is best all around, save your neck, then try to save theirs.
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
Okay, fine. They want to log stuff and be able to go back and look at it later. I have an idea to defeat it, let's all use formats that become intentionally obseleted quickly, use PGP/GPG, high bit encoding, etc, and see if it does them any good. I'd start working on methods that made each email ~500K in size, so they flat out can't log it all. What are they going to do then? tell me that I can't exchange email that large? we'd all still do it anyway.
through this rant, the one point I'm trying to make is that everyone can just send a "Fuck you" to the government by making their seven years of logs and logged traffic take so incredibly much space that it isn't feasible, and we can make the logged information utterly useless through encryption and obselete formats that may be difficult to convert from. I think it should be done.
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
Yeah, I've got Linux installed on my Mac Centris 660 AV, a 25MHz 68040. It's not great (only reported 16.25 bogomips), but it does run and it's stable (up now for like, 30 days or so).
Let's see OSX do that!
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
Well, the "Darwin Core" of the OS was ported to the x86 platform (I'd say Intel, except they're not even doing the best on their own instruction set anymore), and since it's all BSD based it should not be hard at all for more to be ported. In talking with an engineer friend of mine, he said that he didn't see how it would have been much work to port a BSD core to the intel architecture when it was already there in other forms. Maybe the whole OS will be along those lines.
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
...because many of the people who use Linux want something that they can go into the guts of, break, repair, and patch to their hearts' content. I personally want to build something that can let me put a non-unix style OS on the Linux kernel, something that doesn't need something as complex as the rc structure and will be easier to implement for basic changes, but still run applications and GUIs and stuff in userland. Don't get me wrong, OSX looks like it could be a nice option for someone who wants a stable desktop and is backed by a company that wants to be renowned for its GUI, but I'm not ready to abandon a nice, stable, free product until I'm either 1) required to meet some company's requirements at the workplace, 2) interested in tinkering with this new OS, or 3) independently wealthy and not requiring to skrimp and save to keep my computers going.
Linux's best attribute in my opinion is its currently fairly large amount of hardware support, especially for being Open. I don't see the other UNIces supporting nearly as much brand new technology nearly as fast (I know BSD people, new X.1 and X.2 versions add support in the middle, so don't get all flaming here), and I'm closer to being able to just pick up something at the store and having it work. Also, there is a large number of software projects that I can work with, some Open, some freeware binary only, and since I've already got these operating, I'm not inclined to change. I'm happy with where I am. Besides, I like having more than one mouse button... *grin*
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
Slashdot Mirror
"...could fall into a timewarp..."
<singing> "Let's do the time warp again!!!!"
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
... all of the people in China were to jump off of a ten foot high platform ten feet out into the sea, how big would the tidal wave that hit North and South America be?
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
"According to the article, the film that they were actually writing to was not plain silver, but Ag2O, silver oxide."
at least it won't tarnish...
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
What about Jarviks one through six?
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
the patent office has a very simple agenda... to let companies based in the United States rape the international patent treaties by patenting everything up to (or sometimes including) the kitchen sink, so if a foreign company actually does come up with something nifty and novel they can't use it in the United States. Since the Internet is global, future laws COULD set precedents that make the offending site have to block United States of Americans from accessing the site, or make the offender subject to extradition or something silly like that. Unfortunately allowing for patents on things like "one click shopping" (linking via cookie id to a database), Network Address Translation (rewriting the addressing part of a TCP/IP Packet), and others are simply ridiculous. IMHO, if one can implement something without looking at someone else's source code, then they should be able to LEAGALLY do it. This bullshit of patenting an extremely black-box concept is stupid. I'm surprised someone hasn't tried to patent the biological ATP to ADP conversion for respiration or something else like that.
</rant>
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
To Michael S. Hart:
.zip format and the Microsoft DOS style linefeeds, when most of the patrons (from what I can tell) are using some form of UN*X?
Why is project gutenberg using only
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
Walling off the ocean... that's gotta be a nice stable, long term solution...
I know that walls are commonly used to hold back water, that's got to be a nice target for oh, TERRORISTS
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
But, it's going to be a helluva lot harder to do this to stuff that is already in the public domain, like classical fiction, because there are groups that are willing to stand up and defend their rights to these. Also, if it gets too bad, we'll just end up seeing more people driving large explosive filled semi trucks into buildings like what happened at the california state building a little bit ago...
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
hmmm... boiling water with my microprocessor to spin a turbine to make a generator turn... I don't think so...
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
- Presario == much suckage
- Prolinea == suckage
- Deskpro == borderline suckage
- Proliant == not that bad, actually
the reason they're not that bad is that the methods to maintain the systems are well documented, and they do actually seem to work. I once was upgrading from a PII-400 to a PIII-550 in a Proliant 1600-R, and the steps were very simple... download a new ROM image floppy, boot the server with the floppy, burn the ROM, power down the box, and swap the processor/fix jumpers. It worked. the old bios was something out of 1997 or 1998, and the new one was from late December 2000, and it didn't fail. I'd imagine that a new image will let me put any non-XEON PIII in the case, without having to make drastic parts changes.This may sound a little roundabout, but when one has to support 50+ of these, having a working method is a godsend...
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
... and so far I've been quite nicely surprised with the Proliants. I had one ML/370 that had problems with a power outage that fried the mainboard, but that was all that has gone wrong. We deal with about 50 or so of these beasties.
We do have one of those paranoid service contracts from hell where the Compaq paid technician will come out the next day and fix it...
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
Of course! If Mars were a planet, wouldn't it be travelling in those epicycles that (I think) Tycho Brahe was talking about? I mean, how else do you account for that darned retrograde motion!
when they excommunicated Galileo, they did right!
</sarcasm>
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
I have a friend who works at the Arizona State University geology department, Planetary Sciences, Space Photography Labratory, named Dr. David Williams (who by the way is an avid Star Trek Fan, but that's beside the point). A club that I'm in was given a tour by him of the lab, and I asked him about pluto, and he said something to the effect that Pluto's moon is NOT ROUND. Most of the tour was spent on Mars stuff, so I didn't think of getting into details, but I'm fairly confident that I am remembering properly that he said that Pluto's moon is not round...
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
"I can live with paying for my content as I view it. Particularly if it contains no advertising. "
So can I, it's called "not watching television". It's quite simple. There is this thing called "outdoors" that I discovered a few months ago (wow, I wonder if I can patent it?) that has things called trees and birds and sidewalks and parks and grass and stuff in it... it's amazing! If I'm not collecting movies on (non-region non macrovision!) LaserDisc, IRCing, or reading stuff I'm usually outdoors. It's done wonders for my physique, I'm actually losing weight, gaining strength and stamina, and my vision isn't going bad as fast as it was from CRT radiation!
Rant aside, if this Television/Movie industry wants to make content harder and harder to enjoy I'll just do without. As is, I mainly watch PBS and listen to NPR, so I'm not exposed to nearly as many advertisements as most other people. I get ads from the banner at the top of Slashdot (for geek stuff pretty much only), billboards and signs on the streets, and the shameless plugs in the occasional movie that I go see. I'm the marketer's greatest bane, or at least my type is, for I do not conform. Hell, the movies that I actually DO buy are almost ALL on LaserDisc, (currently 75 titles) and are generally movies that have stood the test of time. This consumerism culture that I am subjected to in the United States is bullshit.
Well, enough of my rant...
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
I now have another way to kill my phone batteries!
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
... megs of teeny tiny little roms laying around... As is, if there's ever an earthquake here, I'll be assimilated by falling computer parts...
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
I don't think that genes should be able to be copyrighted. Gene sequences either. it's all naturally occurring, or COULD BE naturally occurring. We need to petition our senators (or whatever representative body you have to deal with) to make genetic (end result, not necessarily the process, that all depends on many things) patents void!
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
and if you look at the quality of newsprint and how much the newspaper costs, it's no wonder that they don't charge more than 50 cents for most daily papers...
I want my processor to actually have functioning intricate fine detail, not offset printing...
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
If you go, and if once you are comfortable, take some with you! Where I work at, four or five people (at one time even more) had all come from one other company. They were good at working together, now the only thing holding them all back is the management *grin*. It can work, and if the current place is dying, and if you like the coworkers, do what is best all around, save your neck, then try to save theirs.
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
Okay, fine. They want to log stuff and be able to go back and look at it later. I have an idea to defeat it, let's all use formats that become intentionally obseleted quickly, use PGP/GPG, high bit encoding, etc, and see if it does them any good. I'd start working on methods that made each email ~500K in size, so they flat out can't log it all. What are they going to do then? tell me that I can't exchange email that large? we'd all still do it anyway.
through this rant, the one point I'm trying to make is that everyone can just send a "Fuck you" to the government by making their seven years of logs and logged traffic take so incredibly much space that it isn't feasible, and we can make the logged information utterly useless through encryption and obselete formats that may be difficult to convert from. I think it should be done.
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
Just what I need, more reasons to bitch to the apartment management about my fscking neighbours' computer sound levels...
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
... too much of this planet is too bloody cold anyway!!!
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
Yeah, I've got Linux installed on my Mac Centris 660 AV, a 25MHz 68040. It's not great (only reported 16.25 bogomips), but it does run and it's stable (up now for like, 30 days or so).
Let's see OSX do that!
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
Well, the "Darwin Core" of the OS was ported to the x86 platform (I'd say Intel, except they're not even doing the best on their own instruction set anymore), and since it's all BSD based it should not be hard at all for more to be ported. In talking with an engineer friend of mine, he said that he didn't see how it would have been much work to port a BSD core to the intel architecture when it was already there in other forms. Maybe the whole OS will be along those lines.
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
...because many of the people who use Linux want something that they can go into the guts of, break, repair, and patch to their hearts' content. I personally want to build something that can let me put a non-unix style OS on the Linux kernel, something that doesn't need something as complex as the rc structure and will be easier to implement for basic changes, but still run applications and GUIs and stuff in userland. Don't get me wrong, OSX looks like it could be a nice option for someone who wants a stable desktop and is backed by a company that wants to be renowned for its GUI, but I'm not ready to abandon a nice, stable, free product until I'm either 1) required to meet some company's requirements at the workplace, 2) interested in tinkering with this new OS, or 3) independently wealthy and not requiring to skrimp and save to keep my computers going.
Linux's best attribute in my opinion is its currently fairly large amount of hardware support, especially for being Open. I don't see the other UNIces supporting nearly as much brand new technology nearly as fast (I know BSD people, new X.1 and X.2 versions add support in the middle, so don't get all flaming here), and I'm closer to being able to just pick up something at the store and having it work. Also, there is a large number of software projects that I can work with, some Open, some freeware binary only, and since I've already got these operating, I'm not inclined to change. I'm happy with where I am. Besides, I like having more than one mouse button... *grin*
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."