I always thought it was kind of stupid that our premier post-Apollo launch system couldn't get beyond LEO. Maintenance of GEO sats would probably be more useful than putting more footprints on Luna in terms of short-term returns.
I use a nearly 10 year old PC at work as my disposable net-connected computer (we have an air gap between our real network and the internets). It's a 333 MHz P2 and running Win2K and FireFox it runs fine, as long as I don't try to use it to watch video. I use it for all of my at-work email, lots of word processing, and viewing and printing PDF's. I also use it to run circuit board design software so I can submit the images over the net to producers.
I'm assuming the OP isn't Stephen King. Otherwise, it's a very bad time to be a writer of either fiction or nonfiction; it's hard to get published, you don't make much, and you're competing against this internets thingy where people give away what you're trying to sell.
I published my novel with Lulu, as well as distributing it online for free, and I'm very happy with the result; in the fullness of time people have willingly sent me tips and bought enough copies to give me about the same amount of money I could have expected on an advance from an unknown author's first paperback, and I didn't write it to pay the rent in any case.
I'm here to tell you I'm not living the dream until I see scum-sucking bad guys brought down from SPACE, preferably vaporized in their lawn chairs while their horrified guests look on in awe.
If the next version of Outlook is as different as the last issue of Word was from everything that went before, the advantage of familiarity will disappear.
First line, oft quoted: "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel"
When Billy wrote that that would have been grey, but today it's bright blue.
Interesting! I wonder though if the Kindles would still work as newspapers after being washed. I know the digital paper will retain the last image even if the Kindle stops working, but my parrot is an eclectic reader and he would quickly get bored if the news stopped being updated.
Knowing that you could do that then not doing it seems rather irresponsible if its so damn important.
No, it's because (1) you can compile the source to get an.exe that you can verify is the same as the one you're running, so you know it's the real source, and (2) YOU don't hav to go to the trouble of compiling and reading the source, the possibility that ANYBODY could keeps the software coder honest. Sure, open source code could still have sploits built in, but it would be much harder to hide them and much riskier than hiding them in the black box of unreadable hex that is a typical.exe.
A manufacturer we represent whose business center and plant was in rural Minnesota bought a competitor whose business was located in San Francisco. They decided who they wanted from the eated company and offered them jobs. Most of the SFicans were appalled at the idea of moving to the great frozen flyover wasteland, but the eater company paid for all of them to come visit for a couple of weeks. In that time they learned that they could own acres of land with three thousand square foot homes for what they had been paying for a walk-up condo, that they could commute in minutes and leave their doors unlocked without worry, and nearly all of them ended up moving to Minnesota. And most of them are still there today, even though their company eventually got eated by a European company and you now hear a lot of British accents around the place.
Back when a 16K x 1 bit RAM chip cost $40, and needed a herd of glue chips to keep it refreshed, bubble RAM was supposed to save us. It was fast, nonvolatile, and (for those early 80's days) dense. There were demo systems and ads and all kinds of hype. And then it just never sort of happened. Dynamic RAM kept getting cheaper and easier to use and the bubbles never came out at all.
The only reason MS is putting this silly scheme into 7 is the large number of corporate interests who have apps that will not run on Vista or 7 natively, and which they do not want to rewrite. The virtual machine was supposed to get them to stop demanding XP from their vendors since there would be a solution. Only it might not be such a reliable solution, particularly on those millions of boxes which won't be quite new but also won't be quite old enough to discard which are in use today.
This is a very critical problem for Microsoft. I have heard people who would never have even looked at a non-MS solution two years ago whispering about Macs and Ubuntu. If migrating is going to involve a vast amount of unscheduled pain, reinstallation, down time, and retraining, do you migrate to the next level of the company which is screwing you or look for an alternative?
Seven has to solve the problem of legacy apps that don't run. If it doesn't, the Mexican standoff will continue with Seven in Vista's place, and one or two Fortune 100 shops throwing their hands in the air and switching FOSS could start a stampede. The unlikeliness of that, while high, decreases just a bit for every day the current situation persists.
I got a new midsize sedan (Hyundai Elantra) which gets 36, and it keeps the rain off of me. (It's also a company car, which is a major benefit in a city with such crappy public transportation as NOLA.)
Historically, people tend to use at home what they use at work, which is how MS Office took over the world. Many home users won't care but workers who use XP and XP apps at work will in some cases prefer to use what they're used to at home. MS knows this and it's another reason they want to push IT into their newer OS.
I know a few people who are really well connected in Fortune 500 IT circles, and they tell me to a man that *NOBODY* is planning to move to Vista or 7 (by which they mean *NOBODY* running a very large corporate IT enterprise). They tend to have corporate security models including stations locked down in various ways that work, deployment models that work, drive reimaging procedures that work, standard desktops and toolsets that work, and legacy code that works, much of which DOESN'T work in Vista or 7. This is the reason you can still get an XP box -- MS keeps raising the bar for it, but corporate just keeps paying the freight. So this is MS next move, to try to slide these guys into 7 by letting them virtualize their XP model.
The problem is that while this will solve some of the IT guys' problems (legacy apps, desktops, maybe security model) it will not solve what is probably the most important problem to some of them, deployment and drive reimaging. Also depending on how easy it is to break out of the emulation sandbox, they may not be happy with the security model either. When you are talking about pretty much rebuilding a network with 100,000 machines, paying an extra couple of hundred in blackmail per box for MS to let you keep using what you know works makes a lot more sense than jumping off into the void. MS may overcome some of the corporate reluctance with this ploy, particularly at smaller companies, but I don't think it's going to crack the egg they need to crack.
The Nick Ives cite is about the "disclosure of private information" angle. That could have held up even if the coypright weren't an angle, and vice-versa. If I tell even one person, and it's the wrong person, about your jello and titties fetish I could have a problem with the first charge. But if you email me your perfectly innocent clown drawings I could safely show them to my friends, as long as my circle of friends isn't large enough to qualify as a "public." But even though they're not private information of yours I would not have the right to widely distribute them, either free or for money.
This is a good question, and it's one area where electronics really have created a new gray area. In the past publication required making physical copies, which involved a certain amount of effort, and even if you weren't getting paid one could infer from the expense you put out yourself that you were creating value that wasn't going to the original author. Nowadays I would expect a decision to hinge upon whether access was active or passive, how much effort went into it, and the number of recipients. Those numbers might all be different than they would be with paper, but you can bet the courts will get around to setting them.
Meanwhile, my motto is better safe than sorry. I might republish an evil C&D letter mainly because, even though it's technically illegal, it would be almost impossible to get a judgement against me for doing it. But forwarding something that wasn't meant to be forwarded to more than a couple of people -- or to anybody if it's of the nature of what this fuckwad solicited -- could very well be on the wrong side of a line that's still not very clear.
Tedhnically they are, but it would be much harder to get an actual judgement against someone for doing that. Something like a C&D is regarded more like a public notice than a private letter, although there have been exceptions (the draconian gag order bound notices sent out by the NSA when it demands that you help them wiretap being a singular example).
This is exactly what I thought would happen, a large civil judgement, as I predicted in the original linked/. thread. Repeat after me: I do not own the content of letters I receive.. Letters you are sent are exactly like books you buy; you can keep them forever and read them all you want and even loan them to your friends, but you cannot publish them. This is an entirely non-controversial no-brainer in legal circles, no matter how silly you think it is, and it's why the guy got slammed. The extra helping of privacy violation is just icing on the copyright cake, and of course he gets the bill for feeding the lawyers too.
I suspect dilithium came from a hint dropped in somebody's ear that regular old lithium was a critical component of hydrogen bombs. But just as regular old triticale, a grain that actually exists, wasn't good enough for Star Trek and so had to be supervened by quadrotriticale in The Trouble with Tribbles, the critical element lithium without which hydrogen bombs couldn't be made probably had to be expanded to dilithium to meet the demands of starship engines. (It's never occurred to me before now but I guess if they ever had to do it again it would have been octo-something.)
The cyclon X cells I used to power a robot I built a few years back can deliver 500 amps -- enough to melt a 10 gauge wire I accidentally dropped across the terminals. Not bad for something about four times the heft of a D cell. The claim sounds like hype, since it's energy density, not discharge rate that everyone is trying to ramp up lately.
At first I wasn't going to get a converter, because I am allergic to paying money for the privilege of watching commercials. But this is one of the reasons I relented.
I have to say I am surprised at the result. Even 60 miles from the transmitters with a modest antenna that gave me a very snowy signal on analog, I have twice as many channels and they are razor sharp. There have been a few transient artifacts but not the hopeless pile of random polygons I feared because of my marginal signal strength. I was very afraid the damn thing wouldn't work at all out here and I'd be stuck for the difference between the true cost and the coupon.
Slashdot Mirror
I always thought it was kind of stupid that our premier post-Apollo launch system couldn't get beyond LEO. Maintenance of GEO sats would probably be more useful than putting more footprints on Luna in terms of short-term returns.
I use a nearly 10 year old PC at work as my disposable net-connected computer (we have an air gap between our real network and the internets). It's a 333 MHz P2 and running Win2K and FireFox it runs fine, as long as I don't try to use it to watch video. I use it for all of my at-work email, lots of word processing, and viewing and printing PDF's. I also use it to run circuit board design software so I can submit the images over the net to producers.
I published my novel with Lulu, as well as distributing it online for free, and I'm very happy with the result; in the fullness of time people have willingly sent me tips and bought enough copies to give me about the same amount of money I could have expected on an advance from an unknown author's first paperback, and I didn't write it to pay the rent in any case.
I'm here to tell you I'm not living the dream until I see scum-sucking bad guys brought down from SPACE, preferably vaporized in their lawn chairs while their horrified guests look on in awe.
If the next version of Outlook is as different as the last issue of Word was from everything that went before, the advantage of familiarity will disappear.
First line, oft quoted: "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" When Billy wrote that that would have been grey, but today it's bright blue.
Interesting! I wonder though if the Kindles would still work as newspapers after being washed. I know the digital paper will retain the last image even if the Kindle stops working, but my parrot is an eclectic reader and he would quickly get bored if the news stopped being updated.
Lining my parrot's cage with Kindles would get expensive.
No, it's because (1) you can compile the source to get an .exe that you can verify is the same as the one you're running, so you know it's the real source, and (2) YOU don't hav to go to the trouble of compiling and reading the source, the possibility that ANYBODY could keeps the software coder honest. Sure, open source code could still have sploits built in, but it would be much harder to hide them and much riskier than hiding them in the black box of unreadable hex that is a typical .exe.
I'm just not sure which is which.
Though I used it because it is the way blogger Duncan "Atrios" Black refers to banks that have been taken over in the current "liquidity crisis."
A manufacturer we represent whose business center and plant was in rural Minnesota bought a competitor whose business was located in San Francisco. They decided who they wanted from the eated company and offered them jobs. Most of the SFicans were appalled at the idea of moving to the great frozen flyover wasteland, but the eater company paid for all of them to come visit for a couple of weeks. In that time they learned that they could own acres of land with three thousand square foot homes for what they had been paying for a walk-up condo, that they could commute in minutes and leave their doors unlocked without worry, and nearly all of them ended up moving to Minnesota. And most of them are still there today, even though their company eventually got eated by a European company and you now hear a lot of British accents around the place.
...not only with respect and awe, but with love.'
To which Forbin replies: 'NEVER!' Roll credits.
Back when a 16K x 1 bit RAM chip cost $40, and needed a herd of glue chips to keep it refreshed, bubble RAM was supposed to save us. It was fast, nonvolatile, and (for those early 80's days) dense. There were demo systems and ads and all kinds of hype. And then it just never sort of happened. Dynamic RAM kept getting cheaper and easier to use and the bubbles never came out at all.
This is a very critical problem for Microsoft. I have heard people who would never have even looked at a non-MS solution two years ago whispering about Macs and Ubuntu. If migrating is going to involve a vast amount of unscheduled pain, reinstallation, down time, and retraining, do you migrate to the next level of the company which is screwing you or look for an alternative?
Seven has to solve the problem of legacy apps that don't run. If it doesn't, the Mexican standoff will continue with Seven in Vista's place, and one or two Fortune 100 shops throwing their hands in the air and switching FOSS could start a stampede. The unlikeliness of that, while high, decreases just a bit for every day the current situation persists.
I got a new midsize sedan (Hyundai Elantra) which gets 36, and it keeps the rain off of me. (It's also a company car, which is a major benefit in a city with such crappy public transportation as NOLA.)
Historically, people tend to use at home what they use at work, which is how MS Office took over the world. Many home users won't care but workers who use XP and XP apps at work will in some cases prefer to use what they're used to at home. MS knows this and it's another reason they want to push IT into their newer OS.
I know a few people who are really well connected in Fortune 500 IT circles, and they tell me to a man that *NOBODY* is planning to move to Vista or 7 (by which they mean *NOBODY* running a very large corporate IT enterprise). They tend to have corporate security models including stations locked down in various ways that work, deployment models that work, drive reimaging procedures that work, standard desktops and toolsets that work, and legacy code that works, much of which DOESN'T work in Vista or 7. This is the reason you can still get an XP box -- MS keeps raising the bar for it, but corporate just keeps paying the freight. So this is MS next move, to try to slide these guys into 7 by letting them virtualize their XP model.
The problem is that while this will solve some of the IT guys' problems (legacy apps, desktops, maybe security model) it will not solve what is probably the most important problem to some of them, deployment and drive reimaging. Also depending on how easy it is to break out of the emulation sandbox, they may not be happy with the security model either. When you are talking about pretty much rebuilding a network with 100,000 machines, paying an extra couple of hundred in blackmail per box for MS to let you keep using what you know works makes a lot more sense than jumping off into the void. MS may overcome some of the corporate reluctance with this ploy, particularly at smaller companies, but I don't think it's going to crack the egg they need to crack.
The Nick Ives cite is about the "disclosure of private information" angle. That could have held up even if the coypright weren't an angle, and vice-versa. If I tell even one person, and it's the wrong person, about your jello and titties fetish I could have a problem with the first charge. But if you email me your perfectly innocent clown drawings I could safely show them to my friends, as long as my circle of friends isn't large enough to qualify as a "public." But even though they're not private information of yours I would not have the right to widely distribute them, either free or for money.
This is a good question, and it's one area where electronics really have created a new gray area. In the past publication required making physical copies, which involved a certain amount of effort, and even if you weren't getting paid one could infer from the expense you put out yourself that you were creating value that wasn't going to the original author. Nowadays I would expect a decision to hinge upon whether access was active or passive, how much effort went into it, and the number of recipients. Those numbers might all be different than they would be with paper, but you can bet the courts will get around to setting them. Meanwhile, my motto is better safe than sorry. I might republish an evil C&D letter mainly because, even though it's technically illegal, it would be almost impossible to get a judgement against me for doing it. But forwarding something that wasn't meant to be forwarded to more than a couple of people -- or to anybody if it's of the nature of what this fuckwad solicited -- could very well be on the wrong side of a line that's still not very clear.
Tedhnically they are, but it would be much harder to get an actual judgement against someone for doing that. Something like a C&D is regarded more like a public notice than a private letter, although there have been exceptions (the draconian gag order bound notices sent out by the NSA when it demands that you help them wiretap being a singular example).
This is exactly what I thought would happen, a large civil judgement, as I predicted in the original linked /. thread. Repeat after me: I do not own the content of letters I receive.. Letters you are sent are exactly like books you buy; you can keep them forever and read them all you want and even loan them to your friends, but you cannot publish them. This is an entirely non-controversial no-brainer in legal circles, no matter how silly you think it is, and it's why the guy got slammed. The extra helping of privacy violation is just icing on the copyright cake, and of course he gets the bill for feeding the lawyers too.
I suspect dilithium came from a hint dropped in somebody's ear that regular old lithium was a critical component of hydrogen bombs. But just as regular old triticale, a grain that actually exists, wasn't good enough for Star Trek and so had to be supervened by quadrotriticale in The Trouble with Tribbles, the critical element lithium without which hydrogen bombs couldn't be made probably had to be expanded to dilithium to meet the demands of starship engines. (It's never occurred to me before now but I guess if they ever had to do it again it would have been octo-something.)
The cyclon X cells I used to power a robot I built a few years back can deliver 500 amps -- enough to melt a 10 gauge wire I accidentally dropped across the terminals. Not bad for something about four times the heft of a D cell. The claim sounds like hype, since it's energy density, not discharge rate that everyone is trying to ramp up lately.
I have to say I am surprised at the result. Even 60 miles from the transmitters with a modest antenna that gave me a very snowy signal on analog, I have twice as many channels and they are razor sharp. There have been a few transient artifacts but not the hopeless pile of random polygons I feared because of my marginal signal strength. I was very afraid the damn thing wouldn't work at all out here and I'd be stuck for the difference between the true cost and the coupon.