I saw traffic lights like these in Germany. Some towns put a pedestrian crossing with traffic light at the town limits (so there does not need to be an intersection); if you come speeding into town, the light turns red. Usually the speed limit in town is half of what it is on highways, so there is a great potential for speeding due to carelessness, this is a nice way of grabbing a drivers attention without giving a ticket right away.
While what you are saying is correct, the fact that a user can view websites any way he wants to and do anything to them still stands. Overall I guess that paying for ads on websites is just a not-so-sound business model.
I agree with the original poster that Gator is doing nothing illegal.
Apple uses ATA in its new Xserve rackmount server. (See here and here)
Quote: The ATA drive subsystem has a high-bandwidth I/O bus that minimizes bottlenecks, even when all four drives are engaged at once. That's how Xserve can achieve a theoretical peak performance of up to 266 megabytes per second, compared to a 160MB/s theoretical performance with SCSI Ultra160 disk drives -- at a significantly lower cost, and while generating less heat than SCSI drives.
Another noise that is hard to locate are sirens of emergency vehicles. This is why some countries (Britain, I believe) now use emergency vehicles that emit white noise and a regular siren sound, so other people on the road can more easily tell where the vehicle is coming from.
I am concerned that having too many newsgroups for the same topic/language will just make it harder to run a discussion and get answers to questions in a reasonable amount of time... There already are alt.php and alt.comp.lang.php and others. I understand the reason why they want to do this (alt.* groups are not carried by many news servers), but to make this new group useful, they should then get rid of alt.comp.lang.php. But hey, one can always post in all of them:-)
This web site (http://www.arctic.net/~snnr/tunnel/index.html) must be one of the most outdated ones I have seen recently. It is referring in several places to a presentation to be held in July 1997...
But then again, the plan started in 1906, so what are 5 years without update?
There are a lot of providers in Germany that support pay-per-call (i.e. you don't have a login, you just dial into a special number and the charge, a few cents per minute, appears on the phone bill). I don't know though if it is possible to use this from a Hotel, but if you stay with friends, it is probably the easiest and cheapest way to go.
MSN is one of the ISPs that offers this. Here is a directory of others with price comparisons: http://de.dir.yahoo.com/Computer_und_Internet/Inte rnet_und_WWW/internettarife/
I had some really bad experiences with one certain type of IDE drive... the 46 GB IBM DeskStar. We originally bought about 15, which all had to be replaced within about 3 or 4 months. The replacements died too. It did not matter if we installed them in desktops or servers (in the server, every drive actually had its own fan). Finally, we received 45 GB Maxtors or 60 GB IBM DeskStars, which have been working fine since. Funny thing is, the bad drives were manufactured in different countries, so it could not just have been a bad batch - more like a design flaw.
But the proof of free software's viability is empirical. Just look around. The catalog of free software is growing and improving daily. So obviously people find a way to make it work. That's what I don't get. How can people continually make theoretical arguments against free software's viability when the quantity and quality of free software is growing by leaps and bounds?
I think you make some good points, especially on how people make it work - by doing either work for hire (which only works if the company you do the work for can afford it by making money otherwise) or if you do it 'after hours' and make your living otherwise.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think there is anything wrong with this. But I still believe that if I had no regular job and had to live by selling my free (as in speech) software, I'd starve to death within weeks.
Linux is a perfect example of this. I can download Red Hat or Mandrake or whatever distro I want, burn it to a bunch of CDs, and install it on my computer. But it's so much easier to go to the store, buy the box, and use those CDs.
You may not agree, but I think that's at least one reason it works.
I agree we disagree:-) and I think the lazyness argument works the other way around... For a lot of people (at least the ones with fast Internet connections), it is easier to download the ISO images and burn them than to actually get in the car and drive to the store.
I just did it two days ago with Mandrake 8.2 - which I could not have even bought at a store at that point.
Also, most of the software is small enough to be easily up- and downloaded, only few applications are big enough that it is not possible doing that over a modem is a reasonably short amount of time.
What I think this model comes down to is donations - if people think a free software program is good, they give money to the original author. But again, lazyness prevails most of the time and it does not happen.
The word ``free'' has two legitimate general meanings; it can refer either to freedom or to price. When we speak of ``free software'', we're talking about freedom, not price. (Think of ``free speech'', not ``free beer''.) Specifically, it means that a user is free to run the program, change the program, and redistribute the program with or without changes.
Free programs are sometimes distributed gratis, and sometimes for a substantial price. Often the same program is available in both ways from different places. The program is free regardless of the price, because users have freedom in using it.
So if I sell my piece of free software, whoever buys it is explicitly allowed to redistribute it unmodified. Which means I can sell a few copies, everybody else then can/will get it for free (as is beer) from who bought it from me. How is this economically viable for me?
(This is meant to be a serious questions - I don't get it)
I had dozens of bad hard drives over the last 10 years, but never heard about free data recovery. I think by using the hard drive, you accept the risk it might go bad and be replaced with a blank one. The same is probably true for any media (tape, jaz, floppy, zip)... But then, IANAL...
Since the vast majority of people only go to Yahoo, Ebay, and MSN, wouldn't the WWW be better if it only had Yahoo, Ebay, and MSN?
This is a bad example, because all the other web sites on the WWW do not make it harder to "find" Yahoo, Ebay, and MSN. They may make it harder to find some Geocities web site, but then that site would probably be considered "bloat" anyway...
If you are a user who only goes to pages that are pre-bookmarked in your browser, you don't care about everything else.
Of course, this would be different if the whole WWW was pre-bookmarked:-)
VMware works fine on XP as well... Windows complains at the installation because of some uncertified virtual network card drivers, but it works anyway. And it is cheaper (unless you have an additional box anyway), even if you need to buy additional memory.
Slashdot Mirror
I saw traffic lights like these in Germany. Some towns put a pedestrian crossing with traffic light at the town limits (so there does not need to be an intersection); if you come speeding into town, the light turns red. Usually the speed limit in town is half of what it is on highways, so there is a great potential for speeding due to carelessness, this is a nice way of grabbing a drivers attention without giving a ticket right away.
What kind of battery does this thing use? Or do you have to plug it in?
While what you are saying is correct, the fact that a user can view websites any way he wants to and do anything to them still stands. Overall I guess that paying for ads on websites is just a not-so-sound business model. I agree with the original poster that Gator is doing nothing illegal.
Quote: The ATA drive subsystem has a high-bandwidth I/O bus that minimizes bottlenecks, even when all four drives are engaged at once. That's how Xserve can achieve a theoretical peak performance of up to 266 megabytes per second, compared to a 160MB/s theoretical performance with SCSI Ultra160 disk drives -- at a significantly lower cost, and while generating less heat than SCSI drives.
in an older story.
After posting, I saw there were about 2 gazillion other jokes about this, but I could not imagine mine being overrated at 1 :-)
...because we were told some of you did not look at the ads shown with the story the first time.
Another noise that is hard to locate are sirens of emergency vehicles. This is why some countries (Britain, I believe) now use emergency vehicles that emit white noise and a regular siren sound, so other people on the road can more easily tell where the vehicle is coming from.
I am concerned that having too many newsgroups for the same topic/language will just make it harder to run a discussion and get answers to questions in a reasonable amount of time... There already are alt.php and alt.comp.lang.php and others. I understand the reason why they want to do this (alt.* groups are not carried by many news servers), but to make this new group useful, they should then get rid of alt.comp.lang.php. But hey, one can always post in all of them :-)
But then again, the plan started in 1906, so what are 5 years without update?
There are a lot of providers in Germany that support pay-per-call (i.e. you don't have a login, you just dial into a special number and the charge, a few cents per minute, appears on the phone bill). I don't know though if it is possible to use this from a Hotel, but if you stay with friends, it is probably the easiest and cheapest way to go.
MSN is one of the ISPs that offers this. Here is a directory of others with price comparisons: http://de.dir.yahoo.com/Computer_und_Internet/Inte rnet_und_WWW/internettarife/
I had some really bad experiences with one certain type of IDE drive... the 46 GB IBM DeskStar. We originally bought about 15, which all had to be replaced within about 3 or 4 months. The replacements died too. It did not matter if we installed them in desktops or servers (in the server, every drive actually had its own fan). Finally, we received 45 GB Maxtors or 60 GB IBM DeskStars, which have been working fine since. Funny thing is, the bad drives were manufactured in different countries, so it could not just have been a bad batch - more like a design flaw.
I think you make some good points, especially on how people make it work - by doing either work for hire (which only works if the company you do the work for can afford it by making money otherwise) or if you do it 'after hours' and make your living otherwise.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think there is anything wrong with this. But I still believe that if I had no regular job and had to live by selling my free (as in speech) software, I'd starve to death within weeks.
I agree we disagree :-) and I think the lazyness argument works the other way around... For a lot of people (at least the ones with fast Internet connections), it is easier to download the ISO images and burn them than to actually get in the car and drive to the store.
I just did it two days ago with Mandrake 8.2 - which I could not have even bought at a store at that point.
Also, most of the software is small enough to be easily up- and downloaded, only few applications are big enough that it is not possible doing that over a modem is a reasonably short amount of time.
What I think this model comes down to is donations - if people think a free software program is good, they give money to the original author. But again, lazyness prevails most of the time and it does not happen.
The word ``free'' has two legitimate general meanings; it can refer either to freedom or to price. When we speak of ``free software'', we're talking about freedom, not price. (Think of ``free speech'', not ``free beer''.) Specifically, it means that a user is free to run the program, change the program, and redistribute the program with or without changes.
Free programs are sometimes distributed gratis, and sometimes for a substantial price. Often the same program is available in both ways from different places. The program is free regardless of the price, because users have freedom in using it.
So if I sell my piece of free software, whoever buys it is explicitly allowed to redistribute it unmodified. Which means I can sell a few copies, everybody else then can/will get it for free (as is beer) from who bought it from me. How is this economically viable for me?
(This is meant to be a serious questions - I don't get it)
I had dozens of bad hard drives over the last 10 years, but never heard about free data recovery. I think by using the hard drive, you accept the risk it might go bad and be replaced with a blank one. The same is probably true for any media (tape, jaz, floppy, zip)... But then, IANAL...
This is a bad example, because all the other web sites on the WWW do not make it harder to "find" Yahoo, Ebay, and MSN. They may make it harder to find some Geocities web site, but then that site would probably be considered "bloat" anyway...
If you are a user who only goes to pages that are pre-bookmarked in your browser, you don't care about everything else.
Of course, this would be different if the whole WWW was pre-bookmarked :-)
Most dorm rooms I have seen so far are so small they can be wired with 3' patch cables...
VMware works fine on XP as well... Windows complains at the installation because of some uncertified virtual network card drivers, but it works anyway. And it is cheaper (unless you have an additional box anyway), even if you need to buy additional memory.