If you are worried about road upkeep raising taxes on tires would make more sense so everyone pays rather than attacking high mileage car owners.
The failure modes of worn out tyres and lack of fuel suggests that taxing fuel makes a lot more sense from a safety perspective. Tyres don't get replaced that often so the tax on them would have to be fairly significant.
I don't want to share the road with drivers who are being encouraged to get as much use as they can out of their tyres. I don't even want to be a pedestrian near those roads.
The other big news in New Zealand related to Kim Dotcom got a very different reaction from the Prime Minister
John Banks ran for the may of Auckland a few years ago and lost. Dotcom and a few others say that he asked Dotcom for a campaign contribution, and then that it should be two lots of $25000 rather than one donation of $50000 because "I want to help you Kim and I can help you more effectively if no-one knows about this donation". Dotcom's security guard late said that Banks confirmed the cheques had been cleared.
Banks later signed the declaration about campaign contributions saying that those (and others) were anonymous. He claims that some staffer filled in the form and that he wasn't responsible even though he signed it. He also can't remember flying to and from Dotcom's mansion in Dotcom's helicopter.
Banks is now the only remaining Member of Parliament for the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers party, having been added to the party shortly before the last election in their only safe seat. Well, it was safe. That party was the most libertarian-leaning in New Zealand. Banks isn't quite that, and any remaining ACT party members probably aren't quite so happy that he is leading changes that look set to spend taxpayer money on schools that teach creationism.
The police have said that they can't charge him with some things as the statute of limitations has passed, and can't prove other things. Dotcom is talking to the media as much as he can, and going to parliament for photo ops. The police have released their file but say that Banks won't allow his statements to be included. Banks says that was the police's decision.
Anyway his one vote is needed by the government so the Prime Minister is saying that he accepts Bank's word that he didn't break the law. He refuses to read the police file.
So matching the "order number" from the first with the "model" from the second tells us that the cheapest T2000 is "Sun Fire T2000 Server, 4 core 1.0GHz UltraSPARC T1 processor, 8GB DDR2 memory (16 * 512MB DIMMs), 2 * 73GB 2.5" 10K rpm SAS hard disk drives, 1 DVD-RO/CD-RW slimline drive, 2 (N+1) power supplies, 4 10/100/1000 ethernet ports, 1 serial port, 3 PCI-E slots, 2 PCI-X slots, Solaris 10 and Java Enterprise System software pre-installed (Standard Configuration)" and costs $8,295.
You can get the software too: "Solaris 10 3/05 HW2 Operating System - This special release is to install and run on Sun Fire TM T2000 servers. It should be used only on this hardware and will be superseded by the Solaris 10 1/06 Operating System once it becomes available."
I live in New Zealand, but there are other countries where the DVD CCA is having a similar lack of success.
As far as I'm aware region coding has never been tested in court here so there is still some debate about its legality. Some DVD players were sold a few years ago that enforced regions, but I don't think the retailers put up much of a fight when the purchasers asked for their money back, so the vendors seem to think the law is on the consumer's side.
From what I've heard the major brands don't actually sell region-free players, but their distributors add instructions for how to remove the region lock to the box, or even arrange for a third party to modify the players.
We've got an election coming up, and the party that has recently taken the lead in the polls probably wants a free trade agreement with the USA more than it cares about consumer rights, so perhaps we'll start to suffer like you do.
I bought a DVD player a couple of months ago, and it came with instructions for how to make it region free. This was a Philips, not some Chinese brand I've never heard of before. If it had been region locked I would have returned if and got a refund, and I would've expected the law to back me up in needed.
It seems odd to write a review of hardware for linux and only consider proprietary, binary-only drivers. The R300 project has progressed to the point that they now list what is left to do, and its shorter than the list of what is already done. Many games are playable, and it looks like they could use some testers who have a wider range of cards.
According to the couple of BMI charts I saw a few years ago I was overweight, so should excercise more and eat less junk food. Yet I was getting a lot of excercise and eating really well, and was in great shape according to any other measurement (well, apart from being short sighted). Now I don't go to the gym anymore and I'm in the healthy BMI range, but wouldn't do nearly so well on the other measurements.
So part of the blurb could be rewritten:
... saw their mean body mass index (BMI) go down, meaning it got worse. BMI is a measure of muscle based on height and weight.
I think a lot of the problems with patents would go away if applying for a patent for something that the applicant knew had been done before, or should have known was obvious to someone in that field, was treated as fraud. That is a fine, or maybe even jail time for that applicant and senior management at that company.
I know, its not going to happen. Even if it did software patents would still be wrong.
The web page does mention ARMlinux, which implies that it's using a StrongARM processor (the same as the Netwinder)
As for watching soaps, I'm guessing that you first have to download them onto a CompactFlash slot (they'd better be short soaps)
If you look around www.gmate.co.kr (near the bottom of Samsung's page they're mentioned under the heading "System and Asic Solution") you'll find a bit of information about a PDA called CHOPIN, which is due out in March 2000. It confirms the StrongARM and Linux are being used, but the only new piece of info amoungst the pages "Under Construction" signs is that it has 32MB RAM
They've probably already GOT ultra-secure versions of OpenBSD for PC-based, single-processor servers, but Linux isn't just for PC's or just for one processor.
While Linux has support for a wider range of the devices that are attached to PCs, OpenBSD runs on a lot more platforms. It is closely related to NetBSD, the primary focus of which is portability.
Britain is proposing some really extreme anti-crypto laws (you would have to turn over the key to any encryted data you had or prove you don't know the key. Proving you don't have it is virtually impossible, so if someone sends you an email containing a bunch of gibberish then anonymously reports that you're into child porn/terrorism you could go to jail).
But on the other hand Germany is sponsoring development of GPG.
Some of the networking utilities in Windows were ported from BSD
eg at ftp://ftp.arl.mil/~mike/ping.html (I didn't get a response from there just now, but it's cached at http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:281918&dq=cac he:ftp.arl.mil/~mike/ping.html) the author of ping writes "The folks at Berkeley eagerly took back my kernel modifications and the PING source code, and it's been a standard part of Berkeley UNIX ever since. Since it's free, it has been ported to many systems since then, including Microsoft Windows95 and WindowsNT."
I can see how karma-as-status could be useful, but I'm worried that people might start acting to increase their karma rather than to improve discussion.
For example, moderating posts the way that they think that the meta-moderators would like, rather than the way they themselves feel.
This could lead to opinions that differ from the norm being stifled.
Some comments on slshdot annoy me, but that's the price to pay for free speech.
From the mid/late 70s through to 1984 the NZ government borrowed large amounts of money to put into industrial projects, and we had a very closed and regulated economy. From 1984 onwards things swung the other way: government departments became State Owned Enterprises, with many of them not being state owned for much longer, and we have the least tarriffs for imports and subsidies for exports in the world.
One of the companies that was sold was Telecom, and one of the conditions of sale was that there would always be free local residential (as opposed to business) calls, and there were limits on how fast the cost of the monthly line rental could be raised. Businesses pay for their calls of course. ISDN is only available to business, and like leased lines is extremely expensive.
At the time it was sold it was considered by many to be the most advanced telecommunications network in the world. Since then their has been very little further investment in the infrastructure, and the network is now way behind the times.
Telecom are the most profitable company in NZ, and makes a lot more money than is considered normal for a telecommunications company of it's size. A large part of the reason for their profitability is that they are the dominant player and that there is very little regulation in their sector. At one stage our Treasury produced a report that suggested that as Telecom had responibilities that their new competitors didn't (eg emergency calls) they should be compensated for any loss of profits resulting from competition. The way that this would work was that their competitors would pay them the difference between the profit that Telecom made and the profit that Telecom would have made without competition. Fortunately this didn't go very far. Unfortunately there has been no progress made on things like number portability and Telecom are able to dictate terms on deals for interconnections. One of the baby bells (or was it two of them in partnership?) set up a company here (Bellsouth, which has since been sold to Vodaphone) to do mobile phones. The man they sent out to run it was asked by a reporter if he would be using similar tactics to Telecom if he were back home (I forget which part of the USA) where the parent company had similar market dominance, and he replied that if he tried he would be sent to jail.
They don't have to use a creative interpretation of the (L)GPL - they just have to include an extra library that is licensed to be used only with MS Linux. This library could provide a compatibility layer to make it easier to port Windows apps. This would of course include support for undocumented calls used by MS, and might not cover some of the API they they have published but don't actually use. Some performance/stability problems compared to Windows are guaranteed. Obvioously, new libraries would be added whenever a freely available alternative neared completion.
Their biggest problem in keeping their former customers will be that one of the reasons to switch to Linux is to get away from MS. I guess we could also see some software coming with a file that says "This software is available under the GPL with the additional restriction that it can't be used on an operating system from MS".
FireWire is still expensive..does anyone know if this is inherent in its design?
ISTR a bit of fuss made a few months ago when Apple announced a new licensing scheme for Firewire. Those companies that got in on the ground floor a few years ago had to pay $7500 (total) for the tachnology. Those who only started licensing it recently are having to pay $1 per port and aren't too happy about it. $1 doesn't sound like much but when you consider that that cost of manufacturing a Firewire port is around 20c (?), the cost of some of the devices that could be made with it (though most of the cheap ones will use USB instead), and the number of these things that some companies could be using it's significant.
Slashdot Mirror
Even the NSA wouldn't cause a disaster of this magnitude just to spy on everyone.
http://www.opencompute.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Open_Compute_Project_Micro-Server_Card_Specification_v0.5.pdf
It uses that connector but the signals are ethernet, SATA, etc. RAM and optionally mSATA are on board.
If you are worried about road upkeep raising taxes on tires would make more sense so everyone pays rather than attacking high mileage car owners.
The failure modes of worn out tyres and lack of fuel suggests that taxing fuel makes a lot more sense from a safety perspective. Tyres don't get replaced that often so the tax on them would have to be fairly significant.
I don't want to share the road with drivers who are being encouraged to get as much use as they can out of their tyres. I don't even want to be a pedestrian near those roads.
Samsung announced they were terminating the LCD supply a few weeks ago:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/10/22/1757207/samsung-terminates-lcd-contract-with-apple
Now we have CPU price going up.
Some commentators have been predicting this for a while:
http://semiaccurate.com/2012/10/23/apple-vs-samsung-samsung-put-the-boot-in-hard/
The other big news in New Zealand related to Kim Dotcom got a very different reaction from the Prime Minister
John Banks ran for the may of Auckland a few years ago and lost. Dotcom and a few others say that he asked Dotcom for a campaign contribution, and then that it should be two lots of $25000 rather than one donation of $50000 because "I want to help you Kim and I can help you more effectively if no-one knows about this donation". Dotcom's security guard late said that Banks confirmed the cheques had been cleared.
Banks later signed the declaration about campaign contributions saying that those (and others) were anonymous. He claims that some staffer filled in the form and that he wasn't responsible even though he signed it. He also can't remember flying to and from Dotcom's mansion in Dotcom's helicopter.
Banks is now the only remaining Member of Parliament for the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers party, having been added to the party shortly before the last election in their only safe seat. Well, it was safe. That party was the most libertarian-leaning in New Zealand. Banks isn't quite that, and any remaining ACT party members probably aren't quite so happy that he is leading changes that look set to spend taxpayer money on schools that teach creationism.
The police have said that they can't charge him with some things as the statute of limitations has passed, and can't prove other things. Dotcom is talking to the media as much as he can, and going to parliament for photo ops. The police have released their file but say that Banks won't allow his statements to be included. Banks says that was the police's decision.
Anyway his one vote is needed by the government so the Prime Minister is saying that he accepts Bank's word that he didn't break the law. He refuses to read the police file.
You'll need to use google's cache to get to some of the pages found by the following:m +coolthreadsm +t2000
t /configure/group/ch_throughput_servers_1.html
w w.sun.com/products-n-solutions/government/florida/ Gov/5.html++site:www.sun.com+t2000&hl=en&client=fi refox-a
http://www.google.com/search?q=+site%3Awww.sun.co
http://www.google.com/search?q=+site%3Awww.sun.co
A brief description of some systems here:
http://www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/governmen
And "Pricing for FLORIDA STATE Customers":
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:OvNX6_g9s84J:w
So matching the "order number" from the first with the "model" from the second tells us that the cheapest T2000 is "Sun Fire T2000 Server, 4 core 1.0GHz UltraSPARC T1 processor, 8GB DDR2 memory (16 * 512MB DIMMs), 2 * 73GB 2.5" 10K rpm SAS hard disk drives, 1 DVD-RO/CD-RW slimline drive, 2 (N+1) power supplies, 4 10/100/1000 ethernet ports, 1 serial port, 3 PCI-E slots, 2 PCI-X slots, Solaris 10 and Java Enterprise System software pre-installed (Standard Configuration)" and costs $8,295.
You can get the software too: "Solaris 10 3/05 HW2 Operating System - This special release is to install and run on Sun Fire TM T2000 servers. It should be used only on this hardware and will be superseded by the Solaris 10 1/06 Operating System once it becomes available."
I live in New Zealand, but there are other countries where the DVD CCA is having a similar lack of success.
As far as I'm aware region coding has never been tested in court here so there is still some debate about its legality. Some DVD players were sold a few years ago that enforced regions, but I don't think the retailers put up much of a fight when the purchasers asked for their money back, so the vendors seem to think the law is on the consumer's side.
From what I've heard the major brands don't actually sell region-free players, but their distributors add instructions for how to remove the region lock to the box, or even arrange for a third party to modify the players.
We've got an election coming up, and the party that has recently taken the lead in the polls probably wants a free trade agreement with the USA more than it cares about consumer rights, so perhaps we'll start to suffer like you do.
I bought a DVD player a couple of months ago, and it came with instructions for how to make it region free. This was a Philips, not some Chinese brand I've never heard of before. If it had been region locked I would have returned if and got a refund, and I would've expected the law to back me up in needed.
It seems odd to write a review of hardware for linux and only consider proprietary, binary-only drivers. The R300 project has progressed to the point that they now list what is left to do, and its shorter than the list of what is already done. Many games are playable, and it looks like they could use some testers who have a wider range of cards.
So part of the blurb could be rewritten:
I think a lot of the problems with patents would go away if applying for a patent for something that the applicant knew had been done before, or should have known was obvious to someone in that field, was treated as fraud. That is a fine, or maybe even jail time for that applicant and senior management at that company.
I know, its not going to happen. Even if it did software patents would still be wrong.
... so that our customers could trick people with them. Hopefully me posting this link won't ruin that.
The web page does mention ARMlinux, which implies that it's using a StrongARM processor (the same as the Netwinder)
As for watching soaps, I'm guessing that you first have to download them onto a CompactFlash slot (they'd better be short soaps)
If you look around www.gmate.co.kr (near the bottom of Samsung's page they're mentioned under the heading "System and Asic Solution") you'll find a bit of information about a PDA called CHOPIN, which is due out in March 2000. It confirms the StrongARM and Linux are being used, but the only new piece of info amoungst the pages "Under Construction" signs is that it has 32MB RAM
They've probably already GOT ultra-secure versions of OpenBSD for PC-based, single-processor servers, but Linux isn't just for PC's or just for one processor.
While Linux has support for a wider range of the devices that are attached to PCs, OpenBSD runs on a lot more platforms. It is closely related to NetBSD, the primary focus of which is portability.
See http://www.openbsd.org/plat.html for details.
The Europeans do it.....
Britain is proposing some really extreme anti-crypto laws (you would have to turn over the key to any encryted data you had or prove you don't know the key. Proving you don't have it is virtually impossible, so if someone sends you an email containing a bunch of gibberish then anonymously reports that you're into child porn/terrorism you could go to jail).
But on the other hand Germany is sponsoring development of GPG.
Some of the networking utilities in Windows were ported from BSD
c he:ftp.arl.mil/~mike/ping.html) the author of ping writes "The folks at Berkeley eagerly took back my kernel modifications and the PING source code, and it's been a standard part of Berkeley UNIX ever since. Since it's free, it has been ported to many systems since then, including Microsoft Windows95 and WindowsNT."
eg at ftp://ftp.arl.mil/~mike/ping.html (I didn't get a response from there just now, but it's cached at http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:281918&dq=ca
I can see how karma-as-status could be useful, but I'm worried that people might start acting to increase their karma rather than to improve discussion.
For example, moderating posts the way that they think that the meta-moderators would like, rather than the way they themselves feel.
This could lead to opinions that differ from the norm being stifled.
Some comments on slshdot annoy me, but that's the price to pay for free speech.
From the mid/late 70s through to 1984 the NZ government borrowed large amounts of money to put into industrial projects, and we had a very closed and regulated economy. From 1984 onwards things swung the other way: government departments became State Owned Enterprises, with many of them not being state owned for much longer, and we have the least tarriffs for imports and subsidies for exports in the world.
One of the companies that was sold was Telecom, and one of the conditions of sale was that there would always be free local residential (as opposed to business) calls, and there were limits on how fast the cost of the monthly line rental could be raised. Businesses pay for their calls of course. ISDN is only available to business, and like leased lines is extremely expensive.
At the time it was sold it was considered by many to be the most advanced telecommunications network in the world. Since then their has been very little further investment in the infrastructure, and the network is now way behind the times.
Telecom are the most profitable company in NZ, and makes a lot more money than is considered normal for a telecommunications company of it's size.
A large part of the reason for their profitability is that they are the dominant player and that there is very little regulation in their sector.
At one stage our Treasury produced a report that suggested that as Telecom had responibilities that their new competitors didn't (eg emergency calls) they should be compensated for any loss of profits resulting from competition. The way that this would work was that their competitors would pay them the difference between the profit that Telecom made and the profit that Telecom would have made without competition. Fortunately this didn't go very far. Unfortunately there has been no progress made on things like number portability and Telecom are able to dictate terms on deals for interconnections.
One of the baby bells (or was it two of them in partnership?) set up a company here (Bellsouth, which has since been sold to Vodaphone) to do mobile phones. The man they sent out to run it was asked by a reporter if he would be using similar tactics to Telecom if he were back home (I forget which part of the USA) where the parent company had similar market dominance, and he replied that if he tried he would be sent to jail.
They don't have to use a creative interpretation of the (L)GPL - they just have to include an extra library that is licensed to be used only with MS Linux.
This library could provide a compatibility layer to make it easier to port Windows apps. This would of course include support for undocumented calls used by MS, and might not cover some of the API they they have published but don't actually use. Some performance/stability problems compared to Windows are guaranteed. Obvioously, new libraries would be added whenever a freely available alternative neared completion.
Their biggest problem in keeping their former customers will be that one of the reasons to switch to Linux is to get away from MS.
I guess we could also see some software coming with a file that says "This software is available under the GPL with the additional restriction that it can't be used on an operating system from MS".
FireWire is still expensive..does anyone know if this is inherent in its design?
ISTR a bit of fuss made a few months ago when Apple announced a new licensing scheme for Firewire.
Those companies that got in on the ground floor a few years ago had to pay $7500 (total) for the tachnology.
Those who only started licensing it recently are having to pay $1 per port and aren't too happy about it.
$1 doesn't sound like much but when you consider that that cost of manufacturing a Firewire port is around 20c (?), the cost of some of the devices that could be made with it (though most of the cheap ones will use USB instead), and the number of these things that some companies could be using it's significant.
They were promising something similar to 3Dfx's Glide to be released for Linux early this year.
That is, a binary-only library that sits between the hardware and Mesa/X