While I, though perhaps not to the extent that most of you take it, love my internet porn, I have to side with the state legislature on this item. Utah, known for it's very conservative bent due to the overwhelming majority of its citizens being Mormons, has every right to shape the law to fit their "community standards".
This isn't about any sort of Freedom of Speech issue. No one is banning the creation of internet porn inside the state. That is still covered by the Freedom of Speech clause. However, access to such is not a right, at least to those of a certain philosophical mind.
I hope that there is no further erosion of the concept of State's Rights as fallout from this.
The most important thing is the data. You can even use something simple like the Excel (or Gnumeric) spreadsheet "best fit" plotting algorithm to the data, if you've got it.
But from all the stuff I've seen, there are always huge gaps where they are either assuming much lower average temperatures or are leaving the data out altogether and relying on a very short recent timespan to extrapolate into the future.
While I think that they are full of shit, for the most part, I do admit that having multiple tornados tear apart LA and a giant deep-freeze kill off all the Scots would be pretty cool.
I was going to say "Bah, what's the use", but this is actually really cool.
Put aside that it's running Linux for a minute. Who cares what software is running it? Not important.
What is important is that we are finally moving away, on a hardware level, from flat, 2 dimensional displays. While the "Help me Obi-one Kenobi" 3D displays are still a long way off (or disappeared a long, long time ago), this is an immense step forward.
They are trying to sell ice to Eskimos! Sand to scorpions! Dentistry to Britons!
Well, that last one doesn't really fit the theme of what I was getting at. Which was: You can't sell something to someone who can get it for themselves for free.
Ever notice how Apple was doing really poorly when they were providing dozens of different system configurations on a fairly large handful of Mac platforms, and were suffering because of it?
The problem was that the consumers simply didn't understand which computer most favorably matched their criteria.
I see the same thing here with Intel's lineup. What is what? Why is this M? Why is that Centrino? WTF does "Extreme" mean in relation to a CPU?
It wasn't until Steve Jobs was able to cut through the bullshit and bring the Mac lineup back to 2 basic consumer platforms that Apple was able to enjoy the benefits of the Apple brand. Until Steve came back, it was just another PC outfit. Now, with Jobs at the helm, and through his seemingly infinite ability to grasp consumer wants and needs, Apple is enjoying a resurgence in popularity and relevance.
Without someone with a grand vision like Steve Jobs, Intel is going to continue suffering through doldrums trying to guide the market with its "alphabet soup" (which you so very astutely coined) without actually listening to the consumers.
I love you suckers out there who are buying these top of the line, bleeding edge chips. It brings the price of "outdated" hardware back to reasonable levels.
Now if you excuse me, I have a 486 DX4 100MHz that I've been keeping an eye on for a while.
So the main point seems to be that there will be a preferential class of packets that will be guaranteed to have some level of service such that the packets arrive quickly and in order. The bad part is that all other traffic will remain at the same old unguaranteed service level.
Well, that's what we have now.
Face it, the reason people use VoIP is because it is cheap/free, not because it has superior QoS than POTS. Throw in compression and encryption and you're talking about some pretty serious degradation of service.
Yes, I know it's hard to believe, but not everyone is on the bi-annual hardware upgrade cycle.
And if you think that the weakest links in the IT department are the computers being used, then you're part of the problem. Hint: the problem lies in the parts you can't upgrade.
This is the primary thing you need to remember about Free Software. You can't take it.
You can borrow it. You can improve it. You can give it to all your friends.
But you can't take it.
The copyright doesn't belong to you. It belongs to the guy who licensed the Free Software to you in the first place. Sure, you may own the copyright to the little bit of code that you wrote yourself, but you are forced to release that code under the Free Software license of your licensor's choosing. Not really free for you, the developer, eh?
Well, that's because the GPL is communism, and I like it that way.
Mozilla is Free Software.
This is misread by almost everyone in the business community and more seriously almost everyone in the OSS community. Even the originator of the concept (RMS) doesn't fully grasp the depth of the statement as he has become one of the proponents of what I call "the Free Software Lie". The Lie is that the "Free" in Free Software is freedom for the developer. It is NOT.
The Freedom referred to in Free Software is freedom for the software under the GPL. Because of the license, the Software has gained Freedom from being exploited in a commercial sense. It is Free from the possibility of being exploited for personal gain of a company. It ceases to be a slave.
It is precisely unfit for business or for personal forks because of those things that give it its freedom. Companies can't imprison or hide the software and remain in the good graces of the GPL and copyright law. If you want a license that grants developers rights, then stick with the BSD (UnFree) license. If you care about the Freedom of Software, then go with the GPL.
They may be human, but without life they are no more "beings" than corpses. We have no qualms about harvesting organs from dead donors, but seem to have some knee jerk reaction to harvesting a few extremely useful cells from dead, young, human flesh.
You can't even say it's a "respect for human life" thing, because if that were the case those babies wouldn't have been aborted in the first place. The ban on harvesting of fetal stem cells is a huge setback to the progress of science.
While this development may be useful in the short term, hopefully in the longterm our politicians will be able to remove the blinders and fundamentalist yokes that they have placed on scientists in this century.
Stem cells save lives. What better way to honor those who died to contribute them than to pass on the benefits of their organs?
Mozilla Thunderbird can't auto-select Japanese fonts appropriately, IN JAPAN!
Not that that has anything to do with Debian, but seeing as how Thunderbird is the premiere "Next Generation" Linux mail reader, it would help if it worked correctly for the languages over in Asia.
The first is that it is a terrible injustice that these spammers won't spend 9 years in jail and have to pay $7,500 for each spam that was received. The second is that this judge is stepping way over the bounds of interpreting and applying the law and is (as it is commonly referred to) "legistlating from the bench" by declaring the punishment to not fit the crime.
The third way to look at this is that Free Speech has won the day. To this way of thinking, another attempt to squash the little guy with a big mouth has failed.
I believe it was Voltaire who said, "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."
Of course he was also known to say, "A witty saying proves nothing."
I like to take it with me to the computer store to try out on the various laptops I am considering buying. If Knoppix doesn't have any trouble with the device drivers, I feel comfortable buying the laptop. If it runs into some issues, I can scratch that laptop off my list. And since it doesn't have any longterm effect on the existing OS, it can be loaded on with impunity.
That's how I decided which fileservers to buy to run my distribution center.
They don't go into it in the article, but Solaris has slowly begun more and more modular (kind of like NetBSD without all that pesky hardware support).
So much so, in fact, that I have several stripped down versions running as various embedded "smart" devices around the office. One is obviously the router, but others include a firewall, file server, and PBX. The best hack I've done so far with this is the Solaris 10 Roomba, but the battery life is really bad.
Solaris is great on the server, but don't discount its abilities on the small platforms!
I'd normally write this in my journal, but for some reason I can't seem to get to it.
I am having some pretty severe shooting pains from the base of my neck down to my left wrist. Coupled with a strange "squeezing" in my chest, and shortness of breath, I'm a little worried.
Only a couple more hours of work. I might hop out and see the doc then.
Any company, even one as evil and condescending as Microsoft, needs to engage their customers. It is just a rule of business that if you don't listen to your customers they will leave you.
Apple computers, under the steady hand of Steve Jobs is magnificent in this regard. They seem to be leading the market in certain directions, but it is more that Steve Jobs is tuned into the customer zeitgeist that he "leads" the customers by following them and providing them with what they want.
RedHat seems to have finally learned this lesson. After throwing out a lot of goodwill by leaving their best customers in the dust (by bringing out the largely incompatible Fedora distro), they seem to have caught on that they need to be where their customers are, not where they want their customers to be.
Considering the population of Britain, and especially comparing it to the population of a huge country like the United States, that little group of TV-program pirates take up a huge amount of bandwidth.
I guess you can understand the low volume in the U.S., the television programs, though low in quality, are high in production value. I've never seen a high-production value British program. That kind of glitter and chintz keeps people coming back to American programming (which, aside from Japanese anime porn) is what I figure these downloaders are interested in.
Face it. On the evolutionary scale, we're all still fascinated by der blinkenlights.
At least not in any way beyond waving them around and acting brave. The real waging of war is done with guns, tanks, and the occasional butcher's knife.
I hope they find the plutonium, though. Marty McFly needs to get back to the future.
(First off, let's just get out of the way the fact that if they were using Macintoshes instead of Windows, they'd be secure by default.)
But in another related vein, the Freedom of Information Act makes the process of hacking into a government computer system essentially mute. Whereas it took a lot of effort to break in and sirens went off when you were caught, now it is just a matter of saying "I want XYZ information" and the government hands it over on a silver platter.
Since computer security is the least of the problems that the DHUD faces, perhaps they'd better spend money on training their officers rather than buying the latest and greatest obsolete laptops for their chiefs.
Sometimes, when I feel most let down by Steve Jobs for doing something that just seems to be contrary to the very Apple-nature of the company, he makes a decisive reversal of tack and makes everything all right again.
No one wants to see the fans and lovers of the Macintosh persecuted for trying to find ways to love the company more, and that's what this is: just another way for Mac fans to find out more about the company.
On the other hand, it is perfectly understandable, as it is part of business, to keep future plans as secret as possible to keep the dogs on Wall Street at bay. However, it was really disappointing to see Apple trying to exact its revenge on those who love it the most.
I'm glad Steve Jobs made this decision. He continues to lead the company in the right direction and bringing us, the loyal Apple fans, the most advanced computers of today.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone call Steve Irwin!
While I, though perhaps not to the extent that most of you take it, love my internet porn, I have to side with the state legislature on this item. Utah, known for it's very conservative bent due to the overwhelming majority of its citizens being Mormons, has every right to shape the law to fit their "community standards".
This isn't about any sort of Freedom of Speech issue. No one is banning the creation of internet porn inside the state. That is still covered by the Freedom of Speech clause. However, access to such is not a right, at least to those of a certain philosophical mind.
I hope that there is no further erosion of the concept of State's Rights as fallout from this.
The most important thing is the data. You can even use something simple like the Excel (or Gnumeric) spreadsheet "best fit" plotting algorithm to the data, if you've got it.
But from all the stuff I've seen, there are always huge gaps where they are either assuming much lower average temperatures or are leaving the data out altogether and relying on a very short recent timespan to extrapolate into the future.
While I think that they are full of shit, for the most part, I do admit that having multiple tornados tear apart LA and a giant deep-freeze kill off all the Scots would be pretty cool.
I was going to say "Bah, what's the use", but this is actually really cool.
Put aside that it's running Linux for a minute. Who cares what software is running it? Not important.
What is important is that we are finally moving away, on a hardware level, from flat, 2 dimensional displays. While the "Help me Obi-one Kenobi" 3D displays are still a long way off (or disappeared a long, long time ago), this is an immense step forward.
They are trying to sell ice to Eskimos! Sand to scorpions! Dentistry to Britons!
Well, that last one doesn't really fit the theme of what I was getting at. Which was: You can't sell something to someone who can get it for themselves for free.
Ever notice how Apple was doing really poorly when they were providing dozens of different system configurations on a fairly large handful of Mac platforms, and were suffering because of it?
The problem was that the consumers simply didn't understand which computer most favorably matched their criteria.
I see the same thing here with Intel's lineup. What is what? Why is this M? Why is that Centrino? WTF does "Extreme" mean in relation to a CPU?
It wasn't until Steve Jobs was able to cut through the bullshit and bring the Mac lineup back to 2 basic consumer platforms that Apple was able to enjoy the benefits of the Apple brand. Until Steve came back, it was just another PC outfit. Now, with Jobs at the helm, and through his seemingly infinite ability to grasp consumer wants and needs, Apple is enjoying a resurgence in popularity and relevance.
Without someone with a grand vision like Steve Jobs, Intel is going to continue suffering through doldrums trying to guide the market with its "alphabet soup" (which you so very astutely coined) without actually listening to the consumers.
I love you suckers out there who are buying these top of the line, bleeding edge chips. It brings the price of "outdated" hardware back to reasonable levels.
Now if you excuse me, I have a 486 DX4 100MHz that I've been keeping an eye on for a while.
So the main point seems to be that there will be a preferential class of packets that will be guaranteed to have some level of service such that the packets arrive quickly and in order. The bad part is that all other traffic will remain at the same old unguaranteed service level.
Well, that's what we have now.
Face it, the reason people use VoIP is because it is cheap/free, not because it has superior QoS than POTS. Throw in compression and encryption and you're talking about some pretty serious degradation of service.
So, in summary, nothing to see here.
How's that old saying go?
Those that do not understand Lisp are doomed to reinvent it, badly.
Why can't someone reinvent C so that it sucks less?
Yes, I know it's hard to believe, but not everyone is on the bi-annual hardware upgrade cycle.
And if you think that the weakest links in the IT department are the computers being used, then you're part of the problem. Hint: the problem lies in the parts you can't upgrade.
This is the primary thing you need to remember about Free Software. You can't take it.
You can borrow it. You can improve it. You can give it to all your friends.
But you can't take it.
The copyright doesn't belong to you. It belongs to the guy who licensed the Free Software to you in the first place. Sure, you may own the copyright to the little bit of code that you wrote yourself, but you are forced to release that code under the Free Software license of your licensor's choosing. Not really free for you, the developer, eh?
Well, that's because the GPL is communism, and I like it that way.
Mozilla is Free Software.
This is misread by almost everyone in the business community and more seriously almost everyone in the OSS community. Even the originator of the concept (RMS) doesn't fully grasp the depth of the statement as he has become one of the proponents of what I call "the Free Software Lie". The Lie is that the "Free" in Free Software is freedom for the developer. It is NOT.
The Freedom referred to in Free Software is freedom for the software under the GPL. Because of the license, the Software has gained Freedom from being exploited in a commercial sense. It is Free from the possibility of being exploited for personal gain of a company. It ceases to be a slave.
It is precisely unfit for business or for personal forks because of those things that give it its freedom. Companies can't imprison or hide the software and remain in the good graces of the GPL and copyright law. If you want a license that grants developers rights, then stick with the BSD (UnFree) license. If you care about the Freedom of Software, then go with the GPL.
They may be human, but without life they are no more "beings" than corpses. We have no qualms about harvesting organs from dead donors, but seem to have some knee jerk reaction to harvesting a few extremely useful cells from dead, young, human flesh.
You can't even say it's a "respect for human life" thing, because if that were the case those babies wouldn't have been aborted in the first place. The ban on harvesting of fetal stem cells is a huge setback to the progress of science.
While this development may be useful in the short term, hopefully in the longterm our politicians will be able to remove the blinders and fundamentalist yokes that they have placed on scientists in this century.
Stem cells save lives. What better way to honor those who died to contribute them than to pass on the benefits of their organs?
Mozilla Thunderbird can't auto-select Japanese fonts appropriately, IN JAPAN!
Not that that has anything to do with Debian, but seeing as how Thunderbird is the premiere "Next Generation" Linux mail reader, it would help if it worked correctly for the languages over in Asia.
Here's the windup... And the pitch!
Return of the Jedi *foul*
The windup... And the pitch!
Phantom Menace *STRIKE*
The windup... And the pitch!
Attack of the Clones *YEEEERR OUT*
The first is that it is a terrible injustice that these spammers won't spend 9 years in jail and have to pay $7,500 for each spam that was received. The second is that this judge is stepping way over the bounds of interpreting and applying the law and is (as it is commonly referred to) "legistlating from the bench" by declaring the punishment to not fit the crime.
The third way to look at this is that Free Speech has won the day. To this way of thinking, another attempt to squash the little guy with a big mouth has failed.
I believe it was Voltaire who said, "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."
Of course he was also known to say, "A witty saying proves nothing."
I like to take it with me to the computer store to try out on the various laptops I am considering buying. If Knoppix doesn't have any trouble with the device drivers, I feel comfortable buying the laptop. If it runs into some issues, I can scratch that laptop off my list. And since it doesn't have any longterm effect on the existing OS, it can be loaded on with impunity.
That's how I decided which fileservers to buy to run my distribution center.
Maybe he means to say that Linus is a very bad manager that lacks the foresight and patience that a large project needs.
But "Software Engineer", "Programmer", and "Developer" are all synonyms.
They don't go into it in the article, but Solaris has slowly begun more and more modular (kind of like NetBSD without all that pesky hardware support).
So much so, in fact, that I have several stripped down versions running as various embedded "smart" devices around the office. One is obviously the router, but others include a firewall, file server, and PBX. The best hack I've done so far with this is the Solaris 10 Roomba, but the battery life is really bad.
Solaris is great on the server, but don't discount its abilities on the small platforms!
Yahoo, Apache, Ebay, Amazon, Netscape
One of these things is not the same kind.
I'd normally write this in my journal, but for some reason I can't seem to get to it.
I am having some pretty severe shooting pains from the base of my neck down to my left wrist. Coupled with a strange "squeezing" in my chest, and shortness of breath, I'm a little worried.
Only a couple more hours of work. I might hop out and see the doc then.
Any company, even one as evil and condescending as Microsoft, needs to engage their customers. It is just a rule of business that if you don't listen to your customers they will leave you.
Apple computers, under the steady hand of Steve Jobs is magnificent in this regard. They seem to be leading the market in certain directions, but it is more that Steve Jobs is tuned into the customer zeitgeist that he "leads" the customers by following them and providing them with what they want.
RedHat seems to have finally learned this lesson. After throwing out a lot of goodwill by leaving their best customers in the dust (by bringing out the largely incompatible Fedora distro), they seem to have caught on that they need to be where their customers are, not where they want their customers to be.
Considering the population of Britain, and especially comparing it to the population of a huge country like the United States, that little group of TV-program pirates take up a huge amount of bandwidth.
I guess you can understand the low volume in the U.S., the television programs, though low in quality, are high in production value. I've never seen a high-production value British program. That kind of glitter and chintz keeps people coming back to American programming (which, aside from Japanese anime porn) is what I figure these downloaders are interested in.
Face it. On the evolutionary scale, we're all still fascinated by der blinkenlights.
At least not in any way beyond waving them around and acting brave. The real waging of war is done with guns, tanks, and the occasional butcher's knife.
I hope they find the plutonium, though. Marty McFly needs to get back to the future.
(First off, let's just get out of the way the fact that if they were using Macintoshes instead of Windows, they'd be secure by default.)
But in another related vein, the Freedom of Information Act makes the process of hacking into a government computer system essentially mute. Whereas it took a lot of effort to break in and sirens went off when you were caught, now it is just a matter of saying "I want XYZ information" and the government hands it over on a silver platter.
Since computer security is the least of the problems that the DHUD faces, perhaps they'd better spend money on training their officers rather than buying the latest and greatest obsolete laptops for their chiefs.
Sometimes, when I feel most let down by Steve Jobs for doing something that just seems to be contrary to the very Apple-nature of the company, he makes a decisive reversal of tack and makes everything all right again.
No one wants to see the fans and lovers of the Macintosh persecuted for trying to find ways to love the company more, and that's what this is: just another way for Mac fans to find out more about the company.
On the other hand, it is perfectly understandable, as it is part of business, to keep future plans as secret as possible to keep the dogs on Wall Street at bay. However, it was really disappointing to see Apple trying to exact its revenge on those who love it the most.
I'm glad Steve Jobs made this decision. He continues to lead the company in the right direction and bringing us, the loyal Apple fans, the most advanced computers of today.