Forgive me but even a Linux-based PDA doesn't really thrill me. Here's why I feel they're useless:
Poor Input methods. It is annoying to try to write everything into it. What PDAs really need are voice recognition.
Poor connectivity. No one wants to plug them in. They should communicate using RF. They need to have at least 50KB/s wireless bandwidth so that you can get real information when you need it.
The batteries should last a lot longer. They should probably operate for a week between charges. 3 days might be acceptable.
The screens are not readable enough. When it's 75dpi in full color then we're getting somewhere.
All this obviates the need for faster processors and a much better cellular network. Obviously the PDAs should have built in phones and have a standard for exchanging data with everything from large databases on the Internet to other PDAs on the street. Until we get a lot closer to this point all PDAs should be called PDBCs: Personal, Digital, Ball & Chains.
First of all it is painfully obvious that you are deeply partisan to the Jewish/Israeli side of the conflict. Why, then, should we believe what you have said as objective truth?
Secondly, if your reasoning were to be applied to, for instance, the United States then all Anglos, Africans, Asians and their decendants should be exiled from North America because it belongs to the Native Americans who were here "several THOUSAND years ago" and who built great nations that were destroyed by European immigrants and settlers only a few hundred years ago. Does this illustrate the wrong-headedness of your and many other Jewish/Israeli defenses against their eviction of the Palestinians over that past several decades.
In the past all over the world there were very few checks on the powerful who wished to sieze more power or more land and influence. The peoples of the world were connected by fewer and weaker economic and social bonds. Cultural, geographic and technologoical diferences betwwen peoples allowed dominance of some nations or empires over others and the net destabilization of the invasion was low.
Today the world's cultures, nations and economies are much more interconnected and dependant upon eachother. Destabilization in one sphere has greater a destabilizing effect on the rest of the world than in times past. Additionally, liberal ideas and values have spread across the world. Subversion and subjugation of one people by another is no longer socially acceptable.
The Jewish reentrance to Palestine has come at a time when there is no longer popular acceptance of the kinds of suppression that the Jewish/Israeli people exert over the less powerful Palestinians. Popular sentiment against Israeli policy and condemning Israel's actions against the Palestinians was expressed clearly by the majority in the recent world conference against racism in Durban, South Africa.
The horrible and toughtless violence perpetrated by both sides in the Israeli conflict is damnable. It is true that the U.S. policy strongly supports Israel. However, this policy is clearly for net political and military/economic advantage. In an interconnected world, net advantages and disadvantages are more important than specific political issues. The U.S. must hold good standing in Israeli and Saudi relations in order to maintain military safeguards for the American economic assets in the Middle East region. Also, The historical U.S. support for Israel carries significance in that policy changes must not be made too quickly in order to maintain the credibility of the U.S. leaders, the policy that they execute and the regional stablity. To a lesser extent the democratic system in Israel must be supported as the expansion of democratic rule is a long term U.S. policy goal. The cultural differences between Israel and the U.S. are smaller than those between the U.S. leaders and the Arab and Musolem people. These factors are primary in the relationship with Israel and they weigh heavier than the plight of the Palestinian people. The Jewish Israeli's have taken advantage of this skillfully and caused great harm.
Personally, I find it highly embarrasing to live in a nation that supports the extermination of the Palestinian people. The onus for negotiating peace and combined prosperity in Israel lies with the Israel which has far greater wealth, power and political influence than the people they seem to blindly subjugate.
At this point the Israelis are fighting against a starving, and desperate enemy. Suicide bombing that is the mainstay of the Palestinian offensive is the extreme of desperation and implies a lack of rational thought. The Palestinian people have demonstrated that they are disorganized and without effective leadership. Therefore it must be Isreal's task to find a peaceful and equitable resolution. Assuredly, there will be no outcome but further terror and the eventual annihilation of the Palestinians without thoughtful peacemaking leadership on the part of the Isrealis.
Both answers are made up but since I'm the one making them up, I am quite sure they are correct.
Do you use Debian? There are many good reasons to use Debian and one of them is that if you use it you know you won't be using non-free software (if you so choose). This may not be important to you but I suspect that to many Debian users it is. In fact, it was the primary reason that Debian was created.
Someone else said that if Debian was a company and was doing this sort of culling of non-free documentation right before a distribution freeze then he would be selling stock. The person is obviously an example of the sort of person who does not care whatsoever about Free software, but more probably about free rides. Debian is not a company. It never will be. It never should be. Thank God. It exists to do exactly this sort of thing and I, for one, am supremely thankful.
It seems that nearly everyone has missed the point of this article. POVRay is a program that makes very heavy use of the FPU. ICC speeds up POVRay's performance by 16% to 28% in the x86 architecture compared to GCC. In other words x86 FPU's are faster executing code from programs built with ICC. The Linux kernel (and almost any kernel for that matter) has very little floating point code. Therefore one cannot assume that ICC would improve kernel performance, even if it could compile it.
The real story here is that the maintainers of GCC aught to look carefully at their optimization code for x86 FPUs.
I'm betting that Intel developers have done their best to make use of the P4 cache. Since Transmeta CPUs do work recompiling programs on the fly they have larger caches (128KB L1 + 512KB L2) than the Athlon (128KB L1 + 256KB L2) and the Pentium 4 (20? KB L1 and 256KB L2). ICC is probably also highly agressive in implimenting SSE and SSE2 instructions. Transmetal CPUs also use VLIW instructions in core wich are by their nature highly parallel (compared to native x86). Even if the Transmeta chips can't use SSE and SSE2 they may benefit from the parallel-oriented optimizations that ICC probably makes.
On a different note: in a program like POVRay that executes basically the same tight loop of instructions mega-gazillions of times during a scene the Transmeta chip's software can have the opportunity to highly optimize the program. I would like to see the stats on the second and third runs of that rendering to see how much the Transmeta "code morphing" improved the performance. It would be very interesting if the GCC and ICC built POVRays perfomed at almost the same speed after a few runs. It would obviously be a great proof of the value of Transmeta's design. I for one have always wondered what the code morphing stuff would be able to do if it were able to interface with the operating system and recompile and save the entire system back to the hard disk as it goes through the optimiztion processes. (I suppose that errors could be highly disasterous.)
That's just my $0.02 and I'm no expert so I could definately be wrong.
I think more important than the rest of this article is the IDE vs SCSI controversy. Anyone who has built more than a couple of PCs knows the rest of the issues that the article covers fairly well.
All of the comments here use only anecdotal evidence to state that one (ide or scsi) is better than the other. I think most people (me included) are not going to spend an extra $200 to $300 for the SCSI solution until we see thorough benchmarks with real-world numbers that show SCSI to make a significant difference.
On that note, what are some ways to generate real-usage benchmarks that would pertain to these I/O systems. Probably it would be good to compare onboard and offboard ultra-wide scsi and udma/13 along with hardware scsi and ide raid (in several configurations). What comes to mind first is database-intensive work. Well Slashdot? What benchmarks would work?
I don't think that anyone takes the kernel versioning as seriously as they used to. I thought that stable kernels were not supposed to include any really new core features but mostly just bug fixes and perhaps new drivers, etc.
Rik's VM should have either showed up in the 2.3 tree and been stabilized there before entering 2.4 or the 2.5 tree should have been opened with it. I guess since 2.4 had to be pushed out the door (and I'm glad it was) there was no time for his VM to mature inside 2.3. But would it be worthwhile to let those ideas stagnate? So much really new activity has been going on since 2.4 that perhaps it would be too hard to manage 2.4 and 2.5 kernels with lots of active development going on both simultaneously.
It seems to me to be a hard management decision to make. The 2.4 series needed a lot of fixes and at the same time there has been a lot of new stuff floating around. Would introducing the 2.5 a few versions ago have slowed development on 2.4 and increased overall patch-management headaches? I suppose the answer is yes but I don't have an idea about how badly it would slow things down.
I do think, however, that it is wonderful to have both Linus and Alan Cox around and maintaining diverging credible trees. They can both gain perspective watching the other's code grow and break. When the two trees do finally merge again we (hopefully) will have the best characteristics of both.
Okay so there is a limit to how big a roof-top mesh network can scale with a single network access point but what about a different configuration?
Where I live many people have cable-modem and/or DSL network access. How can the wireless mesh be used to dynamically route packets to the internet if many points on the mesh are connected to the internet via various ISP links? Is it technically possible? Is it practical?
I have 384kbit bandwidth both ways on my DSL line whereas most people have 768down/128up connections. Sometimes I wish I had that extra 384kbit inbound. What is the liklihood that a mesh with 5 gateways (using different ISPs) distributed over 20 nodes could provide on-average much better bandwidth to the entire network?
First of all here's the quick course to getting your PhD in CPU Fans:
Buy a fan that is approved for your processor.
Read the instructions related to fans that come with the motherboard. I.E. don't put it on backwards
Don't forget to plug it in.
Secondly, I've used Athlons and Durons for over a year and a half. I've built over 100 systems for customers based on these processors and AMD and VIA -based motherboards. I've never had a problem with any of the CPU's or motherboards that took any more effort to fix than checking the manufacturer's website for driver fixes. In all cases the driver fix was already available. I have only ever had 1 problem using Linux. That problem was not chipset related but really a problem with the Linux kernel/drivers relating to the built-in Promise IDE "RAID" controller on a VIA board and I have. Before I could submit the kernel OOPS report there was already an Alan Cox patch available.
I agree that the cooling situtation should be addressed but it really only pertains to situations where the computer undergoes vibration (such as UPS shipping) that sometimes will knock cards out of slots and cables out of connectors. In all the machines that I have built, I have yet to have one die a heat-death.
You cannot honestly knock the AMD-based systems on their technical merits.
So obviously Athlons and Durons are not reliable without a reliable heat-sink/fan solution. However, the price/performance of the AMD chips cannot be beat. This is a dilemma for computer "consultants". Suppose, for instance, that you have a customer--a small business--that needs a new server (firewall/file/web/email). You choose an AMD Duron plus a large case with extra air-flow fans, air filters and a big "expensive" heat-sink/fan.
I've used several Athlons and Durons for a few years now and never had a heat-sink/fan fall off but I've had one fan fail (about 1 in 10). There are several issues that make building the system and insuring its reliability harder than with P4 systems:
To test the fans you really have to turn the system on. Some motherboards will power the fan without having a CPU in the socket but some will not. Is it damaging to the motherboard to run without a CPU? Probably not, but possibly, yes.
Since the Athlons and Durons do require good heat sinks and since there is no "heat slug" on the chip packaging one must be fairly careful when attaching the heat sink in order not to damage the "silicon" (or whatever that central rectangle thingie is).
Since the heat-sink must be very tightly coupled to chip, the attachment mechanism puts a lot of stress on a) the plastic socket b) the "silicon" itself due to the spring.
The pins under the socket that attach it to the motherboard undergo stress from the weight of the fan/heat-sink and the vibration of the fan.
All of these issues contribute to increased liklihood of system failure. While it is true that P3 systems have about the same but slightly less likelihood of failure due to similiar mechanical problems, the P4 solution really is much better than the others in that the heat sink is mechanically attached to the motherboard/chassis rather than only the socket.
I have noticed that many Athlon/Duron motherboards have holes around the CPU socket, presumably for a heat-sink/fan mechanism that will attach thru the holes to the chassis or at least around the motherboard but I have yet to see a cooling solution for these boards that makes use of those holes. Of course this does not address the fact that many Athlon (especially the cheaper) motherboards have capicitors nearby the socket that physically block the installation of many of the larger cooling devices. So one is left with the following questions:
How can I ensure that the cooling solution is attached in such a way that it induces the least stress on the socket, the "silicon" and on the motherboard?
What are the best options for monitoring the CPU temperature in Unix systems and is it possible to make the system automatically shut down so that a) the data is safe and b) the hardware is safe and c) the SA is notified.
That said, I continue to use, recommend and sell AMD-based systems but I would sleep better at night if I knew that the system was not liable to die when (not if) the fan fails.
While pondering of all this a thought comes to mind: The newest hardware is just not as mechanically reliable as the systems of olde (Remember how physically solid the IBM PS/2 systems were? Even the older Macintoshes could take a lot more physical abuse than today's stuff). Is it possible to build something using what is available today ("off the shelf") that approaches being as mechanically solid as what used to come out of IBM, Sun and DEC?
Shipping by ship DOES NOT take months. You were just talking out of your ass. The circumference of the earth is about 22,000 miles. Freight ships regularly travel at or above 30 nautical miles per hour which is about 34.5 statute miles per hour. At that rate it would take just over 26 days to travel around the world by ship. Crossing the Pacific ocean probably takes a week or less. Shipping has almost nothing to do with the delay. The real problem is just business and marketing. All of these things and more must be done before the product is hits US store shelves: There are import and export regulations for which paperwork must be done. Deals must be made with advertising firms and retail stores. English manuals and interfaces must be designed.
The game companies and console companies use the reaction of the Japanese market to gauge what sort of effort they should put into the English-speaking markets. Thus a few months probably go by before they invest in most of the work that it takes to launch the English version. Microsoft is playing it the same way. If they really wanted to they could launch both products at the same time but they're just too lazy (it doesn't make much business sense).
while I was writing an email to the author of that article the mozilla email composer program crashed:( *sigh* I guess there are still _some_ serious and probably elusive bugs to fix but on the whole I like Mozilla better than the "competition." Yes, I've tried them all.
When I was in 1st grade ('81) and supposed to be learning to read my teachers and my parents were very concerned because Jane and Spot and Dick were _not_ running and at the rate I was going they were not really even crawling. It was Christmas time and Mom and dad talked to me and they told me I was going to a different school when the new year started (to a class for those with learning disabilities.)
Santa brought us a TI-99/4A that Christmas and it came with a couple of joysticks and a speech synth (I had wanted an Atari, like the neighbors had). At the time, most of my waking thoughts were dedicated to the wonders of C3PO and R2D2. I knew that I could not make a robot but I thought that perhaps I could make the TI-99 talk to me. I spent all of that vacation pouring over the BASIC programming manuals and mostly I drew diamonds, hearts and turtles on the screen and made it beep. Most of this time was away from my folks and one night after a particularly frustrating day trying to find the documentation for the speech synth. I brought the BASIC reference manual (w/ Picture of Bill Cosby on the back) to my Dad and asked him what was the meaning of the word "Syntax."
Dad: Rob, where'd you hear that word?"
Me: I read it in the book, dad.
Dad: No, Rob, you can't read that. Who told you that word?
Me: Really, dad, I read it right here, "SIN-tax," what does it mean? Syntax Error?
Dad: Sylvia! Get over here! Rob, read some other words on the page to me.
Me: Dad, I just wanna know what it means. I keep seeing it when the type-a-writing is wrong.
Dad: What do you mean? Type-a-write?
Me: How do I type-a-write, so I can make the computer talk?.......
I stayed in my regular classes and from then on mom and dad taught me to read.
Well, it's that time of the year again when some randomly chosen, poorly-funded company (or misguided individual) decides to go thumbing theier noses at the generous, enlightened hackers who free their code to make the code better and to make the world better. What are they thinking? "Fuck 'em! What are they gonna do about it?" is what they're thinking.
We're smart. We have the GPL.
Hasn't stood the test of trial yet, but it looks pretty damn good. That's all we need. GPL is a technical and legal instrument and was conceived as such. But we are finding that it has an emergent property: Not even the dumbest of dumbasses is going to publically defend themselves in court for "stealing" GPL'd code. Not only are they stealing from someone who was toughtfull and kind enough to free their code for everyone but they're stealing from everyone who would ever use it.
It is P.R. suicide. It is the equivilant labeling your tuna cans with stickers that read: "This product contains 10% dolphin, we just grind 'em up and chuck 'em in with your fish cause they're too stupid to stay out of our nets. Goes great on standwiches."
Before fast food those of us who work 3 jobs ate something called a "sack lunch". You are bright enough to recognize that the letters on the keyboard correlate to letters on the screen but you are still dumb enough to make such a comment? Troll.
Is it *BAD* that Intel will own (and destroy) Alpha? YES.
Alpha was constructed by engineers for customers who prioritize quality over cost. Alpha owners have passion for quality. They are themselves engineers and scientists who want a Rolls Royce -class computing machine.
Intel does not make top-notch hardware. Intel makes ugly, nasty, practical devices (sometimes even "practical" is a stretch). Go check your hotmail with a Pentium III just as you would make your daily commute in a Honda Accord. No one is going to care.
Push forward the limits fluid-dynamics simulation with an Alpha cluster as you would joy-ride the Autobahn in an Accura NSX.
Do you see the point yet? There's nothing wrong with Intel making a gazillion dollars selling the IT equivalent of a Chevy truck to most of the world. What is wrong is that we (admittedly very small few) who want grace, beauty and power in our number-crunching machinery have lost one of the gems that defined the "genere".
Not everyone can afford an Alpha or a Ferrari. That doesn't mean that we should allow them to be quashed by Intel.
Of course we're snobby. We are the hackers and the geeks. You are the ignorant (and appearantly the lazy). Go re-certify your MCSE and we aren't going to pay attention to your whoring much less put you down for it. But break our toys and we're going to give you two black eyes.
Don't encrypt your casual emails. It requires overhead work by both parties and is superflous. If you must encrypt your emails then both parties will understand why and they will have the required motivation to get the job done which is very easy with GPG for GNU/Linux and PGP for windows bastards. Mac users... i dunno. They like to do things their own way so what are the chances they'll agree to your standard? I'm sure they will figure out a way to use it if they have to. (i.e. i dunno anything about macs---except G4's are sweet).
How do you sort through all the data? Discard most of it.
How do you get around detection of a tap?
Put the tap in before the cable is finished. Or maybe...
Use a method no one here knows about Or perhaps...
Tap at the repeater & modify the reflection/check signals that it emits. Maybe? Maybe you could...
You build the _special_ repeater into the cable during manufacturing.
How do you get all that data to a supercomputer for sorting and decryption? Probably, you don't. You do traffic analysis and you transmit a very small amount of data to a buoy that transmits to your satellite. Or you remove/insert data in your dummy packets that go between NSA machines on several continents. Also, you put the supercomputer on the nuclear submarine so that any time you _really_ need to sort through some data your sub can link up with your special repeater.
For what else might this be useful? How about inserting noise or false data into the "Enemy's" messages?
This sounds like an awful lot of trouble to go through. Yea, but wouldn't it be fun to get paid to hack like this?
I think that we're pretty low on the curve of being able to find stuff in general, let alone inteligent life. I for one loose my keys and my wallet almost every day for at period of about five minutes and then there's my cell phone for which I sometimes conduct near-exhaustive searches of my domain only to find that it is in my pocket. I'm not the brightest but I know that there are a shitload of people dumber than me (e.g. Clinton/Gore supporters and the 70-odd percent of the population that believes in creationism instead of darwinsim). Granted some of the brightest minds on the planet are doing the searching but the fact that they rely on us--the ignorant masses--for their survival shows pretty clearly that they're no even near optimal vs. our actual capacity to conduct the search.
If the life is truely intelligent then it is avioding us because lord knows we're not too friendly. If you are an inteligent species outside of the planet earth and less powerful than us we'll probably conquer you and if you're more powerful then we'll do whatever we can to become more powerful so that we may later conquer you. Why do I think so? Well, that's pretty much been our modus operandus for all of recorded history.
Then there's the issue of what we can reliably detect. We do know for certian that every one of our ideas about physics basically only works in the domain we can easily observe and even sometimes in our observable domain we don't have good ways to explain what the hell is going on. Add the problem that we're pretty sure that most of the universe consists of dark matter and dark energy that we can't even detect yet and you get the idea that as our gaze wonders past the limits of our biosphere our quality of perception decreases (i'm guessing!) exponentially.
There's some major drawbacks to our existance that I think will stunt our ability to overcome our myopia. One is the fact that we're trapped in linear time and we can only traverse our time in a single direction at a fixed rate. Also we live in only 3 physical dimentions. While this 3D existance seems pretty advanced to us (ask SGI or Nvidia) there's plenty of scientists out there much smarter than I am who are embarassed to try to even explain how we're missing out on the action in the higher echelons of dimentionality (why?--even the small portion of us who even accept the idea that there are more dimentions tend to forget about it pretty easily which is illustrated by the death-rate for passengers of motor-vehicles.)
Do I think we should give up because we won't find anything anyhow?Hell no! We aught to pour all our money and resources into searching, colonizing and exploring outer space. We've got nuclear weapons, acid rain, rising sea levels and major league baseball. That is proof enough for me that this planet is fucked and it really is time to move on. I, for one, have a lot of new and exciting ideas for how we can screw up other habitats and no one is going to let me try that stuff around here. I want to move on.
If you haven't noticed the USA is the most powerful and free country in the world because it was created by people who habitually run away from civilization because they would rather try to survive alone in an (relatively) unknown wilderness than live with the schmuks they grew up with. Did I mention that a lot of the time the wilderness to which they ran posed significant threats of death, dismemberment or even boredom. Well guess what? There's no more wilderness! We filled it with schmuks! The implication here is that we're going to have either learn to live with eachother or devolve into a society similar to the europeans and probably become, like them, a bunch of socialist wimps with traditions and culture and all that other garbage. We need space! It's our final frontier!
I will give everything I own and hold dear to anyone who can get me off this rock to someplace where I can be away from the rest of these jerks--even if there is significant danger of boredom! Long live NASA. Long live SETI (but not too long because it goddamned better start working soon or i'm going to have to detonate a nuclear device).
Cordially,
Rob
Many years of experience as a cable installer (aka cable rat--no, not tv cables) and many, many problems I have encountered have taught me these things. Your mileage may vary.
Hidden metal conduit (large) - this is not strictly required but it has so many benefits that I will devote a whole paragraph to it below this list.
Conduit MUST have large radius (>= 8") bends at "corners."
IF you are too cheap for metal conduit use PVC conduit
IF you are too cheap to use PVC conduit then remember to try to keep your cables away from ceiling fans (motors) flourescent lights (again, ceiling--ballast type) and to all practical extent AC power wiring. In general avoid strong dynamic electrical/magnetic field areas. See notes below.
CAT 5 is cheap. Run two lines to each port box and make sure you put in more port boxes than you think you need - remember murphy.
Two seperate hub sites are better than one. Remember to have electricity available to your alternate hub site.
When you run your cables ALWAYS attach at least one string (NYLON TWINE) to the traveling end of the cable that will snake through your route. The string(s) will stay in the route with the installed cable. This way you can use the string to pull a new (extra) cable easily through the route when (not if) you decide to add a new one between existing ports.
When you add more cables to your route at a later date repeat the string method so you have it for yet another future cable.
Use large breakout (port) boxes in your walls - (i like double-wide) not only will this allow you to add more ports per box but it reduces the chance that you will overbend or break a copper cable when you install them in the port. Use the boxes that are made for data cables NOT boxes made for AC outlets.
If you use the string method in conjunction with the large (METAL!) conduit method you will enjoy up-front savings and ease of future upgrades.
Greased pipes route easier than dry ones. find some non-conductive jelly and slather it on your wires as you feed them.
If you are going to buy a cable snake kit buy the expensive one.
Yes, you want a patch panel.
Yes, your patch panel(s) aught to have twice as many ports as you have cables.
A screw-driver is NOT a punch-down tool.
Don't try to make your own patch cables. (Patch cables are the cables that go from NIC to wall-port). Yes you can make them and they will work (sometimes) but it's just not worth the time. If you want to learn to make them then learn after you've done the installation job.
Buy at least 1.5x as much cable as you think you need. You will loose pieces.
Before you terminate long cable runs at patch-panels coil your cable 3 times in a 12 to 18 inch loop. You will thank yourself later for having that slack. Secure the cable to something stable along it's route just before it attaches to the patch-panel. Secure the coil so no one can yank it. Someone is going to tug on the cable someday. Don't make it easy to tug the wires out of the panel.
Use a two-piece wiring (continuity) tester on your installed cables before you attach a computer. The tester will cost at least $50 or it will be free because you bummed one off your friend, all others are trash. Unplug your tester's (9V) battery after you are done with it because it will switch itself on during storage and run the battery out.
Never attempt to route cables by yourself. Bring a friend and bring a couple of "walkie-talkies." Otherwise you will suffer infinite frustration.
If you haven't gathered by now using conduit is so far superior to not using it that I really shouldn't have mentioned not using it. If you use conduit you will almost never have to climb up into the attic (again) later. If you use metal conduit you will protect your wires from all manner of electrical, magnetic and soccer fields. Clumsy people such as air-conditiong repair men who crawl thruough the attic will not step on or trip over your wires-just the condiut which will survive the encounter. Stored-in-attic junk will fall on the condiut and won't slice the wires or worse damage them so that they work only sometimes. If you use condiut you will not hate adding more cables to your routes. If you use condiut you will improve your karma.
Remember that HQ analog audio cables are always expensive-otherwise they are stolen or broken. Long HQ analog audio cables hate radio waves-especially digital cell phones. They should not be routed in the same condiut as copper data cables.
Wireless networks are almost always insecure. Also, they don't like microwaves.
Coaxial cable (for television, etc) is generally ok next to cat5 copper.
That you would want to wear clothes. What is the point of being in the sun with clothes on?
<P>
<P>Americans... sheesh.
<P>
<P>Also, it sounds like these things are not going to work so well after a few cycles through the washer and dryer.
I think it's kind of reminiscent of (escape from LA?) where the hollywood plastic/transplant surgeon would remove live people's organs and other body parts for transplant to a wealthy paying customer. Why settle for big fake boobs when you can have the real thing(s)?
Somehow I don't think we will ultimately be satisfied until we can slice, dice, improve, remove and recycle every piece of our bodies. Like the video game advertising article (basically) said: people just take for granted that things get worse as marketers and producers find new ways to make a buck. We just take it in stride.
For how much money will you sell your extra kidney? Left arm? Spleen?
He is not a communist.
He does not hate corporations.
He does not want to steal your property.
It infuriates me when people lash out against Stallman because they think he goes too far or they think he misrepresents them.
If you think he is too stubbornly stuck on Freedom then you're entitled to your opinion but it is stupid to attack him for his opinion. He has made a great contribution to our society. What good comes of attempting to discredit him and his work? To do so reveals your own malignance. I challenge you to go make your own contribution.
If you think Stallman misrepresents you then don't attack him. Instead, make your own opinion heard. He is defending his code and his rights. He is defending the rights of all of us who believe in the freedom of speech. He is defending all those who subscribe to the philosophy of the GPL. If you don't like Free Software then go promote your own Open Source software or your proprietary software. Don't stoop to Ad Hominem arguements to promote your ideas. Again, it only exposes your own lack of character.
"...when people have to tell you you're being oppressed, something is most definitely amiss.
"
Maybe you don't feel oppressed using proprietary software. I think most people who don't write code don't feel too opressed. But most people also intuitively know they should be able to copy and distribute software freely. That's why most people will make an "illegal" copy of MS Word or Windows for their friends. They don't have to hate Microsoft, but they know that a proprietary software copyright holder should not have the right to tell you what you can (and can't) do with your copy.
Stallman is a generous, honest and brilliant man. Instead of attacking him, I challenge you to emuate him.
I am a technician at a company that specializes in making military gizmos that no one else in the world really knows how to make. It is run and owned by engineers--PhD's and Masters grads. If you do not have a BS, your opinion does not count. Certianly mine does not.
Our resident electrical engineer and programmer thinks AOL is a pretty good way to get on the internet, though our network is connected via T1. He made our webpage with MS Frontpage. It takes too long to load....
When one of our technicians who is well versed in Perl and PHP and has built several commercial websites offered the opinion that Frontpage was a waste of time and money and I offered that our server could serve our web-pages in-house and save us $65/mo. Our opinions were summarily dismissed. My suggestion was ignored again later when they were having hellaciuos problems with the web server provider being unreliable and unreachable. Later someone asked me why I thought I could tell anything to an Engineer with a masters degree....I don't even have a BS.
Our server was "too slow". It is a P150 w/ 32MB ram running Windows 3.1. The hard drive runs in PIO mode 3. One engineer offered that we should buy a faster machine for the server...no, too expensive. The server crashes too much.....so we installed Windows NT 4 Workstation and added 32MB ram. "How come I can't copy files when theres jobs on the print que?"....a technician who has written Linux kernel drivers for his custom IO cards on his home rig mentioned that FreeBSD might be more efficient on our server.
Engineer: "What's FreeBSD?"
Tech/Net Admin: "a free server OS, like UNIX."
Engineer: "oh those free programs are toys, no one takes them seriously and they aren't ready for business... Besides, no one here knows how to use FreeUnix."
Tech/ Admin: "Actually, all of the technicians here use Linux and some use FreeBSD at home."
Engineer: "None of the engineers know how to use it so we can't use toys like that here."
Tech/ Net Admin.: "Right, but we maintain the server for you guys already"
Engineer: "We just can't afford to run something that none of the engineers can fix if they run into a problem when no Tech is around"
Tech / Net Admin: "uhhhh....right, we--um--need to spend $1000 on a new server."
Engineer: "Oh well, I guess we're stuck with what we've got. Sometimes you guys come up with the craziest ideas..."
Slashdot Mirror
- Poor Input methods. It is annoying to try to write everything into it. What PDAs really need are voice recognition.
- Poor connectivity. No one wants to plug them in. They should communicate using RF. They need to have at least 50KB/s wireless bandwidth so that you can get real information when you need it.
- The batteries should last a lot longer. They should probably operate for a week between charges. 3 days might be acceptable.
- The screens are not readable enough. When it's 75dpi in full color then we're getting somewhere.
All this obviates the need for faster processors and a much better cellular network. Obviously the PDAs should have built in phones and have a standard for exchanging data with everything from large databases on the Internet to other PDAs on the street. Until we get a lot closer to this point all PDAs should be called PDBCs: Personal, Digital, Ball & Chains.Secondly, if your reasoning were to be applied to, for instance, the United States then all Anglos, Africans, Asians and their decendants should be exiled from North America because it belongs to the Native Americans who were here "several THOUSAND years ago" and who built great nations that were destroyed by European immigrants and settlers only a few hundred years ago. Does this illustrate the wrong-headedness of your and many other Jewish/Israeli defenses against their eviction of the Palestinians over that past several decades.
In the past all over the world there were very few checks on the powerful who wished to sieze more power or more land and influence. The peoples of the world were connected by fewer and weaker economic and social bonds. Cultural, geographic and technologoical diferences betwwen peoples allowed dominance of some nations or empires over others and the net destabilization of the invasion was low.
Today the world's cultures, nations and economies are much more interconnected and dependant upon eachother. Destabilization in one sphere has greater a destabilizing effect on the rest of the world than in times past. Additionally, liberal ideas and values have spread across the world. Subversion and subjugation of one people by another is no longer socially acceptable.
The Jewish reentrance to Palestine has come at a time when there is no longer popular acceptance of the kinds of suppression that the Jewish/Israeli people exert over the less powerful Palestinians. Popular sentiment against Israeli policy and condemning Israel's actions against the Palestinians was expressed clearly by the majority in the recent world conference against racism in Durban, South Africa.
The horrible and toughtless violence perpetrated by both sides in the Israeli conflict is damnable. It is true that the U.S. policy strongly supports Israel. However, this policy is clearly for net political and military/economic advantage. In an interconnected world, net advantages and disadvantages are more important than specific political issues. The U.S. must hold good standing in Israeli and Saudi relations in order to maintain military safeguards for the American economic assets in the Middle East region. Also, The historical U.S. support for Israel carries significance in that policy changes must not be made too quickly in order to maintain the credibility of the U.S. leaders, the policy that they execute and the regional stablity. To a lesser extent the democratic system in Israel must be supported as the expansion of democratic rule is a long term U.S. policy goal. The cultural differences between Israel and the U.S. are smaller than those between the U.S. leaders and the Arab and Musolem people. These factors are primary in the relationship with Israel and they weigh heavier than the plight of the Palestinian people. The Jewish Israeli's have taken advantage of this skillfully and caused great harm.
Personally, I find it highly embarrasing to live in a nation that supports the extermination of the Palestinian people. The onus for negotiating peace and combined prosperity in Israel lies with the Israel which has far greater wealth, power and political influence than the people they seem to blindly subjugate.
At this point the Israelis are fighting against a starving, and desperate enemy. Suicide bombing that is the mainstay of the Palestinian offensive is the extreme of desperation and implies a lack of rational thought. The Palestinian people have demonstrated that they are disorganized and without effective leadership. Therefore it must be Isreal's task to find a peaceful and equitable resolution. Assuredly, there will be no outcome but further terror and the eventual annihilation of the Palestinians without thoughtful peacemaking leadership on the part of the Isrealis.
Do you use Debian? There are many good reasons to use Debian and one of them is that if you use it you know you won't be using non-free software (if you so choose). This may not be important to you but I suspect that to many Debian users it is. In fact, it was the primary reason that Debian was created.
Someone else said that if Debian was a company and was doing this sort of culling of non-free documentation right before a distribution freeze then he would be selling stock. The person is obviously an example of the sort of person who does not care whatsoever about Free software, but more probably about free rides. Debian is not a company. It never will be. It never should be. Thank God. It exists to do exactly this sort of thing and I, for one, am supremely thankful.
real men don't use dialog boxes.
The real story here is that the maintainers of GCC aught to look carefully at their optimization code for x86 FPUs.
I'm betting that Intel developers have done their best to make use of the P4 cache. Since Transmeta CPUs do work recompiling programs on the fly they have larger caches (128KB L1 + 512KB L2) than the Athlon (128KB L1 + 256KB L2) and the Pentium 4 (20? KB L1 and 256KB L2). ICC is probably also highly agressive in implimenting SSE and SSE2 instructions. Transmetal CPUs also use VLIW instructions in core wich are by their nature highly parallel (compared to native x86). Even if the Transmeta chips can't use SSE and SSE2 they may benefit from the parallel-oriented optimizations that ICC probably makes.
On a different note: in a program like POVRay that executes basically the same tight loop of instructions mega-gazillions of times during a scene the Transmeta chip's software can have the opportunity to highly optimize the program. I would like to see the stats on the second and third runs of that rendering to see how much the Transmeta "code morphing" improved the performance. It would be very interesting if the GCC and ICC built POVRays perfomed at almost the same speed after a few runs. It would obviously be a great proof of the value of Transmeta's design. I for one have always wondered what the code morphing stuff would be able to do if it were able to interface with the operating system and recompile and save the entire system back to the hard disk as it goes through the optimiztion processes. (I suppose that errors could be highly disasterous.)
That's just my $0.02 and I'm no expert so I could definately be wrong.
This is not a signature.
All of the comments here use only anecdotal evidence to state that one (ide or scsi) is better than the other. I think most people (me included) are not going to spend an extra $200 to $300 for the SCSI solution until we see thorough benchmarks with real-world numbers that show SCSI to make a significant difference.
On that note, what are some ways to generate real-usage benchmarks that would pertain to these I/O systems. Probably it would be good to compare onboard and offboard ultra-wide scsi and udma/13 along with hardware scsi and ide raid (in several configurations). What comes to mind first is database-intensive work. Well Slashdot? What benchmarks would work?
Rik's VM should have either showed up in the 2.3 tree and been stabilized there before entering 2.4 or the 2.5 tree should have been opened with it. I guess since 2.4 had to be pushed out the door (and I'm glad it was) there was no time for his VM to mature inside 2.3. But would it be worthwhile to let those ideas stagnate? So much really new activity has been going on since 2.4 that perhaps it would be too hard to manage 2.4 and 2.5 kernels with lots of active development going on both simultaneously.
It seems to me to be a hard management decision to make. The 2.4 series needed a lot of fixes and at the same time there has been a lot of new stuff floating around. Would introducing the 2.5 a few versions ago have slowed development on 2.4 and increased overall patch-management headaches? I suppose the answer is yes but I don't have an idea about how badly it would slow things down.
I do think, however, that it is wonderful to have both Linus and Alan Cox around and maintaining diverging credible trees. They can both gain perspective watching the other's code grow and break. When the two trees do finally merge again we (hopefully) will have the best characteristics of both.
I have 384kbit bandwidth both ways on my DSL line whereas most people have 768down/128up connections. Sometimes I wish I had that extra 384kbit inbound. What is the liklihood that a mesh with 5 gateways (using different ISPs) distributed over 20 nodes could provide on-average much better bandwidth to the entire network?
- Buy a fan that is approved for your processor.
- Read the instructions related to fans that come with the motherboard. I.E. don't put it on backwards
- Don't forget to plug it in.
Secondly, I've used Athlons and Durons for over a year and a half. I've built over 100 systems for customers based on these processors and AMD and VIA -based motherboards. I've never had a problem with any of the CPU's or motherboards that took any more effort to fix than checking the manufacturer's website for driver fixes. In all cases the driver fix was already available. I have only ever had 1 problem using Linux. That problem was not chipset related but really a problem with the Linux kernel/drivers relating to the built-in Promise IDE "RAID" controller on a VIA board and I have. Before I could submit the kernel OOPS report there was already an Alan Cox patch available.I agree that the cooling situtation should be addressed but it really only pertains to situations where the computer undergoes vibration (such as UPS shipping) that sometimes will knock cards out of slots and cables out of connectors. In all the machines that I have built, I have yet to have one die a heat-death.
You cannot honestly knock the AMD-based systems on their technical merits.
So obviously Athlons and Durons are not reliable without a reliable heat-sink/fan solution. However, the price/performance of the AMD chips cannot be beat. This is a dilemma for computer "consultants". Suppose, for instance, that you have a customer--a small business--that needs a new server (firewall/file/web/email). You choose an AMD Duron plus a large case with extra air-flow fans, air filters and a big "expensive" heat-sink/fan.
I've used several Athlons and Durons for a few years now and never had a heat-sink/fan fall off but I've had one fan fail (about 1 in 10). There are several issues that make building the system and insuring its reliability harder than with P4 systems:
All of these issues contribute to increased liklihood of system failure. While it is true that P3 systems have about the same but slightly less likelihood of failure due to similiar mechanical problems, the P4 solution really is much better than the others in that the heat sink is mechanically attached to the motherboard/chassis rather than only the socket.
I have noticed that many Athlon/Duron motherboards have holes around the CPU socket, presumably for a heat-sink/fan mechanism that will attach thru the holes to the chassis or at least around the motherboard but I have yet to see a cooling solution for these boards that makes use of those holes. Of course this does not address the fact that many Athlon (especially the cheaper) motherboards have capicitors nearby the socket that physically block the installation of many of the larger cooling devices. So one is left with the following questions:
That said, I continue to use, recommend and sell AMD-based systems but I would sleep better at night if I knew that the system was not liable to die when (not if) the fan fails.
While pondering of all this a thought comes to mind: The newest hardware is just not as mechanically reliable as the systems of olde (Remember how physically solid the IBM PS/2 systems were? Even the older Macintoshes could take a lot more physical abuse than today's stuff). Is it possible to build something using what is available today ("off the shelf") that approaches being as mechanically solid as what used to come out of IBM, Sun and DEC?
Perhaps you mean 666 _bytes_ in size. Autoexec files are only text and as such not typically the length of a novel (666KB).
The game companies and console companies use the reaction of the Japanese market to gauge what sort of effort they should put into the English-speaking markets. Thus a few months probably go by before they invest in most of the work that it takes to launch the English version. Microsoft is playing it the same way. If they really wanted to they could launch both products at the same time but they're just too lazy (it doesn't make much business sense).
while I was writing an email to the author of that article the mozilla email composer program crashed :( *sigh* I guess there are still _some_ serious and probably elusive bugs to fix but on the whole I like Mozilla better than the "competition." Yes, I've tried them all.
When I was in 1st grade ('81) and supposed to be learning to read my teachers and my parents were very concerned because Jane and Spot and Dick were _not_ running and at the rate I was going they were not really even crawling. It was Christmas time and Mom and dad talked to me and they told me I was going to a different school when the new year started (to a class for those with learning disabilities.)
Santa brought us a TI-99/4A that Christmas and it came with a couple of joysticks and a speech synth (I had wanted an Atari, like the neighbors had). At the time, most of my waking thoughts were dedicated to the wonders of C3PO and R2D2. I knew that I could not make a robot but I thought that perhaps I could make the TI-99 talk to me. I spent all of that vacation pouring over the BASIC programming manuals and mostly I drew diamonds, hearts and turtles on the screen and made it beep. Most of this time was away from my folks and one night after a particularly frustrating day trying to find the documentation for the speech synth. I brought the BASIC reference manual (w/ Picture of Bill Cosby on the back) to my Dad and asked him what was the meaning of the word "Syntax."
Dad: Rob, where'd you hear that word?" .......
Me: I read it in the book, dad.
Dad: No, Rob, you can't read that. Who told you that word?
Me: Really, dad, I read it right here, "SIN-tax," what does it mean? Syntax Error?
Dad: Sylvia! Get over here! Rob, read some other words on the page to me.
Me: Dad, I just wanna know what it means. I keep seeing it when the type-a-writing is wrong.
Dad: What do you mean? Type-a-write?
Me: How do I type-a-write, so I can make the computer talk?
I stayed in my regular classes and from then on mom and dad taught me to read.
Well, it's that time of the year again when some randomly chosen, poorly-funded company (or misguided individual) decides to go thumbing theier noses at the generous, enlightened hackers who free their code to make the code better and to make the world better. What are they thinking? "Fuck 'em! What are they gonna do about it?" is what they're thinking.
We're smart. We have the GPL.
Hasn't stood the test of trial yet, but it looks pretty damn good. That's all we need. GPL is a technical and legal instrument and was conceived as such. But we are finding that it has an emergent property: Not even the dumbest of dumbasses is going to publically defend themselves in court for "stealing" GPL'd code. Not only are they stealing from someone who was toughtfull and kind enough to free their code for everyone but they're stealing from everyone who would ever use it.
It is P.R. suicide. It is the equivilant labeling your tuna cans with stickers that read: "This product contains 10% dolphin, we just grind 'em up and chuck 'em in with your fish cause they're too stupid to stay out of our nets. Goes great on standwiches."
Before fast food those of us who work 3 jobs ate something called a "sack lunch". You are bright enough to recognize that the letters on the keyboard correlate to letters on the screen but you are still dumb enough to make such a comment? Troll.
Is it *BAD* that Intel will own (and destroy) Alpha? YES.
Alpha was constructed by engineers for customers who prioritize quality over cost. Alpha owners have passion for quality. They are themselves engineers and scientists who want a Rolls Royce -class computing machine.
Intel does not make top-notch hardware. Intel makes ugly, nasty, practical devices (sometimes even "practical" is a stretch). Go check your hotmail with a Pentium III just as you would make your daily commute in a Honda Accord. No one is going to care.
Push forward the limits fluid-dynamics simulation with an Alpha cluster as you would joy-ride the Autobahn in an Accura NSX.
Do you see the point yet? There's nothing wrong with Intel making a gazillion dollars selling the IT equivalent of a Chevy truck to most of the world. What is wrong is that we (admittedly very small few) who want grace, beauty and power in our number-crunching machinery have lost one of the gems that defined the "genere".
Not everyone can afford an Alpha or a Ferrari. That doesn't mean that we should allow them to be quashed by Intel.
Of course we're snobby. We are the hackers and the geeks. You are the ignorant (and appearantly the lazy). Go re-certify your MCSE and we aren't going to pay attention to your whoring much less put you down for it. But break our toys and we're going to give you two black eyes.
Don't encrypt your casual emails. It requires overhead work by both parties and is superflous. If you must encrypt your emails then both parties will understand why and they will have the required motivation to get the job done which is very easy with GPG for GNU/Linux and PGP for windows bastards. Mac users... i dunno. They like to do things their own way so what are the chances they'll agree to your standard? I'm sure they will figure out a way to use it if they have to. (i.e. i dunno anything about macs---except G4's are sweet).
-Rob
- How do you sort through all the data? Discard most of it.
- How do you get around detection of a tap?
- Put the tap in before the cable is finished. Or maybe...
- Use a method no one here knows about Or perhaps...
- Tap at the repeater & modify the reflection/check signals that it emits. Maybe? Maybe you could...
- You build the _special_ repeater into the cable during manufacturing.
- How do you get all that data to a supercomputer for sorting and decryption? Probably, you don't. You do traffic analysis and you transmit a very small amount of data to a buoy that transmits to your satellite. Or you remove/insert data in your dummy packets that go between NSA machines on several continents. Also, you put the supercomputer on the nuclear submarine so that any time you _really_ need to sort through some data your sub can link up with your special repeater.
- For what else might this be useful? How about inserting noise or false data into the "Enemy's" messages?
- This sounds like an awful lot of trouble to go through. Yea, but wouldn't it be fun to get paid to hack like this?
-RobI think that we're pretty low on the curve of being able to find stuff in general, let alone inteligent life. I for one loose my keys and my wallet almost every day for at period of about five minutes and then there's my cell phone for which I sometimes conduct near-exhaustive searches of my domain only to find that it is in my pocket. I'm not the brightest but I know that there are a shitload of people dumber than me (e.g. Clinton/Gore supporters and the 70-odd percent of the population that believes in creationism instead of darwinsim). Granted some of the brightest minds on the planet are doing the searching but the fact that they rely on us--the ignorant masses--for their survival shows pretty clearly that they're no even near optimal vs. our actual capacity to conduct the search.
If the life is truely intelligent then it is avioding us because lord knows we're not too friendly. If you are an inteligent species outside of the planet earth and less powerful than us we'll probably conquer you and if you're more powerful then we'll do whatever we can to become more powerful so that we may later conquer you. Why do I think so? Well, that's pretty much been our modus operandus for all of recorded history.
Then there's the issue of what we can reliably detect. We do know for certian that every one of our ideas about physics basically only works in the domain we can easily observe and even sometimes in our observable domain we don't have good ways to explain what the hell is going on. Add the problem that we're pretty sure that most of the universe consists of dark matter and dark energy that we can't even detect yet and you get the idea that as our gaze wonders past the limits of our biosphere our quality of perception decreases (i'm guessing!) exponentially.
There's some major drawbacks to our existance that I think will stunt our ability to overcome our myopia. One is the fact that we're trapped in linear time and we can only traverse our time in a single direction at a fixed rate. Also we live in only 3 physical dimentions. While this 3D existance seems pretty advanced to us (ask SGI or Nvidia) there's plenty of scientists out there much smarter than I am who are embarassed to try to even explain how we're missing out on the action in the higher echelons of dimentionality (why?--even the small portion of us who even accept the idea that there are more dimentions tend to forget about it pretty easily which is illustrated by the death-rate for passengers of motor-vehicles.)
Do I think we should give up because we won't find anything anyhow? Hell no! We aught to pour all our money and resources into searching, colonizing and exploring outer space. We've got nuclear weapons, acid rain, rising sea levels and major league baseball. That is proof enough for me that this planet is fucked and it really is time to move on. I, for one, have a lot of new and exciting ideas for how we can screw up other habitats and no one is going to let me try that stuff around here. I want to move on.
If you haven't noticed the USA is the most powerful and free country in the world because it was created by people who habitually run away from civilization because they would rather try to survive alone in an (relatively) unknown wilderness than live with the schmuks they grew up with. Did I mention that a lot of the time the wilderness to which they ran posed significant threats of death, dismemberment or even boredom. Well guess what? There's no more wilderness! We filled it with schmuks! The implication here is that we're going to have either learn to live with eachother or devolve into a society similar to the europeans and probably become, like them, a bunch of socialist wimps with traditions and culture and all that other garbage. We need space! It's our final frontier!
I will give everything I own and hold dear to anyone who can get me off this rock to someplace where I can be away from the rest of these jerks--even if there is significant danger of boredom! Long live NASA. Long live SETI (but not too long because it goddamned better start working soon or i'm going to have to detonate a nuclear device). Cordially, Rob
Many years of experience as a cable installer (aka cable rat--no, not tv cables) and many, many problems I have encountered have taught me these things. Your mileage may vary.
If you haven't gathered by now using conduit is so far superior to not using it that I really shouldn't have mentioned not using it. If you use conduit you will almost never have to climb up into the attic (again) later. If you use metal conduit you will protect your wires from all manner of electrical, magnetic and soccer fields. Clumsy people such as air-conditiong repair men who crawl thruough the attic will not step on or trip over your wires-just the condiut which will survive the encounter. Stored-in-attic junk will fall on the condiut and won't slice the wires or worse damage them so that they work only sometimes. If you use condiut you will not hate adding more cables to your routes. If you use condiut you will improve your karma.
Remember that HQ analog audio cables are always expensive-otherwise they are stolen or broken. Long HQ analog audio cables hate radio waves-especially digital cell phones. They should not be routed in the same condiut as copper data cables.
Wireless networks are almost always insecure. Also, they don't like microwaves.
Coaxial cable (for television, etc) is generally ok next to cat5 copper.
damn this mozilla 8.1
That you would want to wear clothes. What is the point of being in the sun with clothes on?
<P>
<P>Americans... sheesh.
<P>
<P>Also, it sounds like these things are not going to work so well after a few cycles through the washer and dryer.
Somehow I don't think we will ultimately be satisfied until we can slice, dice, improve, remove and recycle every piece of our bodies. Like the video game advertising article (basically) said: people just take for granted that things get worse as marketers and producers find new ways to make a buck. We just take it in stride.
For how much money will you sell your extra kidney? Left arm? Spleen?
He does not hate corporations.
He does not want to steal your property.
It infuriates me when people lash out against Stallman because they think he goes too far or they think he misrepresents them.
If you think he is too stubbornly stuck on Freedom then you're entitled to your opinion but it is stupid to attack him for his opinion. He has made a great contribution to our society. What good comes of attempting to discredit him and his work? To do so reveals your own malignance. I challenge you to go make your own contribution.
If you think Stallman misrepresents you then don't attack him. Instead, make your own opinion heard. He is defending his code and his rights. He is defending the rights of all of us who believe in the freedom of speech. He is defending all those who subscribe to the philosophy of the GPL. If you don't like Free Software then go promote your own Open Source software or your proprietary software. Don't stoop to Ad Hominem arguements to promote your ideas. Again, it only exposes your own lack of character.
"...when people have to tell you you're being oppressed, something is most definitely amiss. "
Maybe you don't feel oppressed using proprietary software. I think most people who don't write code don't feel too opressed. But most people also intuitively know they should be able to copy and distribute software freely. That's why most people will make an "illegal" copy of MS Word or Windows for their friends. They don't have to hate Microsoft, but they know that a proprietary software copyright holder should not have the right to tell you what you can (and can't) do with your copy.
Stallman is a generous, honest and brilliant man. Instead of attacking him, I challenge you to emuate him.
-R
------
Tired of ICANN despotism?
Go OpenNIC!
I am a technician at a company that specializes in making military gizmos that no one else in the world really knows how to make. It is run and owned by engineers--PhD's and Masters grads. If you do not have a BS, your opinion does not count. Certianly mine does not.
....a technician who has written Linux kernel drivers for his custom IO cards on his home rig mentioned that FreeBSD might be more efficient on our server.
Our resident electrical engineer and programmer thinks AOL is a pretty good way to get on the internet, though our network is connected via T1. He made our webpage with MS Frontpage. It takes too long to load....
When one of our technicians who is well versed in Perl and PHP and has built several commercial websites offered the opinion that Frontpage was a waste of time and money and I offered that our server could serve our web-pages in-house and save us $65/mo. Our opinions were summarily dismissed. My suggestion was ignored again later when they were having hellaciuos problems with the web server provider being unreliable and unreachable. Later someone asked me why I thought I could tell anything to an Engineer with a masters degree....I don't even have a BS.
Our server was "too slow". It is a P150 w/ 32MB ram running Windows 3.1. The hard drive runs in PIO mode 3. One engineer offered that we should buy a faster machine for the server...no, too expensive. The server crashes too much.....so we installed Windows NT 4 Workstation and added 32MB ram. "How come I can't copy files when theres jobs on the print que?"
Engineer: "What's FreeBSD?"
Tech/Net Admin: "a free server OS, like UNIX."
Engineer: "oh those free programs are toys, no one takes them seriously and they aren't ready for business... Besides, no one here knows how to use FreeUnix."
Tech/ Admin: "Actually, all of the technicians here use Linux and some use FreeBSD at home."
Engineer: "None of the engineers know how to use it so we can't use toys like that here."
Tech/ Net Admin.: "Right, but we maintain the server for you guys already"
Engineer: "We just can't afford to run something that none of the engineers can fix if they run into a problem when no Tech is around"
Tech / Net Admin: "uhhhh....right, we--um--need to spend $1000 on a new server."
Engineer: "Oh well, I guess we're stuck with what we've got. Sometimes you guys come up with the craziest ideas..."