This is a real issue, not FUD, especially for drivers, which RAID type people would have to deal with. Basically every distro I've used has modified the kernal, and the with the checksum name mangling in the 2.4 kernel, this means that a kernel module (ie driver) compiled for a RedHat kernel will not work for a Mandrake kernel. In fact the Mandrake 9.0 and 9.1 kernels are incompatible in this respect! The only solution it to provide dozens of binaries, or go with some elaborate scheme like NVIDIA does and compile part of the module when installing it.
Then there's the issue of supporting your code. That means testing it on all the platforms you will support. Lets count the common distro's out there. RedHat 6.x, 7.x, 8.x, 9.x, Mandrake 8.x, 9.x, Suse 7.x, 8.x, the Debian gradient, and a suite of other ones. Now you dont' have to officially support all of them, but from looking at this list it certainly involves more testing than the 3 to 5 historic Windows platforms.
The truth of the matter is that there are differences between distro's - otherwise there would be no reason to have more than one. Furthermore libraries are finer grained and change (improvements often require incompatible changes) more often than in Windows. And while the differences are small, and it is likely you won't have too many problems, determining that you won't have problems takes time and money.
Supporting linux is often more work than supporting windows - something that ID software and others have discovered. But fortunatly it is also often worth the effort.
I tell the government who to give my tax money to.
How is this complicated, inefficient scenario any better than me directly giving the money to the people I want to? There is no garrentee that this tax money will get to "artists" as I could give all the money to myself. So it is in effect nothing more than a cumbersome charity program.
Even if this system worked like he claimed it would with everyone dutifully entering in all their coupons to be reported by their mp3 player, it still has problems (many of which are shared my other compulsory licencing schemes).
Everyone has to pay the tax regardless of whether they use the media to listen to music or not. Most notably, businesses, who would have to pay since they use the internet and backup media just like everyone else.
Everyone has has the same amount of money to give out. Therefore an avid music fan would end up splitting his coupons between hundreds of good bands. Those more complacent about music (the majority) would still have the same amount of money to give out, an it would likely go to someone who sounded good on the radio. Therefore, independant bands would likely get even less money than they do now, while mass marketed music would get even more.
What if I listen to music in differnent places. Say I mostly listen to techo on my main computer while I'm coding, but listen to completely different music in my car and in the mp3 player in my living room. Now I am back to manually divying up my coupons, lest all my money go to techo.
It has a central weakness in the government database system. Anything with that much money at stake would be under heavy attack.
The government, not individuals decides how much money people should devote to music. This opens more doors for lobbying by the RIAA to increase the music tax.
I have been sceptical about all of the compulsory licencing ideas floating around, but this one has got to be the worst yet.
All we need are good internet resources for the discovery and purchase of music, and there would be no need for illegal music sharing. We are starting to the latter with iTunes and what not, but the former needs more work.
Yes, humans can do a ton of things at the same time, even dynamically in responce to inputs. Let me clarify what I meant. For example, when walking down the street you are coordinating dozens of muscles in responce to sensory input from nerves in your feet and legs, as well as balance and sight. However, you are not concentrating on all these things at the same time. There has been alot of research into this sort of thing and experiments strongly support the idea that we can only concentrate on one thing at a time. What enables us to to many things at once is that all but one of them become habit.
In your exellent example, an organist probably started off as a child playing with one hand, concentrating on reading each note and then placing the correct finger on the correct key. After time he trained his mind and muscles to where he did not have to think about each note, but could simply look at the note and play it. From there he could now concentrate on other things such as the tempo, dynamics, and phrasing. With more practice he could train his body to do more and more things habitually, so that when he is playing if he is thinking about anything it is the higher level aspects of how the music sounds, not what he is doing. I would also wager that he is not thinking about each stave individually all the time, but thinking about the overall sound of the peice, and shifting attention to the most important parts, while letting his well honed habit (skill) take care of the rest.
So can a person learn to have good situational awareness in both sets of "eyes"? Absolutely. (Note this would not be automatic - I don't even have good situational awareness of the sensary organs I have:) And actually now that I think about it again, I guess you could train yourself to know the readings on your gauges without having to shift attention to them. When driving my old truck, I can keep myself at 75 mph by the air noise, without having to think about it. Maintaing knowledge of a gauge is something that can be habituated, while carring on an intelegent conversation is not, so my cell phone analogy was flawed.
Damn, this is the coolest thing I've read in a long time! Imagine having a second set of low grade eye that worked in the dark. You could do all sorts of cool things with it, like effectively having a set of eyes on the back of your head.
The article mentions one potential application being that you could look at dials and switces without taking your eyes off what you were doing. However, would shifting your attention to echo location be as bad as looking away would? Think cell phones. It's kind of like chameleons - they can point their eyes in different directions, but can they concentrate on both of them at the same time? Could humans gain the ability to concentrate on more than one sensory input at a time? Probably not, but the input would still be there and would catch our attention anytime something notable happened. Like when we see something out of the corner of our eye, or hear our name in a crowd. Cognetics is so cool.
It also talked about how bats adjust the frequency of the waves sent out, as the distance to the object changes. I imagine for a bat this would be as automatic as focusing our eyes is to us. We would have to do this manualy, like focusing a camera. Oh, but what if we interfaced the brain or some nerves and trained the mind to do the focusing!
I've always thought that if I were to loose a limb in an accident I would be pounding down doors at universities acrossed the country to find one willing to attempt to use the nerves once controlling my limb to instead control a keyboard/mouse type interface (which would comunicate to the PC via bluetooth eventually). But this is even cooler, and I imagine provided a little information from Dean waters on this, you could build something like this on your own. Hot damn, I have a new project!
First off this whole virus issue is just starting to get really bad. A few years ago it wasn't necisarry for the average user to be so vigiant. As it become necisarry, whose to say that they won't learn by collective experiance. And if you are going require licenses from anyone, lets start with the people writting poor software that is allowing the net to degrade the way it is? (and again whose to say that they won't improve on their own now that it is becoming more necisarry to do so).
But here's my real question. Why post such flaimbait? This article is just some nobody giving his foolish opinion in a non-influential news site. If this was on CNN, then i could kind of see posting it. It this written by a big name in IT, I could see posting it. If there was ANY chance that this guy would be taken seriously, i might understand posting it. But there is none. This article is pure flaimbait, and Bruce Schneier is a Nazi.
guess what, it takes lots of fossil fuels to fertilize and grow crops too.
hmm, I had never thought about that before, but you are right - the sun is only half the story when talking about plants. When you take into consideration crop cycling, crops held back for compost, and decrease in yeilds from only using organic fertalizers, you are probably talking about what, 1/5 yeild compared to current farming methods? Which would make biodiesel over 10 times the price of gasoline today. Indeed not very economical.
So this is why people are all big on hydrogen. I never quite understood it, since it seemed an inefficent way to go. But since we have no good way of producing fuel, but can sustain ourselves on nuclear power for a while longer, we need some sort of battery or fuel-cell to make this power source usable for mobile applications.
I keep thinking about this too, but what profit is there to be made with going to Mars? There are some areas for profit in the space industry, such as putting sattelites into orbit and tourism, but not in exploration.
Some research is not directly profitable, and thus companies are not willing (or more acurrately, not able) to support it. I think it is good for The People to sponsor this type of research.
I know someone who got a Civic Hybrid, and I have done a fair bit of research into getting a hybrid myself. First off I admit that the main reason I wanted to get a hybrid was for the geek factor and to support the development of this cool technology. These aren't the most economical - normal Honda Civic and the Toyota Echo are less expensive overall. They also aren't the only environmentally friendly things out there. Many cars have emissions that are plenty good enough. Plus I'm not too concerned about depleting our use of oil, as it could be replaced with biodesiel very easily, and if oil became scarce it would be economical to do so. They are not the most versatile vehicles either. However, they are good at all of these things. (oh, and the chick dig em:)
Now onto my experiences. At the time I was looking I had some complaints about the Prius. First the controls were horrible. You thought talking on a cell phone was bad, try using a tivo-like all-in-one display for he radio, AC battery monitoring etc. The controls on the Honda Civic were damn near reaching perfection in design. Simple and effective. Then again I am thinking of getting my masters in UI design so maybe I'm more picky about theses things than others. Also the braking felt a little weird, and the car was ugly in my opinion. However, you should look at the new 2004 Prius. I don't know if the controls or braking have improved, but the appearance has changed (I like it), and they moved the battery (both civic and prius currently have it in the rear seat back), so you can fold the rear seat forward.
Driving around the city was great in both of these cars. They had more pickup than some of the normal cars I test drove. They do not have much acceleration at highway speeds though, which means you need to think farther ahead and try and not slow down if you don't need to. I imagine driving in city highway traffic would suck. The only killer for these vehicles are long hills. There is one hill coming into Albuquerque that I'd have to drive often. I've been told that you end up completely draining the battery on this hill, and then left with only the motor you slow down to about 45mph by the time you reach the top. Luckily, there is a truck lane on the hill, so you aren't obstructing traffic.
While all of the battery and electric motor technology for both of these cars have very good warrantees (8-10 years) the main area of concern that I had was with the CVT. We don't know how well these are going to hold up, and as far as I could tell they were not covered by the warrantee.
In my case, I decided to go with something less expensive, with a proven high reliability, so that I could get it paid off quickly and then not worry about it when I decided to go back to grad school. I think that is basically what if comes down to - are you willing to put up with the small annoyance that you cant always go as fast as you'd like and take the small risk that the car might not last as long as you want? If so I think a hybrid could be a great car for you. Under different circumstances I could easily see myself getting a hybrid.
PS: some people have mentioned the VW Jetta Turbo Diesel. I really, really liked this car. The only reason I didn't buy it was because a couple groups (including Consumer Reports) have found it to have serious reliability problems. Last time I checked it was in a race with the Ford Focus for being the least reliable sedan on the market. Shame.
I wouldn't be surprised if the asswipes at SCO intentionally allowed distribution of this document, for the sole purpose that someone important would change the font and read their code. Then they could accuse them of circumventing their copyright protection under the DCMA.
It seems to be consistant with their level of legal ineptitude.
You know here's an cool idea, seeing as the biggest problem with virii is that people don't keep their systems up-to-date.
When someone finds out about an exploit, they tell the company about it (aka MS) and give them time to come up with a patch. Then after sufficient time has passed for security concience people to patch their systems, a virus is released that takes advantage of the exploit to either inform the user that their system is vulnerable and that they should install the patch, or simply install the patch for them.
Alot of times it seems to take a big attack for busy system admins to roll out a system wide update. I have talked to people whose work computers have been hit pretty hard by virii and I just wonder what would have happened had they been hit by a truely malicious virus, not just these annoying but easily recoverable ones. It scares me.
But the scrollwheel is a good solution to what was perceived as a software problem, while internet buttons are not.
1) Having a peice of hardware to directly perform a task is faster than using a harware device to manipulate a software control.
2) There the amount of space available for hardware controls is limited compared to the amount of possible software controls.:.) We should pick the most often executed tasks to dedicate hardware controls to and implement the rest in hardware.
Scrolling is something that users do very often. Compare this to launching your web browser, something I only do a dozen times a day (more if it doesn't have tabbed browsing). I probably scroll my webbrowser a dozen times each time I open a new web-browser window. When you take into account the fact that I browse many other windows as well, so see that a scrolling frequency is at least two orders of magnitude compared to launching your web browser.
Further evidence of this difference is the fact that I am not annoyed when I have to use a computer without internet keys, but having to do without a scroll mouse is now a major inconvience, once I got used to having one.
I would definatly put side scrolling on the list of things that ought to have optional hardware controls, as it would be invaluable for CAD and such. I don't know how effective this design for side-scrolling is - I'd have to test it. I would think a tool that let you pan freely in 2D would be more usefull for those applications. Perhaps a dedicated "pan" key or mouse button, where when you held it down, moving the mouse itself pans the document. I know there have been studies on this but I can't remember the conclusion. (and i'm certain simular things have been done in applications)
hmm, yeah I remember that quote from Carmack too, but I can't seem to find it.
IIRC, it was in responce to a question about if he was concerned about the stuff comming out of Valve, Unreal and other companies surpassing his. (This was about 1999 I think). His responce was that he thought they were doing some really neat stuff but wasn't too concerned, because he could see upfront how good they were. What worried him were the competitors that he had no way of knowing about, hackers working out of their garages and such.
Perhaps Valve took this to heart - essentually relegating themselves to the obscurity garage for years while they worked on the halflife 2 engine:)
The basis of this system is that since we have a fair-use right to listen to our music at any time, and we are only actually listening to a single cd less than 1/100th of that time we need to we are wasting money. So instead we can share that cd with 100 people and take full advantage of it (actually we would need more than one cd depending on peak listening hours and popularity of certain songs)
The problem with this system is that if it ever took off, and was actually maintained legal in court, it would mean that there would be a lot fewer CD's being sold, since we are squeezing more use out of them. Therefore, as demand decreased, prices would rise, since an artist would have charge more money for a CD to make as much money as he used to. The result - it becomes too expensive for a single person to buy a CD, and and the only economical way to listen to music would be to belong to some sort of 'Snapster Fund', which probably wouldn't be that less expensive than it used to cost to buy CD's, and possibly more due to the overhead costs in running it.
So in effect it would not decrease the cost of music in the long run, and would simple make it manditory to go through this additional middleman. Note this plan does nothing to get rid of the RIAA - heck if they couldn't beat it they'd probably end of buying it. (/me shudders)
This is different. Someone didn't create open content - they created copywritten content, which then went into the public domain after the term was over. In most cases the author used the opportunity to restrict copying to only paying customers, and thus made money on his creation.
And yes, once a creative work has been created, it absolutly benifits society for everyone to have access to it. The question is whether an environment can be created where works are free to all and the author is still compensated for his work. But I think that we can easily agree that the current terms of copyright are far longer than neccisarry than needed provide an author time to make money off his work.
A micro-pay system for sheet music would be very nice, but I have to point out that it isn't open content - it's affordable, convienent content. And the whole point of open content is that it's isn't under the control of a single entity, who will provide affordable, convienent access only if he feels like it (which he may be too stupid to do).
But, let's keep that straight... the GPL is for the developer crowd and not the end user. It is not liberating the end user from anything at all.
Actually, the user does gain some additional freedom, although not as much as the developer: the freedom to know that their favorite peice of software, is not going to be locked up. It is really frustrating when a company producing a superior product is put out of business by another producing crap, and the IP to the source goes down with the company. You can keep using the old software for a while, but eventually you will need additional features, and you are pretty much SOL, especially if the defunct software uses proprietary file formats.
This is one of the main reasons I was sold on open source - because I was sick of seeing good software and ideas dieing a premature death, while most of the stuff on the market seemed to be crap. When I found out that someone had found a way to develop high quality software without being at the mercy of business motives I was thrilled.
Yeah, but we really ought to approach this with more grace than the "guilty till proven" innocent stance that slashdoter's seem to seeth with. I mean this guy doesn't have any concrete evidence that the GPL has been violated, didn't give Linksys time to respond to his claims, but instead just posted slander about them on a large news source. Yeah, thats the way to get people to embrace the GPL.
This should be the appropriate line of behavior when you notice a potential GPL violation.
1) Contact the author of the software in question.
They are the ones that have the right to persue a copyright violation, and thus should be the ones to deal with the potential violators, not an angry vigilante. Furthermore, there may be other circumstances which you are not aware of, like if the author is distributing the code in question under a second license. For all you know that "obviously modifed" version was writen by the author himself, so make some money on the side.
2) The author should politely contact the suspect explaining that there is some concern that they might be using his software against the terms of the licence (GPL), and request more information about the situation.
3) The author should check with the good guys at the FSF to make sure he understands all the nuances of the GPL in this situation.
4) If the suspect is not cooperative, the author should then send a more stongly worded letter, stating that the company is in violation of the law. It would be very preferable to hire a laywer to help draft this letter and take a second look at the situation at this point.
5) If the company is still not cooperative, then and only then the author should publicise the violation to the community in the hope that public backlash will cause the company reverse their opinion.
6) As a last resort legal actions should be taken, if money can be had for the trial.
Yes, Linksys has a history of things like this but that does not justify these knee-jerk reactions.
hmm, out of a miniscule sample size of 50, we found that a wide variety of types of music were being shared. Many popular songs were shared by many people, while some songs where only shared by a few. This roughly fits a bell curve distribution as would nomally be found in a random sample of shared files.
Therefore we conclude that the RIAA is targetting people with specific music sharring patterns.
I can see it now - instead of wrestling with your three brothers over who gets control of the remote, (coupled with advanced techiques of covering the remote sensor on the TV, and turning on-off the VCR, cable box, and DVD depending on which remote you have in your posession), there will be a great shouting matches. A marked improvement I must say - kind of like the UN.
That is of course until my mom has had enough, walks into the garage, flips the circit breaker for the living room and orders us outside. (Unless that is also controlled by voice activated firewire. hmm...)
Even if this was being used in a productive manner such as asking other students what the prof meant on something, I don't see it working well in the context of a realtime lecture. You could get absorbed into the conversation about your question, and the look up to realize that you haven't been paying attention to the lecture and don't how much you've missed or where the prof is now - so you'd have to ask more questions and end up getting further behind.
I *never* took notes in class because I found that when I did would end up getting behind in the lecture, just like is the senario explained above. Because of this I found it far more benificial to spend my time in lecture listening to the professor's every word and making sure I understood it - asking questions if I didn't. In a couple classes the prof's lectures were particulary dense, so I made sure to read the book ahead of time to decrease the amount of thought I had to do in class. In a few rare cases where most of the lecture was not in the textbook I brought a tape recorder to class. But in general, anything that would take my mind off the lecture, would be a bad thing in my opinion.
Then again I'm a little slow at parsing. Often times someone will explain something technical to me and I can't inerpret their words real time. I have to buffer them in my head and then read them back to myself visualizing what was said before I understand it. It's kind of annoying - I can understand just about anything that I read from a book, but real-time human input can be a stuggle sometimes.
The only time I could see this as useful is as a divergence when a class is very easy and boring, but attendence is mandated. But I would suppose that those profs would not allow laptops.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a real issue, not FUD, especially for drivers, which RAID type people would have to deal with. Basically every distro I've used has modified the kernal, and the with the checksum name mangling in the 2.4 kernel, this means that a kernel module (ie driver) compiled for a RedHat kernel will not work for a Mandrake kernel. In fact the Mandrake 9.0 and 9.1 kernels are incompatible in this respect! The only solution it to provide dozens of binaries, or go with some elaborate scheme like NVIDIA does and compile part of the module when installing it.
Then there's the issue of supporting your code. That means testing it on all the platforms you will support. Lets count the common distro's out there. RedHat 6.x, 7.x, 8.x, 9.x, Mandrake 8.x, 9.x, Suse 7.x, 8.x, the Debian gradient, and a suite of other ones. Now you dont' have to officially support all of them, but from looking at this list it certainly involves more testing than the 3 to 5 historic Windows platforms.
The truth of the matter is that there are differences between distro's - otherwise there would be no reason to have more than one. Furthermore libraries are finer grained and change (improvements often require incompatible changes) more often than in Windows. And while the differences are small, and it is likely you won't have too many problems, determining that you won't have problems takes time and money.
Supporting linux is often more work than supporting windows - something that ID software and others have discovered. But fortunatly it is also often worth the effort.
- I pay a tax on "media products".
- The government gives me a coupon for this tax.
- I tell the government who to give my tax money to.
How is this complicated, inefficient scenario any better than me directly giving the money to the people I want to? There is no garrentee that this tax money will get to "artists" as I could give all the money to myself. So it is in effect nothing more than a cumbersome charity program. Even if this system worked like he claimed it would with everyone dutifully entering in all their coupons to be reported by their mp3 player, it still has problems (many of which are shared my other compulsory licencing schemes).- Everyone has to pay the tax regardless of whether they use the media to listen to music or not. Most notably, businesses, who would have to pay since they use the internet and backup media just like everyone else.
- Everyone has has the same amount of money to give out. Therefore an avid music fan would end up splitting his coupons between hundreds of good bands. Those more complacent about music (the majority) would still have the same amount of money to give out, an it would likely go to someone who sounded good on the radio. Therefore, independant bands would likely get even less money than they do now, while mass marketed music would get even more.
- What if I listen to music in differnent places. Say I mostly listen to techo on my main computer while I'm coding, but listen to completely different music in my car and in the mp3 player in my living room. Now I am back to manually divying up my coupons, lest all my money go to techo.
- It has a central weakness in the government database system. Anything with that much money at stake would be under heavy attack.
- The government, not individuals decides how much money people should devote to music. This opens more doors for lobbying by the RIAA to increase the music tax.
I have been sceptical about all of the compulsory licencing ideas floating around, but this one has got to be the worst yet. All we need are good internet resources for the discovery and purchase of music, and there would be no need for illegal music sharing. We are starting to the latter with iTunes and what not, but the former needs more work.Does this mean a free toy for every third employee? Yay!
Yes, a copy of linux!
/me ducks
I vote that we concider anything from 64.94.110.11 to be spam. That should take care of the problem for spam filters.
Yes, humans can do a ton of things at the same time, even dynamically in responce to inputs. Let me clarify what I meant. For example, when walking down the street you are coordinating dozens of muscles in responce to sensory input from nerves in your feet and legs, as well as balance and sight. However, you are not concentrating on all these things at the same time. There has been alot of research into this sort of thing and experiments strongly support the idea that we can only concentrate on one thing at a time. What enables us to to many things at once is that all but one of them become habit.
:) And actually now that I think about it again, I guess you could train yourself to know the readings on your gauges without having to shift attention to them. When driving my old truck, I can keep myself at 75 mph by the air noise, without having to think about it. Maintaing knowledge of a gauge is something that can be habituated, while carring on an intelegent conversation is not, so my cell phone analogy was flawed.
In your exellent example, an organist probably started off as a child playing with one hand, concentrating on reading each note and then placing the correct finger on the correct key. After time he trained his mind and muscles to where he did not have to think about each note, but could simply look at the note and play it. From there he could now concentrate on other things such as the tempo, dynamics, and phrasing. With more practice he could train his body to do more and more things habitually, so that when he is playing if he is thinking about anything it is the higher level aspects of how the music sounds, not what he is doing. I would also wager that he is not thinking about each stave individually all the time, but thinking about the overall sound of the peice, and shifting attention to the most important parts, while letting his well honed habit (skill) take care of the rest.
So can a person learn to have good situational awareness in both sets of "eyes"? Absolutely. (Note this would not be automatic - I don't even have good situational awareness of the sensary organs I have
Damn, this is the coolest thing I've read in a long time! Imagine having a second set of low grade eye that worked in the dark. You could do all sorts of cool things with it, like effectively having a set of eyes on the back of your head.
The article mentions one potential application being that you could look at dials and switces without taking your eyes off what you were doing. However, would shifting your attention to echo location be as bad as looking away would? Think cell phones. It's kind of like chameleons - they can point their eyes in different directions, but can they concentrate on both of them at the same time? Could humans gain the ability to concentrate on more than one sensory input at a time? Probably not, but the input would still be there and would catch our attention anytime something notable happened. Like when we see something out of the corner of our eye, or hear our name in a crowd. Cognetics is so cool.
It also talked about how bats adjust the frequency of the waves sent out, as the distance to the object changes. I imagine for a bat this would be as automatic as focusing our eyes is to us. We would have to do this manualy, like focusing a camera. Oh, but what if we interfaced the brain or some nerves and trained the mind to do the focusing!
I've always thought that if I were to loose a limb in an accident I would be pounding down doors at universities acrossed the country to find one willing to attempt to use the nerves once controlling my limb to instead control a keyboard/mouse type interface (which would comunicate to the PC via bluetooth eventually). But this is even cooler, and I imagine provided a little information from Dean waters on this, you could build something like this on your own. Hot damn, I have a new project!
The Institute for Scientific Research site has a bunch of good information about the space elevator including the initial report by NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC).
First off this whole virus issue is just starting to get really bad. A few years ago it wasn't necisarry for the average user to be so vigiant. As it become necisarry, whose to say that they won't learn by collective experiance. And if you are going require licenses from anyone, lets start with the people writting poor software that is allowing the net to degrade the way it is? (and again whose to say that they won't improve on their own now that it is becoming more necisarry to do so).
But here's my real question. Why post such flaimbait? This article is just some nobody giving his foolish opinion in a non-influential news site. If this was on CNN, then i could kind of see posting it. It this written by a big name in IT, I could see posting it. If there was ANY chance that this guy would be taken seriously, i might understand posting it. But there is none. This article is pure flaimbait, and Bruce Schneier is a Nazi.
guess what, it takes lots of fossil fuels to fertilize and grow crops too.
hmm, I had never thought about that before, but you are right - the sun is only half the story when talking about plants. When you take into consideration crop cycling, crops held back for compost, and decrease in yeilds from only using organic fertalizers, you are probably talking about what, 1/5 yeild compared to current farming methods? Which would make biodiesel over 10 times the price of gasoline today. Indeed not very economical.
So this is why people are all big on hydrogen. I never quite understood it, since it seemed an inefficent way to go. But since we have no good way of producing fuel, but can sustain ourselves on nuclear power for a while longer, we need some sort of battery or fuel-cell to make this power source usable for mobile applications.
Thank you for sharing that insight.
I keep thinking about this too, but what profit is there to be made with going to Mars? There are some areas for profit in the space industry, such as putting sattelites into orbit and tourism, but not in exploration.
Some research is not directly profitable, and thus companies are not willing (or more acurrately, not able) to support it. I think it is good for The People to sponsor this type of research.
I know someone who got a Civic Hybrid, and I have done a fair bit of research into getting a hybrid myself. First off I admit that the main reason I wanted to get a hybrid was for the geek factor and to support the development of this cool technology. These aren't the most economical - normal Honda Civic and the Toyota Echo are less expensive overall. They also aren't the only environmentally friendly things out there. Many cars have emissions that are plenty good enough. Plus I'm not too concerned about depleting our use of oil, as it could be replaced with biodesiel very easily, and if oil became scarce it would be economical to do so. They are not the most versatile vehicles either. However, they are good at all of these things. (oh, and the chick dig em :)
Now onto my experiences. At the time I was looking I had some complaints about the Prius. First the controls were horrible. You thought talking on a cell phone was bad, try using a tivo-like all-in-one display for he radio, AC battery monitoring etc. The controls on the Honda Civic were damn near reaching perfection in design. Simple and effective. Then again I am thinking of getting my masters in UI design so maybe I'm more picky about theses things than others. Also the braking felt a little weird, and the car was ugly in my opinion. However, you should look at the new 2004 Prius. I don't know if the controls or braking have improved, but the appearance has changed (I like it), and they moved the battery (both civic and prius currently have it in the rear seat back), so you can fold the rear seat forward.
Driving around the city was great in both of these cars. They had more pickup than some of the normal cars I test drove. They do not have much acceleration at highway speeds though, which means you need to think farther ahead and try and not slow down if you don't need to. I imagine driving in city highway traffic would suck. The only killer for these vehicles are long hills. There is one hill coming into Albuquerque that I'd have to drive often. I've been told that you end up completely draining the battery on this hill, and then left with only the motor you slow down to about 45mph by the time you reach the top. Luckily, there is a truck lane on the hill, so you aren't obstructing traffic.
While all of the battery and electric motor technology for both of these cars have very good warrantees (8-10 years) the main area of concern that I had was with the CVT. We don't know how well these are going to hold up, and as far as I could tell they were not covered by the warrantee.
In my case, I decided to go with something less expensive, with a proven high reliability, so that I could get it paid off quickly and then not worry about it when I decided to go back to grad school. I think that is basically what if comes down to - are you willing to put up with the small annoyance that you cant always go as fast as you'd like and take the small risk that the car might not last as long as you want? If so I think a hybrid could be a great car for you. Under different circumstances I could easily see myself getting a hybrid.
PS: some people have mentioned the VW Jetta Turbo Diesel. I really, really liked this car. The only reason I didn't buy it was because a couple groups (including Consumer Reports) have found it to have serious reliability problems. Last time I checked it was in a race with the Ford Focus for being the least reliable sedan on the market. Shame.
I wouldn't be surprised if the asswipes at SCO intentionally allowed distribution of this document, for the sole purpose that someone important would change the font and read their code. Then they could accuse them of circumventing their copyright protection under the DCMA.
It seems to be consistant with their level of legal ineptitude.
You know here's an cool idea, seeing as the biggest problem with virii is that people don't keep their systems up-to-date.
When someone finds out about an exploit, they tell the company about it (aka MS) and give them time to come up with a patch. Then after sufficient time has passed for security concience people to patch their systems, a virus is released that takes advantage of the exploit to either inform the user that their system is vulnerable and that they should install the patch, or simply install the patch for them.
Alot of times it seems to take a big attack for busy system admins to roll out a system wide update. I have talked to people whose work computers have been hit pretty hard by virii and I just wonder what would have happened had they been hit by a truely malicious virus, not just these annoying but easily recoverable ones. It scares me.
But the scrollwheel is a good solution to what was perceived as a software problem, while internet buttons are not.
:.) We should pick the most often executed tasks to dedicate hardware controls to and implement the rest in hardware.
1) Having a peice of hardware to directly perform a task is faster than using a harware device to manipulate a software control.
2) There the amount of space available for hardware controls is limited compared to the amount of possible software controls.
Scrolling is something that users do very often. Compare this to launching your web browser, something I only do a dozen times a day (more if it doesn't have tabbed browsing). I probably scroll my webbrowser a dozen times each time I open a new web-browser window. When you take into account the fact that I browse many other windows as well, so see that a scrolling frequency is at least two orders of magnitude compared to launching your web browser.
Further evidence of this difference is the fact that I am not annoyed when I have to use a computer without internet keys, but having to do without a scroll mouse is now a major inconvience, once I got used to having one.
I would definatly put side scrolling on the list of things that ought to have optional hardware controls, as it would be invaluable for CAD and such. I don't know how effective this design for side-scrolling is - I'd have to test it. I would think a tool that let you pan freely in 2D would be more usefull for those applications. Perhaps a dedicated "pan" key or mouse button, where when you held it down, moving the mouse itself pans the document. I know there have been studies on this but I can't remember the conclusion. (and i'm certain simular things have been done in applications)
If you look into it, you'll just find sun blaming apple and apple blaming sun.
So what you're saying is that they skipped the "being in bed together" part and went straight to marriage.
What'll really blow your mind is when you realize that not only is disney helping open source, but that open source is helping disney.
:)
Just remember this, next time you submit a patch to wine - you are supporting EVIL(tm).
heh
hmm, yeah I remember that quote from Carmack too, but I can't seem to find it.
:)
IIRC, it was in responce to a question about if he was concerned about the stuff comming out of Valve, Unreal and other companies surpassing his. (This was about 1999 I think). His responce was that he thought they were doing some really neat stuff but wasn't too concerned, because he could see upfront how good they were. What worried him were the competitors that he had no way of knowing about, hackers working out of their garages and such.
Perhaps Valve took this to heart - essentually relegating themselves to the obscurity garage for years while they worked on the halflife 2 engine
The basis of this system is that since we have a fair-use right to listen to our music at any time, and we are only actually listening to a single cd less than 1/100th of that time we need to we are wasting money. So instead we can share that cd with 100 people and take full advantage of it (actually we would need more than one cd depending on peak listening hours and popularity of certain songs)
The problem with this system is that if it ever took off, and was actually maintained legal in court, it would mean that there would be a lot fewer CD's being sold, since we are squeezing more use out of them. Therefore, as demand decreased, prices would rise, since an artist would have charge more money for a CD to make as much money as he used to. The result - it becomes too expensive for a single person to buy a CD, and and the only economical way to listen to music would be to belong to some sort of 'Snapster Fund', which probably wouldn't be that less expensive than it used to cost to buy CD's, and possibly more due to the overhead costs in running it.
So in effect it would not decrease the cost of music in the long run, and would simple make it manditory to go through this additional middleman. Note this plan does nothing to get rid of the RIAA - heck if they couldn't beat it they'd probably end of buying it. (/me shudders)
This is different. Someone didn't create open content - they created copywritten content, which then went into the public domain after the term was over. In most cases the author used the opportunity to restrict copying to only paying customers, and thus made money on his creation.
And yes, once a creative work has been created, it absolutly benifits society for everyone to have access to it. The question is whether an environment can be created where works are free to all and the author is still compensated for his work. But I think that we can easily agree that the current terms of copyright are far longer than neccisarry than needed provide an author time to make money off his work.
A micro-pay system for sheet music would be very nice, but I have to point out that it isn't open content - it's affordable, convienent content. And the whole point of open content is that it's isn't under the control of a single entity, who will provide affordable, convienent access only if he feels like it (which he may be too stupid to do).
But, let's keep that straight... the GPL is for the developer crowd and not the end user. It is not liberating the end user from anything at all.
Actually, the user does gain some additional freedom, although not as much as the developer: the freedom to know that their favorite peice of software, is not going to be locked up. It is really frustrating when a company producing a superior product is put out of business by another producing crap, and the IP to the source goes down with the company. You can keep using the old software for a while, but eventually you will need additional features, and you are pretty much SOL, especially if the defunct software uses proprietary file formats.
This is one of the main reasons I was sold on open source - because I was sick of seeing good software and ideas dieing a premature death, while most of the stuff on the market seemed to be crap. When I found out that someone had found a way to develop high quality software without being at the mercy of business motives I was thrilled.
Yeah, but we really ought to approach this with more grace than the "guilty till proven" innocent stance that slashdoter's seem to seeth with. I mean this guy doesn't have any concrete evidence that the GPL has been violated, didn't give Linksys time to respond to his claims, but instead just posted slander about them on a large news source. Yeah, thats the way to get people to embrace the GPL.
This should be the appropriate line of behavior when you notice a potential GPL violation.
1) Contact the author of the software in question.
They are the ones that have the right to persue a copyright violation, and thus should be the ones to deal with the potential violators, not an angry vigilante. Furthermore, there may be other circumstances which you are not aware of, like if the author is distributing the code in question under a second license. For all you know that "obviously modifed" version was writen by the author himself, so make some money on the side.
2) The author should politely contact the suspect explaining that there is some concern that they might be using his software against the terms of the licence (GPL), and request more information about the situation.
3) The author should check with the good guys at the FSF to make sure he understands all the nuances of the GPL in this situation.
4) If the suspect is not cooperative, the author should then send a more stongly worded letter, stating that the company is in violation of the law. It would be very preferable to hire a laywer to help draft this letter and take a second look at the situation at this point.
5) If the company is still not cooperative, then and only then the author should publicise the violation to the community in the hope that public backlash will cause the company reverse their opinion.
6) As a last resort legal actions should be taken, if money can be had for the trial.
Yes, Linksys has a history of things like this but that does not justify these knee-jerk reactions.
hmm, out of a miniscule sample size of 50, we found that a wide variety of types of music were being shared. Many popular songs were shared by many people, while some songs where only shared by a few. This roughly fits a bell curve distribution as would nomally be found in a random sample of shared files.
Therefore we conclude that the RIAA is targetting people with specific music sharring patterns.
yeah.
I can see it now - instead of wrestling with your three brothers over who gets control of the remote, (coupled with advanced techiques of covering the remote sensor on the TV, and turning on-off the VCR, cable box, and DVD depending on which remote you have in your posession), there will be a great shouting matches. A marked improvement I must say - kind of like the UN.
That is of course until my mom has had enough, walks into the garage, flips the circit breaker for the living room and orders us outside. (Unless that is also controlled by voice activated firewire. hmm...)
Even if this was being used in a productive manner such as asking other students what the prof meant on something, I don't see it working well in the context of a realtime lecture. You could get absorbed into the conversation about your question, and the look up to realize that you haven't been paying attention to the lecture and don't how much you've missed or where the prof is now - so you'd have to ask more questions and end up getting further behind.
I *never* took notes in class because I found that when I did would end up getting behind in the lecture, just like is the senario explained above. Because of this I found it far more benificial to spend my time in lecture listening to the professor's every word and making sure I understood it - asking questions if I didn't. In a couple classes the prof's lectures were particulary dense, so I made sure to read the book ahead of time to decrease the amount of thought I had to do in class. In a few rare cases where most of the lecture was not in the textbook I brought a tape recorder to class. But in general, anything that would take my mind off the lecture, would be a bad thing in my opinion.
Then again I'm a little slow at parsing. Often times someone will explain something technical to me and I can't inerpret their words real time. I have to buffer them in my head and then read them back to myself visualizing what was said before I understand it. It's kind of annoying - I can understand just about anything that I read from a book, but real-time human input can be a stuggle sometimes.
The only time I could see this as useful is as a divergence when a class is very easy and boring, but attendence is mandated. But I would suppose that those profs would not allow laptops.
As proud armed redneck I would like to ask you to stop exporting your rich hippies to Santa Fe, NM.
Thank you.