As a side note, there's also been talk about turning coal into diesel.
This is already being done. In South Africa, to name one country. For political stability and independance, it is in many nations' interest to secure their energy resources. Using coal to produce diesel is a very lossy (energy-wise and in account to CO2 and sulphur emissions) and a bit expensive process, but for many nations, especially those with big coal resources, it's still worth it as they're securing their energy.
The current coal resources are likely to withstand a thousand years draining at the current pace. This can be compared with the estimated 50 years (that also includes all the oil we know about but still is too expensive to harvest) for oil, so if you want to keep driving your diesel, there is no worry resource-wise.
However, it is likely that the current pace cannot continue as the greenhouse effect grows stronger by the day and the CO2 percentage in the atmosphere has by far exceeded its natural levels. To stop the atmospheric CO2 percentage at a country such as Sweden's target level, we cannot burn more fossil fuels than we have oil, and that means no coal burning at all. We don't have an energy crisis coming up, but we do have an environmental disaster growing worse by the gallon.
It should be clear that I strongly concur with the other posters noting that the USA need a pollution tax for its gas. I say we should let this country be the land of the free and not the land of the ignorant. It's of greatest importance that the USA bring the emission levels down as the country accounts for 23% of the world's total emissions.
I'm also sick and tired of browsing through javascript trying to figure out exactly what the link to the actual file is that doesn't plugin correctly. Mplayer deals with the file fine, but the page won't tell me what the URL of the stream is.
I'm suspecting that's why the poster put a direct link to the file in the summary, but I could be wrong..
I misread the article and assumed the case was on sending malformatted RAR-files, making WinRar.exe execute arbitrary code, which would then bypass the virus scanner, but it seems now, after a swift second pass on the article that this is not necessarily the case.
Just register an account and make sure you read everything with a +5 Bonus on everything rated Funny and you should be all set. It's not like any unfunny comments around here are really worth reading, so you could just as well put a -5 modifier on everything else.
At least I enjoyed the joke. Those who moderated it Overrated should really reconsider. As for the "redundant" votes I see the joke in it:)
I doubt this is the way it works outside the States. Internationally the law applies where the crime is commited. Recieving spam is not illegal anywhere, as far as I'm concerned, but sending obviously is. This is why servers move outside the country to circumvent laws in action. It doesn't just apply to the Internet. I know several Swedish TV networks that are broadcasted from Denmark just to make it legal to broadcast commercials directly aimed for children (which is illegal in Sweden).
The world doesn't revolve around economy either. I guess time is worth much more than money to many of the whealthy politicians, especially in the States and Europe. Spam is not only occurring to us regular geeks, but to the politicians' mail accounts too. I guess it takes them at least as much time as it takes us to filter their spam away. With more time, they could work more efficiently. Perhaps not to discuss homosex issues, but to discuss perhaps how to end all the wars going on and how to save the world as we know it. Looking at the current/. poll, I'd say discussing the environmental problems would be a good idea. Especially for the U.S. and U.K. who seems to be falling behind on this area.
How is this useless? If they stop using Michigan servers, well, we have a few less servers to worry about. Hopefully more and more states and countries will apply similiar laws, and life will eventually be good forever and ever. The way I see it, it's a good start. Maybe it only makes it slightly less easy to spam people for now, but it sure is a good step in the right direction.
Might be I've seen your name in the V2_OS forums sometime, but that'd be quite some time ago. If you've read even so much as the brief explanation of what V2_OS is, you should know it's built to be small, modular and efficient.
With a GUI, networking and protection, we would put in stuff in the kernel that takes those features away, as not all systems need network access, just like not all systems need a graphical UI. Even the multitasking part is not needed in all cases. However, all system functions are meant to be re-entrant, and nothing in the kernel is supposed to hinder a multitasking module. Speaking of threads, though, it is on its way to be implemented. It was first implemented 2 years ago, but the implementation is constantly changing, especially due to the complexity of a scheduler that would execute the right threads in the most optimal order without causing ever-lasting loops.
Interprocess communication is done by registering interfaces and modules and protection is meant to be implemented by yet another external modules. Not all systems need protection. A gaming console with only ROMs and volatile RAMs would gain nothing from protection, for instance.
Servers are like any other apps or modules. They get loaded, they are executed and when the time has come, they terminate. There's no reason to put such thing in the kernel. Especially not with V2_OS's goal of being small and modular.
Clearly, V2_OS and Menuet has different goals. Menuet wants to be a desktop OS written in asm. V2_OS wants to be efficient and modular, which could in turn be the base of a desktop written in asm.
Enough off-topic gaggling, though. Don't want this to be some religious flamebait.
If you know your Arabian numbers, you should know it was really a 403.9 error message./.'s lameness filter prevents us from post the Chinese characters. Might be Japanese, though. It's hard to tell, really.
Okay, this is a bit of a troll, but don't you think that using assembly would be useless if the design isn't well thought out and the code isn't optimized? Menuet OS shows that people have put lots of time on writing code that works. It works, but it's not extendible and it's not neat. It's not clean and it's far from optimized in most areas. MenuetOS used interrupts for system functions last time I checked. Modern operating systems stopped doing that aeons ago. Sure, Linux still retains backwards compatibility by allowing the int 0x80 calls, but all of them are available through far or near calls. Oh, and what's more - there's a reason why OSes have abonded the interrupts for system services, and the main reason is due to the overhead of calling them. A interrupt can utilize several hundreds of clock ticks without even doing anything.
In the world of V2, we dream of a system in which from start everything runs in ring0, giving everything full rights to do anything. This enhances performance by a great deal for every memory action. Furthermore, we have everything running in the same address space. Forget those segment registers - you don't need them! Staying in the same address space the CPU only has to calculate the real offset of a logical offset only once after it enters 32bit protected mode. The backside of using single addressing space (known as SAS) is that we limit ourselves to 4GB. But honestly, I don't see any systems in need of a supersmall and superfast optimized OS running with more memory than this. The typical machine for V2 would be Pentiums ( II) and below.
Another thing menuet lacks is modularity and extensibility. Sure, it can run more and more programs, but there's no real way to intergrate it with the system core or to remove certain features, such as the GUI or networking support.
What Menuet has succeeded with is to get their coders moving and coding. Menuet is growing, it does work for several uses, and it can be fast sometimes. But really, most of Menuet is still like so many OSS projects out there - half done, made to work, not optimized, not too well documented and not particulary well thought-out.
This is why V2 lies around my heart, and one day I want it to be the core of it.
I'm running KDE 3.1 on a $100 machine (monitor excluded) and with the fanciest effects disabled, nothing feels slower than it should be. But on the other hand, I'm convinced it should be possible to have these peripherals do more and to it more efficiently than they do. A modular OS written in optimized assembly is what I want!
Back to user-friendlyness, I'd say that after installation and configuration KDE and probably GNOME too are ready for mom and dad.
As a(n amateur) musician, I of course love sharing music, to let everyone hear it, but from time to time I enjoy having bread on my kitchen table. My emtpy stomache in particular enjoyes that part. This new law would make me able to select which pieces of my music I want anyone else to be able to hear, and which parts I want cash for. Now being an amateur, this has no big effect on me, but there are many people I know well who try doing music for their living. One of them is managing a ride at a traveling amusement park for the moment, and need I say, he is not enjoying it.
Also, as a becoming professional programmer, I like the idea of having the stuff I code sold or at least in some way paid for. I think some of you know what I'm talking about. When I want something to be freeware, fine! I'll just put another line together with the copyright notice, and you're free to get it. Same thing for GPL software - just attach the license and you're free to edit it as you like.
The only ones who may seem to be unfairily affected by this seems to be the poor students that can't afford the music (and software?) they want. Yeah, I'm one of them, but well.. It'll take a few years before this law can take action, so I'll just download as much good and fine music there is out there as long as I can. And whence there, there's a lot free music available on the net anyway. Many online CD stores let you listen through the whole albums before buying it. Perhaps not with great quality, but with the crappy sound systems you can afford as a student, it's more than enough..:>
The Sons of Noah
18 The sons of Noah who came out of the ark were Shem, Ham and Japheth. (Ham was the father of Canaan.) 19 These were the three sons of Noah, and from them came the people who were scattered over the earth. 20 Noah, a man of the soil, proceeded [1] to plant a vineyard. 21 When he drank some of its wine, he became drunk and lay uncovered inside his tent. 22 Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father's nakedness and told his two brothers outside. 23 But Shem and Japheth took a garment and laid it across their shoulders; then they walked in backward and covered their father's nakedness. Their faces were turned the other way so that they would not see their father's nakedness. 24 When Noah awoke from his wine and found out what his youngest son had done to him, 25 he said,
"Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers."
26 He also said,
"Blessed be the LORD , the God of Shem! May Canaan be the slave of Shem. [2] 27 May God extend the territory of Japheth [3]; may Japheth live in the tents of Shem, and may Canaan be his [4] slave."
28 After the flood Noah lived 350 years. 29 Altogether, Noah lived 950 years, and then he died.
This sounds like it's a bad idea to show your family jewels to people. Just a thought... The Bible say (yes, bible is plural meaning many books)lots of things about lots of things. Some things may seem to be contradictioning eachother, but that's all a matter how intepretation.
I was actually unaware of that. Thanks for enlighting me. I haven't read all of the bible, and what I have it's in Swedish, so the wordings are not the exactly same. I looked this up and found it to be in Rev 7:1:
7:1 And after these things I saw four angels standing on the four corners of the earth, holding the four winds of the earth, that the wind should not blow on the earth, nor on the sea, nor on any tree.
Reading the notes along with it you get the following:
The word for "corners" (Greek zonia) is translated "quarters" in Revelation 20:8, obviously referring to four directions, not to a flat, square, earth, as some critics allege.
and
The angels are seen as controlling the four winds; thus one is probably at each pole, the other two at opposite ends of some key equatorial diameter, restraining the winds which control the great atmospheric circulation. These winds are normally driven by the sun's heat and earth's rotation, so to keep them from blowing would require tremendous power. This gives a slight insight into the excelling strength of God's holy angels (Psalm 103:20). Since the atmospheric circulation is essential for continental rains, the angels will have been restraining these rains ever since God's two witnesses called for no rain on the earth at the beginning of the tribulation (Revelation 11:6).
I'm not saying this is right, but this is what the English translation I've got here says.
As another poster here on slashdot (I wish I could remember who, giving him/her the credits..) pointed out about half a year ago in a similiar discussion, there is nothing in the bible saying the earth is flat. The closest thing you can get to this is the mentioning of the sun going up and going down, but then, we all see the mentioning of the sun going up and down in the morning newspaper.
My apologies for going a bit off-topic. This isn't especially related to those corpses, said to have been dead for 150'000 years. Personally I'm a bit sceptic about the estimated age. For instance, living pengiuns have been dated dead since 8'000 years.
I've attended a CCNA (Cisco Network cert.) course for the last two years, and basicly all the education was done by the online material. We did have possibilities to go to school and talk to real, physical, actually-existing teachers, so in the beginning we were about 20 people attending each lesson.
By time we learnt that what the teachers said was straight off the course material, and the more we read, the less the teachers seemed to know, so eventually we were only a group of 5-10 (depending on how you count the students) who went to school just to chat with eachother. The lessons became meetings where we discussed geek matters, and all the education was done at home, with nice results.
Since the material was basicly saying the same things over and over again chapter by chapter only introducing one or two new subjects for each and one of them, we learnt how to read it, and our efficiency was increased significantly compared to other courses. So, these courses we had, using up 300 hours on our schedules, in the end only needed 50 hours to read and pass the exam. The rest was coffee breaks.
All this was good in the light of learning things, but socially it was a disaster. There were a few people I only greeted once in 6 months because they did everything at home. When you met the people somewhere, you wouldn't recognize them.
I guess, if you want to learn something, the online classes are good, but if you want something more than that, it's pure disaster. I got my A+, but I don't know all the people in class, despite 300 hours on the schedule.
Duh.. The other way around would be a much cooler hack, because it would be even more useless: software to convert an mp3 into a huge PNG of a well worn record, that plays just fine when fed back into this guys software.
Yeah, that sounds like a cool project for the first few days of the summer! Thanks for giving me the idea!
Slashdot Mirror
As a side note, there's also been talk about turning coal into diesel.
This is already being done. In South Africa, to name one country. For political stability and independance, it is in many nations' interest to secure their energy resources. Using coal to produce diesel is a very lossy (energy-wise and in account to CO2 and sulphur emissions) and a bit expensive process, but for many nations, especially those with big coal resources, it's still worth it as they're securing their energy.
The current coal resources are likely to withstand a thousand years draining at the current pace. This can be compared with the estimated 50 years (that also includes all the oil we know about but still is too expensive to harvest) for oil, so if you want to keep driving your diesel, there is no worry resource-wise.
However, it is likely that the current pace cannot continue as the greenhouse effect grows stronger by the day and the CO2 percentage in the atmosphere has by far exceeded its natural levels. To stop the atmospheric CO2 percentage at a country such as Sweden's target level, we cannot burn more fossil fuels than we have oil, and that means no coal burning at all. We don't have an energy crisis coming up, but we do have an environmental disaster growing worse by the gallon.
It should be clear that I strongly concur with the other posters noting that the USA need a pollution tax for its gas. I say we should let this country be the land of the free and not the land of the ignorant. It's of greatest importance that the USA bring the emission levels down as the country accounts for 23% of the world's total emissions.
News for botanics. Stuff that smells good.
I'm also sick and tired of browsing through javascript trying to figure out exactly what the link to the actual file is that doesn't plugin correctly. Mplayer deals with the file fine, but the page won't tell me what the URL of the stream is.
I'm suspecting that's why the poster put a direct link to the file in the summary, but I could be wrong..
Of course he did. Everybody does! He was probably just amazed of the 1/60 timing to reveal it.
I misread the article and assumed the case was on sending malformatted RAR-files, making WinRar.exe execute arbitrary code, which would then bypass the virus scanner, but it seems now, after a swift second pass on the article that this is not necessarily the case.
When the virus is installed, it has probably also deactivated your virus scanner.
Sweden:
Population: 9,000,000 by 2004-08-12
Land: 449,964 sqkm
Density: 20.00 persons/sqkm
CO2 emissions: 5.5 tonnes per capita
Finland:
Population: 5,211,311
Land: 338,144sqkm
Density: 17.1/sqkm
CO2 emissions: 10 tonnes per capita
Norway:
Population: 4,593,041
Land: 385,1991 sqkm
Density: 14/sqkm
CO2 emmisions: 10 tonnes per capita
And these countries are cold nordic countries, with the majority of the energy consumtion being used for heating houses. Sparse.
Um. If you have a passive hub, you need no overclocking. The passive hub is just merely a bunch of wirings. No clock pulse there.
...does it run Linux?
Yeah, but does it run on Linux?
Just register an account and make sure you read everything with a +5 Bonus on everything rated Funny and you should be all set. It's not like any unfunny comments around here are really worth reading, so you could just as well put a -5 modifier on everything else.
:)
At least I enjoyed the joke. Those who moderated it Overrated should really reconsider. As for the "redundant" votes I see the joke in it
I doubt this is the way it works outside the States. Internationally the law applies where the crime is commited. Recieving spam is not illegal anywhere, as far as I'm concerned, but sending obviously is. This is why servers move outside the country to circumvent laws in action. It doesn't just apply to the Internet. I know several Swedish TV networks that are broadcasted from Denmark just to make it legal to broadcast commercials directly aimed for children (which is illegal in Sweden).
The world doesn't revolve around economy either. I guess time is worth much more than money to many of the whealthy politicians, especially in the States and Europe. Spam is not only occurring to us regular geeks, but to the politicians' mail accounts too. I guess it takes them at least as much time as it takes us to filter their spam away. With more time, they could work more efficiently. Perhaps not to discuss homosex issues, but to discuss perhaps how to end all the wars going on and how to save the world as we know it. Looking at the current /. poll, I'd say discussing the environmental problems would be a good idea. Especially for the U.S. and U.K. who seems to be falling behind on this area.
How is this useless? If they stop using Michigan servers, well, we have a few less servers to worry about. Hopefully more and more states and countries will apply similiar laws, and life will eventually be good forever and ever. The way I see it, it's a good start. Maybe it only makes it slightly less easy to spam people for now, but it sure is a good step in the right direction.
Might be I've seen your name in the V2_OS forums sometime, but that'd be quite some time ago. If you've read even so much as the brief explanation of what V2_OS is, you should know it's built to be small, modular and efficient.
With a GUI, networking and protection, we would put in stuff in the kernel that takes those features away, as not all systems need network access, just like not all systems need a graphical UI. Even the multitasking part is not needed in all cases. However, all system functions are meant to be re-entrant, and nothing in the kernel is supposed to hinder a multitasking module. Speaking of threads, though, it is on its way to be implemented. It was first implemented 2 years ago, but the implementation is constantly changing, especially due to the complexity of a scheduler that would execute the right threads in the most optimal order without causing ever-lasting loops.
Interprocess communication is done by registering interfaces and modules and protection is meant to be implemented by yet another external modules. Not all systems need protection. A gaming console with only ROMs and volatile RAMs would gain nothing from protection, for instance.
Servers are like any other apps or modules. They get loaded, they are executed and when the time has come, they terminate. There's no reason to put such thing in the kernel. Especially not with V2_OS's goal of being small and modular.
Clearly, V2_OS and Menuet has different goals. Menuet wants to be a desktop OS written in asm. V2_OS wants to be efficient and modular, which could in turn be the base of a desktop written in asm.
Enough off-topic gaggling, though. Don't want this to be some religious flamebait.
Peace.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
If you know your Arabian numbers, you should know it was really a 403.9 error message. /.'s lameness filter prevents us from post the Chinese characters. Might be Japanese, though. It's hard to tell, really.
Okay, this is a bit of a troll, but don't you think that using assembly would be useless if the design isn't well thought out and the code isn't optimized? Menuet OS shows that people have put lots of time on writing code that works. It works, but it's not extendible and it's not neat. It's not clean and it's far from optimized in most areas. MenuetOS used interrupts for system functions last time I checked. Modern operating systems stopped doing that aeons ago. Sure, Linux still retains backwards compatibility by allowing the int 0x80 calls, but all of them are available through far or near calls. Oh, and what's more - there's a reason why OSes have abonded the interrupts for system services, and the main reason is due to the overhead of calling them. A interrupt can utilize several hundreds of clock ticks without even doing anything.
In the world of V2, we dream of a system in which from start everything runs in ring0, giving everything full rights to do anything. This enhances performance by a great deal for every memory action. Furthermore, we have everything running in the same address space. Forget those segment registers - you don't need them! Staying in the same address space the CPU only has to calculate the real offset of a logical offset only once after it enters 32bit protected mode. The backside of using single addressing space (known as SAS) is that we limit ourselves to 4GB. But honestly, I don't see any systems in need of a supersmall and superfast optimized OS running with more memory than this. The typical machine for V2 would be Pentiums ( II) and below.
Another thing menuet lacks is modularity and extensibility. Sure, it can run more and more programs, but there's no real way to intergrate it with the system core or to remove certain features, such as the GUI or networking support.
What Menuet has succeeded with is to get their coders moving and coding. Menuet is growing, it does work for several uses, and it can be fast sometimes. But really, most of Menuet is still like so many OSS projects out there - half done, made to work, not optimized, not too well documented and not particulary well thought-out.
This is why V2 lies around my heart, and one day I want it to be the core of it.
I'm running KDE 3.1 on a $100 machine (monitor excluded) and with the fanciest effects disabled, nothing feels slower than it should be. But on the other hand, I'm convinced it should be possible to have these peripherals do more and to it more efficiently than they do. A modular OS written in optimized assembly is what I want!
Back to user-friendlyness, I'd say that after installation and configuration KDE and probably GNOME too are ready for mom and dad.
How exactly is this law a joke?
:>
As a(n amateur) musician, I of course love sharing music, to let everyone hear it, but from time to time I enjoy having bread on my kitchen table. My emtpy stomache in particular enjoyes that part. This new law would make me able to select which pieces of my music I want anyone else to be able to hear, and which parts I want cash for. Now being an amateur, this has no big effect on me, but there are many people I know well who try doing music for their living. One of them is managing a ride at a traveling amusement park for the moment, and need I say, he is not enjoying it.
Also, as a becoming professional programmer, I like the idea of having the stuff I code sold or at least in some way paid for. I think some of you know what I'm talking about. When I want something to be freeware, fine! I'll just put another line together with the copyright notice, and you're free to get it. Same thing for GPL software - just attach the license and you're free to edit it as you like.
The only ones who may seem to be unfairily affected by this seems to be the poor students that can't afford the music (and software?) they want. Yeah, I'm one of them, but well.. It'll take a few years before this law can take action, so I'll just download as much good and fine music there is out there as long as I can. And whence there, there's a lot free music available on the net anyway. Many online CD stores let you listen through the whole albums before buying it. Perhaps not with great quality, but with the crappy sound systems you can afford as a student, it's more than enough..
This sounds like it's a bad idea to show your family jewels to people. Just a thought... The Bible say (yes, bible is plural meaning many books)lots of things about lots of things. Some things may seem to be contradictioning eachother, but that's all a matter how intepretation.
Reading the notes along with it you get the following:
and
I'm not saying this is right, but this is what the English translation I've got here says.
"So the earth is flat?"
As another poster here on slashdot (I wish I could remember who, giving him/her the credits..) pointed out about half a year ago in a similiar discussion, there is nothing in the bible saying the earth is flat. The closest thing you can get to this is the mentioning of the sun going up and going down, but then, we all see the mentioning of the sun going up and down in the morning newspaper.
My apologies for going a bit off-topic. This isn't especially related to those corpses, said to have been dead for 150'000 years. Personally I'm a bit sceptic about the estimated age. For instance, living pengiuns have been dated dead since 8'000 years.
High school level. Swedish school system. There's no need to say more.
I've attended a CCNA (Cisco Network cert.) course for the last two years, and basicly all the education was done by the online material. We did have possibilities to go to school and talk to real, physical, actually-existing teachers, so in the beginning we were about 20 people attending each lesson.
By time we learnt that what the teachers said was straight off the course material, and the more we read, the less the teachers seemed to know, so eventually we were only a group of 5-10 (depending on how you count the students) who went to school just to chat with eachother. The lessons became meetings where we discussed geek matters, and all the education was done at home, with nice results.
Since the material was basicly saying the same things over and over again chapter by chapter only introducing one or two new subjects for each and one of them, we learnt how to read it, and our efficiency was increased significantly compared to other courses. So, these courses we had, using up 300 hours on our schedules, in the end only needed 50 hours to read and pass the exam. The rest was coffee breaks.
All this was good in the light of learning things, but socially it was a disaster. There were a few people I only greeted once in 6 months because they did everything at home. When you met the people somewhere, you wouldn't recognize them.
I guess, if you want to learn something, the online classes are good, but if you want something more than that, it's pure disaster. I got my A+, but I don't know all the people in class, despite 300 hours on the schedule.
Duh.. The other way around would be a much cooler hack, because it would be even more useless: software to convert an mp3 into a huge PNG of a well worn record, that plays just fine when fed back into this guys software.
Yeah, that sounds like a cool project for the first few days of the summer! Thanks for giving me the idea!