I think if you look for that in some online library of "perpetuum mobile" you will find other examples of it and why it doesn't work.
Of course it runs down. It just takes a lot longer than I'd expect it to. Give it a try - I don't pretend to understand what all's going on here, but the experiment is enough to convince me that maybe this guy in Japan is onto something after all - not perpetual motion or any such nonsense, but perhaps a better understanding of magnetism, anyway...
Granted, the Linux community could do the same in 6 months to 1 year. The problem is that they don't even begin to acknowledge the need for a complete overhaul. The replies to this post will probably say "what's wrong with Linux as it is today?" Therein lies the problem.
No it couldn't - the "Linux community", in general, takes a very long time to produce their result: a more elegant *copy* of an existing application. There are exceptions, but pretty much nothing gets done in 1-year timeframes - Mozilla took the better part of a decade - so long that it ceded most of the world's browser users to IE. We still wouldn't have a usable Office alternative if Sun hadn't shelled out millions of real dollars for Star Division and then given the code away - sorry, but AbiWord and Gnumeric just aren't in the same league as Star/Open Office, and not even in the same galaxy with MS Office - it will be more years, if ever, before they are serious alternatives for any but the lightest use. I could go on - the list is familiar to us all, but the theme is constant.
Unfortunately, the only things that actually *do* get developed quickly by the open source community are a minimal hard core set of programming tools, P2P file sharing apps, and a bazillion black death window themes...
This is the exact same argument every peddler of perpetual motion machines uses to claim that his invention is not a perpetual motion machine, but is somehow harnessing external power which is just hanging around out there to be used.
The Earth's electromagnetic field is a popular choice among these hucksters. With this guy, it's magnets.
I'm not so sure. I am normally extremely skeptical of such claims, and yes, I understand at least most of the implications of the laws of thermodynamics, and believe they hold true here, too. But at the same time, I've witnessed this effect myself, and so can you - it's easy. Either something strange, or the illusion of something strange, is going on, and I don't at this point pretend understand it all. Here's how you can see for yourself:
----
Building "Colin Dublin's Batteryless Magnetic Motor"
(Credit for "discovering" this particular arrangement must be given to my 9-year-old son, Colin, who came to me a few months ago claiming to have invented "a motor without batteries". An avid Junkyard Wars fan, he is continually trying to invent new motors and engines. (I guess it just runs in the family...;-) ) While the gadget certainly does run down, it takes an unexpectedly long time to do so.)
Go to the toy store and get one of those cool little magnetic construction sets that have a bunch of ball bearings and a bunch little plastic connector sticks with neodymium magnets molded into each end. (You really ought to have a set of these anyway, right? They're just too cool not to...) Now start building:
1) Make a flat, regular pentagon, with 5 ball bearings connected by five sticks.
2) Now tesselate the top by adding a stick from each of the pentagon's ball bearings to a sixth ball bearing above.
3) Repeat the process to tesselate the bottom side, too. You should now have a polyhedron consisting of ten triangular sides, 5 top and 5 bottom, with your original pentagon in the middle. (If not, start over and try to figure out where my instructions are confusing you...)
4) Stick a ball bearing onto another stick, and let that ball adhere to the top ball of your polyhedron. This is the "low friction bearing/axle" for the gadget. Note that there are two ball bearings stuck together here - that's important to keep the friction down.
5) While holding the axle stick vertically in one hand with the polyhedron hanging under it, give the polygon a spin with the other hand. It will run down in a bit.
6) Now spin it again, but this time, hold another magnet stick near (but not touching) the outer rim of the polyhedron as it spins. If you can do it steadily, without perturbing the spinning polyhedron too much, you'll feel and see it continue to spin far longer than you might expect.
Depending on the polarities with which you assembled the thing, you can get a rather surprising sustaining effect at times, especially if you "alternate" the polarity of the tesselating sticks. Experiment to see what works best. Because the rim is five-sided, you'll have some point at which there are two balls of the same polarity, and this will make things bumpy. Try other shapes, too, if your set allows (some are better than others) - a hexagon, for instance. Have fun with the magnets; you might even learn something. And who knows, maybe you'll have a career option in Japan as a magnetic motor engineer...
But this guy was looking at Linux like a tool to be used.
Oh, the Horror! Sorry, but Linux *should* be looked at as a tool to be used - that's what it *is*, to those of us who aren't so silly as to think it's a religion.
As Ted Nelson has said, "Using a computer should always be easier than not using a computer." That's a pretty safe assertion for any tool...
The way to achieve unity in the gnu/linux community's desktop civil war is for a new desktop to be created ( or an existing one seriously beefed up ) that will be SO FAR AHEAD of all of the other choices that most people and distros will lose interest in the other choices.
Easier said then done, I know.
Seems like a job for a company with some money to spend.....like Novell or IBM.
The very interesting (but dead-on accurate) implication of your assertion is that the bazaar is completely incapable of doing this on its own. I would love to see OSS *really* innovate (in the "SO FAR AHEAD" sense), but it hasn't happened yet, and I'm not holding my breath. Almost all OSS "successes" are copies (sometimes quite superior copies, granted) of existing programs and ideas: GIMP/Photoshop, OpenOffice/MSOffice, Apache/NCSA-HTTPD, Evolution/Outlook, Samba/LanMan(yuk!), Mono/.Net and so on. Revolutionary (as opposed to "evolutionary") developments are distressingly absent in the community.
Have you compared RDP with X on a LAN? X wins, no questions about it (except Gnome)....BTW, X apps run fine over DSL. I do it all the time. If however you want to bitch about how Gnome apps run over DSL, I'll join with you cos Gnome really does suck when compared to KDE, CDE, GnuStep etc.
GNOME's abysmal performance has less to do with X than it does with Gnome's reliance on CORBA, one of those "elegant" ideas that just doesn't fly in the real world, and never has. It amazes me how Gnome/Linux users can have the gall to gripe about Microsoft bloatware, when their own system is every bit as obese...
Besides the hints, what other apps do you run? How many of those 150 are running real applications, during peak hours, and what kind of response do they have?
200 ms is what I experience during periods of worm attacks/busy virus days from a cable modem. If you have a wide enough network, you are bound to run into these situations. Mainly I'm trying to get away from the 2 ms local network latencies.
You can definitely run *real* application across X if you build your network properly. More than a decade ago, I built an early switched network based on the original Kalpana Etherswitch to do exactly that in Chevron's Houston and New Orleans Data Centers. The applications were primarily heavy-duty seismic processing and visualization - definitely prime time, fast-response-required applications. The data was obviously too big to move or access effectively via NFS at 10 Mb/s, but what worked just fine was to log into the server that happened to have a local copy of the data you wanted to work with, run the application there, and X the display back to whatever workstation or X terminal you were on. This setup supported very serious work (in a very usable manner) for several hundred users, many of whom were using NCD or Tektronix X terminals as their local devices.
Given the improvements of the past ten years in CPUs, graphics engines, one or two orders of improvement in network speed (depending on your budget, 100 or Gig - but 10 Mb was as fast as it got back then), and Ethernet switches (that's how you minimize latency!) that cost only a few dollars per port, anyone who says you can't do real work over X quite simply has their head up and locked, or is proving their incompetence at both network and system configuration.
In reality, about the only thing you can't really do over X is multimedia, but that's just because the X consortium as well as the XFree folks view X as finished, so it has stagnated over the past several years. Too bad - X is far from ideal, but it does have a lot going for it, and it can be easily hidden from the user well enough now that it's no longer really painful. In the real world, few people really need to watch movies on their computers - for general business use, all the apps will run just fine over X. In spite of its usefulness, X is really the Achilles heel of Linux right now, since it's effectively fossilized with no real heir apparent.
BTW: I've done several studies on real TCO for various employers and clients over the past 15 years, and the X-based solution *always* turns out to be the cheapest both to buy and to administer on an ongoing basis. That result is consistent even when the employer or client really wanted another result - the advantage of X-based systems is so compelling that nothing else can really compete. Terminal services could be a contender if MS didn't force you to buy an XP user license for each remote user - that pretty much destroys any economic incentive to eliminate end-user PCs in favor of terminal devices...;-)
define sport as: "a [physically] athletic recreation where defense can be played."
auto racing, chess, etc. lose on the first count.
Ernest Hemingway would disagree with you. He said that there are only three REAL sports: Auto racing, mountain climbing, and bullfighting. All the rest were pretenders.
Well, theoretically the same bayesian filter that knows to put spam in the "spam" folder, can be similarly taught to put arbitrary content in an arbitrary folder. The trick is training it.
This is really not that hard. Check out POPfile, an open-source Perl program that's intended for spam filtering, but can be used and adapted for much more. It's as good or better than Mozilla's bayesian engine - I would still be using it except that the Mozilla approach does offer some integration benefits. For other applications, though, POPfile should be great - think of it as an all-purpose bayesian engine you can modify at will. (Not that that's necessarily trivial, but it *is* possible...)
Don't guess that their home directory is/home/blah, use the objects given to you and find out
UNIX apps doing things like that are hosed anyway for portability. For example, on Mac OS X, there is no/home.
That's why you should use "~mred" instead - that will always return the proper path to Mr. Ed's home directory. (Usually direcly from/etc/passwd or it's equivalent.)
It is kind of suprising it took us this long to get a cross-platform standard on how to specify how to draw shapes! But it is a good thing.
I don't think computers will ever be the same once SVG takes off.
You're assuming it *will* take off. Don't get me wrong, I sincerely and fervently hope it does (it would make my life a LOT easier), but until and unless Microsoft puts support for SVG into IE, that *cannot* happen. (I rate Microsoft supporting SVG as just slightly less likely than John Kerry taking a consistent and unchanging stand on any given issue and marrying a woman who's not an heiress...)
Seriously, this is an area where Microsoft's monopoly *really* matters - with over 90% of the world's web surfers using IE, SVG is just flat irrelevant if Microsoft doesn't support it. Since it conflicts and competes with their own strategy and goals, I don't expect to see SVG support from Microsoft anytime soon. Even if they were to decide to support it, that wouldn't be until at least the "Longhorn timeframe" (in MS-speak), which is now likely 2006 or beyond...
mmonia???????? WhatRU smoking? Those things don't run on ammonia AFAIK, and never have.
Vapor absorption cycle refrigeration has been done with a variety of working fluids over the years, including ammonia. Ammonia was actually quite common in the natural-gas-powered home refrigerators popular until the early to mid 1950's. Unfortunately, almost all of the economically viable working fluids of this type were poisonous and/or could cause severe lung burns. They could never even be considered in today's litigious climate.
Anyway, vapor absoprtion died off within a few years after DuPont introduced Freon with a flurry of stories (true, though) about how people died horrible deaths in thier own homes. Whatever other weaknesses Freon may have, it at least has the property of being extremely inert and generally not too harmful to life. (Many inhalers still use Freon propellant because most of the alternatives are of considerably less-proven safety...) Freons are still considerably safer than the HFCs that have replaced them, some of which have been linked to severe liver damage even at very low exposures (like the typical leak in a car air conditioning system.)
Anyway, vapor absorption refrigeration is a good option, since it can use any source of sufficient quality heat to run. If you're interested in slightly odd refrigeration cycles and techniques, check out the Einstein-Szilard refrigeration system, another cool idea that never made it commercially. And, yes, it *was* designed by the two guys you associate with those names...
FWIW, I'm still a Google fan, but am finding that Teoma (which uses the same engine as Jeeves, but I like Teoma's presentation better) is delivering results where Google fails.
Google's great (well as good as Infoseek was in its prime before Disney/ABC/Go bought it and ruined it), but Teoma's methods seem to hold up a bit better and retrn results that are often more useful and relevant than Google's, especially in those cases where Google returns way too much crap. You don't have to switch - use Google for what it's good at, but if you find yourself still looking for the needle after two or three search modifications, then hop over to Teoma and give it a try. I did, at a friend's urging, and have been surprised at how well it works. (I have no connection whatever with Teoma, other than as a user.)
Google is still my home page, but I am now using Teoma two or three times a day, and am actually thinking about switching, which I couldn't have imagined several months ago...
Yahoo is getting better, too, and adding more and more useful services all the time. You've just got to love capitalist competition! Thank you, Adam Smith...
In addition to the sites listed above, don't forget the site even older than TUCOWS, the site that was arguably the first real download site on the net: Simtel. (http://www.simtel.com
Simtel is still pretty good, and has always been a good place to find free or cheap software. AFAIK, it was the first large-scale public repository for free and open source software. Before sunsite.unc.edu, before ftp.uu.net, there was Simtel - in the old days, the first place to look for programs or source was ftp.wsmr(for White Sands Missile Range).army.mil. Simtel had *gigabytes* of stuff availabe even before AUPs allowed commercial use of the Internet.
OK, while I'm dating myself - How many people here remember what TUCOWS is an acronym for? (Hint - think Windows 95...) Not many, even here on Slashdot, I'll bet...
I meant to make clear in the post above that the idea of a slim, fast BIOS-OS is a good idea in many cases, not all cases - it doesn't fit everywhere, but there is a lot that we could learn from looking at the capabilities of a well-designed ROM-based OS environment.
For instance, have you ever noticed how much PalmOS is like the original Macintosh OS? A ROM-based OS with not only basic infrastructure functionality, but also a toolbox ROM defining UI elements that can be called on by the applications. This is a poserful idea, and it deserves a modern tratment by someone. Whether Phoenix is going to do it well is still very much a valid question...
But in suspend, they got such dismal battery "life." I mean, 1.5 hours of battery life for regular use, 8 hours of suspend? I have had my Mac suspended for weeks with no problem. What is so hard about bringing the power use down when the machine is all but off?
There are two kinds of suspend: suspend to RAM (S2R) (which still requires power for the RAM and may or may not be able to turn of mostly everythign else, depending on hardware and BIOS capabilities) and suspend to disk (S2D), which, of course, can consume essentially nothing.
This is the difference between "suspend" and "hibernate" in Windows parlance. Most modern hardware fully supports ACPI, since it's a requirement for being MS-certified. Windows, esp XP has excellent ACPI support, but its configuration can be botched up by someone that doesn't know what they're doing - either a user or the factory. The design of Windows' power managment interface makes it far too easy to do the wrong thing. If properly configured, though, the machine will first enter S2R, then, after a certain time (or when the batteries begin to cave in), it will transition to S2D and cut power to an absolute minimum. Sadly, many Windows laptops let the batteries get eaten in S2R mode *before* saving to disk. This is just bone-headed policy, though, not an architectural problem. Users can fix it if they understand what they're doing. (Although, to be fair, the location and size of the S2D file or partition can be a problem, especially if you've increased the amount of RAM and the S2D partition wasn't enlarged to match. (It seems to me *this* is the sort of thing laptops BIOSes shoud be taking care of automatically - when more RAM is detected, check to see if there's enough free space, and if there is, juggle things around to enlarge the S2D partition (sometimes a file under Phoenix-derived BIOSes, making this easier)and shrink the user partitions accordingly. Tricky, but not really all that hard.)
Linux is still problematic, since it's ACPI support is much-improved lately, but still not really up to the task. So far as I'm concerned, this is still a major area where Linux is just not really capable of playing in the modern world yet - pretty much everything today should have and use ACPI, not just laptops.
I agree that only Apple makes this whole process work anything at all like it should...
if a laptop had a built in CF slot designed with intent, you could buy CF equal to your ram, and use it for your suspend/hibernate write out of memory instead of a drive, and it should run a damn sight quicker.. no?
No, probably not. As slow as hard disks are, they're often faster than flash.
The *real* problem here is OS bloat: suspend/resume takes a long time because it quite simply takes bloody forever to write out the contents of RAM, especially when RAM on most machines now is larger than the hard disk itself was only several years ago!
What Phoenix is doing here is great, and we should applaud it: They are replacing the bloated pigs of operating systems we use with a lean, fast, usable system that is ready for use instantly. To my mind, it's about time someone did this, and I hope this BIOS-OS finds its way into all of the hardware of the future.
This isn't nearly as much about the bogeyman of DRM (which I really couldn't care less about) as it is about bringing a new and valuable capability to our computers.
BTW: It's very likely that this idea will spread, and Linux and BSD-based BIOSes of this type are the logical direction to go, since BIOS vendors will (reasonably enough) want to avoid having to pay license tribute. I see nothing but upside here.
It's interesting that you mention blackmask.com in your rant against PG2. Interestingly, David Moynihan, who runs blackmask.com has said both there (and here on/. in this very topic, search for "dmoynihan") has no problem at all with PG2, and thinks what they are doing is a very good thing.
Seriously, what we see here is nothing more than the anti-capitalist ranting of a bunch of GPL bigots, who can't stand the idea that someone might actually *profit* (gasp!) from the sale of bits. (And, of course, the PG license expressly permits this sort of use, as it should. Like the BSD, Apache, and X licenses, it is more concerned with good resources being used and propagated than in advancing an anti-commerce political agenda...)
Here's a quick excerpt from blackmask.com on the issue:
A lot of the HTML coding on PG 2 was done by me with the notice change, but that's cool; not so much because Mr. Guagliardo has previously purchased a CD set from me, but rather that I've in the past mailed.zipped HTML disks to Dr. Hart, encouraging him to use them as he sees fit.
What's lost in the discussion is the fact that PG 2 has 48,500 more books than PG 1 (and 45k more than me), and may be a prototype alternative to something like NetLibrary, which used wrapped PG titles as part of their bid to get everyone to sign on--(PG 2 gets bonus points in my opinion for adopting the URL Netlibrary.net on their sign-up page). It's quite possible those 40k+ extra books are worth $8.95 a year.
That's the reason that the BSD folks gets so cranky about the GPL. BSD code that gets combined with GPLed code can only be distributed under the GPL. It's a one-way street. GPL license advocates can poach from BSD licensed codebases, but the BSD folks can't do likewise (without being subject to the GPL). The real problem with this is that the GPL derivative of the BSD work often competes with the original BSD version for developer mindshare. If the GPL derivative becomes substantially more useful than the BSD original version then the GPL derivative sucks the air out of the room for the original version.
This is absolutely true. The GPL is all about "gimme" which is why the GPL crowd's actions are completely predictable to anyone who's ever had a two-year-old.
In essence, the GPL's stance relative to other licenses is, "What's mine is mine, and what's yours is mine. We call this FREEDOM. Our Freedom. You can go pound sand."
This is why the GPL is so dangerous. If we let the FSF get away with this sort of thing much longer, we will *really* regret it. As my sig says, the FSF and the GPL are ultimately a far greater threat to our freedoms in the long run than Microsoft ever could be. The FSF's goal is to make itself the only viable "open source" license. That would be a horrible thing - for all of us. There are serious dangers to license monocultures as well, perhaps more dangers than an OS monoculture could ever present...
The more restrictions you put on the code, the less free it becomes; because GPL puts more restrictions on the user than BSD does, it is by definition less free. The only totally free code, without any restrictions whatsoever, is code which has been placed in the public domain. GPL is only mostly free...
Very true, but it's important to recognize that it is an virulent hatred (and yes, that's the right word) of the idea that someone might engage in sofware commerce that drives the GPL bigots.
The GPL is not about code, it's not about freedom. It's about doing everything possible to prevent anyone, anywhere, from selling software. When you get right down to it, the GPL is really about peeing in the punchbowl....
1. The Dot. Instead of "search string", search.string works.
A Dash is similar, except that the dot seems to require a single character there, while a dash makes it optional:
Example: "ip-v6" will find entries containing both "ipv6" and "IP v6". Handy for acronymic sorts of things or those sorts of compound words that may or may not be separated by a dash or space in real life...
Digital Convergence While you *can* sortof achieve these things with WiFi and IP Streaming, the bottom line is that neither WiFi nor IP Addresses are trivial enough for Grandma to connect hreself.
No, actually, it *is* easy enough for Grandma, but the problem is that corporate egos are trying as hard as they can to keep this from really working. The problem, as usual, isn't that we have no standard, but rahter that we have at least one too many.
The bottom line: we (users and product designers) are all caught in the middle of a Mexican Standoff between Zeroconf/Rendezvous and Universal Plug-n-Play.
Zeroconf is a real, open, IETF standard, and also the basis for Apple's Rendezvous.
UPnP is the Intel/Microsoft altrernative, which is a SOAP-based "non-standard standard", and specifies far more than is necessary (and probably wise) for interoperability. ALthough it looks more "complete" on the surface, it is overweight, and that completeness may well turn into an unacceptable brittleness in years to come, where Zeroconf aims more to be a very basic platform upon which to build.
From where I sit, it's easier, cleaner, and considerably simpler to implement Zeroconf. It does all the things that matter, but since it skips the questionable value UPnP puts on forcing everything into SOAP, it's much cleaner, ligher weight, and thus far more suitable for embedded devices.
The problem, of course, is that Intel and MS are NOT going to support Zeroconf, although it works like maginc in the Mac world, hard-to-find Windows clients like Howl are required to use it with Windows. That pretty much quashes any possibility of Grandma's using it, if she's going to be using the PC she bought at CompUSA anywhere in the system.
Ultimately, this will be one of the most important battlegrounds of the next few years: It's hard to overstate how important it is to have this capability if we want to be able to move beyond PC-based devices to real, intelligent network devices that offer far more flexibility at far less cost. Intel and MS want that world to fail, while Apple sees little to lose there. Sadly, open source is mostly AWOL in this battle, although there are some exceptions.
There's only one answer: demand full Zeroconf support in *all* operating systems, and vote with your dollars!
Actually, you are now able let your users use Outlook (full functionality) without using Exchange on the server side. SUSE sells OpenExchange, Samsung sells Contact. Both run on a Linux server. They're not cheap, but they are substantially cheaper than Exchange.
But both may well fail in the marketplace, because too many Linux bigots are philosophically opposed to paying for software, regardless of its utility or value.
I personally think this is the biggest thing counting against open source today: the rabid GPL-bigot-types that insist everything must be free, and we should all just do without modern functionality until a GPL'ed clone is available. This is anything but innovation, and it's poisonous not only to progress, but our economy and culture at large, too.
Don't get me wrong - I'm an avid open source advocate myself - but as a consultant to many Fortune 100 companies, I've seen this played out way too many times: The worst enemy of open source advocates is without question open source advocates.
C'mon, now, PEnnsylvania 6-5000 kicks them all in the butt! (A huge Glenn Miller hit from the 1940's for those that haven't had the enjoyment of listening to the great "retro" songs of the 20th century. Of all the "Big Bands", Miller's was the "biggest".)
Of course, if you happen to live on one of the few places where you can still dial with a subset of the digits, I suppose BR-549 might hold some appeal to some. (No explanation here, I think I'll let people Google that one. That sort of thing could seriously mind warp the rapper/anime crowd...)
Slashdot Mirror
I think if you look for that in some online library of "perpetuum mobile" you will find other examples of it and why it doesn't work.
Of course it runs down. It just takes a lot longer than I'd expect it to. Give it a try - I don't pretend to understand what all's going on here, but the experiment is enough to convince me that maybe this guy in Japan is onto something after all - not perpetual motion or any such nonsense, but perhaps a better understanding of magnetism, anyway...
Granted, the Linux community could do the same in 6 months to 1 year. The problem is that they don't even begin to acknowledge the need for a complete overhaul. The replies to this post will probably say "what's wrong with Linux as it is today?" Therein lies the problem.
No it couldn't - the "Linux community", in general, takes a very long time to produce their result: a more elegant *copy* of an existing application. There are exceptions, but pretty much nothing gets done in 1-year timeframes - Mozilla took the better part of a decade - so long that it ceded most of the world's browser users to IE. We still wouldn't have a usable Office alternative if Sun hadn't shelled out millions of real dollars for Star Division and then given the code away - sorry, but AbiWord and Gnumeric just aren't in the same league as Star/Open Office, and not even in the same galaxy with MS Office - it will be more years, if ever, before they are serious alternatives for any but the lightest use. I could go on - the list is familiar to us all, but the theme is constant.
Unfortunately, the only things that actually *do* get developed quickly by the open source community are a minimal hard core set of programming tools, P2P file sharing apps, and a bazillion black death window themes...
This is the exact same argument every peddler of perpetual motion machines uses to claim that his invention is not a perpetual motion machine, but is somehow harnessing external power which is just hanging around out there to be used.
;-) ) While the gadget certainly does run down, it takes an unexpectedly long time to do so.)
The Earth's electromagnetic field is a popular choice among these hucksters. With this guy, it's magnets.
I'm not so sure. I am normally extremely skeptical of such claims, and yes, I understand at least most of the implications of the laws of thermodynamics, and believe they hold true here, too. But at the same time, I've witnessed this effect myself, and so can you - it's easy. Either something strange, or the illusion of something strange, is going on, and I don't at this point pretend understand it all. Here's how you can see for yourself:
----
Building "Colin Dublin's Batteryless Magnetic Motor"
(Credit for "discovering" this particular arrangement must be given to my 9-year-old son, Colin, who came to me a few months ago claiming to have invented "a motor without batteries". An avid Junkyard Wars fan, he is continually trying to invent new motors and engines. (I guess it just runs in the family...
Go to the toy store and get one of those cool little magnetic construction sets that have a bunch of ball bearings and a bunch little plastic connector sticks with neodymium magnets molded into each end. (You really ought to have a set of these anyway, right? They're just too cool not to...) Now start building:
1) Make a flat, regular pentagon, with 5 ball bearings connected by five sticks.
2) Now tesselate the top by adding a stick from each of the pentagon's ball bearings to a sixth ball bearing above.
3) Repeat the process to tesselate the bottom side, too. You should now have a polyhedron consisting of ten triangular sides, 5 top and 5 bottom, with your original pentagon in the middle. (If not, start over and try to figure out where my instructions are confusing you...)
4) Stick a ball bearing onto another stick, and let that ball adhere to the top ball of your polyhedron. This is the "low friction bearing/axle" for the gadget. Note that there are two ball bearings stuck together here - that's important to keep the friction down.
5) While holding the axle stick vertically in one hand with the polyhedron hanging under it, give the polygon a spin with the other hand. It will run down in a bit.
6) Now spin it again, but this time, hold another magnet stick near (but not touching) the outer rim of the polyhedron as it spins. If you can do it steadily, without perturbing the spinning polyhedron too much, you'll feel and see it continue to spin far longer than you might expect.
Depending on the polarities with which you assembled the thing, you can get a rather surprising sustaining effect at times, especially if you "alternate" the polarity of the tesselating sticks. Experiment to see what works best. Because the rim is five-sided, you'll have some point at which there are two balls of the same polarity, and this will make things bumpy. Try other shapes, too, if your set allows (some are better than others) - a hexagon, for instance. Have fun with the magnets; you might even learn something. And who knows, maybe you'll have a career option in Japan as a magnetic motor engineer...
But this guy was looking at Linux like a tool to be used.
Oh, the Horror! Sorry, but Linux *should* be looked at as a tool to be used - that's what it *is*, to those of us who aren't so silly as to think it's a religion.
As Ted Nelson has said, "Using a computer should always be easier than not using a computer." That's a pretty safe assertion for any tool...
The way to achieve unity in the gnu/linux community's desktop civil war is for a new desktop to be created ( or an existing one seriously beefed up ) that will be SO FAR AHEAD of all of the other choices that most people and distros will lose interest in the other choices.
Easier said then done, I know.
Seems like a job for a company with some money to spend.....like Novell or IBM.
The very interesting (but dead-on accurate) implication of your assertion is that the bazaar is completely incapable of doing this on its own. I would love to see OSS *really* innovate (in the "SO FAR AHEAD" sense), but it hasn't happened yet, and I'm not holding my breath. Almost all OSS "successes" are copies (sometimes quite superior copies, granted) of existing programs and ideas: GIMP/Photoshop, OpenOffice/MSOffice, Apache/NCSA-HTTPD, Evolution/Outlook, Samba/LanMan(yuk!), Mono/.Net and so on. Revolutionary (as opposed to "evolutionary") developments are distressingly absent in the community.
Have you compared RDP with X on a LAN? X wins, no questions about it (except Gnome). ...BTW, X apps run fine over DSL. I do it all the time. If however you want to bitch about how Gnome apps run over DSL, I'll join with you cos Gnome really does suck when compared to KDE, CDE, GnuStep etc.
GNOME's abysmal performance has less to do with X than it does with Gnome's reliance on CORBA, one of those "elegant" ideas that just doesn't fly in the real world, and never has. It amazes me how Gnome/Linux users can have the gall to gripe about Microsoft bloatware, when their own system is every bit as obese...
Besides the hints, what other apps do you run? How many of those 150 are running real applications, during peak hours, and what kind of response do they have?
;-)
200 ms is what I experience during periods of worm attacks/busy virus days from a cable modem. If you have a wide enough network, you are bound to run into these situations. Mainly I'm trying to get away from the 2 ms local network latencies.
You can definitely run *real* application across X if you build your network properly. More than a decade ago, I built an early switched network based on the original Kalpana Etherswitch to do exactly that in Chevron's Houston and New Orleans Data Centers. The applications were primarily heavy-duty seismic processing and visualization - definitely prime time, fast-response-required applications. The data was obviously too big to move or access effectively via NFS at 10 Mb/s, but what worked just fine was to log into the server that happened to have a local copy of the data you wanted to work with, run the application there, and X the display back to whatever workstation or X terminal you were on. This setup supported very serious work (in a very usable manner) for several hundred users, many of whom were using NCD or Tektronix X terminals as their local devices.
Given the improvements of the past ten years in CPUs, graphics engines, one or two orders of improvement in network speed (depending on your budget, 100 or Gig - but 10 Mb was as fast as it got back then), and Ethernet switches (that's how you minimize latency!) that cost only a few dollars per port, anyone who says you can't do real work over X quite simply has their head up and locked, or is proving their incompetence at both network and system configuration.
In reality, about the only thing you can't really do over X is multimedia, but that's just because the X consortium as well as the XFree folks view X as finished, so it has stagnated over the past several years. Too bad - X is far from ideal, but it does have a lot going for it, and it can be easily hidden from the user well enough now that it's no longer really painful. In the real world, few people really need to watch movies on their computers - for general business use, all the apps will run just fine over X. In spite of its usefulness, X is really the Achilles heel of Linux right now, since it's effectively fossilized with no real heir apparent.
BTW: I've done several studies on real TCO for various employers and clients over the past 15 years, and the X-based solution *always* turns out to be the cheapest both to buy and to administer on an ongoing basis. That result is consistent even when the employer or client really wanted another result - the advantage of X-based systems is so compelling that nothing else can really compete. Terminal services could be a contender if MS didn't force you to buy an XP user license for each remote user - that pretty much destroys any economic incentive to eliminate end-user PCs in favor of terminal devices...
define sport as: "a [physically] athletic recreation where defense can be played."
auto racing, chess, etc. lose on the first count.
Ernest Hemingway would disagree with you. He said that there are only three REAL sports: Auto racing, mountain climbing, and bullfighting. All the rest were pretenders.
Well, theoretically the same bayesian filter that knows to put spam in the "spam" folder, can be similarly taught to put arbitrary content in an arbitrary folder. The trick is training it.
This is really not that hard. Check out POPfile, an open-source Perl program that's intended for spam filtering, but can be used and adapted for much more. It's as good or better than Mozilla's bayesian engine - I would still be using it except that the Mozilla approach does offer some integration benefits. For other applications, though, POPfile should be great - think of it as an all-purpose bayesian engine you can modify at will. (Not that that's necessarily trivial, but it *is* possible...)
Don't guess that their home directory is /home/blah, use the objects given to you and find out
/home.
/etc/passwd or it's equivalent.)
UNIX apps doing things like that are hosed anyway for portability. For example, on Mac OS X, there is no
That's why you should use "~mred" instead - that will always return the proper path to Mr. Ed's home directory. (Usually direcly from
When did communism ever look great on chalkboards?
:-) </rimshot>
<rimshot> When the GPL was first posted? Sure seems to still fool a lot of folks...
It is kind of suprising it took us this long to get a cross-platform standard on how to specify how to draw shapes! But it is a good thing.
I don't think computers will ever be the same once SVG takes off.
You're assuming it *will* take off. Don't get me wrong, I sincerely and fervently hope it does (it would make my life a LOT easier), but until and unless Microsoft puts support for SVG into IE, that *cannot* happen. (I rate Microsoft supporting SVG as just slightly less likely than John Kerry taking a consistent and unchanging stand on any given issue and marrying a woman who's not an heiress...)
Seriously, this is an area where Microsoft's monopoly *really* matters - with over 90% of the world's web surfers using IE, SVG is just flat irrelevant if Microsoft doesn't support it. Since it conflicts and competes with their own strategy and goals, I don't expect to see SVG support from Microsoft anytime soon. Even if they were to decide to support it, that wouldn't be until at least the "Longhorn timeframe" (in MS-speak), which is now likely 2006 or beyond...
mmonia????????
WhatRU smoking?
Those things don't run on ammonia AFAIK, and never have.
Vapor absorption cycle refrigeration has been done with a variety of working fluids over the years, including ammonia. Ammonia was actually quite common in the natural-gas-powered home refrigerators popular until the early to mid 1950's. Unfortunately, almost all of the economically viable working fluids of this type were poisonous and/or could cause severe lung burns. They could never even be considered in today's litigious climate.
Anyway, vapor absoprtion died off within a few years after DuPont introduced Freon with a flurry of stories (true, though) about how people died horrible deaths in thier own homes. Whatever other weaknesses Freon may have, it at least has the property of being extremely inert and generally not too harmful to life. (Many inhalers still use Freon propellant because most of the alternatives are of considerably less-proven safety...) Freons are still considerably safer than the HFCs that have replaced them, some of which have been linked to severe liver damage even at very low exposures (like the typical leak in a car air conditioning system.)
Anyway, vapor absorption refrigeration is a good option, since it can use any source of sufficient quality heat to run. If you're interested in slightly odd refrigeration cycles and techniques, check out the Einstein-Szilard refrigeration system, another cool idea that never made it commercially. And, yes, it *was* designed by the two guys you associate with those names...
maybe he was using jeeves?
not everyone has discovered google yet...
FWIW, I'm still a Google fan, but am finding that Teoma (which uses the same engine as Jeeves, but I like Teoma's presentation better) is delivering results where Google fails.
Google's great (well as good as Infoseek was in its prime before Disney/ABC/Go bought it and ruined it), but Teoma's methods seem to hold up a bit better and retrn results that are often more useful and relevant than Google's, especially in those cases where Google returns way too much crap. You don't have to switch - use Google for what it's good at, but if you find yourself still looking for the needle after two or three search modifications, then hop over to Teoma and give it a try. I did, at a friend's urging, and have been surprised at how well it works. (I have no connection whatever with Teoma, other than as a user.)
Google is still my home page, but I am now using Teoma two or three times a day, and am actually thinking about switching, which I couldn't have imagined several months ago...
Yahoo is getting better, too, and adding more and more useful services all the time. You've just got to love capitalist competition! Thank you, Adam Smith...
In addition to the sites listed above, don't forget the site even older than TUCOWS, the site that was arguably the first real download site on the net: Simtel. (http://www.simtel.com
Simtel is still pretty good, and has always been a good place to find free or cheap software. AFAIK, it was the first large-scale public repository for free and open source software. Before sunsite.unc.edu, before ftp.uu.net, there was Simtel - in the old days, the first place to look for programs or source was ftp.wsmr(for White Sands Missile Range).army.mil. Simtel had *gigabytes* of stuff availabe even before AUPs allowed commercial use of the Internet.
OK, while I'm dating myself - How many people here remember what TUCOWS is an acronym for? (Hint - think Windows 95...) Not many, even here on Slashdot, I'll bet...
I meant to make clear in the post above that the idea of a slim, fast BIOS-OS is a good idea in many cases, not all cases - it doesn't fit everywhere, but there is a lot that we could learn from looking at the capabilities of a well-designed ROM-based OS environment.
For instance, have you ever noticed how much PalmOS is like the original Macintosh OS? A ROM-based OS with not only basic infrastructure functionality, but also a toolbox ROM defining UI elements that can be called on by the applications. This is a poserful idea, and it deserves a modern tratment by someone. Whether Phoenix is going to do it well is still very much a valid question...
But in suspend, they got such dismal battery "life." I mean, 1.5 hours of battery life for regular use, 8 hours of suspend? I have had my Mac suspended for weeks with no problem. What is so hard about bringing the power use down when the machine is all but off?
There are two kinds of suspend: suspend to RAM (S2R) (which still requires power for the RAM and may or may not be able to turn of mostly everythign else, depending on hardware and BIOS capabilities) and suspend to disk (S2D), which, of course, can consume essentially nothing.
This is the difference between "suspend" and "hibernate" in Windows parlance. Most modern hardware fully supports ACPI, since it's a requirement for being MS-certified. Windows, esp XP has excellent ACPI support, but its configuration can be botched up by someone that doesn't know what they're doing - either a user or the factory. The design of Windows' power managment interface makes it far too easy to do the wrong thing. If properly configured, though, the machine will first enter S2R, then, after a certain time (or when the batteries begin to cave in), it will transition to S2D and cut power to an absolute minimum. Sadly, many Windows laptops let the batteries get eaten in S2R mode *before* saving to disk. This is just bone-headed policy, though, not an architectural problem. Users can fix it if they understand what they're doing. (Although, to be fair, the location and size of the S2D file or partition can be a problem, especially if you've increased the amount of RAM and the S2D partition wasn't enlarged to match. (It seems to me *this* is the sort of thing laptops BIOSes shoud be taking care of automatically - when more RAM is detected, check to see if there's enough free space, and if there is, juggle things around to enlarge the S2D partition (sometimes a file under Phoenix-derived BIOSes, making this easier)and shrink the user partitions accordingly. Tricky, but not really all that hard.)
Linux is still problematic, since it's ACPI support is much-improved lately, but still not really up to the task. So far as I'm concerned, this is still a major area where Linux is just not really capable of playing in the modern world yet - pretty much everything today should have and use ACPI, not just laptops.
I agree that only Apple makes this whole process work anything at all like it should...
if a laptop had a built in CF slot designed with intent, you could buy CF equal to your ram, and use it for your suspend/hibernate write out of memory instead of a drive, and it should run a damn sight quicker.. no?
No, probably not. As slow as hard disks are, they're often faster than flash.
The *real* problem here is OS bloat: suspend/resume takes a long time because it quite simply takes bloody forever to write out the contents of RAM, especially when RAM on most machines now is larger than the hard disk itself was only several years ago!
What Phoenix is doing here is great, and we should applaud it: They are replacing the bloated pigs of operating systems we use with a lean, fast, usable system that is ready for use instantly. To my mind, it's about time someone did this, and I hope this BIOS-OS finds its way into all of the hardware of the future.
This isn't nearly as much about the bogeyman of DRM (which I really couldn't care less about) as it is about bringing a new and valuable capability to our computers.
BTW: It's very likely that this idea will spread, and Linux and BSD-based BIOSes of this type are the logical direction to go, since BIOS vendors will (reasonably enough) want to avoid having to pay license tribute. I see nothing but upside here.
Seriously, what we see here is nothing more than the anti-capitalist ranting of a bunch of GPL bigots, who can't stand the idea that someone might actually *profit* (gasp!) from the sale of bits. (And, of course, the PG license expressly permits this sort of use, as it should. Like the BSD, Apache, and X licenses, it is more concerned with good resources being used and propagated than in advancing an anti-commerce political agenda...)
Here's a quick excerpt from blackmask.com on the issue:
That's the reason that the BSD folks gets so cranky about the GPL. BSD code that gets combined with GPLed code can only be distributed under the GPL. It's a one-way street. GPL license advocates can poach from BSD licensed codebases, but the BSD folks can't do likewise (without being subject to the GPL). The real problem with this is that the GPL derivative of the BSD work often competes with the original BSD version for developer mindshare. If the GPL derivative becomes substantially more useful than the BSD original version then the GPL derivative sucks the air out of the room for the original version.
This is absolutely true. The GPL is all about "gimme" which is why the GPL crowd's actions are completely predictable to anyone who's ever had a two-year-old.
In essence, the GPL's stance relative to other licenses is, "What's mine is mine, and what's yours is mine. We call this FREEDOM. Our Freedom. You can go pound sand."
This is why the GPL is so dangerous. If we let the FSF get away with this sort of thing much longer, we will *really* regret it. As my sig says, the FSF and the GPL are ultimately a far greater threat to our freedoms in the long run than Microsoft ever could be. The FSF's goal is to make itself the only viable "open source" license. That would be a horrible thing - for all of us. There are serious dangers to license monocultures as well, perhaps more dangers than an OS monoculture could ever present...
The more restrictions you put on the code, the less free it becomes; because GPL puts more restrictions on the user than BSD does, it is by definition less free. The only totally free code, without any restrictions whatsoever, is code which has been placed in the public domain. GPL is only mostly free...
Very true, but it's important to recognize that it is an virulent hatred (and yes, that's the right word) of the idea that someone might engage in sofware commerce that drives the GPL bigots.
The GPL is not about code, it's not about freedom. It's about doing everything possible to prevent anyone, anywhere, from selling software. When you get right down to it, the GPL is really about peeing in the punchbowl....
1. The Dot. Instead of "search string", search.string works.
A Dash is similar, except that the dot seems to require a single character there, while a dash makes it optional:
Example: "ip-v6" will find entries containing both "ipv6" and "IP v6". Handy for acronymic sorts of things or those sorts of compound words that may or may not be separated by a dash or space in real life...
Digital Convergence While you *can* sortof achieve these things with WiFi and IP Streaming, the bottom line is that neither WiFi nor IP Addresses are trivial enough for Grandma to connect hreself.
No, actually, it *is* easy enough for Grandma, but the problem is that corporate egos are trying as hard as they can to keep this from really working. The problem, as usual, isn't that we have no standard, but rahter that we have at least one too many.
The bottom line: we (users and product designers) are all caught in the middle of a Mexican Standoff between Zeroconf/Rendezvous and Universal Plug-n-Play.
Zeroconf is a real, open, IETF standard, and also the basis for Apple's Rendezvous.
UPnP is the Intel/Microsoft altrernative, which is a SOAP-based "non-standard standard", and specifies far more than is necessary (and probably wise) for interoperability. ALthough it looks more "complete" on the surface, it is overweight, and that completeness may well turn into an unacceptable brittleness in years to come, where Zeroconf aims more to be a very basic platform upon which to build.
From where I sit, it's easier, cleaner, and considerably simpler to implement Zeroconf. It does all the things that matter, but since it skips the questionable value UPnP puts on forcing everything into SOAP, it's much cleaner, ligher weight, and thus far more suitable for embedded devices.
The problem, of course, is that Intel and MS are NOT going to support Zeroconf, although it works like maginc in the Mac world, hard-to-find Windows clients like Howl are required to use it with Windows. That pretty much quashes any possibility of Grandma's using it, if she's going to be using the PC she bought at CompUSA anywhere in the system.
Ultimately, this will be one of the most important battlegrounds of the next few years: It's hard to overstate how important it is to have this capability if we want to be able to move beyond PC-based devices to real, intelligent network devices that offer far more flexibility at far less cost. Intel and MS want that world to fail, while Apple sees little to lose there. Sadly, open source is mostly AWOL in this battle, although there are some exceptions.
There's only one answer: demand full Zeroconf support in *all* operating systems, and vote with your dollars!
Actually, you are now able let your users use Outlook (full functionality) without using Exchange on the server side. SUSE sells OpenExchange, Samsung sells Contact. Both run on a Linux server. They're not cheap, but they are substantially cheaper than Exchange.
But both may well fail in the marketplace, because too many Linux bigots are philosophically opposed to paying for software, regardless of its utility or value.
I personally think this is the biggest thing counting against open source today: the rabid GPL-bigot-types that insist everything must be free, and we should all just do without modern functionality until a GPL'ed clone is available. This is anything but innovation, and it's poisonous not only to progress, but our economy and culture at large, too.
Don't get me wrong - I'm an avid open source advocate myself - but as a consultant to many Fortune 100 companies, I've seen this played out way too many times: The worst enemy of open source advocates is without question open source advocates.
C'mon, now, PEnnsylvania 6-5000 kicks them all in the butt! (A huge Glenn Miller hit from the 1940's for those that haven't had the enjoyment of listening to the great "retro" songs of the 20th century. Of all the "Big Bands", Miller's was the "biggest".)
Of course, if you happen to live on one of the few places where you can still dial with a subset of the digits, I suppose BR-549 might hold some appeal to some. (No explanation here, I think I'll let people Google that one. That sort of thing could seriously mind warp the rapper/anime crowd...)