I think these numbers, and this perspective, are very much mistaken.
R. Buckminster Fuller, in his 1980 book Critical Path, claims that humanity's energy income from the sun (the amount of energy from the sun that reaches the earth every second) is several million times larger than humanity's total energy consumption, world-wide. Granted, you have to find ways to make use of that energy, but the energy is there, and it's nothing but solar energy.
How does that relate to your numbers? Well, to begin with, we need to ask what 30% efficiency of solar cells refers to. Does it really include all the energy from the sun that hits a given area, and the resulting electrical power that's generated? What about thermal solutions, as another poster pointed out?
Also, keep in mind that practically all other forms of energy that we know on this planet are ultimately solar energy. Wind, for example: it's flow of the atmosphere because the air is heated differentially by the sun (we're using the atmosphere as a big turbine, as it were). Water power: the water is elevated to higher levels by solar energy, and then we take some of that energy out of it again as it flows downward. Examples abound. So, in fact, there is far more solar energy than you'd think, and certainly far more than we could ever use.
For consumer-grade scenarios (my neighbour living off my bandwidth), restricting access to certain MAC addresses is enough. (By the way, does anyone know how easy/difficult it is nowadays to get WiFi hardware that lets you choose your own MAC address?)
For higher demands, use a proxy/firewall against which users (not machines) must authenticate in order to get out.
This just underlines that encryption at the wireless link level may not be the right way to go. Even if the algorithm wasn't so weak -- it strikes me as odd that a whole network should be protected by just a single key, which needs to be present on every individual machine of this network. How easily is this compromised!
It's far better not to rely on wireless link encryption and encrypt your application-level protocols instead. SSL for web browsing, PGP or S/MIME for e-mail, ssh for login. Far better algorithms, far better key management.
1. about:config -> keyword.URL set to http://www.google.com/search?oe=UTF-8&q= instead of the default (not very intiutive no), which causes Firefox to search on Google with anything entered that doesn't look like an URL, which is anything that hasn't got a dot embedded in the first word I think(?).
You made my day!!! This is the one big thing I was missing when I switched from Mozilla to Firefox.
I draw direct parallels to what's happening in Iraq to what happened in Germany after the collapse of the Nazi regime, where in Germany there were years of bombings, murders, and widespread terror spread by the 'wolfpack' (Nazi reminants which act very much like the insurgents in Iraq are acting now)
I'm German, reasonably well educated, but I never heard such a thing about post-war Germany. When World War II was over, everybody was very quick to adapt to the new circumstances, and become allies of the winning countries (America in the West, Soviet Union in the East). The transition was in fact so quick that even die-hard Nazis immediately found comfortable positions within the new type of society, of course not displaying their Nazi mind-set openly anymore. There certainly weren't "bombings, murders, and widespread terror for years". Nothing comparable to the situation in Iraq, whatsoever.
The concept of this gadget is cool, but could someone enlighten me to the uses of a USB flash drive out in the wild?
Hmmmm, I use my pocket knife pretty frequently, but the last time I did it in the wild is far in the distant past. It's a perfect everyday tool for countless situations, and so a USB drive on it would be very handy at times. If only because it saves you from having to carry around two gadgets, instead of just one.
It is interesting that the money spent on ringtones world-wide (approx. $2 billion a year, from a random statistic I just grabbed off the web) would be all that it takes to fund a manned mission to Mars (estimated at maybe $10 billion, over a period of, say, 10 years).
Here's an idea: what if the prices for ringtones were kept at the current level no matter what, whereas the record companies etc. were forced to turn over their excess profits so they can be invested into space exploration?
I think one answer may be Test Driven Development (TDD). This means developers are supposed to create tests as they code -- prior to coding a new feature, a test is written that exercises the feature. Initially, the test is supposed to fail. Add the feature, and the test passes. This can be done on any level, given appropriate tools: GUI, End-to-End, Unit Testing, etc. Oh, did I mention JUnit? The tiniest piece of code with the most impact in recent years.
I came across this when I recently read the book by Erich Gamma and Kent Beck, Contributing to Eclipse. They do TDD in this book all the time, and it sounds like it's actually fun.
Not that I have done it myself yet! It sounds like a case where you have to go through some initial inconvencience just to get into the habit, but I imagine that once you've done that, development and testing can be much more fun altogether.
Here's a translation of the first half of the article. I find that
part particularly interesting because of the inherent argument between
the Greens and the Conservatives about how to make money with free
software.
Munich's Town Council blesses Concept for Linux Migration
The 30-million-Euro-project LiMux can start: On Wednesday, the town
council of Munich has officially agreed to the step-by-step plan for
transitioning the entire computer landscape of the about 16,000
workers in the city's administration. The governing red-green
coalition, along with representatives from FDP, OeDP, and PDS voted
in favour of the migration. The CSU, ruling with absolute majority
in Bavaria, voted against the Penguin moving into the offices.
Conservative politicians expressed concerns that leisure-time
programmers ("Feierabendprogrammierer") from the Open-Source camp would
destroy the IT economy of Munich. They feared risks also for the
employees, who mainly must learn how to use a new word processor now.
LiMux means the migration of about 13,000 desktop computers and the
corresponding servers. Initially, the project leaders in the town
council want to make bid invitations to select concrete open source
products. Not only IBM and Novell's subsidiary Suse should be
involved here, although the original LiMux design was done by those
two major players in the Linux market. One of the main goals of the
migration is, however, to create jobs right in Munich's IT economy and
to maintain a competitive market. "We must be careful now not to get
rid of the one monopolist by making ourselves dependent on the next
global giant," said green councellor Jens Muehlhaus up front, alluding
to Microsoft and Big Blue. He wants to involve the small and
medium-sized IT companies in and around Munich, especially for the
non-standard programs (Fachanwendungen) and special solutions that are
needed. Talking to heise online, Muehlhaus regretted the decision of
the CSU, who still hadn't understood that with free software, money
is mainly being made through services.
I've been to many conferences in my career, and two things have been true about all of them:
they were beneficial to my work and my general education in a way that is hardly matched by anything else, e.g. a book or information from the web
they were usually not worth it for the actual program, the talks, etc. It was all about meeting the right people. The talks sometimes only seem to function as an alibi for that.
I don't think the Wizards of OS will be any different, and yes, I think I'll be going there.
Dude, you KNOW you just gave M$ a to-do list for IE, right?
Naah, given that this has been available on the public internet for more than a year, I think it's safe to assume that they are much too arrogant to take up on this.
Besides, they could always download their to-do list in source and binary form from mozilla.org anyway. That's the beauty of free software, when the whole world is your to-do list:-)
Internet Explorer is the best and most compatible web browser.
I don't want to be feeding the troll, but seriously, you don't believe this, do you? IE has a history of breaking every conceivable W3C standard as Microsoft sees fit, and it's only because of Microsoft's monopoly that they can get away with it.
Have you ever tried to make any web page look the same in IE and any other browser? Surely, the very idea of being "the most compatible" is somewhat moot if there's no point of reference. Who (or what) do you think IE is compatible with?
"[...] the SCO Group GmbH must no longer claim that purchasers of Linux operating systems must fear lawsuits if the purchased operating systems are not SCO Linux or Caldera Linux..."
Since this bit has been the most controversial one, I believe you should be careful about doing any boolean arithmetic with it. The negations in the original are different:
"SCO Group GmbH must no longer claim that purchasers of Linux operating systems must fear lawsuits, unless the operating system that was bought is SCO Linux or Caldera Linux..."
Yes, it's logically the same, but natural language sometimes is not entirely logical. Just to clear up any potential confusion.
"SCO Group GmbH will henceforth in its business relations,
that is, towards customers and users, no longer claim that
Linux operating systems contain illegally aquired intellectual
property of SCO Unix. The settlement further prohibits SCO from
claiming that end users, if they employ Linux, may be held liable for
infringement of SCO Intellectual Properties. Further, the claim that
Linux is an unauthorized derivate of Unix, is no longer acceptable.
Last, but not least, SCO Group GmbH may no longer claim that buyers
of Linux operating systems had to fear criminal prosecution, unless
the operating system that was bought is SCO Linux or Caldera Linux...
"Henceforth, SCO will also cease to claim publically that proof for
the copyright infringement would be presented shortly. Exception:
Should this proof be presented within one month after this
settlement, then such a claim may further be made publically."
I'm from Europe, Germany to be specific. [...] And please don't tell me that things have improved since then, as I still see lags of multiple hours within the network of one provider, and up to multiple days between providers.
Sounds like a case of YMMV, since I'm from Germany too. Maybe we'd have to talk providers here. I'm on O2, and these folks had to try hard to survive against the big providers, which might explain why their system finally became quite good by comparison (not that it didn't take them years to get there!).
And maybe we should also talk cities. I'm in Berlin, which is arguably the best-covered GSM area in Germany.
So the bottom line seems to be that there's nothing inherent in the technology that would make it less-than-instant, it's just a matter of experience and commitment on the part of the providers.
And please don't get me started on the braindead 160-character limit, which results in a larger overhead than useful data.
It's arbitrary, and the cost of an SMS is completely unrelated to the actual amount of text in it, so there's no technical reason why it couldn't be different. Nonetheless, I find it extremely interesting how this arbitrary 160-character-limit affects the nature of communication. (If only because it shuts up those who would otherwise flood you with endless "short messages".)
They can (and really do) take up to 7 days to get delivered, even if one's phone has good reception for almost all the time.
Are you from the US? Here in Europe, delivery lags are pretty much a non-issue by now. I haven't had an SMS delayed by any significant amount of time (i.e. more than a few seconds) in years.
(Unless it's New Year's Eve, that is.)
I only know this for those messages to which I got immediate replies of course, but that is probably the majority of my messages.
Microsoft makes it appear like a giant disaster that their source code
leaked to the public. (At the same time, they say , well, it's not that disastrous -- they got it all under control, for sure.) But if it's
so devastating when everybody can see your source code, what does that
mean for the reputation of open source software, which is founded on
that very principle?
Granted, it may be devastating for Microsoft if everybody sees their
code, which was developed under the assumption that nobody else would
ever see it.
Mind you, we always claim that open source is superior because since
everyone can look at it, there are less bugs, less security
problems, etc.
Now, when this happens to Microsoft, everybody is worried what
security problems might come up.
I sense a strange kind of double-moral here -- perhaps both on the side of Microsoft, and in the open source community.
As a contractor you're satisfying all the reasons the authors give for starting their own "businesses" and it's a lot less of an initial risk.
Absolutely. The one thing you don't need to have as a contractor is a good idea of something that other people might be interested in. You just work on what your customers find interesting and important. If all goes well, you can transform that into stuff that's interesting for you as well (that's why they hired you).
Also, the one thing that counts more than anything else for a contractor is your contacts. You should build them before you actually start to depend on them financially, e.g. while you study. Actually, it doesn't take much conscious effort. It just happens if you spend long enough among technically oriented people.
For a lot of people, there is no way to be that selective without starving. It's already hard to find a job in non-free software.
Point taken. I would argue, however, that the question of free vs. non-free software is surprisingly orthogonal to the question whether you can find a job as a programmer or not.
As an employee, you have much less of a bargaining position when it comes to decisions what software is going to be used, and what license your own software is released under (much less than a self-employed consultant.) But in most cases, you can shape your own workplace over time, by making recommendations and simply using free stuff whereever you have an opportunity and it suits your needs. (In many companies, it's the developers who gradually build up something like an open source culture that finally creeps into management.)
Other people's work should be free, but not mine. Just imagine if all software was free, not just the other guys.
Sorry, I may not have said it clearly enough. About half of my income comes from writing/enhancing free software systems for companies that pay me for it. Sometimes, I had to fight tooth and nail with them that this software/these modifications would be released back to the community, under a free software license. If a company doesn't agree to this, I won't work for them. The point is, after I had made this unmistakably clear to them, companies would usually just accept it, and let me do my work anyway. It was still worthwhile to them, even if it didn't result in any proprietary software that they could claim to themselves afterwards.
On the other hand, when I create a web app for a bank, which they use to manage their customer data with, then that software is normally absolutely meaningless to anyone outside that bank. Nobody has a use for it. Partly for that reason, and partly because the internal workings of a bank are nobody else's business, the software is not intended for public release at all. It is therefore moot to request that it be under GPL, or anything.
Sure, it would be nice if we could factor out some generally useful stuff from these programs and release that under a free license. However, it usually happens the other way round: I can recommend free software components for use in these internal projects, and this is where free software enters the equation. It saves my customers a lot of money to begin with, and this creates a climate where I might eventually start adding features to those free software packages (because we need them in our internal project), and release them back to the community,
paid by the company at which I'm using this stuff.
This is all just meant to illustrate that there are countless ways by which you can earn money working on free software, and be a part of the community. Today, with the growing acceptance of this development model in the industry, it's absolutely possible to make a living that way.
I'm sorry but you didn't get the point. What I'm saying is that you can work on free software, and be paid for it. There is no reason that keeps you from getting a paycheck for this kind of work.
The free software development model is a viable alternative for making business, and if companies such as Apple would realize that in the same way as, say, IBM does, programmers and users would be better off.
Programmers and engineers need to eat too. We can't all work for free.
The all-too-common misconception again. I'm an engineer and a programmer, working only on free software projects, and I make a decent living off of it. (Before you ask, "only free software projects" means that for software that is released to the general public, I request that it is under a free license, otherwise I won't work on it. For internal software used only at a customer site, the question naturally doesn't apply. I do recommend using free software as infrastructure in these cases though. So all my work centers around free software, literally.)
It all depends on where you set your priorities, and whether you are willing to question the established way of dealing with software, and try something new.
A lot of big businesses are jumping onto the same bandwaggon right now. And when someone like IBM does it, believe me, there's a lot of money involved.
Slashdot Mirror
R. Buckminster Fuller, in his 1980 book Critical Path, claims that humanity's energy income from the sun (the amount of energy from the sun that reaches the earth every second) is several million times larger than humanity's total energy consumption, world-wide. Granted, you have to find ways to make use of that energy, but the energy is there, and it's nothing but solar energy.
How does that relate to your numbers? Well, to begin with, we need to ask what 30% efficiency of solar cells refers to. Does it really include all the energy from the sun that hits a given area, and the resulting electrical power that's generated? What about thermal solutions, as another poster pointed out?
Also, keep in mind that practically all other forms of energy that we know on this planet are ultimately solar energy. Wind, for example: it's flow of the atmosphere because the air is heated differentially by the sun (we're using the atmosphere as a big turbine, as it were). Water power: the water is elevated to higher levels by solar energy, and then we take some of that energy out of it again as it flows downward. Examples abound. So, in fact, there is far more solar energy than you'd think, and certainly far more than we could ever use.
For higher demands, use a proxy/firewall against which users (not machines) must authenticate in order to get out.
It's far better not to rely on wireless link encryption and encrypt your application-level protocols instead. SSL for web browsing, PGP or S/MIME for e-mail, ssh for login. Far better algorithms, far better key management.
Here's an idea: what if the prices for ringtones were kept at the current level no matter what, whereas the record companies etc. were forced to turn over their excess profits so they can be invested into space exploration?
I came across this when I recently read the book by Erich Gamma and Kent Beck, Contributing to Eclipse. They do TDD in this book all the time, and it sounds like it's actually fun.
Not that I have done it myself yet! It sounds like a case where you have to go through some initial inconvencience just to get into the habit, but I imagine that once you've done that, development and testing can be much more fun altogether.
Thanks, and please keep those news coming, there is a major slashdot effect happening on every site that has live coverage!
Munich's Town Council blesses Concept for Linux Migration
The 30-million-Euro-project LiMux can start: On Wednesday, the town council of Munich has officially agreed to the step-by-step plan for transitioning the entire computer landscape of the about 16,000 workers in the city's administration. The governing red-green coalition, along with representatives from FDP, OeDP, and PDS voted in favour of the migration. The CSU, ruling with absolute majority in Bavaria, voted against the Penguin moving into the offices. Conservative politicians expressed concerns that leisure-time programmers ("Feierabendprogrammierer") from the Open-Source camp would destroy the IT economy of Munich. They feared risks also for the employees, who mainly must learn how to use a new word processor now.
LiMux means the migration of about 13,000 desktop computers and the corresponding servers. Initially, the project leaders in the town council want to make bid invitations to select concrete open source products. Not only IBM and Novell's subsidiary Suse should be involved here, although the original LiMux design was done by those two major players in the Linux market. One of the main goals of the migration is, however, to create jobs right in Munich's IT economy and to maintain a competitive market. "We must be careful now not to get rid of the one monopolist by making ourselves dependent on the next global giant," said green councellor Jens Muehlhaus up front, alluding to Microsoft and Big Blue. He wants to involve the small and medium-sized IT companies in and around Munich, especially for the non-standard programs (Fachanwendungen) and special solutions that are needed. Talking to heise online, Muehlhaus regretted the decision of the CSU, who still hadn't understood that with free software, money is mainly being made through services.
- they were beneficial to my work and my general education in a way that is hardly matched by anything else, e.g. a book or information from the web
- they were usually not worth it for the actual program, the talks, etc. It was all about meeting the right people. The talks sometimes only seem to function as an alibi for that.
I don't think the Wizards of OS will be any different, and yes, I think I'll be going there.Naah, given that this has been available on the public internet for more than a year, I think it's safe to assume that they are much too arrogant to take up on this.
Besides, they could always download their to-do list in source and binary form from mozilla.org anyway. That's the beauty of free software, when the whole world is your to-do list :-)
I don't want to be feeding the troll, but seriously, you don't believe this, do you? IE has a history of breaking every conceivable W3C standard as Microsoft sees fit, and it's only because of Microsoft's monopoly that they can get away with it.
Have you ever tried to make any web page look the same in IE and any other browser? Surely, the very idea of being "the most compatible" is somewhat moot if there's no point of reference. Who (or what) do you think IE is compatible with?
And concerning which browser is "the best", there's always the classic list of 101 things that the Mozilla browser can do that IE cannot.
Assuming that "6.30 am" means local time in Barstow, California, that would be 6.30 PST -0800, or 14.30 GMT.
"[...] the SCO Group GmbH must no longer claim that purchasers of Linux operating systems must fear lawsuits if the purchased operating systems are not SCO Linux or Caldera Linux..."
Since this bit has been the most controversial one, I believe you should be careful about doing any boolean arithmetic with it. The negations in the original are different:
"SCO Group GmbH must no longer claim that purchasers of Linux operating systems must fear lawsuits, unless the operating system that was bought is SCO Linux or Caldera Linux..."
Yes, it's logically the same, but natural language sometimes is not entirely logical. Just to clear up any potential confusion.
"SCO Group GmbH will henceforth in its business relations, that is, towards customers and users, no longer claim that Linux operating systems contain illegally aquired intellectual property of SCO Unix. The settlement further prohibits SCO from claiming that end users, if they employ Linux, may be held liable for infringement of SCO Intellectual Properties. Further, the claim that Linux is an unauthorized derivate of Unix, is no longer acceptable. Last, but not least, SCO Group GmbH may no longer claim that buyers of Linux operating systems had to fear criminal prosecution, unless the operating system that was bought is SCO Linux or Caldera Linux...
"Henceforth, SCO will also cease to claim publically that proof for the copyright infringement would be presented shortly. Exception: Should this proof be presented within one month after this settlement, then such a claim may further be made publically."
Sounds like a case of YMMV, since I'm from Germany too. Maybe we'd have to talk providers here. I'm on O2, and these folks had to try hard to survive against the big providers, which might explain why their system finally became quite good by comparison (not that it didn't take them years to get there!).
And maybe we should also talk cities. I'm in Berlin, which is arguably the best-covered GSM area in Germany.
So the bottom line seems to be that there's nothing inherent in the technology that would make it less-than-instant, it's just a matter of experience and commitment on the part of the providers.
And please don't get me started on the braindead 160-character limit, which results in a larger overhead than useful data.
It's arbitrary, and the cost of an SMS is completely unrelated to the actual amount of text in it, so there's no technical reason why it couldn't be different. Nonetheless, I find it extremely interesting how this arbitrary 160-character-limit affects the nature of communication. (If only because it shuts up those who would otherwise flood you with endless "short messages".)
Are you from the US? Here in Europe, delivery lags are pretty much a non-issue by now. I haven't had an SMS delayed by any significant amount of time (i.e. more than a few seconds) in years.
(Unless it's New Year's Eve, that is.)
I only know this for those messages to which I got immediate replies of course, but that is probably the majority of my messages.
Granted, it may be devastating for Microsoft if everybody sees their code, which was developed under the assumption that nobody else would ever see it.
Mind you, we always claim that open source is superior because since everyone can look at it, there are less bugs, less security problems, etc.
Now, when this happens to Microsoft, everybody is worried what security problems might come up.
I sense a strange kind of double-moral here -- perhaps both on the side of Microsoft, and in the open source community.
Absolutely. The one thing you don't need to have as a contractor is a good idea of something that other people might be interested in. You just work on what your customers find interesting and important. If all goes well, you can transform that into stuff that's interesting for you as well (that's why they hired you).
Also, the one thing that counts more than anything else for a contractor is your contacts. You should build them before you actually start to depend on them financially, e.g. while you study. Actually, it doesn't take much conscious effort. It just happens if you spend long enough among technically oriented people.
Point taken. I would argue, however, that the question of free vs. non-free software is surprisingly orthogonal to the question whether you can find a job as a programmer or not.
As an employee, you have much less of a bargaining position when it comes to decisions what software is going to be used, and what license your own software is released under (much less than a self-employed consultant.) But in most cases, you can shape your own workplace over time, by making recommendations and simply using free stuff whereever you have an opportunity and it suits your needs. (In many companies, it's the developers who gradually build up something like an open source culture that finally creeps into management.)
Sorry, I may not have said it clearly enough. About half of my income comes from writing/enhancing free software systems for companies that pay me for it. Sometimes, I had to fight tooth and nail with them that this software/these modifications would be released back to the community, under a free software license. If a company doesn't agree to this, I won't work for them. The point is, after I had made this unmistakably clear to them, companies would usually just accept it, and let me do my work anyway. It was still worthwhile to them, even if it didn't result in any proprietary software that they could claim to themselves afterwards.
On the other hand, when I create a web app for a bank, which they use to manage their customer data with, then that software is normally absolutely meaningless to anyone outside that bank. Nobody has a use for it. Partly for that reason, and partly because the internal workings of a bank are nobody else's business, the software is not intended for public release at all. It is therefore moot to request that it be under GPL, or anything.
Sure, it would be nice if we could factor out some generally useful stuff from these programs and release that under a free license. However, it usually happens the other way round: I can recommend free software components for use in these internal projects, and this is where free software enters the equation. It saves my customers a lot of money to begin with, and this creates a climate where I might eventually start adding features to those free software packages (because we need them in our internal project), and release them back to the community, paid by the company at which I'm using this stuff.
This is all just meant to illustrate that there are countless ways by which you can earn money working on free software, and be a part of the community. Today, with the growing acceptance of this development model in the industry, it's absolutely possible to make a living that way.
The free software development model is a viable alternative for making business, and if companies such as Apple would realize that in the same way as, say, IBM does, programmers and users would be better off.
The all-too-common misconception again. I'm an engineer and a programmer, working only on free software projects, and I make a decent living off of it. (Before you ask, "only free software projects" means that for software that is released to the general public, I request that it is under a free license, otherwise I won't work on it. For internal software used only at a customer site, the question naturally doesn't apply. I do recommend using free software as infrastructure in these cases though. So all my work centers around free software, literally.)
It all depends on where you set your priorities, and whether you are willing to question the established way of dealing with software, and try something new.
A lot of big businesses are jumping onto the same bandwaggon right now. And when someone like IBM does it, believe me, there's a lot of money involved.