Nah; the Finnish language is one of the roughly 50% of languages that don't have definite articles. So omitting the "the" is quite appropriate.
Either that, or you do the standard Finnish-learning-English mistake of using "the" incorrectly. But there's really no good incorrect placing in this headline. "Star Trek the Spoof..."? I don't think so.
Actually, I noticed the verbal ambiguity more. I was wondering which top Finnish movie Star Trek was spoofing. Or was maybe some Star Trek spoof topping [the rating of] some unnamed Finnish movie? Which of those verbs is missing its final 's'?
(And, this being/., would there be an apostrophe before the missing 's'?;-)
We call humans "man". We call God "him". We default to the male gender when ambiguous.
What's really bizarre is reading such comments in a discussion of a movie that's in Finnish.
Finns don't do any of that in their speech, because the Finnish language has no gender at all. Not even in the pronouns. The above quote, translated into Finnish, sounds bizarre. Not wrong, just nonsensical, because the gender of the English words is untranslatable. In Finnish, you can't default to the male gender, because there's no such thing as gender.
There are words for "man" and "woman", of course; they're "miehen" and "nainen". But neither of these is regularly used for a person of unspecified sex; the term for that is "henki", which is genderless. (It actually means something more like "soul" or "spirit", but it's regularly used where we might say "person" in English)
Fact is that such claims are an artifact of your language. Of the 6,000 or so languages spoken on Earth, many use any of several different systems for dealing with sex/gender. And quite a few don't bother with such concepts. The native speakers of all tend to think that their way is the "natural" way that everyone speaks and thinks.
Good idea. Now if we could just get all other browser users to understand this. It's never a good idea to take code from strangers and run it automatically.
If browser makers were responsible citizens, they'd all supply their browsers with javascript and all other scripting tools turned off by default. There are cases where they're useful, with sites that you know are trustworthy. But enabling scripting by default is just asking for trouble.
Actually, the ongoing flame wars and FUD over the (L)GPL illustrate my original point. It's obvious that 1) people are really good at putting interpretations on legal documents that are utterly unlike what was intended, and 2) how a legal document is interpreted is decided by the courts, often is a way that's utterly unlike what any of the participants expected. (And it's really somewhat of a pity that the (L)GPL hasn't been tested in court, but that's mostly because corporate lawyers advise their clients not to push their case.;-)
The framers of the GPL clearly intended to write a simple legal license that would give users some rights that the default copyright laws don't give. But still, rather than using your own reading (or the original intent) as a legal guideline, it's a good idea to get legal advice on what the GPL really means in a court of law. History says that all parties are likely to be surprised by the courts' interpretation of that license.
Similarly, MS is claiming to "open" their document formats, and license us all to use those formats. Even if we give them the benefit of thee doubt, we'd be fools to trust the word of their marketing people. The real meaning of their license is what the courts eventually say it is, not what any of us may think it is. And Microsoft's management is as likely as many of us to be surprised by the courts' interpretation.
Also, we have a bit of history with MS licenses. This is reason to be doubly careful, and not take their marketing people at their word. We need to hear from lawyers with expertise in the areas of trademark, copyright and patent to understand what their "open" license may actually mean.
[T]he format is free to use. In his next post, Brian points out that the license is perpetual; that is, it cannot be changed once granted.
We've seen other such licenses that have turned out to be very misleading. For example, if I use the license and write software that implements the specs, can I legally sell my software? The fact that I have a license doesn't mean that I can pass the license on to others in my products.
There are lots of potential legal gotchas in a lot of "free" licenses. Given MS's history, a bit of paranoia is in order here. We need people suggesting ways that they can turn around and sue us into bandruptcy if we use their specs. Then we need assurances that they won't sue us in any of those ways. And we need lawyers looking at the assurances and telling us whether they're legally meaningful, or whether we might get sued anyway.
After all, consider the RIAA. Who'd have ever thought that someone could be sued for buying a recording, sticking it into their own sound equipment and playing the music? But that's happening these days. We've even just had a story of recordings that intentionally damage our playing equipment when we attempt to play the music.
Ecma's wiki and site seems to be pretty much confirm that they're composed of manufacturer members. I wouldn't consider them the equivalent of ANSI or UL.
A related point that I'm wondering about: When the standards specs are complete, how will I get them? Will they be online? Or will I have to pay and sign an NDA to get a copy?
This isn't an idle distinction. I well remember, back in the 1980's, working on networking projects where we really wanted to get the OSI stuff up and running alongside IP, to compare them. A problem was that the OSI specs weren't online; they could only be ordered in print. By the time we got a purchase order approved, an order sent, and the docs delivered, we had long since downloaded the RFCs for the internet equivalent and implemented it all. And part of the problem was that we had to hand-type the stuff from the OSI specs, leading to lots of typos and extra time to spot the typing errors. The IP docs could be directly copied to the code without error. (And yes, I am one of those weirdos who writes perl scripts that read spec docs and spit out code. I've gotten all sorts of funny reactions from people when they first discover those entries in my makefiles.;-)
The end result was that our OSI code could never catch up with the IP code. It couldn't even come close, simply due to the delays in dealing with for-pay, on-paper specs when the competitor was instantly available online in machine-readable form.
If we'd had to sign NDAs for the OSI stuff, we'd never have gotten anywhere. But then, I guess we really didn't anyway, because all that OSI code is now dead and forgotten.
I can see ECMA using a similar approach to delay us "open source" geeks, so they can hold it semi-private while oh-so-innocently pretending to have opened it all. It'll likely be open in the same sense as the OSI specs, but maybe with NDAs. With MS's marketing clout, the effect won't be to eliminate those formats from the market. The main effect will be a big drag on developers' time, as they try to jump through all the hoops required to get something working.
I do expect that 6 months from now, we'll be hearing a lot of "Hey, we opened the formats, but nobody else has implemented them. Our competitors must be intentionally ignoring them; or maybe they're just incompetent." No mention of the fact that the specs haven't been published yet. And, if computing history is any guide, that 18-month estimate means at least 3 years, probably more.
This sort of thing isn't what you'd call a efficient. But I don't suppose anybody ever called software a rational market.
Let's abandon Vienna, rather than pay upkeep on the canal system. Let's evacuate Amsterdam, cause paying for all those dikes is just pointlessly expensive! Hey, all you people living in places that require any kind of enviornmental adaptation: MOVE!
Yeah; we've heard a lot of that sort of attitude about New Orleans here in the US. Meanwhile, others have pointed out that New Orleans will be rebuilt, with stronger dikes, for the same reason that Amsterdam was rebuilt when the same sort of disaster happened there half a century ago.
It turns out that Amsterdam and New Orleans exist where they are for the same strong economic reason. They are both near the mouth of a major river system with lots of traffic. It doesn't work to use a single type of ship for river and ocean shipping; you need a seaport near or in the estuary for transfer of goods between the two kinds of ships. And since that's where you do the transfer, you also build lots of warehouses there. Otherwise your commerce doesn't work. Right now there are a lot of economic problems in the middle of the US because so much shipping via the Mississippi has been crippled.
And, of course, you don't build dikes or levees on a retail, private basis. If you do, a single negligent owner of 100 meters of shoreline will cause what just happened in New Orleans. River-mouth seaports need protection from storms, and that protection must be done on an area-wide basis; i.e., as a government project.
Some Americans are figuring this out, as the Dutch did 50 years ago.
The really annoying part is that the Army Corps of Engineers provided a detailed summary well before the storm hit. New Orleans' 17th-Street levee that was the biggest break was the item at the top of their list of recommended maintenance projects. The reaction of the Bush Administration was to cut almost all the funding. But this has been thoroughly documented and widely published, and lots of people consider Bush's people directly responsible for the resulting disaster. They were warned in clear engineering reports, and they chose to cut the maintenance.
We'll see whether this causes any changes in the US, as it did in the Netherlands 50 years ago. Chances it won't produce changes in the crowd that calls itself "conservative" these days. But much of the population is getting the idea that maybe these aren't the sorts that you want to put in charge of critical infrastructure. We'll see what future elections bring.
... the town will probably see an endless stream of shadow puppet pranks.
And in a few years, we'll see them organizing a Shadow Puppet Festival, with thousands of tourists attending. Eventually it'll be turned into a Broadway musical and Hollywood movie.
I'd read about central heating in a few Danish cities, but I hadn't read that it was being done in Oslo. Of course, you'd expect the Scandinavians to do such a thing, if anyone would.
I've also read of a few central heating plants in some Japanese cities, but I don't know any details.
So, to get back on topic, is there any place in Scandinavia where there's a "central sunlight" utility? There must be a lot of places in Norway with problems similar to this Austrian town's. The south side of some of those east-west fjords must get pretty gloomy about this time of year. Have any Norwegian towns worked on a sunlight delivery system?
Interesting. I hadn't heard of such a cooling "utility".
At one of the universities that I was at, there was a similar sort of central cooling system. Some decades ago, a number of departments started installing cooling equipment that dumped the heat into the water system. Eventually, this resulted in the water system being tied into the campus power/heating system, with water being cycled back to the central plant to adjust its temperature (hotter in winter, cooler in summer). Since this was done with big centralized equipment, it was more efficient than lots of separate small boxes would be. But this wasn't ever installed fully everywhere on the campus, so cooling was never as efficient as heating.
This approach is widely used in large buildings (hospitals, hotels, skyscrapers), where the water pipes are often used as heat sources and sinks as needed, and the building's power plant continuously adjusts the hot/cold temperatures as needed.
But who would have thought there would ever be a need for cooling in Helsinki?;-)
The EU should pay for some weird underground heating...
Actually, that's not at all weird. Here in the US, there are a number of universities that have done this. I attended two of them. In the winter, when visitors commented on the "waste" of heated sidewalks, it was fun to explain that it was a side effect of the cost-saving heating system.
What they do is obvious: There's a big campus heating plant, with underground pipes connecting it to the other buildings. Mostly, the pipes are inside tunnels, which contain other long, skinny things like wiring of various sorts. And, for obvious reasons, the tunnels are usually built underneath sidewalks, so that the leaking heat will keep the walks clear in winter.
The only problem is that they don't put them under all the sidewalks. But in general, such central heating systems cost a lot less than separate heating systems in each building.
Too bad that people in towns generally can't implement something similar. But if they did, the cost would be called "taxes", and no matter how much less they were than per-house heating systems, people wouldn't accept them. Taxes are, you know, evil; paying twice as much to a private corporation is good.
There is technology to do similar things with light. Google for "light pipe". How practical this might be on a town level isn't obvious.
Unless they pull some DMCA shenanigans, but I can't see them being quite that stupid...
Heh. Remember the incident last year, when people tried sneaking a bill through Congress that would make it legal for a company to send you code that damages or destroys your computer.
Among the "DMCA shenanigans" will be repeated attempts to slip such provisions into new laws, and to make sure that it's illegal for you to remove code like this, no matter how much it damages your computer.
the first and probably only rootkit wich has done something good
Well, I'll bet there will be a number of others, different in the details but fundamentally similar.
We can expect that the people running other companies are thinking of doing the same sort of thing, and a lot of them probably have the projects underway. There may be others out there that are working, and we just haven't discovered them yet.
But we probably will. Why? Because part of the nature of business management is contempt for their competitors' products. This means that their rootkits aren't taking into account all the other rootkits, and they won't be tested against their competitors' DRM code. So after you've loaded N CDs into your Windows computer, each installing its own rootkit, guess what's gonna happen? Anyone with any experience at all with computers can tell you.
The symptoms will be noticed; the culprit software will be dug out and examined; the story will hit the fan all over again.
Stay tuned for the fun...
(And I do wonder what will happen the first time some company tries invoking the DMCA against customers and/or security firms who publish the facts about their rootkits. That'll be especially entertaining to discuss here.;-)
Cars are complex, but McDonnalds doesnt put a tracking device in rthe ignition system while I am buying a bigmac.
Actually, that's because an easier way has recently appeared. At least in the US, there's now a law in place that all auto tires much contain RFID chips.
So rather than attaching anything to your car, what they can do is put an RFID reader at their drive-up windows that reads the ID numbers of your tires. They can buy the info about the car's registration (legally or otherwise) from various industry and government sources. This gives them a way to track your purchase patterns, and perhaps compare the info with other cooperating companies.
Granted, this would only work now for very new cars, or older cars with new tires. In a few years, this will be most cars.
(What, me paranoid? But think about it the next time you pass a drive-up window. It's slowly getting easier to track your motions, if people really want to do it.;-)
If AV vendors can't protect against this type of threat, and cannot identify cloaked software when it has been distributed for a year,...
Ah, but they could. Sony told them all about it, so that they could write code that recognized Sony's rootkit, and ignored it.
So now the question is: How can we defend ourselves against AV vendors that make such deals with the devil?
Actually, this question has a simple question: We can't. At least, not as long as we persist in running binary-only distros on our machines. If we don't have the source code to that kernel, anything at all could be hidden there, and we'd never know until it bit us.
You can't guarantee that a given.DOC file will work equally well in Word and OOo.
Hell, you can't even guarantee that a given.DOC will work equally well (or at all) in a recipient's version of Word.
I recently worked with a company whose big compatibility problem was persuading all their people to upgrade their W95 machines to W98. They also had lots of fun trying to figure out how to handle Word docs sent from a 21st-century version of Windows.
They really didn't know what to make of our linux and Mac laptops...
The zoneinfo C library supports leapseconds (but craps out in the year 2038).
It does? That's interesting; it implies that the implementers have solved the problem of cross-time communication.
For example, suppose I need to schedule an event for the first second of the year 2025 UTC, i.e. 20250101 00:00:00. Today, we don't know how many leap seconds there will be in the next decade, or when they will be inserted. So using only information available right now, the actual time (i.e., the second count) can't be calculated.
But the zoneinfo C library solves this problem. The only way this can be done is to get the table of leap seconds from a decade from now.
So how do they do this? Any why has the technology been kept from the rest of us?
Inquiring minds want to know.
(Also, I'll predict that by 2038 all cpus will be at least 64 bits, if not 256, and the only 32-bit cpus will be in the hands of museums and a few hobbyists. So the overflow to bit 33 that happens in that year won't actually effect very many of us. I hope I'll be around to see if my prediction is correct.)
That sounds about right. And there are also groups like the Navajo and Hopi who have made serious comments about demanding equal time for their creation myths. That would be more difficult for the Christian fundamentalists to dismiss, since these aren't spoofs.
Actually, when I was in high school, I would have thought it fun to have chapters on such myths. They may not be technically correct, but they tell us some interesting things about how our ancestors sometimes did things. And just in case anyone gets too uppity about how far we've advance, it helps to have a reminder that there are still people who believe some of those stories despite all the evidence.
There are courses on such topics in a lot of colleges, of course. It's quite a proper topic for a joint history/anthropology course. Some history-of-science courses also teach about relevant early attempts to explain our world.
I wonder if the Flat Earth Society has tried to crash the ID party? It might be fun if they could start pushing for inclusion in science texts.
As long as they teach Flying Spaghetti Monsterism of course. I want to see that belief system in a textbook, dammit.
As long as they give equal space to Invisible Pink Unicornism. Or else you'll have a big political fight on your hand (unlike the current situation;-).
Really; wouldn't it be fun to see both in a textbook? I wonder if it would be possible for a publisher to sneak them in without it being discovered beforehand? The kids would probably love it.
... wings were designed by somebody (we don't say who;-) ) and birds could not have evolved wings.
That's what ID theory would say.
Actually, if you read that exremely literally, biologists would agree. That is, birds themselves didn't themselves one day decide to evolve wings. They didn't (and still don't) have the brain power to make such a decision. Their evolving of wings was in fact directed by an outside "actor" - which we call "natural selection". Darwin understood quite well why this would upset the religious force, since the director of his evolutionary process is something that has no intelligence, does no designing, and has no goal or purpose.
One clever way I've heard it expressed is that the verb "evolve" isn't transitive. That is, birds didn't evolve wings, and giraffes didn't evolve long necks. They didn't do anything at all to their wings or necks. Those critters just went about their lives, trying to eat and reproduce, without a thought as to what their descendants would look like. And this totally mindless "natural selection" process modified each generation to be slightly different than the parent generation. Nowhere in the process is there a mind that's "evolving" something transitively, with a purpose.
What I haven't read yet is how the ID people get out of the infinite regress that their "theory" produces. How did the Designer come to exist? Created by an even more intelligent designer? Presumably someone has tackled this, but how do you google for their answer?
... what was god doing in the eternity that preceded the creation of our universe?
Pilot studies. But they all failed miserably at the job of creating the intellectual companions that God was looking for. Rumor is that He's about to give up on this one, too, reduce it to a pool of quarks, and move on to test model Aleph-3.
I wish MySQL would give away free copies.......oh wait......!!!!!!
Yeah, and MySQL releases always seem to run on at least Windows, linux and OSX. When I looked at the download site, I didn't find MSSQL for linux or OSX. Maybe they somehow forgot to include the links to those? It's gotta be an oversight on the part of the web-site maintainers, right?
Seriously, while FF reaching 10% is good news, we do need to avoid pushing for another monoculture. The world would be better off with a flock of browsers designed to work well (which included efficiently) for different people and different environments.
A flock of different browsers, all standards-compliant of course, would really help to avoid a situation where a single piece of malware can bring down zillions of machines.
And there are good technical reasons for wanting browsers designed differently. There are all sorts of special situations where one might want an unusual browser. Thus, lynx does pretty well for the visually impaired, and it's also a browser that can be run from scripts (since it doesn't do full graphics). A browser running on a handheld with a tiny screen is going to render things differently that something on a huge screen, and code that does both kinds of renderings is going to be inherently slower than code that's more specialized.
Lots of readers can probably give situations where they'd really like a browser that's unusual in some way. I know I can think of lots of things I'd like done differently from how FF does them.
So, good as firefox may be, we should treat its success as grounds for pushing for still more good browsers. Some may be based on FF. But we'd probably be even better off if they are independent code. Monocultures are dangerous, and should be consciously avoided.
Of course, right now we might start the anti-FF action by pushing for opera. OK; it's not open-source, which is a mark against it. But it's good, and the company is a bunch of nice guys (so far). They just made it ad-free. So everyone should grab a copy and start running up the server stats for it.
And use konqueror some more. Can it run on Windows yet? That'd be fun to foist on the MS crowd.
The ideal would be no browser over 10% of the stats.
Slashdot Mirror
Nah; the Finnish language is one of the roughly 50% of languages that don't have definite articles. So omitting the "the" is quite appropriate.
..."? I don't think so.
/., would there be an apostrophe before the missing 's'? ;-)
Either that, or you do the standard Finnish-learning-English mistake of using "the" incorrectly. But there's really no good incorrect placing in this headline. "Star Trek the Spoof
Actually, I noticed the verbal ambiguity more. I was wondering which top Finnish movie Star Trek was spoofing. Or was maybe some Star Trek spoof topping [the rating of] some unnamed Finnish movie? Which of those verbs is missing its final 's'?
(And, this being
We call humans "man". We call God "him". We default to the male gender when ambiguous.
What's really bizarre is reading such comments in a discussion of a movie that's in Finnish.
Finns don't do any of that in their speech, because the Finnish language has no gender at all. Not even in the pronouns. The above quote, translated into Finnish, sounds bizarre. Not wrong, just nonsensical, because the gender of the English words is untranslatable. In Finnish, you can't default to the male gender, because there's no such thing as gender.
There are words for "man" and "woman", of course; they're "miehen" and "nainen". But neither of these is regularly used for a person of unspecified sex; the term for that is "henki", which is genderless. (It actually means something more like "soul" or "spirit", but it's regularly used where we might say "person" in English)
Fact is that such claims are an artifact of your language. Of the 6,000 or so languages spoken on Earth, many use any of several different systems for dealing with sex/gender. And quite a few don't bother with such concepts. The native speakers of all tend to think that their way is the "natural" way that everyone speaks and thinks.
But it's basically nonsense.
I don't use javascript
Good idea. Now if we could just get all other browser users to understand this. It's never a good idea to take code from strangers and run it automatically.
If browser makers were responsible citizens, they'd all supply their browsers with javascript and all other scripting tools turned off by default. There are cases where they're useful, with sites that you know are trustworthy. But enabling scripting by default is just asking for trouble.
Actually, the ongoing flame wars and FUD over the (L)GPL illustrate my original point. It's obvious that 1) people are really good at putting interpretations on legal documents that are utterly unlike what was intended, and 2) how a legal document is interpreted is decided by the courts, often is a way that's utterly unlike what any of the participants expected. (And it's really somewhat of a pity that the (L)GPL hasn't been tested in court, but that's mostly because corporate lawyers advise their clients not to push their case. ;-)
The framers of the GPL clearly intended to write a simple legal license that would give users some rights that the default copyright laws don't give. But still, rather than using your own reading (or the original intent) as a legal guideline, it's a good idea to get legal advice on what the GPL really means in a court of law. History says that all parties are likely to be surprised by the courts' interpretation of that license.
Similarly, MS is claiming to "open" their document formats, and license us all to use those formats. Even if we give them the benefit of thee doubt, we'd be fools to trust the word of their marketing people. The real meaning of their license is what the courts eventually say it is, not what any of us may think it is. And Microsoft's management is as likely as many of us to be surprised by the courts' interpretation.
Also, we have a bit of history with MS licenses. This is reason to be doubly careful, and not take their marketing people at their word. We need to hear from lawyers with expertise in the areas of trademark, copyright and patent to understand what their "open" license may actually mean.
[T]he format is free to use. In his next post, Brian points out that the license is perpetual; that is, it cannot be changed once granted.
We've seen other such licenses that have turned out to be very misleading. For example, if I use the license and write software that implements the specs, can I legally sell my software? The fact that I have a license doesn't mean that I can pass the license on to others in my products.
There are lots of potential legal gotchas in a lot of "free" licenses. Given MS's history, a bit of paranoia is in order here. We need people suggesting ways that they can turn around and sue us into bandruptcy if we use their specs. Then we need assurances that they won't sue us in any of those ways. And we need lawyers looking at the assurances and telling us whether they're legally meaningful, or whether we might get sued anyway.
After all, consider the RIAA. Who'd have ever thought that someone could be sued for buying a recording, sticking it into their own sound equipment and playing the music? But that's happening these days. We've even just had a story of recordings that intentionally damage our playing equipment when we attempt to play the music.
Paranoia here is quite appropriate.
Ecma's wiki and site seems to be pretty much confirm that they're composed of manufacturer members. I wouldn't consider them the equivalent of ANSI or UL.
;-)
A related point that I'm wondering about: When the standards specs are complete, how will I get them? Will they be online? Or will I have to pay and sign an NDA to get a copy?
This isn't an idle distinction. I well remember, back in the 1980's, working on networking projects where we really wanted to get the OSI stuff up and running alongside IP, to compare them. A problem was that the OSI specs weren't online; they could only be ordered in print. By the time we got a purchase order approved, an order sent, and the docs delivered, we had long since downloaded the RFCs for the internet equivalent and implemented it all. And part of the problem was that we had to hand-type the stuff from the OSI specs, leading to lots of typos and extra time to spot the typing errors. The IP docs could be directly copied to the code without error. (And yes, I am one of those weirdos who writes perl scripts that read spec docs and spit out code. I've gotten all sorts of funny reactions from people when they first discover those entries in my makefiles.
The end result was that our OSI code could never catch up with the IP code. It couldn't even come close, simply due to the delays in dealing with for-pay, on-paper specs when the competitor was instantly available online in machine-readable form.
If we'd had to sign NDAs for the OSI stuff, we'd never have gotten anywhere. But then, I guess we really didn't anyway, because all that OSI code is now dead and forgotten.
I can see ECMA using a similar approach to delay us "open source" geeks, so they can hold it semi-private while oh-so-innocently pretending to have opened it all. It'll likely be open in the same sense as the OSI specs, but maybe with NDAs. With MS's marketing clout, the effect won't be to eliminate those formats from the market. The main effect will be a big drag on developers' time, as they try to jump through all the hoops required to get something working.
I do expect that 6 months from now, we'll be hearing a lot of "Hey, we opened the formats, but nobody else has implemented them. Our competitors must be intentionally ignoring them; or maybe they're just incompetent." No mention of the fact that the specs haven't been published yet. And, if computing history is any guide, that 18-month estimate means at least 3 years, probably more.
This sort of thing isn't what you'd call a efficient. But I don't suppose anybody ever called software a rational market.
Let's abandon Vienna, rather than pay upkeep on the canal system. Let's evacuate Amsterdam, cause paying for all those dikes is just pointlessly expensive! Hey, all you people living in places that require any kind of enviornmental adaptation: MOVE!
Yeah; we've heard a lot of that sort of attitude about New Orleans here in the US. Meanwhile, others have pointed out that New Orleans will be rebuilt, with stronger dikes, for the same reason that Amsterdam was rebuilt when the same sort of disaster happened there half a century ago.
It turns out that Amsterdam and New Orleans exist where they are for the same strong economic reason. They are both near the mouth of a major river system with lots of traffic. It doesn't work to use a single type of ship for river and ocean shipping; you need a seaport near or in the estuary for transfer of goods between the two kinds of ships. And since that's where you do the transfer, you also build lots of warehouses there. Otherwise your commerce doesn't work. Right now there are a lot of economic problems in the middle of the US because so much shipping via the Mississippi has been crippled.
And, of course, you don't build dikes or levees on a retail, private basis. If you do, a single negligent owner of 100 meters of shoreline will cause what just happened in New Orleans. River-mouth seaports need protection from storms, and that protection must be done on an area-wide basis; i.e., as a government project.
Some Americans are figuring this out, as the Dutch did 50 years ago.
The really annoying part is that the Army Corps of Engineers provided a detailed summary well before the storm hit. New Orleans' 17th-Street levee that was the biggest break was the item at the top of their list of recommended maintenance projects. The reaction of the Bush Administration was to cut almost all the funding. But this has been thoroughly documented and widely published, and lots of people consider Bush's people directly responsible for the resulting disaster. They were warned in clear engineering reports, and they chose to cut the maintenance.
We'll see whether this causes any changes in the US, as it did in the Netherlands 50 years ago. Chances it won't produce changes in the crowd that calls itself "conservative" these days. But much of the population is getting the idea that maybe these aren't the sorts that you want to put in charge of critical infrastructure. We'll see what future elections bring.
... the town will probably see an endless stream of shadow puppet pranks.
And in a few years, we'll see them organizing a Shadow Puppet Festival, with thousands of tourists attending. Eventually it'll be turned into a Broadway musical and Hollywood movie.
This is in the Austrian Alps, you know.
I'd read about central heating in a few Danish cities, but I hadn't read that it was being done in Oslo. Of course, you'd expect the Scandinavians to do such a thing, if anyone would.
I've also read of a few central heating plants in some Japanese cities, but I don't know any details.
So, to get back on topic, is there any place in Scandinavia where there's a "central sunlight" utility? There must be a lot of places in Norway with problems similar to this Austrian town's. The south side of some of those east-west fjords must get pretty gloomy about this time of year. Have any Norwegian towns worked on a sunlight delivery system?
Interesting. I hadn't heard of such a cooling "utility".
;-)
At one of the universities that I was at, there was a similar sort of central cooling system. Some decades ago, a number of departments started installing cooling equipment that dumped the heat into the water system. Eventually, this resulted in the water system being tied into the campus power/heating system, with water being cycled back to the central plant to adjust its temperature (hotter in winter, cooler in summer). Since this was done with big centralized equipment, it was more efficient than lots of separate small boxes would be. But this wasn't ever installed fully everywhere on the campus, so cooling was never as efficient as heating.
This approach is widely used in large buildings (hospitals, hotels, skyscrapers), where the water pipes are often used as heat sources and sinks as needed, and the building's power plant continuously adjusts the hot/cold temperatures as needed.
But who would have thought there would ever be a need for cooling in Helsinki?
The EU should pay for some weird underground heating ...
Actually, that's not at all weird. Here in the US, there are a number of universities that have done this. I attended two of them. In the winter, when visitors commented on the "waste" of heated sidewalks, it was fun to explain that it was a side effect of the cost-saving heating system.
What they do is obvious: There's a big campus heating plant, with underground pipes connecting it to the other buildings. Mostly, the pipes are inside tunnels, which contain other long, skinny things like wiring of various sorts. And, for obvious reasons, the tunnels are usually built underneath sidewalks, so that the leaking heat will keep the walks clear in winter.
The only problem is that they don't put them under all the sidewalks. But in general, such central heating systems cost a lot less than separate heating systems in each building.
Too bad that people in towns generally can't implement something similar. But if they did, the cost would be called "taxes", and no matter how much less they were than per-house heating systems, people wouldn't accept them. Taxes are, you know, evil; paying twice as much to a private corporation is good.
There is technology to do similar things with light. Google for "light pipe". How practical this might be on a town level isn't obvious.
Unless they pull some DMCA shenanigans, but I can't see them being quite that stupid...
Heh. Remember the incident last year, when people tried sneaking a bill through Congress that would make it legal for a company to send you code that damages or destroys your computer.
Among the "DMCA shenanigans" will be repeated attempts to slip such provisions into new laws, and to make sure that it's illegal for you to remove code like this, no matter how much it damages your computer.
the first and probably only rootkit wich has done something good
...
;-)
Well, I'll bet there will be a number of others, different in the details but fundamentally similar.
We can expect that the people running other companies are thinking of doing the same sort of thing, and a lot of them probably have the projects underway. There may be others out there that are working, and we just haven't discovered them yet.
But we probably will. Why? Because part of the nature of business management is contempt for their competitors' products. This means that their rootkits aren't taking into account all the other rootkits, and they won't be tested against their competitors' DRM code. So after you've loaded N CDs into your Windows computer, each installing its own rootkit, guess what's gonna happen? Anyone with any experience at all with computers can tell you.
The symptoms will be noticed; the culprit software will be dug out and examined; the story will hit the fan all over again.
Stay tuned for the fun
(And I do wonder what will happen the first time some company tries invoking the DMCA against customers and/or security firms who publish the facts about their rootkits. That'll be especially entertaining to discuss here.
Cars are complex, but McDonnalds doesnt put a tracking device in rthe ignition system while I am buying a bigmac.
;-)
Actually, that's because an easier way has recently appeared. At least in the US, there's now a law in place that all auto tires much contain RFID chips.
So rather than attaching anything to your car, what they can do is put an RFID reader at their drive-up windows that reads the ID numbers of your tires. They can buy the info about the car's registration (legally or otherwise) from various industry and government sources. This gives them a way to track your purchase patterns, and perhaps compare the info with other cooperating companies.
Granted, this would only work now for very new cars, or older cars with new tires. In a few years, this will be most cars.
(What, me paranoid? But think about it the next time you pass a drive-up window. It's slowly getting easier to track your motions, if people really want to do it.
If AV vendors can't protect against this type of threat, and cannot identify cloaked software when it has been distributed for a year, ...
Ah, but they could. Sony told them all about it, so that they could write code that recognized Sony's rootkit, and ignored it.
So now the question is: How can we defend ourselves against AV vendors that make such deals with the devil?
Actually, this question has a simple question: We can't. At least, not as long as we persist in running binary-only distros on our machines. If we don't have the source code to that kernel, anything at all could be hidden there, and we'd never know until it bit us.
You can't guarantee that a given .DOC file will work equally well in Word and OOo.
.DOC will work equally well (or at all) in a recipient's version of Word.
...
Hell, you can't even guarantee that a given
I recently worked with a company whose big compatibility problem was persuading all their people to upgrade their W95 machines to W98. They also had lots of fun trying to figure out how to handle Word docs sent from a 21st-century version of Windows.
They really didn't know what to make of our linux and Mac laptops
Yeah; it's "Greenwich", but pronounced "grenn itch".
There's a strict rule in English against place names being spelt the way they're pronounced.
(BTW, "spelt" is a kind of grain.)
The zoneinfo C library supports leapseconds (but craps out in the year 2038).
It does? That's interesting; it implies that the implementers have solved the problem of cross-time communication.
For example, suppose I need to schedule an event for the first second of the year 2025 UTC, i.e. 20250101 00:00:00. Today, we don't know how many leap seconds there will be in the next decade, or when they will be inserted. So using only information available right now, the actual time (i.e., the second count) can't be calculated.
But the zoneinfo C library solves this problem. The only way this can be done is to get the table of leap seconds from a decade from now.
So how do they do this? Any why has the technology been kept from the rest of us?
Inquiring minds want to know.
(Also, I'll predict that by 2038 all cpus will be at least 64 bits, if not 256, and the only 32-bit cpus will be in the hands of museums and a few hobbyists. So the overflow to bit 33 that happens in that year won't actually effect very many of us. I hope I'll be around to see if my prediction is correct.)
We've seen suggestions in this thread that we use Zulu time, GMT, and UTC.
;-)
So why don't you people make your minds? Which is it to be?
If we can't settle this choice, how do we expect the rest of the world fo follow our lead.
That sounds about right. And there are also groups like the Navajo and Hopi who have made serious comments about demanding equal time for their creation myths. That would be more difficult for the Christian fundamentalists to dismiss, since these aren't spoofs.
Actually, when I was in high school, I would have thought it fun to have chapters on such myths. They may not be technically correct, but they tell us some interesting things about how our ancestors sometimes did things. And just in case anyone gets too uppity about how far we've advance, it helps to have a reminder that there are still people who believe some of those stories despite all the evidence.
There are courses on such topics in a lot of colleges, of course. It's quite a proper topic for a joint history/anthropology course. Some history-of-science courses also teach about relevant early attempts to explain our world.
I wonder if the Flat Earth Society has tried to crash the ID party? It might be fun if they could start pushing for inclusion in science texts.
As long as they teach Flying Spaghetti Monsterism of course. I want to see that belief system in a textbook, dammit.
;-).
As long as they give equal space to Invisible Pink Unicornism. Or else you'll have a big political fight on your hand (unlike the current situation
Really; wouldn't it be fun to see both in a textbook? I wonder if it would be possible for a publisher to sneak them in without it being discovered beforehand? The kids would probably love it.
... wings were designed by somebody (we don't say who ;-) ) and birds could not have evolved wings.
That's what ID theory would say.
Actually, if you read that exremely literally, biologists would agree. That is, birds themselves didn't themselves one day decide to evolve wings. They didn't (and still don't) have the brain power to make such a decision. Their evolving of wings was in fact directed by an outside "actor" - which we call "natural selection". Darwin understood quite well why this would upset the religious force, since the director of his evolutionary process is something that has no intelligence, does no designing, and has no goal or purpose.
One clever way I've heard it expressed is that the verb "evolve" isn't transitive. That is, birds didn't evolve wings, and giraffes didn't evolve long necks. They didn't do anything at all to their wings or necks. Those critters just went about their lives, trying to eat and reproduce, without a thought as to what their descendants would look like. And this totally mindless "natural selection" process modified each generation to be slightly different than the parent generation. Nowhere in the process is there a mind that's "evolving" something transitively, with a purpose.
What I haven't read yet is how the ID people get out of the infinite regress that their "theory" produces. How did the Designer come to exist? Created by an even more intelligent designer? Presumably someone has tackled this, but how do you google for their answer?
... what was god doing in the eternity that preceded the creation of our universe?
Pilot studies. But they all failed miserably at the job of creating the intellectual companions that God was looking for. Rumor is that He's about to give up on this one, too, reduce it to a pool of quarks, and move on to test model Aleph-3.
I wish MySQL would give away free copies.......oh wait......!!!!!!
Yeah, and MySQL releases always seem to run on at least Windows, linux and OSX. When I looked at the download site, I didn't find MSSQL for linux or OSX. Maybe they somehow forgot to include the links to those? It's gotta be an oversight on the part of the web-site maintainers, right?
Seriously, while FF reaching 10% is good news, we do need to avoid pushing for another monoculture. The world would be better off with a flock of browsers designed to work well (which included efficiently) for different people and different environments.
A flock of different browsers, all standards-compliant of course, would really help to avoid a situation where a single piece of malware can bring down zillions of machines.
And there are good technical reasons for wanting browsers designed differently. There are all sorts of special situations where one might want an unusual browser. Thus, lynx does pretty well for the visually impaired, and it's also a browser that can be run from scripts (since it doesn't do full graphics). A browser running on a handheld with a tiny screen is going to render things differently that something on a huge screen, and code that does both kinds of renderings is going to be inherently slower than code that's more specialized.
Lots of readers can probably give situations where they'd really like a browser that's unusual in some way. I know I can think of lots of things I'd like done differently from how FF does them.
So, good as firefox may be, we should treat its success as grounds for pushing for still more good browsers. Some may be based on FF. But we'd probably be even better off if they are independent code. Monocultures are dangerous, and should be consciously avoided.
Of course, right now we might start the anti-FF action by pushing for opera. OK; it's not open-source, which is a mark against it. But it's good, and the company is a bunch of nice guys (so far). They just made it ad-free. So everyone should grab a copy and start running up the server stats for it.
And use konqueror some more. Can it run on Windows yet? That'd be fun to foist on the MS crowd.
The ideal would be no browser over 10% of the stats.