The founder of the Ohm's Law that says P = U x I (Power equals voltage times current)?
Imagine a voltage of 5 V, to draw 100 Watts from that you need a current of 20 Amperes. The german DIN 57100 requires a cable of 4mm to provides such a current.
Voltages inside a PC are usally 5V and 12 V. For 12 V you still need sort of 8,333 Amperes, that means 1mm for the cables.
The other problem will be the plugs and sockets. 20 A is enough to sort of solder the contacts together or start a small fire if there is too little contact between them.
Ok, lets imagine a device that can negotiate 100 Volts, then you just need 1 Amperes for 100 Watts. Fine, but that means that the USB connection now needs to be treated like a healt hazard because its over 65 Volts and can proivde more then 50 mA.
I'm really curious to see how they will jump over that physical obstacle.:-)
that this kernel already got device IDs for next years Intel hardware. This is something completely new, since Intel so far had a much more closed policy and wouldn't have told device IDs prior to the chipset release.
Now there is a really good chance that driver code will make it into the distribution kernels until the new hardware will be released for mass production. So the chances that brand new hardware will work without any flaws in 2011 are higher than ever before.
Thanks to Intel for this change in their policy. This was a small step for Intel (since everybody "knows" that they will release new chips every year) but a giant leap for providing Linux hardware compatibility right "out-of-the-box".
Just print out a catalog of all the voters that need to vote in that election office. If someone votes, then you mark him as "was voting already" but not recording the time of his vote. At the end of the day you have a list of people that voted and a list of votes, but you can't do any correlation on it.
It looks like they need to save paper because election machines are so expensive and now they just record voters data in the order they appear in the voting office.
The possession of this software is virtually undetectable unless some kind of crime has been committed using them (such as using it to actually attack someone else's machine). Well guess what, attacking someone else's machine has ALREADY been illegal (and justly so).
I would say "you are right" by just looking at this law. Being a German citizen I can also see other attempts of the government that go into the direction of seeiking private PCs online and without letting the user know. Of course they say its against terrrorsts, but if we put away the fact that they will have some difficulties on the technical side it would give them the basics to see if you have those tools installed or not. And then the question is if you are a person that the government wants to get rid of or not. If you're harmless probably nothing will happen, if you're a danger for the government because you make the people think, then you have a good chance to be put behind bars for some silly reason.
Germany is actually close to the methods they were using 1933-1945 and 1945-1989 in Eastern Germany. The german constitution (aka "Grundgesetz") is changed frequently to allow new laws that would have made the people of 1949 who wrote the Rev. 1 think that George Orwell was an optimist.
The actual german government has lost the confidence of the people because they spend much more effort in installing the Big Brother than they spend efforts in solving the real problems of their country. Next elections will be very interesting.
I would already be happier, if there was the option to buy systems without operating system. Dell could sell such systems cheaper not only because of the lacking windows system but also because they would not have to offer support for OS issues.
I work at a PC manufacturer that sells PCs and I know the rules of the game. One problem is that there is a contract with Microsoft that says "you're not allowed to ship any PC without operating system" of course because they didn't want that you ship hardware to run pirated OS versions on it. The other side of the medal is that of course customers don't want to pay the Microsoft tax, so if someone doesn't want to order an OEM windows, then we will ship the box with a Linux-DVD. So the contract is not violated since we always ship with an OS, even if its probably not what MS had in mind.
Besides that the question is if it will be really cheaper to ship without Windows. I don't know the conditions that Dell has when buying OEM licenses, but I know from the past long ago that MS is defending themselves against firms that officially say "We offer an alternative to MS". Long ago there were shops that offered OS/2 on their systems and the result was that they didn't get the boxes from MS any more or if then at a higher price than before. So the risk is that Microsoft is rising the price for an OEM license and you gain nothing.
Lets see the support issues. As I told you we ship an "alibi DVD" with the explicit note that we don't offer support for that and its just an OS to fulfill the "do not ship without os rule". Even for that we get a lot of support questions. The problem is, that a PC without OS is like a car without fuel, it may look nice, but it is useless. So you have at least to do some statement on which OS can run on your PC, and people tend to see a support agreement in that. Face the facts: There is no official support for openSUSE from Novell and there is no official support for Fedora from Red Hat. So if people use that "free distributions" then they expect their system to work with those distros, if problems show up then they want the support from the system vendor. Of course you could recommend RHEL or SLED,
but then you get support only if your box is "certified" and even worse, the Microsoft tax is replaced by a Red Hat or Novell tax.
Personally I know that Linux is fine for the desktop, but in a profit driven world the problem of system vendors is that they have to invest in ressources for an OS that has a market share below 5%. That is the real problem with it. If Linux desktop market share would be 20% then nobody would complain that offering Linux boxes means investing money for support and engineering.
It would be nice if each model said something like "certified that all hardware works with Linux Distros X, Y, and Z out of the box" so that I wouldn't have to hunt that info down myself.
Then you would need to know what kind of "quality statement" the certification of hardware is. I'm doing Linux hardware certifications for a PC manufacturer (not Dell, not HP) and I know the certification procedures of Red Hat and Novell. The problem is that "certified" doesn't mean that the thing will work like you expect it. There are too many dependencies, and there is no chance to test them all because of the combinatoric explosion. So you might test a machine with hard disks from Seagate finding out that the same technology and capacity from WD doesn't work. The other problem is that customers imply things like "If the machine is certified then 3D accelerated hardware graphics should work". The certification tests for video are testing if the X server (even the vesa driver) comes up on the Red Hat side, Novell is just blanking the screen with DPMS and then seeing if it comes back. Of course the idea is that you can't run the tests if you don't have X working. But the idea behind it is that customers have other expectations than what the certification really is stating.
The other problem is that there are certification programs for enterprise level distributions, but there is no independent certification program for free distributions like Debian, Ubuntu, openSUSE, Fedora and so on. So you would need to trust the statement of $VENDOR that the hardware is working with the distribution that you want to use. Such a statement implies a sort of support agreement and that means additional budget for every Linux distro that you declare as "working".
since this is happening in a country that goes to war because of not existing weapons of mass destruction.
Sorry folks, what's coming up next? People get arrested because of dealing with drugs even if nobody finds drugs with them. But of course the have thrown it away. Everyone can get sacked for theft, even if he has no stolen things with him, but he could have had and then dumped them somewhere else.
In my country there is a principle that everyone is considered to be innocent until you can prove the opposite. Looks like this principle needs to be re-established in the US as well.
Running Debian/Sarge for i386 architecture on an AMD64 machine I wonder which steps I need to do if I want to change to AMD64 architecture with the new stable release in December. I guess apt won't have the arch-update command, but does it mean "reinstallation" or is there some smart strategy to migrate from i386 to x86_64?
...just imagine the Open Source community would build an alternative OSS-ECU and that car/driver would win the championship. This would give Open Source a lot of attention.
Sorry, but this is ridicolous. If this is true than I'm happy that I'm living in a country that has a law that communcitation carriers are NOT allowed to NOT deliver communication.
/.-Article about Office delay also delayed
on
Office Delayed, Too
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Well, at least since I'm using Open Source in my Office no work is delayed there anymore.:-)
Finally we have an Office Suite that is able to read the RTF product documentation that someone in our firm wrote 10 years ago with MS-Office thinking that RTF is a format that you can also read with MS-Office in 10 years.:-)
Sorry for my lack of knowledge about New Zealand. I'm located in Europe, so practicaly if you dig a hole through the globe you will come out near my location on the other side.
The term kiwi bird was used intentionally because here we also have a fruit that is called kiwi. Sure that people in New Zealand associate kiwi with the bird, but here in Europe the knowledge about.nz is so limited that you first think of the fruit when you hear "kiwi".
Its quite easy. Read the article and read especially the fact that people want to buy. So first step is stopping to offer downloads for free and offer Linux in a box.
Next step is to look at whom you are targeting. The people in New Zealand have hardly ever seen a penguin in their life. So replace that Tux with a friendly looking Kiwi bird and you'll get much more attention from the people there.
I guess those 2 small steps will double the impact of Linux in New Zealand.
Namen sind nur Schall und Rauch
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (German writer)
This means literally "Names are just sound and smoke" and the deeper meaning is "Names arent important". Well, I don't think that names are a problem because of the following reasons:
Usually a menu tree isn't flat but categorized. If I open my Debian menu I find a section for graphics and so I assume that the programs in this section have something to do with graphics.
If I install a package I'm doing it because I want to use it. And at that point I can learn easily that GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program and so I can hardly forget that this is the program to use if I want to edit my digital camera photos.
Many times I observed that people are not reading the menus, they just have learned that the app they want to use is on the 4th last entry in that submenu and they click there without even reading. Difficult if the menu structure changes, but people can adapt to this as well
Ok, if you're using a shell then you need to remember the names, but who prevents you from defining an
alias photoshop='gimp'
Re:A Layman's Troubleshooting Guide?
on
Linux Troubleshooting
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Working in Linux support for customers I can just give you a hint. The first step toward a successful problem solution is that the one who wants to solve the problem understands the problem. You can achieve this goal by learning How To Ask Questions The Smart Way.
Another important thing that other people want to know if they have to solve your problem is all available information about your environment. Tools like hwinfo or sysreport can be of great help to the supporter.
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine a voltage of 5 V, to draw 100 Watts from that you need a current of 20 Amperes. The german DIN 57100 requires a cable of 4mm to provides such a current.
Voltages inside a PC are usally 5V and 12 V. For 12 V you still need sort of 8,333 Amperes, that means 1mm for the cables. The other problem will be the plugs and sockets. 20 A is enough to sort of solder the contacts together or start a small fire if there is too little contact between them. Ok, lets imagine a device that can negotiate 100 Volts, then you just need 1 Amperes for 100 Watts. Fine, but that means that the USB connection now needs to be treated like a healt hazard because its over 65 Volts and can proivde more then 50 mA.
I'm really curious to see how they will jump over that physical obstacle. :-)
that this kernel already got device IDs for next years Intel hardware. This is something completely new, since Intel so far had a much more closed policy and wouldn't have told device IDs prior to the chipset release.
Now there is a really good chance that driver code will make it into the distribution kernels until the new hardware will be released for mass production. So the chances that brand new hardware will work without any flaws in 2011 are higher than ever before.
Thanks to Intel for this change in their policy. This was a small step for Intel (since everybody "knows" that they will release new chips every year) but a giant leap for providing Linux hardware compatibility right "out-of-the-box".
See Barry Schwartz on the paradox of choice. Got to help someone with his Windows-PC lately and got seriously confused by this invasive dialog. :-)
...giving them away for free of charge. :-)
SCNR
Just print out a catalog of all the voters that need to vote in that election office. If someone votes, then you mark him as "was voting already" but not recording the time of his vote. At the end of the day you have a list of people that voted and a list of votes, but you can't do any correlation on it.
It looks like they need to save paper because election machines are so expensive and now they just record voters data in the order they appear in the voting office.
The possession of this software is virtually undetectable unless some kind of crime has been committed using them (such as using it to actually attack someone else's machine). Well guess what, attacking someone else's machine has ALREADY been illegal (and justly so).
I would say "you are right" by just looking at this law. Being a German citizen I can also see other attempts of the government that go into the direction of seeiking private PCs online and without letting the user know. Of course they say its against terrrorsts, but if we put away the fact that they will have some difficulties on the technical side it would give them the basics to see if you have those tools installed or not. And then the question is if you are a person that the government wants to get rid of or not. If you're harmless probably nothing will happen, if you're a danger for the government because you make the people think, then you have a good chance to be put behind bars for some silly reason.
Germany is actually close to the methods they were using 1933-1945 and 1945-1989 in Eastern Germany. The german constitution (aka "Grundgesetz") is changed frequently to allow new laws that would have made the people of 1949 who wrote the Rev. 1 think that George Orwell was an optimist.
The actual german government has lost the confidence of the people because they spend much more effort in installing the Big Brother than they spend efforts in solving the real problems of their country. Next elections will be very interesting.
to clean up the mess in our space. :-)
I would already be happier, if there was the option to buy systems without operating system. Dell could sell such systems cheaper not only because of the lacking windows system but also because they would not have to offer support for OS issues.
I work at a PC manufacturer that sells PCs and I know the rules of the game. One problem is that there is a contract with Microsoft that says "you're not allowed to ship any PC without operating system" of course because they didn't want that you ship hardware to run pirated OS versions on it. The other side of the medal is that of course customers don't want to pay the Microsoft tax, so if someone doesn't want to order an OEM windows, then we will ship the box with a Linux-DVD. So the contract is not violated since we always ship with an OS, even if its probably not what MS had in mind.
Besides that the question is if it will be really cheaper to ship without Windows. I don't know the conditions that Dell has when buying OEM licenses, but I know from the past long ago that MS is defending themselves against firms that officially say "We offer an alternative to MS". Long ago there were shops that offered OS/2 on their systems and the result was that they didn't get the boxes from MS any more or if then at a higher price than before. So the risk is that Microsoft is rising the price for an OEM license and you gain nothing.
Lets see the support issues. As I told you we ship an "alibi DVD" with the explicit note that we don't offer support for that and its just an OS to fulfill the "do not ship without os rule". Even for that we get a lot of support questions. The problem is, that a PC without OS is like a car without fuel, it may look nice, but it is useless. So you have at least to do some statement on which OS can run on your PC, and people tend to see a support agreement in that. Face the facts: There is no official support for openSUSE from Novell and there is no official support for Fedora from Red Hat. So if people use that "free distributions" then they expect their system to work with those distros, if problems show up then they want the support from the system vendor. Of course you could recommend RHEL or SLED, but then you get support only if your box is "certified" and even worse, the Microsoft tax is replaced by a Red Hat or Novell tax.
Personally I know that Linux is fine for the desktop, but in a profit driven world the problem of system vendors is that they have to invest in ressources for an OS that has a market share below 5%. That is the real problem with it. If Linux desktop market share would be 20% then nobody would complain that offering Linux boxes means investing money for support and engineering.
It would be nice if each model said something like "certified that all hardware works with Linux Distros X, Y, and Z out of the box" so that I wouldn't have to hunt that info down myself.
Then you would need to know what kind of "quality statement" the certification of hardware is. I'm doing Linux hardware certifications for a PC manufacturer (not Dell, not HP) and I know the certification procedures of Red Hat and Novell. The problem is that "certified" doesn't mean that the thing will work like you expect it. There are too many dependencies, and there is no chance to test them all because of the combinatoric explosion. So you might test a machine with hard disks from Seagate finding out that the same technology and capacity from WD doesn't work. The other problem is that customers imply things like "If the machine is certified then 3D accelerated hardware graphics should work". The certification tests for video are testing if the X server (even the vesa driver) comes up on the Red Hat side, Novell is just blanking the screen with DPMS and then seeing if it comes back. Of course the idea is that you can't run the tests if you don't have X working. But the idea behind it is that customers have other expectations than what the certification really is stating.
The other problem is that there are certification programs for enterprise level distributions, but there is no independent certification program for free distributions like Debian, Ubuntu, openSUSE, Fedora and so on. So you would need to trust the statement of $VENDOR that the hardware is working with the distribution that you want to use. Such a statement implies a sort of support agreement and that means additional budget for every Linux distro that you declare as "working".
...when you get kidnapped by Aliens?
since this is happening in a country that goes to war because of not existing weapons of mass destruction.
Sorry folks, what's coming up next? People get arrested because of dealing with drugs even if nobody finds drugs with them. But of course the have thrown it away. Everyone can get sacked for theft, even if he has no stolen things with him, but he could have had and then dumped them somewhere else.
In my country there is a principle that everyone is considered to be innocent until you can prove the opposite. Looks like this principle needs to be re-established in the US as well.
I'd really love it if I would get paid for posting comments on Slashdot. :-)
Running Debian/Sarge for i386 architecture on an AMD64 machine I wonder which steps I need to do if I want to change to AMD64 architecture with the new stable release in December. I guess apt won't have the arch-update command, but does it mean "reinstallation" or is there some smart strategy to migrate from i386 to x86_64?
...just imagine the Open Source community would build an alternative OSS-ECU and that car/driver would win the championship. This would give Open Source a lot of attention.
that even with computers you will never have a "paperless office". :-)
this rendezvous was a sort of "blind date".
That the software can "phone home" more easily?
Sorry, but this is ridicolous. If this is true than I'm happy that I'm living in a country that has a law that communcitation carriers are NOT allowed to NOT deliver communication.
Well, at least since I'm using Open Source in my Office no work is delayed there anymore. :-)
SCNR
Finally we have an Office Suite that is able to read the RTF product documentation that someone in our firm wrote 10 years ago with MS-Office thinking that RTF is a format that you can also read with MS-Office in 10 years. :-)
Sorry for my lack of knowledge about New Zealand. I'm located in Europe, so practicaly if you dig a hole through the globe you will come out near my location on the other side.
.nz is so limited that you first think of the fruit when you hear "kiwi".
The term kiwi bird was used intentionally because here we also have a fruit that is called kiwi. Sure that people in New Zealand associate kiwi with the bird, but here in Europe the knowledge about
Its quite easy. Read the article and read especially the fact that people want to buy. So first step is stopping to offer downloads for free and offer Linux in a box.
Next step is to look at whom you are targeting. The people in New Zealand have hardly ever seen a penguin in their life. So replace that Tux with a friendly looking Kiwi bird and you'll get much more attention from the people there.
I guess those 2 small steps will double the impact of Linux in New Zealand.
said it comes from Sony/BMG and then it was a rootkit installer. :-)
This means literally "Names are just sound and smoke" and the deeper meaning is "Names arent important". Well, I don't think that names are a problem because of the following reasons:
- Usually a menu tree isn't flat but categorized. If I open my Debian menu I find a section for graphics and so I assume that the programs in this section have something to do with graphics.
- If I install a package I'm doing it because I want to use it. And at that point I can learn easily that GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program and so I can hardly forget that this is the program to use if I want to edit my digital camera photos.
- Many times I observed that people are not reading the menus, they just have learned that the app they want to use is on the 4th last entry in that submenu and they click there without even reading. Difficult if the menu structure changes, but people can adapt to this as well
Ok, if you're using a shell then you need to remember the names, but who prevents you from defining anWorking in Linux support for customers I can just give you a hint. The first step toward a successful problem solution is that the one who wants to solve the problem understands the problem. You can achieve this goal by learning How To Ask Questions The Smart Way.
Another important thing that other people want to know if they have to solve your problem is all available information about your environment. Tools like hwinfo or sysreport can be of great help to the supporter.