And it may not be a physical law, but it generally happens that way. Just try *not* to learn who won the latest soccer match. I find out by whether the people under my window decide to throw a party at 3 AM or not. And if by some chance they don't, the coworkers will be discussing it the next morning. And if not, it'll be on TV, and newspapers, and people will discuss it on the street, and so on.
That's the point: if there's some information that people consider valuable they'll naturally spread it far and wide, without making an effort, or even intending to spread it. Effort needs to be exerted to stop that from happening. If you have some valuable information, you can assume other people will find out sooner or later, unless you make an effort to keep it secret.
For me, that you can't delete comments actually makes slashdot more valuable.
It's one of the reasons why I post here, and not on some guy's blog. In some places, comments vanish or fail to appear depending on the whims of the owner, moderator, and upset posters who can't stand losing an argument and just delete their comments.
Slashdot has the advantage that some very, very unusual situations excepted (like a court order), everything stays, no matter what. That makes me a lot less reticent to type a long well thought post, as I know it's not going to vanish just because I ran into the wrong moderator today. Even if it gets modded down to -1 it still stays on the site, so I can still have a conversation with the one I'm replying to.
I can understand why you'd want more control, but IMO there's no policy that's the best in all cases. I prefer the slashdot way, while you might be happier somewhere else.
I release source under the GPL very intentionally for instance. That makes it undesirable to many companies. I'm happy enough to negotiate a different license, in exchange for money of course.
I have also earned money writing GPL licensed code, by getting hired to improve an existing project.
Same goes for CC-NC licenses. If I release something under those terms it's my intention to let the random Joe with a blog use the content for free, but if a magazine wants it, they have to pay.
No, saying "information wants to be free" is like saying "what goes up must come down", or "water flows downhill". It's not an imperative, nor a moral judgement, or how things ought to be. It's just describing the natural tendency of it.
If you don't do anything to stop information from spreading, it tends to spread around "on its own" if it's useful.
Just like things naturally fall or flow to a lower position if there isn't anything in the way.
And right under that, in the terms of service it says:
In each such case, the submitting user grants Geeknet the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display such Content (in whole or part) worldwide and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed, all subject to the terms of any applicable license.
Copyright doesn't mean absolute control over your stuff. You certainly can demand that unlawful reproduction be stopped, but if you granted "royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable" permission you can't go and change your mind on that.
But as technology advances, more and more uses reach the point where further improvements don't add anything.
Back when people were using a 386 with 4MB RAM, computer specs mattered even to the average person. The average joe could find that something basic like word processing could run slowly or not at all, and things like having a math coprocessor mattered for office tasks.
These days if somebody asks you what kind of computer you recommend for email and word processing you can tell them that it pretty much doesn't matter, as it's nearly impossible to find a computer that could have a problem with that (even netbooks should do it just fine). Even for gaming you can get away with "anything with a nvidia or ATI card". It won't be perfect for the very latest stuff, but it shouldn't fail horribly either.
So I do think that at some point, those things become considerably less important. I used to care a lot about laptops having uncomfortably small hard disks. Now I don't even look, and worry more about battery time and weight. For me I think disk space topped out at somewhere around 50 GB. At that point, unless I feel like having a copy of every single video, CD and DVD I own with me, I'm unlikely to reach 50% usage. That's a lot more comfortable than in the 386 days, when I spent time on thinking what to install and how to free up some space.
It's possible to get useful amounts of power by simply placing a coil of wire under the line, and getting power by induction. On the ground it would need a big coil, but a plane could fly along the powerline and get much better efficiency. So why perch on it?
It seems you hear about breakthroughs when the promising research happens. You don't find out about the first company that puts it to work though, unless it's something really huge.
That pretty much sums up why I subscribe to LWN, even though it's all free if you wait a week. It's a specialist site, that does its job very well, and that's worth rewarding.
Now, a site that is yet another regurgitation of the AP feed? No. I'll just go to another.
And things like what Murdoch came up with (apparently the interface is akin to a PDF, without copy paste or links)? They'd have to pay me to put up with that.
Something is a "bargain" when it has a very good price/value ratio.
A full frame DSLR camera for $1000 would be a bargain, though you can get a DSLR for $400 easily, and if you're not picky and just want any digital camera at all you can get it for $50.
Used many. I've had Asus, HP, Toshiba and Dell laptops.
I basically go search by the characteristics I want (memory, graphics, size, weight, etc), then pick something from there. Generally I find about 4-5 laptops with the right specs, and choose from that by the minor things like looks and small price variations.
I guarantee that you chose them because of advertising.
Nope. I've never ever seen an ad for the MP3 player, and didn't know the brand existed. Nobody I showed it to heard of Cowon either. I just looked around and found something that fit my needs (playing ogg, good battery life)
You know which cereal to buy because of advertising.
Actually no. I buy systematically. I'll try a new brand every week until I've tried them all, then buy the brands I like best. I do the same thing with restaurants, ice cream, etc.
A 200W power supply isn't outputting 200W all the time. It can output up to 200W, if whatever is hooked up to it wants that much. And the reason it says 200W on it is that much above that something overheats and it dies horribly. But there's absolutely no issue with connecting a 20W load to it.
The point I was trying to make is that for all the hand wringing about Three mile island, cherynobl, hiroshima, the exxon valdez, to any other "epic" environmental catastrophe, life actually seems to be getting better (or more efficient in the case of your computing)
You sure pick some bad examples.
TMI wasn't much of catastrophe at all, and not an environmental one.
Chernobyl can be said to favour the environment, since it removed a city, and left lots of room for nature to move into. Dying of cancer after 5 years is a big deal for people, but very tolerable for many animals. But it had plenty consequences for sure, which still persist today, and it still is mostly unpopulated. World-wide it had tremendous consequences for the adoption of nuclear power.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were completely intentional, and were inflicted on enemy terrotory, where nobody of the ones responsible about it cared about the consequences of it, except for that the more horrible it was, the better.
Exxon Valdez is the one good example. The damage endures. Yes, it got better, but it's still not completely fixed. Just because you don't hear about it anymore, doesn't mean it's all fixed now.
Yes, we can live through such things and go on, nobody said we can't. But the consequences persist for decades. Enough oil spills and nuclear accidents will make things very unpleasant.
We cannot afford to piss in our kitchen, or shit in our living room, but we cannot assert that exhaling CO2 is the same thing as shitting or pissing.
The problem is that the atmosphere and the ocean are very much a sort of "kitchen" or "living room". It's not some magical place that makes everything you dump into it disappear. They're big, but very much finite. Also, breaking something is much easier than fixing it.
The big problem with the knee jerk environmentalist position is that the basic assumption, "if man did it it was bad", simply doesn't hold true in all cases.
I see very little of this assumption. I hope you're not going to say that the reason environmentalists say oil spills are bad is just "because man did it". People already are suffering plenty consequences due to the gulf spill, and that will continue for quite some years.
I guess the bottom line is this -> we're always going to get bitten in the ass some day, but we can't let the fear of that stop us from living life.
We can greatly reduce the amount of times we get bitten in the ass. Just think if BP had been a bit more careful. It would have worked out a lot cheaper for them.
Has your life become more, or less pleasant over the past 30 years?
Depending on the point of view.
At each point in time, it's been pretty much constant. Looking back, things have improved. That is, back when I had a 386 I was pretty happy with it, and now that I have a quad core box, I'm pretty happy with it as well. The amount of satisfaction I feel now and felt back then is about the same, though the quad core gets a lot more done.
Power usage has been more or less constant. I use about the same amount of power as I did back then, except much more efficiently. I could actually cut back quite a bit, because a laptop can do all I need, while using a fraction of the power of a desktop.
I think if people are honest, a lot of the nostalgia for the past stops us from realizing just how pleasant cheap energy makes things.
In my case it's nothing to do with energy, but with efficiency. Over more than 10 years I've been using 200-300W for computer hardware, except today it gets a lot more done with that. Cars existed 30 years ago, and how pleasant they are to use has little to do with the amount of energy spent.
Also, as can be seen with BP, that things seem to be just fine today, doesn't mean they won't get fucked up tomorrow. Reality can't be ignored. Pollution accumulates, equipment wears out, failures happen. If you pretend that stuff doesn't exist, and fail to deal with it, it'll bite you in the ass sooner or later.
Re:Come on. Stop with the bullshit and be hoenst.
on
Climategate's Final Days
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
There is absolutely no way that humans are the only reason for climate change. Truly believing that we have doomed the Earth is ignorant at best, and fucking stupid at worst.
So?
That being said, there is absolutely no way that humans haven't affected things somehow. We may not be causing the planet to implode, but that doesn't mean our actions have had zero effects. I point you in the direction of the Gulf if you need proof of that.
Ok, good...
To sum it up: We aren't dooming the planet, but we aren't blameless either. Why is it so hard for people to understand that our actions affect the planet, but aren't necessarily wrecking it? I leave you with a quote:
Citation needed. And the conclusion doesn't follow. Just because birds ocassionally shit into the pool, and kids ocassionally pee into it doesn't mean you can empty a septic tank into it, then claim that the former two things mean it's not your fault it's a cesspool now.
"The planet is fine; the people are fucked." -George Carlin
Good quote, but doesn't favour your position. It's precisely what worries me. The planet will keep on existing, life will survive and even thrive in the most poisonous environments. But just because some bacteria can live in such conditions doesn't mean I can, or even if I can find a way it doesn't mean it's going to be pleasant. And I'd rather have a pleasant life.
That is available - if you are willing to pay for the unit. One offs (or very low production runs) are very expensive. Unless you have thousands of people who want a computer case/laptop case just like you, it is just not economical to manufacture one completely custom to you.
Sure. I was just talking about how the way I'd like things to be like. Apple is very, very far from it. Dell is much closer.
Unless the thing is designed completely modularly, it's just not going to work - I know some laptops have a swappable optical drive unit that can be removed and replaced with an extra battery, for example, but then you are getting into compromise territory - you need space, weight and design changes to accommodate the mechanical hardware for swappable units.
I had one of those, and thought it was really cool. Unfortunately it's hard to find anymore.
I like Apple a lot, and I admire the way they have streamlined their product lines, but I would like slightly more options than I have, but I'm on the upper end of the spectrum where the line is just starting to blur between "turnkey" and "spec your own down to the paint job" consumer.
I don't like them at all, precisely for the same reason. I want to buy the right thing, not to spend $500 more than I wanted because the cheaper model has all I need except one thing, which the expensive one has along with 10 other things I don't want.
Sure I'd like some more flexibility, but I think if Apple's store ended up looking like Dell's with literally thousands of possibilities it would just be chaos.
Absolutely not. All you need is a good laptop selector. Dell has it right now.
You go there and select: 11" - 14" Dedicated video card 5-7 lbs Power
You get a grand total of 2 laptops to choose from. Then there are minor choices for those, like CPU speeds and disk sizes. That's the main reason I bought from Dell. Apple didn't have anything I wanted, HP's site was a mess, everything I liked from Asus was way too big, Acer didn't have anything I liked. The only thing that annoys me somewhat is that they have the option of having the laptop only in black or pink. More selection would be nice.
If HP and Asus had a laptop selector like Dell I'd have been done in 10 minutes. For Asus I actually ended up mirroring the product catalog and grepping it for specs.
That's nice, but it sucks if you want something unusual.
For me, there's not nearly enough choice. I recently chose from more than 200 laptops, and ended up going with a Dell one. (I don't have any particular love for Dell, mind. I've had HP, Toshiba and Asus laptops as well). Mac hardware is outright out because it has a TPM. I loathe the idea itself of it, and refuse to buy any hardware that has it.
Like I said, compare that to Dell where when looking at business desktops alone there are: Vostro, Optiplex, Inspiron, Studio, XPS, AlienWare and Precision all of which have probably dozens of configurations and models, some VERY different from each other. There are some stupid choices, like you can't (or couldn't) get Windows 7 64-bit on many of the Optiplex line, when you could on the Vostros, even though Vostros are supposedly the inferior quality machine. What gives? It took me hours of reading to figure out which Dell was the best (and then the pricing differential and lack of 64-bit os license made me pick a Vostro).
What that tells me is that there's not enough choice yet. For me, the ideal would be complete configurability: say what components you want, what battery life, size and weight, choose the external appearance and it comes up with a price.
Great way to make sure nobody uses it until it expires.
Why would anybody license this, given that GPS routing already works perfectly fine? My ancient GPS takes maybe 5 seconds to calculate a route.
Though, I'm opposed to patents on this sort of thing in the first place, and have serious doubts that patents should exist at all anymore, so read the comment with that in mind.
Microsoft's unfriendliness to Open Source has very little to do with them releasing any, or hosting code repositories.
The unfriendliness is expressed in terms of vague threats using software patents, attempts to derail implementation in various places, suspicious licensing deals like with Novell and so on.
All that has to go for me to start changing my mind. Until that happens, I'm not touching CodePlex with a 10 foot pole, and consider it completely irrelevant at best, and some sort of trap at worst.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not literal, it's a metaphor.
And it may not be a physical law, but it generally happens that way. Just try *not* to learn who won the latest soccer match. I find out by whether the people under my window decide to throw a party at 3 AM or not. And if by some chance they don't, the coworkers will be discussing it the next morning. And if not, it'll be on TV, and newspapers, and people will discuss it on the street, and so on.
That's the point: if there's some information that people consider valuable they'll naturally spread it far and wide, without making an effort, or even intending to spread it. Effort needs to be exerted to stop that from happening. If you have some valuable information, you can assume other people will find out sooner or later, unless you make an effort to keep it secret.
For me, that you can't delete comments actually makes slashdot more valuable.
It's one of the reasons why I post here, and not on some guy's blog. In some places, comments vanish or fail to appear depending on the whims of the owner, moderator, and upset posters who can't stand losing an argument and just delete their comments.
Slashdot has the advantage that some very, very unusual situations excepted (like a court order), everything stays, no matter what. That makes me a lot less reticent to type a long well thought post, as I know it's not going to vanish just because I ran into the wrong moderator today. Even if it gets modded down to -1 it still stays on the site, so I can still have a conversation with the one I'm replying to.
I can understand why you'd want more control, but IMO there's no policy that's the best in all cases. I prefer the slashdot way, while you might be happier somewhere else.
Where did you get that idea?
I release source under the GPL very intentionally for instance. That makes it undesirable to many companies. I'm happy enough to negotiate a different license, in exchange for money of course.
I have also earned money writing GPL licensed code, by getting hired to improve an existing project.
Same goes for CC-NC licenses. If I release something under those terms it's my intention to let the random Joe with a blog use the content for free, but if a magazine wants it, they have to pay.
No, saying "information wants to be free" is like saying "what goes up must come down", or "water flows downhill". It's not an imperative, nor a moral judgement, or how things ought to be. It's just describing the natural tendency of it.
If you don't do anything to stop information from spreading, it tends to spread around "on its own" if it's useful.
Just like things naturally fall or flow to a lower position if there isn't anything in the way.
And right under that, in the terms of service it says:
Copyright doesn't mean absolute control over your stuff. You certainly can demand that unlawful reproduction be stopped, but if you granted "royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable" permission you can't go and change your mind on that.
But as technology advances, more and more uses reach the point where further improvements don't add anything.
Back when people were using a 386 with 4MB RAM, computer specs mattered even to the average person. The average joe could find that something basic like word processing could run slowly or not at all, and things like having a math coprocessor mattered for office tasks.
These days if somebody asks you what kind of computer you recommend for email and word processing you can tell them that it pretty much doesn't matter, as it's nearly impossible to find a computer that could have a problem with that (even netbooks should do it just fine). Even for gaming you can get away with "anything with a nvidia or ATI card". It won't be perfect for the very latest stuff, but it shouldn't fail horribly either.
So I do think that at some point, those things become considerably less important. I used to care a lot about laptops having uncomfortably small hard disks. Now I don't even look, and worry more about battery time and weight. For me I think disk space topped out at somewhere around 50 GB. At that point, unless I feel like having a copy of every single video, CD and DVD I own with me, I'm unlikely to reach 50% usage. That's a lot more comfortable than in the 386 days, when I spent time on thinking what to install and how to free up some space.
It's possible to get useful amounts of power by simply placing a coil of wire under the line, and getting power by induction. On the ground it would need a big coil, but a plane could fly along the powerline and get much better efficiency. So why perch on it?
Also, where does the plane get its ground?
No, actually it does.
It's just that when it happens, it seems completely normal.
It seems you hear about breakthroughs when the promising research happens. You don't find out about the first company that puts it to work though, unless it's something really huge.
The Earth isn't a closed system.
I'm not sure if you noticed, but there's a rather big flaming ball of hydrogen in the sky.
That should have been explained in high school as well.
Heh, but notice how this is not the fearsome predator that lurks on Facebook or other places on the very, very scary Internet.
This guy was actually invited by her own mother there.
In other words, the people to fear are not the scary strangers on the net, but the ones we have right near.
+1
That pretty much sums up why I subscribe to LWN, even though it's all free if you wait a week. It's a specialist site, that does its job very well, and that's worth rewarding.
Now, a site that is yet another regurgitation of the AP feed? No. I'll just go to another.
And things like what Murdoch came up with (apparently the interface is akin to a PDF, without copy paste or links)? They'd have to pay me to put up with that.
Something is a "bargain" when it has a very good price/value ratio.
A full frame DSLR camera for $1000 would be a bargain, though you can get a DSLR for $400 easily, and if you're not picky and just want any digital camera at all you can get it for $50.
Used many. I've had Asus, HP, Toshiba and Dell laptops.
I basically go search by the characteristics I want (memory, graphics, size, weight, etc), then pick something from there. Generally I find about 4-5 laptops with the right specs, and choose from that by the minor things like looks and small price variations.
Cowon D2.
What I did was going to the wikipedia comparison page, looking at the columns, and picking something I liked.
Nope. I've never ever seen an ad for the MP3 player, and didn't know the brand existed. Nobody I showed it to heard of Cowon either. I just looked around and found something that fit my needs (playing ogg, good battery life)
Actually no. I buy systematically. I'll try a new brand every week until I've tried them all, then buy the brands I like best. I do the same thing with restaurants, ice cream, etc.
That's nonsensical.
A 200W power supply isn't outputting 200W all the time. It can output up to 200W, if whatever is hooked up to it wants that much. And the reason it says 200W on it is that much above that something overheats and it dies horribly. But there's absolutely no issue with connecting a 20W load to it.
You sure pick some bad examples.
TMI wasn't much of catastrophe at all, and not an environmental one.
Chernobyl can be said to favour the environment, since it removed a city, and left lots of room for nature to move into. Dying of cancer after 5 years is a big deal for people, but very tolerable for many animals. But it had plenty consequences for sure, which still persist today, and it still is mostly unpopulated. World-wide it had tremendous consequences for the adoption of nuclear power.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were completely intentional, and were inflicted on enemy terrotory, where nobody of the ones responsible about it cared about the consequences of it, except for that the more horrible it was, the better.
Exxon Valdez is the one good example. The damage endures. Yes, it got better, but it's still not completely fixed. Just because you don't hear about it anymore, doesn't mean it's all fixed now.
Yes, we can live through such things and go on, nobody said we can't. But the consequences persist for decades. Enough oil spills and nuclear accidents will make things very unpleasant.
The problem is that the atmosphere and the ocean are very much a sort of "kitchen" or "living room". It's not some magical place that makes everything you dump into it disappear. They're big, but very much finite. Also, breaking something is much easier than fixing it.
I see very little of this assumption. I hope you're not going to say that the reason environmentalists say oil spills are bad is just "because man did it". People already are suffering plenty consequences due to the gulf spill, and that will continue for quite some years.
We can greatly reduce the amount of times we get bitten in the ass. Just think if BP had been a bit more careful. It would have worked out a lot cheaper for them.
Depending on the point of view.
At each point in time, it's been pretty much constant. Looking back, things have improved. That is, back when I had a 386 I was pretty happy with it, and now that I have a quad core box, I'm pretty happy with it as well. The amount of satisfaction I feel now and felt back then is about the same, though the quad core gets a lot more done.
Power usage has been more or less constant. I use about the same amount of power as I did back then, except much more efficiently. I could actually cut back quite a bit, because a laptop can do all I need, while using a fraction of the power of a desktop.
In my case it's nothing to do with energy, but with efficiency. Over more than 10 years I've been using 200-300W for computer hardware, except today it gets a lot more done with that. Cars existed 30 years ago, and how pleasant they are to use has little to do with the amount of energy spent.
Also, as can be seen with BP, that things seem to be just fine today, doesn't mean they won't get fucked up tomorrow. Reality can't be ignored. Pollution accumulates, equipment wears out, failures happen. If you pretend that stuff doesn't exist, and fail to deal with it, it'll bite you in the ass sooner or later.
So?
Ok, good...
Citation needed. And the conclusion doesn't follow. Just because birds ocassionally shit into the pool, and kids ocassionally pee into it doesn't mean you can empty a septic tank into it, then claim that the former two things mean it's not your fault it's a cesspool now.
Good quote, but doesn't favour your position. It's precisely what worries me. The planet will keep on existing, life will survive and even thrive in the most poisonous environments. But just because some bacteria can live in such conditions doesn't mean I can, or even if I can find a way it doesn't mean it's going to be pleasant. And I'd rather have a pleasant life.
I stand corrected.
Sure. I was just talking about how the way I'd like things to be like. Apple is very, very far from it. Dell is much closer.
I had one of those, and thought it was really cool. Unfortunately it's hard to find anymore.
I don't like them at all, precisely for the same reason. I want to buy the right thing, not to spend $500 more than I wanted because the cheaper model has all I need except one thing, which the expensive one has along with 10 other things I don't want.
Absolutely not. All you need is a good laptop selector. Dell has it right now.
You go there and select:
11" - 14"
Dedicated video card
5-7 lbs
Power
You get a grand total of 2 laptops to choose from. Then there are minor choices for those, like CPU speeds and disk sizes. That's the main reason I bought from Dell. Apple didn't have anything I wanted, HP's site was a mess, everything I liked from Asus was way too big, Acer didn't have anything I liked. The only thing that annoys me somewhat is that they have the option of having the laptop only in black or pink. More selection would be nice.
If HP and Asus had a laptop selector like Dell I'd have been done in 10 minutes. For Asus I actually ended up mirroring the product catalog and grepping it for specs.
That's nice, but it sucks if you want something unusual.
For me, there's not nearly enough choice. I recently chose from more than 200 laptops, and ended up going with a Dell one. (I don't have any particular love for Dell, mind. I've had HP, Toshiba and Asus laptops as well). Mac hardware is outright out because it has a TPM. I loathe the idea itself of it, and refuse to buy any hardware that has it.
What that tells me is that there's not enough choice yet. For me, the ideal would be complete configurability: say what components you want, what battery life, size and weight, choose the external appearance and it comes up with a price.
here you go
They should find a better use for my money than the music industry.
Here's the EFF donation page, for those who'd want to contribute as well.
There's prior art. If made public enough, it should ensure nobody else can patent it.
Alternatively, perhaps it could be possible to patent it, then dedicate it.
Great way to make sure nobody uses it until it expires.
Why would anybody license this, given that GPS routing already works perfectly fine? My ancient GPS takes maybe 5 seconds to calculate a route.
Though, I'm opposed to patents on this sort of thing in the first place, and have serious doubts that patents should exist at all anymore, so read the comment with that in mind.
Microsoft's unfriendliness to Open Source has very little to do with them releasing any, or hosting code repositories.
The unfriendliness is expressed in terms of vague threats using software patents, attempts to derail implementation in various places, suspicious licensing deals like with Novell and so on.
All that has to go for me to start changing my mind. Until that happens, I'm not touching CodePlex with a 10 foot pole, and consider it completely irrelevant at best, and some sort of trap at worst.