Oh, lisp d00d, get a copy of the Little Lisper (or the Little Schemer). It will make you a happy lisp d00d. Plus it is just highly entertaining. Programming a la Dr. Seuss.
It's funny, you remind me of a guy used to I know when I was a phone monkey. Really great with computers, but my boss and I wouldn't let him near the phones. I think the problem here is that we're talking about two seperate things here. Neither of us wants to deal with the lusers and jerks. It's a bad time for everyone involved. But haven't you ever had a conversation with a technically competent person who had a gap in knowledge that you helped fill in? Or the other way round? I think that filling in those gaps can mean as much to the linux community as helping to code software - after all, it means more people who know what they're doing.
In my own linux migration, I started out by researching what was involved and what sort of hardware changes I'd need to make. One of the ways I did this, other than reading through distro docs, was by asking friends of mine who were already running some sort of *nix/BSD what their experiences had been. Aren't newbies allowed at least that? Without meaning to sound to much like a Junior Flowerchild here, mellow and cooperative can be good, dude.
Okay, that's fair. But at the same time, have you ever known documentation to fall behind the software? Or read documentation that includes errors? What about plain old poorly written docs? If a first time user gets stuck and the docs suck, they shouldn't have to fear for their life to ask for help. Yeah, the first place someone whould go is the docs. I've heard plenty of stupid questions that could have been answered by reading the docs and wasted much more time explaining to those same schmucks that they need to read the docs first. But that's no reason to be a complete weenie. Sure, tell them to rtfm - just be polite about it, you know? Makes the world a happier place for everyone...
Dude, at some point you never used linux before. Or unix. Or any computer. Now, unless you're really going to be starting up a seriously real psychic friends network, at some point between then and now, someone showed you what to do to make it go. What's being discussed is not turning *nix/bsd into something made by playskool, what's being discussed is how first time users are supposed to learn how to use linux without asking you for help. Frankly, with the attitude you're displaying, I think that the *nix community is better off with nobody asking you for help.
itachi, former phone monkey who knows the difference between lusers and clients...
I don't really have an answer here, more of an expansion to the question, I guess. Since tools like linuxconf can be so dangerous (big gaping security hole waiting to be exploited in the machine isn't properly configed, and who is going to be most likely to not know what config is dangerous? First time users. Not to mention breaking things that you don't understand...), is that really the best answer? I think that a better solution to this would be a very detailed set of installation and/or config documents. For some things, this isn't that big a deal - if you can't get quake3 running in the first 20 minutes the machine was booted into *nix/BSD, you'll live. But if you don't know how to deal with basic config and setup, you can leave yourself open to being rooted, and that is a danger not only to yourself, but to everyone who has a computer that is network accessible from yours. Not a problem for the home box with nothing but loopback, but a serious problem for someone installing linux in their office, or on a college campus, or attaching to a DSL or cable modem. Personally, the way I first did this was by looking for man pages associated with everything in/etc. But that's time consuming, and there's plenty of stuff you don't learn that way. I suppose that for a given item you want to setup, that might not be that bad a method, for the moment. Still, I like the notion of a big pile of documentation. IIRC, red hat used to sell a package where you got these two immense reference manuals along with the distro cd and some other cds of software. Something like that would be good for a first time install, I think. Although it would have to be done just right - easily cross referenced, available in text or digital form, and up to date. Having meandered about this notion, I think it'll never happen, because it is that most feared and hated part of the programming project - documentation. Bummer, dude.
Now, in an attempt at answering, I would say that YaST is a really good tool for this, although I don't know if it can be shoehorned onto anything other that suse. YaST is fun and fabulous, although it doesn't do everything. But what it does, it does nice.
Dude, read the can. Ask Guiness. The bottled stuff is one thing, but the pub draught cans (and the stuff you get out of a properly tapped keg of Guiness) have nitrogen bubbles. If you do a taste test, you will notice that in fact the bottled Guiness and the N2 Guiness are completely different beers. The N2 stuff is creamier, smoother. The body is more like whole milk as you swish it in your mouth. There are minor, very subtle taste differences which could really be entirely attributed to the change in mouthfeel. But if you doubt this, do a simple experiment. Do NOT smoke, eat, bruch your teeth, or chew gum beforehand for ~ 1hr. Buy a can of pub draught and a bottle without the widget. Rinse mouth with water - keep the large glass of water on hand. Pour a portion of ambrosia from the bottle into a small juice glass. Pour similar sized portion of the N2 guiness into another juice glass. Then taste the N2 guiness. Swish it in your mouth, think about where on your tongue you are tasting the beer, and what the various tastes are on the different parts of your tongue. Swallow, think about the finish of the beer. Rinse mouth with water (swallowing) and then try the same thing with the bottled guiness. The bottled guiness has a more harsh taste, a rougher mouth feel, and a very different body. Try the two different styles again and again, trying to see the differences. It helps to do this with several friends, because it's easier to describe the differences if you can bounce adjectives off of each other. Make sure to rinse your mouth with water between styles. Then, when you have finished the experiement, destroy the remaining samples at your leisure. That last step is a doozy, depending on how prepared you are for the experiment and how many lab assistants you have.
That's not a valid counter-arguement, because of the warnings to @Home. If a system has open mail relays that spammers are using and I notify the admins, I would expect the admins to shut the open relays. That's basic courtesy, not to mention something that saves wear and tear on your system. Any admin worth their job should appreciate this concept - ignoring requests by others to fix a problem such as this is insulting and isolationist. The UDP is (partly) the apparent desired end result of @Home's actions - they ignore the rest of the internet and the rest of the internet ignores them. Finally, it is trivial for @Home to close these mail relays, and pressue from @Home's customers to end this UDP should encourage @Home to take the necessary actions.
Not being a chemist, I'm not sure if this makes a difference, but I know that any real milk stout (aka cream stout, except for the crap that Sam Adams tries to pass off as cream stout) has lactose added during fermentation. At least a portion of the lactose remains unfermented. As for the price of lambic, you just need to find the right place - here in Philly you can find quite a few belgian beers for less than $7 (or a lot more). In fact, anyone in the Philly area who appreciates beer really needs to try out both Monk's and Ludwig's Garten - one german, one belgian, both with really stupendous beer menus.
I don't know, I mean, this guy was a bit, um, different. Really liked his porn. And the way the lab was laid out, it might be possible. If a couple could have sex in the lab, which I know happened, surely this gent could have done whatever he wanted as well.
Well, having worked tech support at a small college and having been forced to deal with the very situation described... Sure, you can pull the decency law thing, but it is really not a comfortable situation to be in when you have to tell someone that the web-porn that they are looking at is disturbing the other people in the lab and would they mind using a more isolated computer. Believe me, if there were an isolated enough computer in the labs, some poor goober would have to clean the keyboard constantly. It is an issue, unless the computer is in the middle of a room that is constantly occupied. Even then, it just depends on how the person at the keyboard feels about getting it on (until the cops show up) with librarian supervision.
FIA has tacked a lot of restrictions onto F1 racing in order to keep the competition as much with the drivers and not as much with the tech. So no superchargers (hence the way high redlines at 2 to 3 times consumer engines), limitations on fuel mixes, etc. The point is still the same, though. And glow plug engines run on way hotted up mixes, IIRC. Like partly nitrous. That 4hp per cc sounds off, though. Honda are doing well to be getting 240 bhp out of 2 Liters in the S2000 - what horsepower calcuations are being used? And who is making that engine? Is it 4-stroke or two? Turboed? Supered? Running on std. gas, or some sort of alcohol fuel, or a chemists magic recipie?
Dude, the first electric cars occured before Henry Ford's model T, which is generally agreed to be the first consumer car (sure, you could buy from someone else, but who else was making one every 10 seconds?) Electric cars suck. Really really suck. Slow (ain't no electric car gonna outrun a '68 Dodge Charger 440), short range (that overpowered Charger that gets offensively low mileage has a better range), poor acceleration, and ridiculous expense. Gas powered cars are cheap, light, fast, easy to maintain, and can get usable mileage (20-30 mpg w/15-20 gal. tank gets 300 to 600 miles between refils. vs. 100-150 for modern electrics). Hybrids are the way to go given today's tech - small battery reserve that gets recharged off of the driveshaft during decceleration, gas and electric working together to provide acceptable acceleration while simultaneously allowing for very efficient cruising by shutting down the gas engine and using the electric to provide coasting power - see the ugly Honda Insight that gets 60 mpg city, according to EPA tests. As for your rant, you're wrong. Look at racing engines. At one point in the history of motorsports, this big beast called the Sunbeam was the land speed record-holding machine. 1000 bhp. from a 2700 cubic inch engine. It went a little faster than 200 mph. Now look at modern F1. The limit is 3 liters. Way way way less engine, but due to fancy engineering, they get huge horsepower (think 800 or so). Getting such increased power to displacement ratios is all about tech. Fuel tech, engineering the engine, developing lighter alloys, random stuff like that. Which carries over to consumer cars - check the old Caddy v-16s vs. today's v-6s. Bigger doesn't mean crap in automotive design, but engineering can be everything.
Although it'd be nice if O'Reilly could tell you whether something was on backorder when you ordered it, rather than via email at an unspcified later time...
Look at Ebola, Marburg, and related virii. They don't pussyfoot around, or stop breeding when the host becomes unstable. They go full bore as long as they can as fast as they can. That's why you never hear of a serious outbreak - the infected die faster than the virus can spread. Hardly ruthless, though. Just reproduction at a very basic level... Can you imagine what a computer virus with the dormancy and lethality od HIV? That'd be scary.
A really really out there, ahead of it's time, fabulously cool car with more useful features than you can shake a stick at... 3 headlights, one in the middle. Standard seatbelts at a time when some manufacturers didn't install seatbelts at all. Headlights that track with the steering. Automatic tranny. Beautiful styling. 0 to 60 in 10 seconds, which doesn't sound like much today, but for a family sedan from 1948... (just remember, some of today's family sedans can out-accelerate many factory stock sports cars from 30 years ago, so a car from '48 keeping even with cars more than 50 years newer is pretty slick). A big flat 6 in the back, designed as an air cooled helicopter engine but hacked into a liquid cooled engine for use in the Tucker Torpedo.
Given that it was DARPA funded, it wasn't 100% academics. But since the first 4 nodes were uni's, and the 5th was bbn (who built the stuff in the first place), I'd say that it was hardly without academic influences. Maybe the military/industrial/academic complex?:)
No, dude, that's FDDI.:) Although I think there may be a historical reason for the diagram, since IIRC it's very similar to the NextStep telnet icon dealie. Just a guess.
Lots of people who have commented thus far don't seem to get what Corel is suing over. Personal preference is not an issue in large scale government purchasing like this. It's all done with bidding. Not a question of whether the purchasers like the stupid little dancing paperclip or anything like that. Govt. contracts are awarded by bids. The department of foo puts out a request for bids (several types, all the same idea), companies write back with proposal saying that they can provide X goods and or services to meet the bid, it will take Y amount of time, and cost Z dollars. The government says oh, that bid is reasonable and cheap. Then they give a contract to the winning bidder. Now, since both Corel and MS had working products when the bidding was done, it should come down to cheap and fast. Of course, if the bidding process is cheap and a contractor is picked from a hat, they can pretty much set their price. And that is A Bad Thing. Corel's claim is that there was no bidding process, but if there had been, they would have been able to win the contract by having the lowest bidding price. The suit makes plenty of sense, and as a US taxpayer, I want very much for the federal govt. to use the bidding system to keep costs low.
As the Circuit Court said, "The fact that this form of intellectual property results from a service that NSI provides does not preclude the property from garnishment any more than the service provided by the Patent Office immunizes patents from garnishment." In other words, it's property. Not just a name, but something that someone can own. Cnet article on the ruling
After reading this article, I think that McLanahan has every bit of legal ground that he needs to file criminal charges against NSI for the theft of his property. Please remember that NSI is based in Herdon, Va, right near the very Circuit Court that issued the ruling. Mr McLanahan, if you're reading this, please go for it. As for NSI, we need something better, without a doubt.
Well, itachi is japanese for weasel, but no, I'm not. I am, however, an international trade nut. It's fascinating. Half politics, half economics. And believe me, there is nothing I want more than the elimination of trade barriers. Trade barriers hurt nobody more than the nation that erects them. As for the cow herder dictating policy, go to the wto webpage and read up on how policy is instituted.
Free trade guarantees nothing. We've had free trade here in America in the software industry for years - need I tell you where that thought is going?
Well, everyone in the US can buy a copy of Windows98 at the same price, no matter where in the US they are. Ditto the latest RedHat box, or Oracle 8i, or Photoshop, etc. Now, in areas where there is serious competition, like games, the prices are much lower. Recently, it was decided by the regulatory body responsible for such things (this is where the WTO fits) that there was a monopoly in the market, and they are working on dealing with this issue.
Looking at international trade, which is what the WTO deals with, we find that there are some serious differences from intranational trade. If you go to Cuba, you find that sugar is much cheaper than in the US, relative to other goods. Why can't US consumers pay the same price for sugar relative to a standard market basket of goods that Cuban consumers pay for sugar relative to the same market basket? Well, it's the lack of free trade. Quotas, specifically - the US limits the ammount of sugar imported into the US (originally as a concession to allow Cuban sugar to be sold for a much higher price within the US, thereby helping Cuban farmers, but after Castro rose to power, the quotas have been kept in place because of corn farmers lobbying to keep corn syrup in demand, and also as a way of boosting the sugar industry in whatever sugar growing nations the US is most friendly with at the moment). Bummer, dude. A better example is the Big Mac. Standard thing, found all over. Sugar varies depending on how it is produced, but a big mac contains the same stuff everywhere. If there is totally free trade between two countries, then consumers sacrifice just as much buying power of their respective currencies to get a big mac in either country. So free trade is about money that you, personally, will save. Why should you pay twice as much for a big mac? Assuming totally free trade everywhere, prices on everything are lower. And that is how free trade is about money for the consumer.
The WTO answers to it's member nations. The WTO is not accountable to mulit-nats, it has nothing to do with them. It is an NGO that is comprised of government representatives. There are approx. 135 member nations in the WTO right now. The reps to the WTO are picked by the govt they represent, and they work within the WTO on behalf of the govt. that they represent. Since every member nation gets to represent itself to the WTO, by proxy, every person in every member nation is represented to the WTO. If you live in a member nation and think that your govt is making poor choices wrt to WTO, talk to your govt. Furthermore, the WTO and it's predecessors have been around since 1947. It is not new. Your arguments show a serious mis-understanding of the WTO and the mechanisms of international trade. For more information about the WTO, try their website.
No, not the colonial system. Look at any one person. They are better at some things than others. I personally can't write poetry. So I'm not a poet. I play with networks. But if everyone played with networks, who'd write poetry? I don't know how well Ginsberg (sp?) would be with computer networks, but most people think he writes pretty good poetry. A real world example of this is sugar and hops. Sugarcane doesn't grow to well in the pacific northwest of the US. Hops (as in beer) do. Meanwhile, sugarcane grows pretty well in cuba. Really well. Hops, not so well. In the early 1960s, Fidel Castro tried to diversify Cuban agriculture. His plan failed. Not for lack of trying, but because other crops didn't grow very well, and they weren't producing enough other farm goods to make up for the sugar they weren't growing. Specialization doesn't mean only producing one good, it means producing the things that are most efficiently produced. Would you suggest that farmers in Canada grow bananas? Or that miners in Wales and West Virginia give up on coal because then they'll be dependant on trade? That is a very bad plan. It's not Orewellian to make your living by doing what you do well, it's smart. I am sorry if I did not make my use of the word specialization clear in the first place.
No, the idea of the WTO is to increase free trade and lower (with the intention of eventually removing) tariffs, quotas, and the like. It can be beneficial even to non-members - country A joins WTO, lowers imports quotas for everyone, country B, not a member, has something they want to export to country A, and so they are better off because country A joined. Now, this wont necessarily happen, because the WTO membership influences trade behavior wrt other members, not to the entire world. However, a forward thinking nation would see that the lowering of trade barriers to everyone means greater competition and lower prices for all goods, with increased specialization. Life gets good for everyone when everyone starts to see things like that.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, lisp d00d, get a copy of the Little Lisper (or the Little Schemer). It will make you a happy lisp d00d. Plus it is just highly entertaining. Programming a la Dr. Seuss.
Dude, Andretti is a weenie. We drive like Juan Manuel Fangio. Get it right. ;)
itachi
It's funny, you remind me of a guy used to I know when I was a phone monkey. Really great with computers, but my boss and I wouldn't let him near the phones. I think the problem here is that we're talking about two seperate things here. Neither of us wants to deal with the lusers and jerks. It's a bad time for everyone involved. But haven't you ever had a conversation with a technically competent person who had a gap in knowledge that you helped fill in? Or the other way round? I think that filling in those gaps can mean as much to the linux community as helping to code software - after all, it means more people who know what they're doing.
In my own linux migration, I started out by researching what was involved and what sort of hardware changes I'd need to make. One of the ways I did this, other than reading through distro docs, was by asking friends of mine who were already running some sort of *nix/BSD what their experiences had been. Aren't newbies allowed at least that? Without meaning to sound to much like a Junior Flowerchild here, mellow and cooperative can be good, dude.
itachi
Okay, that's fair. But at the same time, have you ever known documentation to fall behind the software? Or read documentation that includes errors? What about plain old poorly written docs? If a first time user gets stuck and the docs suck, they shouldn't have to fear for their life to ask for help. Yeah, the first place someone whould go is the docs. I've heard plenty of stupid questions that could have been answered by reading the docs and wasted much more time explaining to those same schmucks that they need to read the docs first. But that's no reason to be a complete weenie. Sure, tell them to rtfm - just be polite about it, you know? Makes the world a happier place for everyone...
itachi
Dude, at some point you never used linux before. Or unix. Or any computer. Now, unless you're really going to be starting up a seriously real psychic friends network, at some point between then and now, someone showed you what to do to make it go. What's being discussed is not turning *nix/bsd into something made by playskool, what's being discussed is how first time users are supposed to learn how to use linux without asking you for help. Frankly, with the attitude you're displaying, I think that the *nix community is better off with nobody asking you for help.
itachi, former phone monkey who knows the difference between lusers and clients...
I don't really have an answer here, more of an expansion to the question, I guess. Since tools like linuxconf can be so dangerous (big gaping security hole waiting to be exploited in the machine isn't properly configed, and who is going to be most likely to not know what config is dangerous? First time users. Not to mention breaking things that you don't understand...), is that really the best answer? I think that a better solution to this would be a very detailed set of installation and/or config documents. For some things, this isn't that big a deal - if you can't get quake3 running in the first 20 minutes the machine was booted into *nix/BSD, you'll live. But if you don't know how to deal with basic config and setup, you can leave yourself open to being rooted, and that is a danger not only to yourself, but to everyone who has a computer that is network accessible from yours. Not a problem for the home box with nothing but loopback, but a serious problem for someone installing linux in their office, or on a college campus, or attaching to a DSL or cable modem. Personally, the way I first did this was by looking for man pages associated with everything in /etc. But that's time consuming, and there's plenty of stuff you don't learn that way. I suppose that for a given item you want to setup, that might not be that bad a method, for the moment. Still, I like the notion of a big pile of documentation. IIRC, red hat used to sell a package where you got these two immense reference manuals along with the distro cd and some other cds of software. Something like that would be good for a first time install, I think. Although it would have to be done just right - easily cross referenced, available in text or digital form, and up to date. Having meandered about this notion, I think it'll never happen, because it is that most feared and hated part of the programming project - documentation. Bummer, dude.
Now, in an attempt at answering, I would say that YaST is a really good tool for this, although I don't know if it can be shoehorned onto anything other that suse. YaST is fun and fabulous, although it doesn't do everything. But what it does, it does nice.
itachi
Dude, read the can. Ask Guiness. The bottled stuff is one thing, but the pub draught cans (and the stuff you get out of a properly tapped keg of Guiness) have nitrogen bubbles. If you do a taste test, you will notice that in fact the bottled Guiness and the N2 Guiness are completely different beers. The N2 stuff is creamier, smoother. The body is more like whole milk as you swish it in your mouth. There are minor, very subtle taste differences which could really be entirely attributed to the change in mouthfeel. But if you doubt this, do a simple experiment. Do NOT smoke, eat, bruch your teeth, or chew gum beforehand for ~ 1hr. Buy a can of pub draught and a bottle without the widget. Rinse mouth with water - keep the large glass of water on hand. Pour a portion of ambrosia from the bottle into a small juice glass. Pour similar sized portion of the N2 guiness into another juice glass. Then taste the N2 guiness. Swish it in your mouth, think about where on your tongue you are tasting the beer, and what the various tastes are on the different parts of your tongue. Swallow, think about the finish of the beer. Rinse mouth with water (swallowing) and then try the same thing with the bottled guiness. The bottled guiness has a more harsh taste, a rougher mouth feel, and a very different body. Try the two different styles again and again, trying to see the differences. It helps to do this with several friends, because it's easier to describe the differences if you can bounce adjectives off of each other. Make sure to rinse your mouth with water between styles. Then, when you have finished the experiement, destroy the remaining samples at your leisure. That last step is a doozy, depending on how prepared you are for the experiment and how many lab assistants you have.
itachi
That's not a valid counter-arguement, because of the warnings to @Home. If a system has open mail relays that spammers are using and I notify the admins, I would expect the admins to shut the open relays. That's basic courtesy, not to mention something that saves wear and tear on your system. Any admin worth their job should appreciate this concept - ignoring requests by others to fix a problem such as this is insulting and isolationist. The UDP is (partly) the apparent desired end result of @Home's actions - they ignore the rest of the internet and the rest of the internet ignores them. Finally, it is trivial for @Home to close these mail relays, and pressue from @Home's customers to end this UDP should encourage @Home to take the necessary actions.
itachi the incoherent
Not being a chemist, I'm not sure if this makes a difference, but I know that any real milk stout (aka cream stout, except for the crap that Sam Adams tries to pass off as cream stout) has lactose added during fermentation. At least a portion of the lactose remains unfermented. As for the price of lambic, you just need to find the right place - here in Philly you can find quite a few belgian beers for less than $7 (or a lot more). In fact, anyone in the Philly area who appreciates beer really needs to try out both Monk's and Ludwig's Garten - one german, one belgian, both with really stupendous beer menus.
itachi
I don't know, I mean, this guy was a bit, um, different. Really liked his porn. And the way the lab was laid out, it might be possible. If a couple could have sex in the lab, which I know happened, surely this gent could have done whatever he wanted as well.
itachi
Well, having worked tech support at a small college and having been forced to deal with the very situation described...
Sure, you can pull the decency law thing, but it is really not a comfortable situation to be in when you have to tell someone that the web-porn that they are looking at is disturbing the other people in the lab and would they mind using a more isolated computer. Believe me, if there were an isolated enough computer in the labs, some poor goober would have to clean the keyboard constantly. It is an issue, unless the computer is in the middle of a room that is constantly occupied. Even then, it just depends on how the person at the keyboard feels about getting it on (until the cops show up) with librarian supervision.
itachi
FIA has tacked a lot of restrictions onto F1 racing in order to keep the competition as much with the drivers and not as much with the tech. So no superchargers (hence the way high redlines at 2 to 3 times consumer engines), limitations on fuel mixes, etc. The point is still the same, though. And glow plug engines run on way hotted up mixes, IIRC. Like partly nitrous. That 4hp per cc sounds off, though. Honda are doing well to be getting 240 bhp out of 2 Liters in the S2000 - what horsepower calcuations are being used? And who is making that engine? Is it 4-stroke or two? Turboed? Supered? Running on std. gas, or some sort of alcohol fuel, or a chemists magic recipie?
itachi
Dude, the first electric cars occured before Henry Ford's model T, which is generally agreed to be the first consumer car (sure, you could buy from someone else, but who else was making one every 10 seconds?) Electric cars suck. Really really suck. Slow (ain't no electric car gonna outrun a '68 Dodge Charger 440), short range (that overpowered Charger that gets offensively low mileage has a better range), poor acceleration, and ridiculous expense. Gas powered cars are cheap, light, fast, easy to maintain, and can get usable mileage (20-30 mpg w/15-20 gal. tank gets 300 to 600 miles between refils. vs. 100-150 for modern electrics). Hybrids are the way to go given today's tech - small battery reserve that gets recharged off of the driveshaft during decceleration, gas and electric working together to provide acceptable acceleration while simultaneously allowing for very efficient cruising by shutting down the gas engine and using the electric to provide coasting power - see the ugly Honda Insight that gets 60 mpg city, according to EPA tests. As for your rant, you're wrong. Look at racing engines. At one point in the history of motorsports, this big beast called the Sunbeam was the land speed record-holding machine. 1000 bhp. from a 2700 cubic inch engine. It went a little faster than 200 mph. Now look at modern F1. The limit is 3 liters. Way way way less engine, but due to fancy engineering, they get huge horsepower (think 800 or so). Getting such increased power to displacement ratios is all about tech. Fuel tech, engineering the engine, developing lighter alloys, random stuff like that. Which carries over to consumer cars - check the old Caddy v-16s vs. today's v-6s. Bigger doesn't mean crap in automotive design, but engineering can be everything.
itachi
Borders.com and, of course, ora.com
Although it'd be nice if O'Reilly could tell you whether something was on backorder when you ordered it, rather than via email at an unspcified later time...
itachi
Look at Ebola, Marburg, and related virii. They don't pussyfoot around, or stop breeding when the host becomes unstable. They go full bore as long as they can as fast as they can. That's why you never hear of a serious outbreak - the infected die faster than the virus can spread. Hardly ruthless, though. Just reproduction at a very basic level... Can you imagine what a computer virus with the dormancy and lethality od HIV? That'd be scary.
itachi
A really really out there, ahead of it's time, fabulously cool car with more useful features than you can shake a stick at... 3 headlights, one in the middle. Standard seatbelts at a time when some manufacturers didn't install seatbelts at all. Headlights that track with the steering. Automatic tranny. Beautiful styling. 0 to 60 in 10 seconds, which doesn't sound like much today, but for a family sedan from 1948... (just remember, some of today's family sedans can out-accelerate many factory stock sports cars from 30 years ago, so a car from '48 keeping even with cars more than 50 years newer is pretty slick). A big flat 6 in the back, designed as an air cooled helicopter engine but hacked into a liquid cooled engine for use in the Tucker Torpedo.
itachi
Given that it was DARPA funded, it wasn't 100% academics. But since the first 4 nodes were uni's, and the 5th was bbn (who built the stuff in the first place), I'd say that it was hardly without academic influences. Maybe the military/industrial/academic complex? :)
itachi
No, dude, that's FDDI. :) Although I think there may be a historical reason for the diagram, since IIRC it's very similar to the NextStep telnet icon dealie. Just a guess.
itachi
Lots of people who have commented thus far don't seem to get what Corel is suing over. Personal preference is not an issue in large scale government purchasing like this. It's all done with bidding. Not a question of whether the purchasers like the stupid little dancing paperclip or anything like that. Govt. contracts are awarded by bids. The department of foo puts out a request for bids (several types, all the same idea), companies write back with proposal saying that they can provide X goods and or services to meet the bid, it will take Y amount of time, and cost Z dollars. The government says oh, that bid is reasonable and cheap. Then they give a contract to the winning bidder. Now, since both Corel and MS had working products when the bidding was done, it should come down to cheap and fast. Of course, if the bidding process is cheap and a contractor is picked from a hat, they can pretty much set their price. And that is A Bad Thing. Corel's claim is that there was no bidding process, but if there had been, they would have been able to win the contract by having the lowest bidding price. The suit makes plenty of sense, and as a US taxpayer, I want very much for the federal govt. to use the bidding system to keep costs low.
itachi
As the Circuit Court said, "The fact that this form of intellectual property results from a service that NSI provides does not preclude the property from garnishment any more than the service provided by the Patent Office immunizes patents from garnishment."
In other words, it's property. Not just a name, but something that someone can own.
Cnet article on the ruling
After reading this article, I think that McLanahan has every bit of legal ground that he needs to file criminal charges against NSI for the theft of his property. Please remember that NSI is based in Herdon, Va, right near the very Circuit Court that issued the ruling. Mr McLanahan, if you're reading this, please go for it. As for NSI, we need something better, without a doubt.
itachi
Well, itachi is japanese for weasel, but no, I'm not. I am, however, an international trade nut. It's fascinating. Half politics, half economics. And believe me, there is nothing I want more than the elimination of trade barriers. Trade barriers hurt nobody more than the nation that erects them. As for the cow herder dictating policy, go to the wto webpage and read up on how policy is instituted.
itachi
Free trade guarantees nothing. We've had free trade here in America in the software industry
for years - need I tell you where that thought is going?
Well, everyone in the US can buy a copy of Windows98 at the same price, no matter where in the US they are. Ditto the latest RedHat box, or Oracle 8i, or Photoshop, etc. Now, in areas where there is serious competition, like games, the prices are much lower. Recently, it was decided by the regulatory body responsible for such things (this is where the WTO fits) that there was a monopoly in the market, and they are working on dealing with this issue.
Looking at international trade, which is what the WTO deals with, we find that there are some serious differences from intranational trade. If you go to Cuba, you find that sugar is much cheaper than in the US, relative to other goods. Why can't US consumers pay the same price for sugar relative to a standard market basket of goods that Cuban consumers pay for sugar relative to the same market basket? Well, it's the lack of free trade. Quotas, specifically - the US limits the ammount of sugar imported into the US (originally as a concession to allow Cuban sugar to be sold for a much higher price within the US, thereby helping Cuban farmers, but after Castro rose to power, the quotas have been kept in place because of corn farmers lobbying to keep corn syrup in demand, and also as a way of boosting the sugar industry in whatever sugar growing nations the US is most friendly with at the moment). Bummer, dude. A better example is the Big Mac. Standard thing, found all over. Sugar varies depending on how it is produced, but a big mac contains the same stuff everywhere. If there is totally free trade between two countries, then consumers sacrifice just as much buying power of their respective currencies to get a big mac in either country. So free trade is about money that you, personally, will save. Why should you pay twice as much for a big mac? Assuming totally free trade everywhere, prices on everything are lower. And that is how free trade is about money for the consumer.
itachi
The WTO answers to it's member nations. The WTO is not accountable to mulit-nats, it has nothing to do with them. It is an NGO that is comprised of government representatives. There are approx. 135 member nations in the WTO right now. The reps to the WTO are picked by the govt they represent, and they work within the WTO on behalf of the govt. that they represent. Since every member nation gets to represent itself to the WTO, by proxy, every person in every member nation is represented to the WTO. If you live in a member nation and think that your govt is making poor choices wrt to WTO, talk to your govt. Furthermore, the WTO and it's predecessors have been around since 1947. It is not new. Your arguments show a serious mis-understanding of the WTO and the mechanisms of international trade. For more information about the WTO, try their website.
itachi
No, not the colonial system. Look at any one person. They are better at some things than others. I personally can't write poetry. So I'm not a poet. I play with networks. But if everyone played with networks, who'd write poetry? I don't know how well Ginsberg (sp?) would be with computer networks, but most people think he writes pretty good poetry. A real world example of this is sugar and hops. Sugarcane doesn't grow to well in the pacific northwest of the US. Hops (as in beer) do. Meanwhile, sugarcane grows pretty well in cuba. Really well. Hops, not so well. In the early 1960s, Fidel Castro tried to diversify Cuban agriculture. His plan failed. Not for lack of trying, but because other crops didn't grow very well, and they weren't producing enough other farm goods to make up for the sugar they weren't growing. Specialization doesn't mean only producing one good, it means producing the things that are most efficiently produced. Would you suggest that farmers in Canada grow bananas? Or that miners in Wales and West Virginia give up on coal because then they'll be dependant on trade? That is a very bad plan. It's not Orewellian to make your living by doing what you do well, it's smart. I am sorry if I did not make my use of the word specialization clear in the first place.
itachi
No, the idea of the WTO is to increase free trade and lower (with the intention of eventually removing) tariffs, quotas, and the like. It can be beneficial even to non-members - country A joins WTO, lowers imports quotas for everyone, country B, not a member, has something they want to export to country A, and so they are better off because country A joined. Now, this wont necessarily happen, because the WTO membership influences trade behavior wrt other members, not to the entire world. However, a forward thinking nation would see that the lowering of trade barriers to everyone means greater competition and lower prices for all goods, with increased specialization. Life gets good for everyone when everyone starts to see things like that.
itachi