Correct. You need a chunk of weapons grade plutonium about the size of a base ball to make a fission device, and while not so much, still a reasonable quantity to go critical. I remember seeing the "Fat Man & Little Boy" documentatry about the Manhatten project and how they had one criticality experiment go wrong and kill one of the scientists. They said that basically once you see the blue flash it's too late - you've already had sufficient radiation exposure to kill you.
So the neighbors saw this kid's shed glowing? Hmmm.... good urban legend.
You hardly need to be a genius to make nitro-glycerine. I won't go into the details in case some fool decides to try, but suffice it to say that most soup recipes are more complicated. I'm surprised if he really did make it without having an accident - it's extremely unstable. a friend of my family blew one of his hands off and severly disfigured his face.
Because it's more strategic to them to attempt to subvert the web to IE standards (under the agreement AOL would use IE vs their own Netscape), than to try to make a few bucks off MSN which isn't very popular anyway.
Given that it's Time Warner-AOL who have stopped the talks, not Microsoft, it seems apparent that everyone knows who has the upper hand. Time Warner is obviously a formidable competitor even for Microsoft, and with ICQ/AIM they already own instant messaging and have a HUGE base of AOL users whose switch from IE to Netscape would be a major defeat for Microsoft who are continuing to struggle to have any kind of success in the internet arena other than IE's popularity.
Exactly. Maybe non-Matrox cards don't work this way, but ctrl +/- on a Matrox card just gives you a different resolution virtual screen of the same size that you can pan around with the cursor keys. It's cool and useful, but not the same thing as changing to a full screen desktop at a different resolution.
Tito broke what rules? The Russian's are a partner in the SS, paying their own way, and it's up to them if they want to send scientists, tourists or monkeys. Kudos to the Russians for gaining some great PR, and helping fund their own program. Too bad that at $600M per launch for the Shuttle, that NASA were *UNABLE* to make money on taking Tito - for them it would have been a huge loss. NASA should concentrate on doing things efficiently and not wasting our money before they think they have any credibility in critisizing the way the Russians choose to do things.
NASA are lying. Before the launch they were totally hostile to Tito going up, and now they pretend they were bending over backwards to support him (and pissing away all our tax dollars in the process). Way to go, NASA - if you wanted good PR and think the public is happy with you wasting their money, then you should have pocketed the $20M and had Tito as YOUR guest, not the Russian's.
The head of NASA called you personally to discuss this, did he? Tell me, do the American's always spend their time watching the Russian crew, or do they ever actually do any work up there?
If the NASA guys needed to have meals served to them by Tito, it sounds as if they were the ones being baby-sitted. You'd have thought that with the millions of tax dollars that go into training these guys that they would have learned where the pantry is.
Rather than wondering if Mars can adequately support freakish glowing jelly plants, why not just plant a whole diverisy of different plant types and see what (if anything) CAN survive and adapt?
Why are the folks at NASA so interested in whether Mars can support glowing jelly plants? Do they know something that we don't?!
The Shuttle is a complete failure if you measure that by it's ability to meet it's objectives. When it was designed, it was expected to cost $50M per launch, not the current $500M+. The cheapest way to put stuff in space is still big fireworks.
I don't believe the source even has to accompany the binaries - just that you have to make it available upon request at minimal media cost to anyone who buys your product.
It seemed the original poster may have actually been talking about the product itself, not the source, being available for download, and of course there's no such requirement. Just because your source is GPL'd doesn't mean you have to give your product away!
There are plenty of free sites that offer lots of storage - do you just want to avoid the ads, or are there other reasons you're not using one of the free sites?
NASA are going to be putting up a Mars comms satellite soon (next few years) that will establish a permanent 1Mbps link back to earth.
What'd be cooler than IMAX quality film would be a robot that via telepresence gave you the experience of actually being ON mars, wandering about and looking at stuff! I've read about people who've tried telepresence robots in the lab, and have said that it's extremely freaky to look at yourself this way - easy to imagine!
AFAIK the russians also did the first unmanned retrieval of rocks from the moon (did NASA ever even try this?).
I just read that the Russians also nowadays land their command caspsules on earth with retro rocket braking (this is how Tito came home), not in the ocean as the US always did. A lot more cost effective than the Shuttle which costs 10x more per launch than it was originally intended to.
What exactly do you mean by "commercial strength"?
What's lacking in Konqueror or Opera that you don't consider them "commercial strength"?
Personally I still use Netscape 4.73 on Linux, and have never seen reason to switch. I've tried Opera and Konqueror just out of curiosity, and have tried Netscape 6.0 on Windows, not to mention Mozilla ? very briefly on Mandrake 8.0, but at then end of the day Netscape 4.73 is working fine for me, and I see no reason to switch.
On the odd occasion I use Windows I use Netscape 4.73 there too (plus I use it on Solaris at work, for which IE is also available), even though enough people say IE is better that I'm willing to believe them. Netscape does everything I want, so I'm sticking with it!
I didn't mean to imply that I think anyone's under any moral obligation - this isn't shareware, it's freeware. I just pointed out that if you've downloaded or bought from cheapbytes then you havn't helped Mandrake, and that would IMO be when it might be appropriate to donate (if you want to support them).
True. There was an report on one of the busines programs on TV the other day about the latest version of WordPerfect which acknowledged that features or quality are now immaterial to it's success, since Microsoft is now so entrenched. People buy Windows, Word etc because they are the standard - not because they are the best. Of course these things never last - the same was true of IBM at one stage.
Perhaps, but I'm not aware of Mandrake contributing to open source projects in the way that other such as RedHat or SuSE do. Stuff like harddrake may be GPL'd but given that most people use distributions and every distribution has their own equivalent tools, this doesn't benefit anyone other than Mandrake.
More to the point, the whole of GNU and Linux, and the wealth of GPL'd applicatipons, existed nefore companies like RedHat and Mandrake came into being to try to make money off it. If anything, they're the ones that owe the free software developers - not vice versa.
If these companies do feed back GPL'd software into the community that that's cool that they honoring the spirit of things and giving something back for what they have got from it (who's richer, Bob Young, Richard Stallman or Linus?), but I certainly don't feel that they're net givers! Perhaps the coolest move was RedHat giving stock options to developers - that was a real give back.
The main thing that distinguishes the different distros other than their philosophies on what versions to release are their vlaue added components which comes down to installation and configuration. What's sad is that Mandrake chose to GPL those components and are therefore stuck with that choice even if that turns out not to have been a viable business model. They've now put themselves in a position where thay cannot stop free iso downloads even if they'd like to, and are therefore somewhat dependent on people like you who download and then donate.
I know Mandrake have a large market share, but I'd be curious how many of those are paying customers, and how many are downloaders or cheapbytes customers.
IMO SuSE is definitely going to be one of the survivors - they are doing very well (diminant in Europe, I believe), and have a philosophy that distinguishes them from RedHat and Mandrake. I see more and more people who've been former RedHat/Mandrake users who subsequently move to SuSE.
Whether Debian and Slackware can both continue, I'm not sure. Maybe they'll survive (or at least one of them) as more niche orientated for server use, since for desktop use they're IMO going to have a hard time competeing with the wealth of packages available in the RPM format (unless of course they switch).
As a former RedHat and current but dissatisfied Mandrake user, I'm looking at the next release of Libranet (debian based) or Slackware as my next upgrade. It seems Slackware current is about to go Beta, and is surprisingly up-to-date in terms of having all the latest X, KDE, GNOME etc releases, along with a nice solid 2.95.3 gcc.
I agree there's no reason to be offended by mandrake asking for donations, OTOH there's no reason to feel morally obligated either.
The museum example was entirely bogus because museums are paid for by our money in the first place, and secondly they're non-profit. If Mandrake get out of their financial slump then do you ever expect them to turn around and share their profits with their customers? It'd be cool, but I doubt it.
Probably the biggest value Mandrake add to their distribution is their excellent installer and harddrake partition utility. I think what we're seeing here is a darwinian evolution of the Linux distribution business model. SuSE chose to make their value added components non-GPL so that they could control distribution and actually get paid for their work, which obviously makes sense (well, duh!), and their customers obviously agree. It's sad that Mandrake chose to GPL their most valuable value-added parts, but that's a decision they're going to have to live with and learn from.
At the end of the day ANY maturing market, whether it's automobile mafufacturers or Linux distributors is going to consolidate to a very few survivors after the original land grab rush, and maybe Madndrake will not survive due to the choices they have made. It's like that despair poster: "Maybe the only purpose of your life is to be a warning to others"!.
If you use Mandrake and bought it from them or retail, then you owe them nothing. However if you use it and downloaded it or bought if from cheapbytes then Mandrake got nothing from you, and you might consider making a donation.
The botom line though is that's the business model Mandrake have chosen, and if it doesn't work then it's up to them to change it.
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Correct. You need a chunk of weapons grade plutonium about the size of a base ball to make a fission device, and while not so much, still a reasonable quantity to go critical. I remember seeing the "Fat Man & Little Boy" documentatry about the Manhatten project and how they had one criticality experiment go wrong and kill one of the scientists. They said that basically once you see the blue flash it's too late - you've already had sufficient radiation exposure to kill you.
So the neighbors saw this kid's shed glowing? Hmmm.... good urban legend.
You hardly need to be a genius to make nitro-glycerine. I won't go into the details in case some fool decides to try, but suffice it to say that most soup recipes are more complicated. I'm surprised if he really did make it without having an accident - it's extremely unstable. a friend of my family blew one of his hands off and severly disfigured his face.
Because it's more strategic to them to attempt to subvert the web to IE standards (under the agreement AOL would use IE vs their own Netscape), than to try to make a few bucks off MSN which isn't very popular anyway.
Given that it's Time Warner-AOL who have stopped the talks, not Microsoft, it seems apparent that everyone knows who has the upper hand. Time Warner is obviously a formidable competitor even for Microsoft, and with ICQ/AIM they already own instant messaging and have a HUGE base of AOL users whose switch from IE to Netscape would be a major defeat for Microsoft who are continuing to struggle to have any kind of success in the internet arena other than IE's popularity.
I'm guessing Microsoft are going to back down.
Exactly. Maybe non-Matrox cards don't work this way, but ctrl +/- on a Matrox card just gives you a different resolution virtual screen of the same size that you can pan around with the cursor keys. It's cool and useful, but not the same thing as changing to a full screen desktop at a different resolution.
Tito broke what rules? The Russian's are a partner in the SS, paying their own way, and it's up to them if they want to send scientists, tourists or monkeys. Kudos to the Russians for gaining some great PR, and helping fund their own program. Too bad that at $600M per launch for the Shuttle, that NASA were *UNABLE* to make money on taking Tito - for them it would have been a huge loss. NASA should concentrate on doing things efficiently and not wasting our money before they think they have any credibility in critisizing the way the Russians choose to do things.
NASA are lying. Before the launch they were totally hostile to Tito going up, and now they pretend they were bending over backwards to support him (and pissing away all our tax dollars in the process). Way to go, NASA - if you wanted good PR and think the public is happy with you wasting their money, then you should have pocketed the $20M and had Tito as YOUR guest, not the Russian's.
The Russian's are already doing this. Aside from Tito, they did a Pizza Hut ad on the ISS that is about to air.
:-)
Considering the Phallic shape of a rocker, I'd like to see a 40' high Trojan ad on the outside
The head of NASA called you personally to discuss this, did he? Tell me, do the American's always spend their time watching the Russian crew, or do they ever actually do any work up there?
If the NASA guys needed to have meals served to them by Tito, it sounds as if they were the ones being baby-sitted. You'd have thought that with the millions of tax dollars that go into training these guys that they would have learned where the pantry is.
Rather than wondering if Mars can adequately support freakish glowing jelly plants, why not just plant a whole diverisy of different plant types and see what (if anything) CAN survive and adapt?
Why are the folks at NASA so interested in whether Mars can support glowing jelly plants? Do they know something that we don't?!
Linus Torvalds called Windows a "festering crock of shit"
Bill Gates called Alan Cox a "long haired communist"
and,
Richard Stallman called Steve Ballmer a "capitalist toadie".
More news tomorrow.
The Shuttle is a complete failure if you measure that by it's ability to meet it's objectives. When it was designed, it was expected to cost $50M per launch, not the current $500M+. The cheapest way to put stuff in space is still big fireworks.
I don't believe the source even has to accompany the binaries - just that you have to make it available upon request at minimal media cost to anyone who buys your product.
It seemed the original poster may have actually been talking about the product itself, not the source, being available for download, and of course there's no such requirement. Just because your source is GPL'd doesn't mean you have to give your product away!
True - I didn't think of that, although I guess you could combine a sourceforge page with another free one as backup/whatever.
There are plenty of free sites that offer lots of storage - do you just want to avoid the ads, or are there other reasons you're not using one of the free sites?
NASA are going to be putting up a Mars comms satellite soon (next few years) that will establish a permanent 1Mbps link back to earth.
What'd be cooler than IMAX quality film would be a robot that via telepresence gave you the experience of actually being ON mars, wandering about and looking at stuff! I've read about people who've tried telepresence robots in the lab, and have said that it's extremely freaky to look at yourself this way - easy to imagine!
AFAIK the russians also did the first unmanned retrieval of rocks from the moon (did NASA ever even try this?).
I just read that the Russians also nowadays land their command caspsules on earth with retro rocket braking (this is how Tito came home), not in the ocean as the US always did. A lot more cost effective than the Shuttle which costs 10x more per launch than it was originally intended to.
interesting - thanks
What exactly do you mean by "commercial strength"?
What's lacking in Konqueror or Opera that you don't consider them "commercial strength"?
Personally I still use Netscape 4.73 on Linux, and have never seen reason to switch. I've tried Opera and Konqueror just out of curiosity, and have tried Netscape 6.0 on Windows, not to mention Mozilla ? very briefly on Mandrake 8.0, but at then end of the day Netscape 4.73 is working fine for me, and I see no reason to switch.
On the odd occasion I use Windows I use Netscape 4.73 there too (plus I use it on Solaris at work, for which IE is also available), even though enough people say IE is better that I'm willing to believe them. Netscape does everything I want, so I'm sticking with it!
I didn't mean to imply that I think anyone's under any moral obligation - this isn't shareware, it's freeware. I just pointed out that if you've downloaded or bought from cheapbytes then you havn't helped Mandrake, and that would IMO be when it might be appropriate to donate (if you want to support them).
True. There was an report on one of the busines programs on TV the other day about the latest version of WordPerfect which acknowledged that features or quality are now immaterial to it's success, since Microsoft is now so entrenched. People buy Windows, Word etc because they are the standard - not because they are the best. Of course these things never last - the same was true of IBM at one stage.
Perhaps, but I'm not aware of Mandrake contributing to open source projects in the way that other such as RedHat or SuSE do. Stuff like harddrake may be GPL'd but given that most people use distributions and every distribution has their own equivalent tools, this doesn't benefit anyone other than Mandrake.
More to the point, the whole of GNU and Linux, and the wealth of GPL'd applicatipons, existed nefore companies like RedHat and Mandrake came into being to try to make money off it. If anything, they're the ones that owe the free software developers - not vice versa.
If these companies do feed back GPL'd software into the community that that's cool that they honoring the spirit of things and giving something back for what they have got from it (who's richer, Bob Young, Richard Stallman or Linus?), but I certainly don't feel that they're net givers! Perhaps the coolest move was RedHat giving stock options to developers - that was a real give back.
The main thing that distinguishes the different distros other than their philosophies on what versions to release are their vlaue added components which comes down to installation and configuration. What's sad is that Mandrake chose to GPL those components and are therefore stuck with that choice even if that turns out not to have been a viable business model. They've now put themselves in a position where thay cannot stop free iso downloads even if they'd like to, and are therefore somewhat dependent on people like you who download and then donate.
I know Mandrake have a large market share, but I'd be curious how many of those are paying customers, and how many are downloaders or cheapbytes customers.
IMO SuSE is definitely going to be one of the survivors - they are doing very well (diminant in Europe, I believe), and have a philosophy that distinguishes them from RedHat and Mandrake. I see more and more people who've been former RedHat/Mandrake users who subsequently move to SuSE.
Whether Debian and Slackware can both continue, I'm not sure. Maybe they'll survive (or at least one of them) as more niche orientated for server use, since for desktop use they're IMO going to have a hard time competeing with the wealth of packages available in the RPM format (unless of course they switch).
As a former RedHat and current but dissatisfied Mandrake user, I'm looking at the next release of Libranet (debian based) or Slackware as my next upgrade. It seems Slackware current is about to go Beta, and is surprisingly up-to-date in terms of having all the latest X, KDE, GNOME etc releases, along with a nice solid 2.95.3 gcc.
I agree there's no reason to be offended by mandrake asking for donations, OTOH there's no reason to feel morally obligated either.
The museum example was entirely bogus because museums are paid for by our money in the first place, and secondly they're non-profit. If Mandrake get out of their financial slump then do you ever expect them to turn around and share their profits with their customers? It'd be cool, but I doubt it.
Probably the biggest value Mandrake add to their distribution is their excellent installer and harddrake partition utility. I think what we're seeing here is a darwinian evolution of the Linux distribution business model. SuSE chose to make their value added components non-GPL so that they could control distribution and actually get paid for their work, which obviously makes sense (well, duh!), and their customers obviously agree. It's sad that Mandrake chose to GPL their most valuable value-added parts, but that's a decision they're going to have to live with and learn from.
At the end of the day ANY maturing market, whether it's automobile mafufacturers or Linux distributors is going to consolidate to a very few survivors after the original land grab rush, and maybe Madndrake will not survive due to the choices they have made. It's like that despair poster: "Maybe the only purpose of your life is to be a warning to others"!.
If you use Mandrake and bought it from them or retail, then you owe them nothing. However if you use it and downloaded it or bought if from cheapbytes then Mandrake got nothing from you, and you might consider making a donation.
The botom line though is that's the business model Mandrake have chosen, and if it doesn't work then it's up to them to change it.