Well, I bought some RHAT stock after it's huge drop on the theory that a brand name has value in the market and if people want support for Linux, they'll pay for a brand name. I figured it had some prospects for growth in the post-bubble era.
I'm not too happy about the prospect of it being absorbed and diluted into the AOL/TW borg. I don't see how that enormous corporation can grow to be a significant amount larger than its current size. If this happens, I guess I'll wait until the purchase at a premium price, then cash out.
Don't be a dumbass. Fair use is a privilege, not a right. You, and everyone else (this includes corporations) have the right to copy protect content however you please.
You're right. Fair use does not guarantee that it should be easy to record a copy for personal use.
However, broadcasting is a pivilege, not a right. Getting an easement on everybody's property for cable is a privilege, not a right. Parking a satellite in a geosynchronous slot is a privilege, not a right.
I think that it's only fair that in return for using their government granted monopolies on these publicly owned channels for their content distribution, broadcasters, satellite and cable companies should not be allowed to thwart reasonable fair use by their customers.
If they don't want to allow fair use, that's fine. They would just have to distribute their content in an entirely private distribution channel, like delivering DVDs via UPS.
With the current corporate-controlled political climate, however, I doubt that my argument will get very far.
All the questions and answers here are referring to "CDs". I thought that Philips, who owns the trademark on the CD logo, says that these shiny plastic disks being peddled by these record companies are not in fact "CDs" because they do not conform to the standards of a genuine CD.
Perhaps they need to update their FAQ and all marketing material to reflect this. This FAQ is very confusing to the consumer because it gives the impression that they are selling actual CDs and that "CDs" have some kind of problem.
current directive in Redmond is for all product groups to sweep the entire code base for security-related bugs.
Problem is, that's not going to do a lot of good if these people don't have the experience to spot security bugs in the first place. The potential universe of exploits is huge, and it includes interactions between components written by different groups. I doubt that they even have the talent base to do this job effectively.
It's possible to create an OS that's secure out of the box; OpenBSD is an example. Now Microsoft wants to get to the same place, but with orders of magnitude more code, a small fraction of the time, and next to zero corporate security culture. This is beyond "trying to have a baby in one month". This is more like putting 5900 women in a room and trying to get a baby in one hour.
Let's see... 4 guys have Honda Accords that get ~25 MPG. They each drive 10,000 miles/year, using 1600 gallons of gas.
One guy decides he just has to have one of these things. Now he's using 1052 gallons of gas/year. To keep the total amount of gas used constant (and in the grand scheme of things, there is a fixed amount of gas in the world), the other three guys would only get 182 gallons each. They would each have to find a car that gets 54 MPG and suffer the safety and performance penalties.
Since it costs so much more to make a car that gets that kind of mileage, the government will develop a program to subsidize the three guys' new cars at taxpayer expense.
Net result: one guy gets a self esteem boost every time he runs down the block to pick up a package of diapers. Three guys have to drive pokey little shitboxes to compensate. The taxpayers foot the bill.
i'm wondering what will happen with 10 Ghz processor because every cycle, lights can only travel about 3 cm...?
The problem is actually worse than you indicate. Electrical signals on a chip propagate much slower than the speed of light due to the impedance properties of the signal traces.
This problem explains some of the "features" of the P4 that people complain about. The architecture reserves entire pipeline stages for "signal drive"; these stages are just to let signals propagate accross the chip. IIRC, the drive stages are wasted on today's P4's, but once the clock speed reaches higher GHz, they will be very necessary.
Concepts such as "hyperthreading" may become more popular as well. This allows multiple alternate CPU states sharing the same silicon. If they alternate every CPU clock, for example, one hyperthread can be calculating while the other one is propagating its last clock's results across the chip.
Are you supposed to file a new copy with the government every time you make a significant change? With a lot of software, that's several times a day. And I don't want to have to turn MY code over to the government.
Why not? They're granting you total monopoly power over your code that you would not have without their help. They're willing to dispatch armed agents to enforce your monopoly. Sounds fair to me.
Anyway, nobody's forcing you to copyright your code.
It also defies the concept of natural copyright. I don't have to do anything to 'get' my copyright, I own it naturally.
Give me a break. I can't think of any legal construction less "natural" than copyright. Unlike fundamental principals that have endured through thousands of years of civilization, copyright was a compromise developed a couple centuries ago in response to a particular technological development (the printing press). There is no reason to think that this concept in unmodified form would be most appropriate way to handle different technologies like software.
OTOH, maybe Microsoft is just parasitically sucking capital out of the US economy and adding it to the $36Billion hoard of cash buried in its back yard. It's not like they have that many employees on the payroll to cut checks for; nor are they sending out dividends.
Even if both parties agree to a contract, if the contract is grossly unfair it can (and will) be struck down by the courts.
This sure makes me feel better. I signed a contract a while back with a very shady character (he was weird... one of his feet looked like a hoof or something!).
Anyway, the deal was I would get tons of $cash, universal adulation and as many beautiful women as I care to know. He even threw in a free fiddle made of gold as a bonus. In return I would surrender my soul for eternal damnation (or something like that; I just skimmed the fine print).
Life's been great lately, but I've been beginning to worry about my end of this deal. I'm really glad that it won't actually hold up in court. Man, it looks like that guy was a sucker!
Per KW/h, nuclear power is cheaper than many other generation facilities.
Would it still be economically competetive if nuclear power plants did not have their special exemption from liability claims? If they had to buy full liability insurance on the private market, I doubt it.
Large anything in the UI sucks because it takes space away from the actual information that I'm trying to work on. I always shrink all buttons, window frames, etc. to the smallest possible size. I enlarge all fonts to be nice and readable (because the text contains the information I'm trying to work on). I assign keyboard shortcuts to the most frequently clicked things, so a few milliseconds of mouse time on obscure buttons is irrelevant.
Sure, maybe you can ship the OS with huge child-like controls for newbies, but it is essential that grown-ups be able to shrink them down to an unobtrusive size.
Remember that AA is a deliberate blurring of the font outlines in order to create the illusion of smoother curves/gradients.
The goal is to filter out false detail that is generated by sampling noise. You don't want to see the false detail. All digital audio equipment does the exact same thing and nobody's complaining (except pure analog enthusiasts).
I run a 17" monitor at 1280x1024
Many 17" monitors are too blurry to sharply draw individual pixels at 1280x1024. Try a high-end 21" monitor or an LCD and report back.
In KDE with AA turned on, everything becomes blurry.
KDE is not a shining example of AA. Regardless of what your opinion of MSFT may be, try looking at Win2K TrueType fonts on a really good monitor. That is the bar Gnome should be aiming for.
If we develop the technology to push asteroids around, then there is some chance that it would be used avoid the highly unlikely case of a natural impact in the foreseeable future.
However, I think that it's more likely that it would be used as a doomsday weapon by some lunatic group or country by pushing an asteroid towards the earth. Given mankind's track record at handling powerful new technologies over the last few thousand years, I'd rather go with the natural odds.
I'm not so sure if the moon is the ideal low-noise environment. I seem to recall reading somewhere that just last year they discovered some kind of huge black slab buried on the moon. It was supposedly making very powerful transmissions towards Jupiter or something. That sounds like a big source of potential interference.
Tidal forces cause drag which acts against the angular momentum of the moon's rotation until it locks into sync with it's orbital period. IIRC, the same effect is currently slowing the earth's rotation (and increasing the size of the moon's orbit in the process). In the far future, the earth's day might be a month long, but I'm not sure since the sun has a nontrivial tidal influence on the earth as well.
I'm assuming you're worried about satellites already in orbit. If their software can be modified by upload, how about at least adding a routine to check a digital signature appended to each command packet. That could help prevent some script kiddie with a hacked DSS dish from rooting your spacecraft.
As for new satellites under design, just encrypt the channel, stupid! Its not like its rocket science or anything.
The UK government wouldn't be in this pickle if they hadn't made a monumental mistake over 160 years ago. If they had seen fit to fully fund Charles Babbage's startup concepts, the British Crown would be the dominant player in information technology today.
As it stands, they didn't. Babbage went to his grave as a failure despite his pleas for funding, and now the British Government playing second fiddle to some skinny rich geek in Seattle.
Some say that government ownership would have stifled innovation. Maybe there would have been little progress beyond Babbage's designs. Whiners would argue that computers would be saddled with compatibility constraints like the government regulated telephone system (which to this day remains compatible with 19th century handsets).
But so what? What would any true geek prefer to have: (A) a gleaming, multi-ton steam powered machine sporting thousands of shiny steel gears, or (B) a stupid beige box cowering under their desk? The answer is obviously A.
The economics of scale has been directed at the wrong target. Any nerd can easily afford lots of the ugly plastic boxes we call computers, but today even a version 1 Difference Engine would be beyond most people's means. It didn't have to turn out like this. It's a shame, because just like a fine car, chix dig that kind of hardware. (Ada Lovelace, for example. Not bad.) Chix cannot relate to tiny silicon gadgets. I had to expend a lot of extra effort courting my wife using my wits and personality because my computers meant nothing to her.
I place the blame for the current sorry state of affairs in computing technology squarely on the British government's shortsightedness. Right now, they are just trying to deflect attention from the fact that they dropped the ball.
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I'm not too happy about the prospect of it being absorbed and diluted into the AOL/TW borg. I don't see how that enormous corporation can grow to be a significant amount larger than its current size. If this happens, I guess I'll wait until the purchase at a premium price, then cash out.
Great news! You've got a version of IE that runs on Linux, so I can "upgrade". What's the URL?
You're right. Fair use does not guarantee that it should be easy to record a copy for personal use.
However, broadcasting is a pivilege, not a right. Getting an easement on everybody's property for cable is a privilege, not a right. Parking a satellite in a geosynchronous slot is a privilege, not a right.
I think that it's only fair that in return for using their government granted monopolies on these publicly owned channels for their content distribution, broadcasters, satellite and cable companies should not be allowed to thwart reasonable fair use by their customers.
If they don't want to allow fair use, that's fine. They would just have to distribute their content in an entirely private distribution channel, like delivering DVDs via UPS.
With the current corporate-controlled political climate, however, I doubt that my argument will get very far.
Perhaps they need to update their FAQ and all marketing material to reflect this. This FAQ is very confusing to the consumer because it gives the impression that they are selling actual CDs and that "CDs" have some kind of problem.
Problem is, that's not going to do a lot of good if these people don't have the experience to spot security bugs in the first place. The potential universe of exploits is huge, and it includes interactions between components written by different groups. I doubt that they even have the talent base to do this job effectively.
It's possible to create an OS that's secure out of the box; OpenBSD is an example. Now Microsoft wants to get to the same place, but with orders of magnitude more code, a small fraction of the time, and next to zero corporate security culture. This is beyond "trying to have a baby in one month". This is more like putting 5900 women in a room and trying to get a baby in one hour.
Now you're perpetuating the stereotype that everyone who enjoys whiskey is a drunkard.
One guy decides he just has to have one of these things. Now he's using 1052 gallons of gas/year. To keep the total amount of gas used constant (and in the grand scheme of things, there is a fixed amount of gas in the world), the other three guys would only get 182 gallons each. They would each have to find a car that gets 54 MPG and suffer the safety and performance penalties.
Since it costs so much more to make a car that gets that kind of mileage, the government will develop a program to subsidize the three guys' new cars at taxpayer expense.
Net result: one guy gets a self esteem boost every time he runs down the block to pick up a package of diapers. Three guys have to drive pokey little shitboxes to compensate. The taxpayers foot the bill.
The problem is actually worse than you indicate. Electrical signals on a chip propagate much slower than the speed of light due to the impedance properties of the signal traces.
This problem explains some of the "features" of the P4 that people complain about. The architecture reserves entire pipeline stages for "signal drive"; these stages are just to let signals propagate accross the chip. IIRC, the drive stages are wasted on today's P4's, but once the clock speed reaches higher GHz, they will be very necessary.
Concepts such as "hyperthreading" may become more popular as well. This allows multiple alternate CPU states sharing the same silicon. If they alternate every CPU clock, for example, one hyperthread can be calculating while the other one is propagating its last clock's results across the chip.
Why not? They're granting you total monopoly power over your code that you would not have without their help. They're willing to dispatch armed agents to enforce your monopoly. Sounds fair to me.
Anyway, nobody's forcing you to copyright your code.
It also defies the concept of natural copyright. I don't have to do anything to 'get' my copyright, I own it naturally.
Give me a break. I can't think of any legal construction less "natural" than copyright. Unlike fundamental principals that have endured through thousands of years of civilization, copyright was a compromise developed a couple centuries ago in response to a particular technological development (the printing press). There is no reason to think that this concept in unmodified form would be most appropriate way to handle different technologies like software.
OTOH, maybe Microsoft is just parasitically sucking capital out of the US economy and adding it to the $36Billion hoard of cash buried in its back yard. It's not like they have that many employees on the payroll to cut checks for; nor are they sending out dividends.
This sure makes me feel better. I signed a contract a while back with a very shady character (he was weird ... one of his feet looked like a hoof or something!).
Anyway, the deal was I would get tons of $cash, universal adulation and as many beautiful women as I care to know. He even threw in a free fiddle made of gold as a bonus. In return I would surrender my soul for eternal damnation (or something like that; I just skimmed the fine print).
Life's been great lately, but I've been beginning to worry about my end of this deal. I'm really glad that it won't actually hold up in court. Man, it looks like that guy was a sucker!
All OSes are evolving towards the same ultimate endpoint: An embedded control system for TVs.
Somehow, I am disappointed. I had thought that computers had more potential than that.
Would it still be economically competetive if nuclear power plants did not have their special exemption from liability claims? If they had to buy full liability insurance on the private market, I doubt it.
Sure, maybe you can ship the OS with huge child-like controls for newbies, but it is essential that grown-ups be able to shrink them down to an unobtrusive size.
# cat > /etc/rc.conf
That way, I know I won't be hosed by any text editor.
The goal is to filter out false detail that is generated by sampling noise. You don't want to see the false detail. All digital audio equipment does the exact same thing and nobody's complaining (except pure analog enthusiasts).
I run a 17" monitor at 1280x1024
Many 17" monitors are too blurry to sharply draw individual pixels at 1280x1024. Try a high-end 21" monitor or an LCD and report back.
In KDE with AA turned on, everything becomes blurry.
KDE is not a shining example of AA. Regardless of what your opinion of MSFT may be, try looking at Win2K TrueType fonts on a really good monitor. That is the bar Gnome should be aiming for.
Hogwash. Maybe your monitor is just so fuzzy that you can't tell the difference.
However, I think that it's more likely that it would be used as a doomsday weapon by some lunatic group or country by pushing an asteroid towards the earth. Given mankind's track record at handling powerful new technologies over the last few thousand years, I'd rather go with the natural odds.
I'm not so sure if the moon is the ideal low-noise environment. I seem to recall reading somewhere that just last year they discovered some kind of huge black slab buried on the moon. It was supposedly making very powerful transmissions towards Jupiter or something. That sounds like a big source of potential interference.
Tidal forces cause drag which acts against the angular momentum of the moon's rotation until it locks into sync with it's orbital period. IIRC, the same effect is currently slowing the earth's rotation (and increasing the size of the moon's orbit in the process). In the far future, the earth's day might be a month long, but I'm not sure since the sun has a nontrivial tidal influence on the earth as well.
Now, this is a significant innovation. I was sitting awake in bed all night worrying about a man-in-the-middle greeting card attack:
-
Alice chooses a Hallmark condolence card, and emails it to Bob on an unsecure link.
- Mallory intercepts the condolence card message and substitutes a novelty insult card. Mallory forwards the message to Bob.
- Bob receives the card, and is tricked into believing that Alice is an insensitive bitch.
- Alice denies sending the card, but Bob doesn't believe her. Their friendship is never quite the same after this.
With a secure greeting card, this could never happen!As for new satellites under design, just encrypt the channel, stupid! Its not like its rocket science or anything.
As it stands, they didn't. Babbage went to his grave as a failure despite his pleas for funding, and now the British Government playing second fiddle to some skinny rich geek in Seattle.
Some say that government ownership would have stifled innovation. Maybe there would have been little progress beyond Babbage's designs. Whiners would argue that computers would be saddled with compatibility constraints like the government regulated telephone system (which to this day remains compatible with 19th century handsets).
But so what? What would any true geek prefer to have: (A) a gleaming, multi-ton steam powered machine sporting thousands of shiny steel gears, or (B) a stupid beige box cowering under their desk? The answer is obviously A.
The economics of scale has been directed at the wrong target. Any nerd can easily afford lots of the ugly plastic boxes we call computers, but today even a version 1 Difference Engine would be beyond most people's means. It didn't have to turn out like this. It's a shame, because just like a fine car, chix dig that kind of hardware. (Ada Lovelace, for example. Not bad.) Chix cannot relate to tiny silicon gadgets. I had to expend a lot of extra effort courting my wife using my wits and personality because my computers meant nothing to her.
I place the blame for the current sorry state of affairs in computing technology squarely on the British government's shortsightedness. Right now, they are just trying to deflect attention from the fact that they dropped the ball.