The beam power might be 9 GW, but the energy density would be about the same as a cell phone gives out. The idea is that you create a big aerial called a rectenna that covers whole square kilometers and collect the dilute energy.
I have to admin a groupware server and a Spamassassin milter that I've placed in front of it. I throw out anything that scores more than 15 points and tag anything that scores over five. Autowhitelisting and the built-in Bayes filter are enabled. I've even dropped in a selection of third party rules.
This all works pretty well but a trickle of spam still gets through to the end users. I've set up conferences on the groupware box where users can drag missed spam and mistagged ham to for training. Here is the kicker. I have a population of 130 or so of which maybe 7 actually cooperate in feeding me mail to train the Bayes filter (or tweak the others). For everyone else, whatever spam gets through is just something that happens to them (thank goodness for clamav which the milter also runs). Entreaties to feed me training material go unheeded.
I'm interested in further refining this setup with DSPAM or CRM114. It seems to me that neither of those will work without active cooperation from the users for training material. How do you get around that? For all of SA's flaws, it can work even for apathetic users.
And yes this is necessary apathy or no. The powers that be don't like public school teachers getting penis enlargement ads.
I don't see how. You would have to expend about as much energy to reach a height that corresponds with the desired end velocity. Then you have the problem of turning the downward velocity into the required lateral velocity. You have no atmosphere worth talking about at that height so you would have to use a rocket to get the lateral component required. By the time all is said and done, you were better off getting the required speed from launch.
Stallman's take on the whole thing can be found here. As usual it is as much helpful as it is inflammatory. Hell, the letters RMS is all it takes to completely shutdown half the minds and all productive discussion here. I think you're better off bringing up our favorite group of 40's Teutonic goose-steppers.
Well, the GNU/Linux thing gets a revisit. Eben Moglen has been a much classier act. I think he does much better at being a spokesman for the FSF. The message is essentially the same but the impression you get is far more tactful and thoughtful and dare I say clean-cut..professional even. The FSF has a link page to Moglen and Kuhn's public answers to SCO here.
I remember a few months back you and another Australian group were trying to get SCO to substantiate their accusations or shut up. I haven't heard anything about that in a while. Is there anything new to tell?
I have little doubt he could build an OS. He would have to spend a lot of time getting good at things you don't encounter in game progamming. When all is said and done he could make at the very least a competent kernel or system library developer. Whether or not he would be exceptional at it is something we'll probably never know.
I use Linux and have zero problem with someone doing well and making money. What I and many of have a problem with is the way money becomes power and then that power is outrageously abused. As I posted earlier today, MS is not only competing on quality of product and service. They are also competing with smear campaigns and lawyers. Remember that Brazilian minister who is getting sued for criticism of MS' marketing tactics? Yes, they disavow it now but MS fund AdTI and AdTI wrote a very "unhelpful distraction". They called it that once it become clear the mud was going to stick to them.
We are by no means a united group of "commie hippies" out to undermine capitalism. Some of us even own businesses and would take exception to being collectivized. All most of us are trying to say is that making money is not an excuse to throw ethics and morals out the window. There is no problem with having a lot if money if you a) earned it honestly and b) don't use it to buy fake journalists and politicians.
Oh and remember this: "DOS ain't done until 123 won't run." This isn't jealously at the success of another. We are expressing moral outrage at behaivor that should not be acceptable to anybody. Even megacapitalists.
Should the IE team break the experience of 90+% of web users by "specifically" re-implementing it to w3 specifications, just to save time and effort for a MUCH smaller number of developers who are have been in the game long enough to know that IE is proprietary shit, and won't stand for it?
Maybe they should because they are a convicted monopoly who have gone outrageously out of their way to make life difficult for that other ten percent. This isn't incidental. They use every chance they get to break things for anybody who has the effrontery to not use their stuff. Maybe they should fix things because that behaivor hasn't gone unnoticed and it won't stay 10% unless they quit acting like a greedy little kid who shouts "MINE! ALL MINE!" all the time.
While they're at it, maybe they can try competing with quality product and services rather than with lawyers, proxy kamikazi attack firms, and paid hatchet men.
Not only will MS copy FOSS innovations, they'll insinuate that they invented them. Expect MS to talk about "innovation" a lot when they put the new IE out.
ISA is also more electronics hobbyist friendly. You used to be able to buy ISA prototyping boards at Radio Shack. Its much easier to design something for 8Mhz than it is 33Mhz. It isn't important in the larger sense I'll grant but I can see that PCs are getting much more difficult for the average hobbiest to connect his custom gadgets to.
Yet. If Linux gets enough market share, some spyware, virusses and other crap WILL come to Linux. Never EVER underestimate the stupidity of the average computer user.
I don't entirely buy it. By that logic, Apache should be exploited far more often than IIS. Is has more than twice the marketshare so it should be targeted more. But it isn't. IIS accounts for more exploits in ABSOLUTE numbers than Apache. This is directly due to Apache's design and the Apache Project's diligence in patching holes.
Most of this crap is autoinstalled through browser holes. Linux browsers don't have known holes that stay unpatched for months and months. As Linux becomes more mainstream on the desktop, I have little doubt someone will come up with something intelligent for autoupdating as well. Linux simply isn't as hospitable by design to malware. Even with more Linux in the hands of clueless users, it will be more work to exploit with malware.
Now if we can just get Lindows to force the creation of user accounts on install. Its optional now and that isn't good enough. OSX style software installation is the only other thing end user Linux really needs in this regard. OS X is a decent target for this sort of thing and they don't suffer from it either. That is as much due to OS X design as it it's statistical significance.
That may be heart of the Hatch==Mormon sentiment. There is no doubt that Utah is Mormon Country. I think the way a lot of non-Mormons feel is that since Hatch is Utah's man and most Utahians are Mormon then Mormons by and large approve of the things Hatch does. Not only does Hatch pull this crap year in and year out, he gets reelected too.
I'll admit that it isn't entirely fair but he is seen as THE secular face of Mormonism.
How would this be for a anti-Hatch ad: (voiceover) "Orrin Hatch wants to take consumer electronics back to the turn of the century....the 19th century.....:" Be sure to work in lots of quotes about remotely destroying PCs and throwing people in jail for just talking about copying.
Have some Hatch lookalike going into people's houses and vandalizing their VCRs with a railroad spike and a hammer with nice juicy closeups of Record buttons being hammered off. In the background, you see an all-american family being hauled off by jackbooted thugs...including Little Timmy.
Another good video would be Mom sitting at the 'puter pecking out some email while the Hatchalike is outside the house pushing down the handle on an old fashioned dynamite detonator. The computer blows up and throws Mom against the wall.
The guy is a total loon and luddite. Perhaps it's time to clue the good people of Utah in to that.
On a side note, I couldn't believe my eyes the other day when I saw a brand new X-Box on sale for $99.
Since the effort began, there has been a lot of derision about Linux (and BSDs?) on the XBox. These things are getting cheaper and the next generation XBox is going to make these things show up in thrifts and garage sales. It will still be powerful enough for the price to be a nice little dedicated machine.
I wouldn't even pay $99 for XBox but I might give a thrift $15 for one. That would be a nice little MAME machine (with nice controllers!) or media player for a very small investment of money and time. It wouldn't do badly as a household server especially if the HD were upgraded.
Techies also hold the functionality of their tools very dear. Something thats simple, elegant, and works every time will move damn near all of us to tears*. Now we have a group of ham fisted jack booted bastards who want to fuck up our tools for a few extra pennies. The really sad thing is that whatever elegance our tools have will be completely buried under layers of DRM cruft and it still won't work. People will still find ways to copy their precious "content".
"They" will succeed in driving this industry (which BTW is way more money than the "content" industry) back into the garage and underground. 10 years from now we'll be trying to figure out how to make home clean rooms and chip fabs. There'll be little dishes and laser transmitters all over the place. We'll have to rebuild the network and the BBSes from the ground up too. And when they can't figure out how to make their crufted up DRM shit function anymore because they've beaten sharp knives into useless blugeons who are they going to turn to? I'll have a nice gesture waiting for them.
* I don't agree with the author's view of Unix but this is otherwise dead on.
The UNIX api was never controlled by one company. Even AT&T never had the level of control that MS does on WIN32 and.NET. MS can ALWAYS make their APIs a fast moving target to stymie the Wines, ReactOSes, and Monos of the world. That said, Wine does seem to be useful if you want to target a particular Windows app and run it elsewhere. It msy also have value if you need to make some Windows API source code cross platform.
Try running Windows XP on a PII of any clock speed. I dare you.
Our school district has a number of 400Mhz PIIs that we added 256MB sticks of SDRAM to so that we could transistion them to XP from 98SE. For light use of Office and web surfing they work just fine. You wouldn't want to edit video on these machines but they are perfectly usable in most HS and MS classrooms.
There seem to be two schools of thought regarding acceptance and compliance with the GPL.
One school says that public statements rejecting the GPL mean that one doesn't accept it in the legal sense. Making such a statement and then distributing GPL product is automatically violating the GPL. Fyodor seems to belong to this camp.
The opinion on the matter is actions are the only thing that matter. One could publically diss the GPL as long as the actual obligations regarding the providing of the source and license are respected. This seems to be the Samba Team's position.
I'll also point out that SCO has done more than publically disparage the GPL. They have asserted that the GPL is null and void several times in a court of law. That is much stronger mojo than mere press conference lip flapping. Fyodor may have a point.
They may also have imposed conditions the GPL doesn't permit on code distributed from their FTP site. This screws them under either theory of GPL acceptance. IBM for one is hanging them for this in their counterclaims.
UnixWare (and OpenServer) licensing represents >$40M of revenue. You think anyone who buys it is just going to kiss that goodbye? Hell no. Anyone with a clue will buy it and then promptly offer a transition program over a course of 2-5 years for existing customers.
The inability to do just that is what makes these products consistent losers for whoever owns them. Most of these things are being used to run POS systems or other transactional networks. Regardless of whether or not the underlying product is crap, the deployments are all debugged by now. Since these systems are where a business is directly taking in money, they won't mess with them unless they absolutely have to.
The only changes these users want is compatibility with newer hardware that can be replaced and serviced economically.
Any vendor who tries to transistion these users risks their taking the plunge to an already mature product. These users feel in their bones that ANY transition will break things. Force one on them and they may just decide to get the pain over with; preferably with a product that is developmentally stable and has a blue chip behind it.
The truth is that the/. community has maligned this legitimate, above the boards company just for trying to get restitution for code that they really did buy.
www.groklaw.net.
Since the commentary there will be no more to your liking than the commentary here; just read the court filings. SCO has done everything possible to obfuscate and delay the case as long as possible. A legitimate company with a legitimate grievance would have worked with the kernel team to mitigate their harm. As it is, they're trying make the kernel devs their unpaid slaves by leveling accusations without details. In this way, they can claim ownership of what they allegedly own as well as what is undisputably the original work of the kernel developers. NO ONE is obligated to pay SCO for that work.
Paying SCO $699 or whatever it is does not compensate the kernel devs...some of whom are employed by deep pocketed corps who will insist on their full GPL rights. Nope, SCO is going to have to publically identify with specificity what allegedly infringes so it can be removed from the kernel. It does not help that SCO also appears to be trying to appropriate the POSIX standards. The POSIX standards are NOT the property of SCO. SCO has no right to automatically expect tribute from anyone who implements them.
They will also have to do something about their bizarre theories of what is a derivative work before they will get any sympathy whatsoever.
Your "legitimate above board business" is trying to commit a much larger theft then the one they are accusing others of. Being a business does not give you the right to steal no matter how money you think it will make you.
There is money to be made, but everytime a class action suit is brought, people on slashdot bitch about the fact that the laywers get the lions share of the settlement. Damned if you do, damned if you dont.
Maybe it would help to look at class action suits differently then. I look at CA suits as a way to bitchslap a corporation thats getting too big for its breaches. So what if I only get a check for $0.23? (true story) They had to mail out several million just like it. We're depositing the damn thing just so they get hit with the processing charges as well.
CA suits are way to punish corps. You'll never enrich yourself from one of the things.
Slashdot Mirror
The beam power might be 9 GW, but the energy density would be about the same as a cell phone gives out. The idea is that you create a big aerial called a rectenna that covers whole square kilometers and collect the dilute energy.
Begin Mi-agi voice:
Focus Danu-san Focus
I have to admin a groupware server and a Spamassassin milter that I've placed in front of it. I throw out anything that scores more than 15 points and tag anything that scores over five. Autowhitelisting and the built-in Bayes filter are enabled. I've even dropped in a selection of third party rules.
This all works pretty well but a trickle of spam still gets through to the end users. I've set up conferences on the groupware box where users can drag missed spam and mistagged ham to for training. Here is the kicker. I have a population of 130 or so of which maybe 7 actually cooperate in feeding me mail to train the Bayes filter (or tweak the others). For everyone else, whatever spam gets through is just something that happens to them (thank goodness for clamav which the milter also runs). Entreaties to feed me training material go unheeded.
I'm interested in further refining this setup with DSPAM or CRM114. It seems to me that neither of those will work without active cooperation from the users for training material. How do you get around that? For all of SA's flaws, it can work even for apathetic users.
And yes this is necessary apathy or no. The powers that be don't like public school teachers getting penis enlargement ads.
And do you think Yahoo would continue to provide free IM servers and bandwith to users if this were the case?
Yahoo providing the service would be irrelevant. A Jabber server running at each ISP would make IM more distributed.
I really don't see a difference. Without the MS funding, an anti FOSS organization might as well be another Windows zealot posting on Slashdot.
I don't see how. You would have to expend about as much energy to reach a height that corresponds with the desired end velocity. Then you have the problem of turning the downward velocity into the required lateral velocity. You have no atmosphere worth talking about at that height so you would have to use a rocket to get the lateral component required. By the time all is said and done, you were better off getting the required speed from launch.
Stallman's take on the whole thing can be found here. As usual it is as much helpful as it is inflammatory. Hell, the letters RMS is all it takes to completely shutdown half the minds and all productive discussion here. I think you're better off bringing up our favorite group of 40's Teutonic goose-steppers.
Well, the GNU/Linux thing gets a revisit. Eben Moglen has been a much classier act. I think he does much better at being a spokesman for the FSF. The message is essentially the same but the impression you get is far more tactful and thoughtful and dare I say clean-cut..professional even. The FSF has a link page to Moglen and Kuhn's public answers to SCO here.
I remember a few months back you and another Australian group were trying to get SCO to substantiate their accusations or shut up. I haven't heard anything about that in a while. Is there anything new to tell?
I have little doubt he could build an OS. He would have to spend a lot of time getting good at things you don't encounter in game progamming. When all is said and done he could make at the very least a competent kernel or system library developer. Whether or not he would be exceptional at it is something we'll probably never know.
I use Linux and have zero problem with someone doing well and making money. What I and many of have a problem with is the way money becomes power and then that power is outrageously abused. As I posted earlier today, MS is not only competing on quality of product and service. They are also competing with smear campaigns and lawyers. Remember that Brazilian minister who is getting sued for criticism of MS' marketing tactics? Yes, they disavow it now but MS fund AdTI and AdTI wrote a very "unhelpful distraction". They called it that once it become clear the mud was going to stick to them.
We are by no means a united group of "commie hippies" out to undermine capitalism. Some of us even own businesses and would take exception to being collectivized. All most of us are trying to say is that making money is not an excuse to throw ethics and morals out the window. There is no problem with having a lot if money if you a) earned it honestly and b) don't use it to buy fake journalists and politicians.
Oh and remember this: "DOS ain't done until 123 won't run." This isn't jealously at the success of another. We are expressing moral outrage at behaivor that should not be acceptable to anybody. Even megacapitalists.
Should the IE team break the experience of 90+% of web users by "specifically" re-implementing it to w3 specifications, just to save time and effort for a MUCH smaller number of developers who are have been in the game long enough to know that IE is proprietary shit, and won't stand for it?
Maybe they should because they are a convicted monopoly who have gone outrageously out of their way to make life difficult for that other ten percent. This isn't incidental. They use every chance they get to break things for anybody who has the effrontery to not use their stuff. Maybe they should fix things because that behaivor hasn't gone unnoticed and it won't stay 10% unless they quit acting like a greedy little kid who shouts "MINE! ALL MINE!" all the time.
While they're at it, maybe they can try competing with quality product and services rather than with lawyers, proxy kamikazi attack firms, and paid hatchet men.
Correct alpha channel support
Correct cache behaivior with SSL connections
Correct CSS1 support
Correct CSS2 support
Specific enough?
Not only will MS copy FOSS innovations, they'll insinuate that they invented them. Expect MS to talk about "innovation" a lot when they put the new IE out.
ISA is also more electronics hobbyist friendly. You used to be able to buy ISA prototyping boards at Radio Shack. Its much easier to design something for 8Mhz than it is 33Mhz. It isn't important in the larger sense I'll grant but I can see that PCs are getting much more difficult for the average hobbiest to connect his custom gadgets to.
Yet. If Linux gets enough market share, some spyware, virusses and other crap WILL come to Linux. Never EVER underestimate the stupidity of the average computer user.
I don't entirely buy it. By that logic, Apache should be exploited far more often than IIS. Is has more than twice the marketshare so it should be targeted more. But it isn't. IIS accounts for more exploits in ABSOLUTE numbers than Apache. This is directly due to Apache's design and the Apache Project's diligence in patching holes.
Most of this crap is autoinstalled through browser holes. Linux browsers don't have known holes that stay unpatched for months and months. As Linux becomes more mainstream on the desktop, I have little doubt someone will come up with something intelligent for autoupdating as well. Linux simply isn't as hospitable by design to malware. Even with more Linux in the hands of clueless users, it will be more work to exploit with malware.
Now if we can just get Lindows to force the creation of user accounts on install. Its optional now and that isn't good enough. OSX style software installation is the only other thing end user Linux really needs in this regard. OS X is a decent target for this sort of thing and they don't suffer from it either. That is as much due to OS X design as it it's statistical significance.
Some of those registry values are as bad as programs. They direct IE to visit sites that run lots of tasty javascript and ActiveX.
What we need to do is vote him out
That may be heart of the Hatch==Mormon sentiment. There is no doubt that Utah is Mormon Country. I think the way a lot of non-Mormons feel is that since Hatch is Utah's man and most Utahians are Mormon then Mormons by and large approve of the things Hatch does. Not only does Hatch pull this crap year in and year out, he gets reelected too.
I'll admit that it isn't entirely fair but he is seen as THE secular face of Mormonism.
How would this be for a anti-Hatch ad: (voiceover) "Orrin Hatch wants to take consumer electronics back to the turn of the century....the 19th century.....:" Be sure to work in lots of quotes about remotely destroying PCs and throwing people in jail for just talking about copying.
Have some Hatch lookalike going into people's houses and vandalizing their VCRs with a railroad spike and a hammer with nice juicy closeups of Record buttons being hammered off. In the background, you see an all-american family being hauled off by jackbooted thugs...including Little Timmy.
Another good video would be Mom sitting at the 'puter pecking out some email while the Hatchalike is outside the house pushing down the handle on an old fashioned dynamite detonator. The computer blows up and throws Mom against the wall.
The guy is a total loon and luddite. Perhaps it's time to clue the good people of Utah in to that.
On a side note, I couldn't believe my eyes the other day when I saw a brand new X-Box on sale for $99.
Since the effort began, there has been a lot of derision about Linux (and BSDs?) on the XBox. These things are getting cheaper and the next generation XBox is going to make these things show up in thrifts and garage sales. It will still be powerful enough for the price to be a nice little dedicated machine.
I wouldn't even pay $99 for XBox but I might give a thrift $15 for one. That would be a nice little MAME machine (with nice controllers!) or media player for a very small investment of money and time. It wouldn't do badly as a household server especially if the HD were upgraded.
It would help if some high profile Mormons expressed some disgust with this sort of thing.
Techies also hold the functionality of their tools very dear. Something thats simple, elegant, and works every time will move damn near all of us to tears*. Now we have a group of ham fisted jack booted bastards who want to fuck up our tools for a few extra pennies. The really sad thing is that whatever elegance our tools have will be completely buried under layers of DRM cruft and it still won't work. People will still find ways to copy their precious "content".
"They" will succeed in driving this industry (which BTW is way more money than the "content" industry) back into the garage and underground. 10 years from now we'll be trying to figure out how to make home clean rooms and chip fabs. There'll be little dishes and laser transmitters all over the place. We'll have to rebuild the network and the BBSes from the ground up too. And when they can't figure out how to make their crufted up DRM shit function anymore because they've beaten sharp knives into useless blugeons who are they going to turn to? I'll have a nice gesture waiting for them.
* I don't agree with the author's view of Unix but this is otherwise dead on.
The UNIX api was never controlled by one company. Even AT&T never had the level of control that MS does on WIN32 and .NET. MS can ALWAYS make their APIs a fast moving target to stymie the Wines, ReactOSes, and Monos of the world. That said, Wine does seem to be useful if you want to target a particular Windows app and run it elsewhere. It msy also have value if you need to make some Windows API source code cross platform.
Try running Windows XP on a PII of any clock speed. I dare you.
Our school district has a number of 400Mhz PIIs that we added 256MB sticks of SDRAM to so that we could transistion them to XP from 98SE. For light use of Office and web surfing they work just fine. You wouldn't want to edit video on these machines but they are perfectly usable in most HS and MS classrooms.
There seem to be two schools of thought regarding acceptance and compliance with the GPL.
One school says that public statements rejecting the GPL mean that one doesn't accept it in the legal sense. Making such a statement and then distributing GPL product is automatically violating the GPL. Fyodor seems to belong to this camp.
The opinion on the matter is actions are the only thing that matter. One could publically diss the GPL as long as the actual obligations regarding the providing of the source and license are respected. This seems to be the Samba Team's position.
I'll also point out that SCO has done more than publically disparage the GPL. They have asserted that the GPL is null and void several times in a court of law. That is much stronger mojo than mere press conference lip flapping. Fyodor may have a point.
They may also have imposed conditions the GPL doesn't permit on code distributed from their FTP site. This screws them under either theory of GPL acceptance. IBM for one is hanging them for this in their counterclaims.
Is anybody here an AL?
UnixWare (and OpenServer) licensing represents >$40M of revenue. You think anyone who buys it is just going to kiss that goodbye? Hell no. Anyone with a clue will buy it and then promptly offer a transition program over a course of 2-5 years for existing customers.
The inability to do just that is what makes these products consistent losers for whoever owns them. Most of these things are being used to run POS systems or other transactional networks. Regardless of whether or not the underlying product is crap, the deployments are all debugged by now. Since these systems are where a business is directly taking in money, they won't mess with them unless they absolutely have to.
The only changes these users want is compatibility with newer hardware that can be replaced and serviced economically.
Any vendor who tries to transistion these users risks their taking the plunge to an already mature product. These users feel in their bones that ANY transition will break things. Force one on them and they may just decide to get the pain over with; preferably with a product that is developmentally stable and has a blue chip behind it.
The truth is that the /. community has maligned this legitimate, above the boards company just for trying to get restitution for code that they really did buy.
www.groklaw.net.
Since the commentary there will be no more to your liking than the commentary here; just read the court filings. SCO has done everything possible to obfuscate and delay the case as long as possible. A legitimate company with a legitimate grievance would have worked with the kernel team to mitigate their harm. As it is, they're trying make the kernel devs their unpaid slaves by leveling accusations without details. In this way, they can claim ownership of what they allegedly own as well as what is undisputably the original work of the kernel developers. NO ONE is obligated to pay SCO for that work.
Paying SCO $699 or whatever it is does not compensate the kernel devs...some of whom are employed by deep pocketed corps who will insist on their full GPL rights. Nope, SCO is going to have to publically identify with specificity what allegedly infringes so it can be removed from the kernel. It does not help that SCO also appears to be trying to appropriate the POSIX standards. The POSIX standards are NOT the property of SCO. SCO has no right to automatically expect tribute from anyone who implements them.
They will also have to do something about their bizarre theories of what is a derivative work before they will get any sympathy whatsoever.
Your "legitimate above board business" is trying to commit a much larger theft then the one they are accusing others of. Being a business does not give you the right to steal no matter how money you think it will make you.
There is money to be made, but everytime a class action suit is brought, people on slashdot bitch about the fact that the laywers get the lions share of the settlement. Damned if you do, damned if you dont.
Maybe it would help to look at class action suits differently then. I look at CA suits as a way to bitchslap a corporation thats getting too big for its breaches. So what if I only get a check for $0.23? (true story) They had to mail out several million just like it. We're depositing the damn thing just so they get hit with the processing charges as well.
CA suits are way to punish corps. You'll never enrich yourself from one of the things.