Not really. The Commodore 64 was the best selling personal computer ever. Commodore died because they produced a better product (the Amiga) but didn't market it well. It's unfortunate, but marketing gives an edge of an inferior product over one that is superior. I'm not referring so much to the Apple ][ so much as to the early Macintosh and the IBM PCs of the time. IBM has always been successful because of their marketing, even before PCs. They won out in the 1960s for the same reason. The Commodore 64 had superior graphics and it cost less than the Apple ][. That was the height of Commodore. You can't blame Apple for Commodore's marketing failures, though.
Why I like gentoo..
on
Gentoo Reviewed
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I'm one of those people who insists on compiling everything myself and not using packages. I do this because I like to have some control over what options are used when compiling and that everything is optimized to run on my machine.
Unfortunately, there's no consistent way to cleanly remove things that I compile. And keeping track of the dependencies is next to impossible to do. I don't like to clutter up my directories with files and directories that aren't needed anymore.
I'm a big fan of the ports collection in any BSD because it solves both of those problems. Everything is compiled on my machine and later it's simple to cleanly remove stuff I'm no longer using.
Gentoo also has a ports collection, which is why I chose it over other Linux distros. Debian is quite nice but I have yet to find a way to use some packages from stable, some from testing, and some from unstable, while still having everything getting along. I like almost everything else about Debian, but that's what frustrates me about it, and why I give Gentoo the nod.
It would be nice, however, to have a more automated install process in Gentoo. I'd like to be able to choose being doing it myself and starting from any stage, or being able to use an automated install program like other distros have. I'm not asking for a lot, but just something as simple as Slackware's install program would be a nice touch.
That being said, I use Gentoo, and I like it a lot.:)
I'm a storm spotter. I'm in Saint Louis County (MO).
Anyways, to answer your question, doppler radar has a radial velocity mode which detects the velocity of winds moving towards or away from the radar site. This is the tool used mostly to identify tornadoes by radar.
Sometimes the reflectivity will indicate a "hook echo" which is also used to identify possible tornadoes.
Anyways, through computers, the inbound and outbound velocities are added together in areas of rotation. If it exceeds 70 knots, it's considered a Tornado Vortex Signature (TVS). The TVS is not an actual tornado, but the parent circulation that can produce a tornado.
Not every tornado will have a hook echo on radar. On the other hand, every tornado will have the parent circulation, which can be detected on radar. Not every TVS will spawn a tornado, though.
To correct your points about communication, the NSSL (National Severe Storms Laboratory) does not issue watches or warnings. The SPC (Storm Prediction Center) in Norman issues all watches, but not warnings. The SPC was formerly the NSSFC (National Severe Storms Forecast Center), located in Kansas City.
Your local NWS office issues the warnings. While storm spotters are very important (and will be necessary for a long time, even with better radar), the ability to detect potential tornadoes and severe storms has greatly improved in recent years. It's a lot better than you might think.
If you look through tornado warnings issued by NWS offices, you'll note that most of them say that a storm with strong rotation has been indicated on radar. Rarely, if ever, will you see that a tornado warning has been issued because of spotter reports. It'd be more likely in the case of land/waterspouts and gustnadoes, but those aren't as dangerous as the usual tornadoes.
The solution isn't to make it difficult to patent stupid things by making the price prohibitively high. The solution is for the patent offices to do their homework and actually review prior patents, get a clue as to what they're granting patents to, and make better attempts to verify that there isn't prior art out there already. Raising the price of the patents doesn't screw over the large companies. To them, $7,000 is a drop in the bucket. It hurts the small companies and independent inventors that don't have the money just sitting around. If the patent system were globalized and one large patent office replaced the ones for every country, and each country helped fund it, it might be possible to have a reasonable price and still be able to have the money for the office to do their homework and check up on things before granting patents.
First of all, I suspect that some of the more "user-friendly" distributions already support most of those features. What I'd like to have is a nice front-end to know what packages do what and to be able to easily install them. This means having a utility in X to automatically download and install packages.
Second of all, I'd like to suggest Lindows or Xpde. Neither is perfect, but they tend to do a reasonably good job of simulating the Windows interface once installed. I know next ot nothing about either, otherwise, though, except from what I've read in various accounts on this site and others.
As for the part about setting up a dual boot, even Slackware 7.0 will attempt to configure LILO. It's not that hard to do. It'll even attempt to set it up automatically for you. What I would like to see is some utility such as GNU Parted included in the setup program for resizing existing FAT partitions. I don't know if it does NTFs. It's useful for people who already have Windows on their computers and don't really want to mess with installing it again from scratch to also install Linux.
Also, to be easily installed by the average user, consise, easy to read, and clear documentation is needed. This means a short user's manual needs to come packaged with any Linux distribution intended for the passes. It needs to be printed. This doesn't mean README files,.TXT files, or.PDF files. This means a book. While the author of the article doesn't seem to consider it important, it can be invaluable.
Lastly, Microsoft provides technical support over the phone. If a Linux distribution is to be used by the masses, it should provide this as well.
It's not just in the quality of the installation program, it's the overall experience and what's offered that makes a new operating system friendly to users. A little effort in these areas will do wonders for getting Linux on the desktop.
The FCC also needs to raise or completely remove the limits on transmitter power. Allow stations to broadcast farther, so if maybe I can't get programming from one of the major networks in my area, I'd be able to get it from another station.
Second, I very much doubt that this will be a big deal. It's to the advantage of the networks to have an affiliate in all of the areas of the US with a sizable TV audience. The more area they cover, the more people there are viewing their ads, and the more revenue they get.
Who really gets screwed out of this is smaller networks that can't afford to have affiliations with stations in every city. In markets that have many stations, smaller networks have an opportunity to own or affiliate with stations that haven't already been taken by the major networks.
I interchangably refer to affiliates and stations owned by the networks, because the effects are mostly the same. There's no way a station owned by FOX would affiliate with NBC.
It's my understanding that this same family of viruses is responsible for measles and mumps in humans and distemper in dogs. For a little information about this virus, check here. All of those have vaccines for them. So would it be possible to prepare a vaccine for this virus, too?
First of all, I agree that publishing houses suck. I know the context of this article relates to middle school, but textbook publishers are lousy at all levels.
As a college student, I get frustrated with math textbooks that present few examples, a lot of derivations, and problems that don't necessarily follow the examples. It's rather difficult to learn from that. If I'm stuck on a homework problem, I'm pretty much screwed no matter how many times I go back and read it. There's also an attempt to ruin the used book business by publishing minor revisions with different problems every couple of years. As a victim of this, I'm all for anything that opposes the large publishing houses.
It's an interesting way to teach science, and the approach sounds a lot like reading A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking. I learned a lot from that book that I certainly would never have picked up from a classic textbook. It's a good idea.
I'd also like to add a suggestion. In a lot of schools, textbooks are being replaced with CDs containing the text. It's a nice idea, but I think a combination of both is the best idea. Consider a book that has the text, PDF files on a CD, and interactive examples or at least videos to supplement the text. It seems like a good way to learn, especially for the audience these books are intended, that being middle school.
I don't like that one of the linked articles suggests an end of IRC. Any server can be DDoS'd and there's nothing that makes IRC more vulnerable than any other service being provided. In general, the IP addresses of hubs are hidden from ordinary users, the the worst damage that can be done is taking some client servers offline.
Yes, the kiddies get large botnets, but that doesn't mean they win. There were times a few years ago that most EFnet servers were offline for days, and that EFnet logs many servers during that time. But the kiddies were never able to destroy the network, and it's come back stronger than ever. If anything, the kiddies didn't hurt the network, they made it better. There's a chanfix, inspired by the attacks, to restore opless and some taken-over channels. This goes a long way to preventing attacks. Most of the EFnet attacks were motivated by channel disputes.
Undernet has hid which server a user is connected to and has disabled commends such as/links. There's now a +x mode which if a user is logged into X/W, hides the user's host.
Where I'm going with this is the best IRC networks generally survive the attacks and are stronger in the end. I don't think an attack on Dalnet is the end of IRC.
While I'm no expert on this, as a longtime user of IRC, in the past couple years I've seen a huge rise in the number of users who send you a website to visit upon joining a channel. Some networks take the steps of helping these users remove the trojan, or removing them from the network. On the other hand, some networks do nothing to solve these problems. If these are the same trojans that provide DDoS bots, opers could be doing a lot more to track down and solve the problems. I, for one, often report these to EFnet opers, and the opers are almost always quick to remove the user from the network.
What's my point in all of this? With some common sense, some coding skills, and opers who are willing to help, a network can solve a lot of its problems. If EFnet and Undernet managed to overcome DDoS attacks many times in the past, one wonders why Dalnet wasn't able to.
And the end of Dalnet doesn't mean the end of IRC. Other networks are better prepared to deal with this sort of thing, and can survive much more than Dalnet has. While the article raises valid concerns, it's written from the standpoint of someone who doesn't seem to know much about other networks.
Anyway, I hope Dalnet doesn't just cease to exist. Somehow I doubt it will, though.
You pay to be there but you use their facilities to do your work. I'd tend to think if were a student there but used only resources independent of the university that they'd have no right to something you'd do. You could say so what that you used their resources but I don't think you can pretend that the resources of the university weren't necessary to your work.
You may be paying to be there but you used resources owned by them. If you purchased the resources yourself and didn't go through a university, then you would own your work yourself. In a lot of cases, perhaps not with computers so much but in other areas of research, it's simply impossible for the average person to purchase the needed resources. My point is you may have paid to attend the university but you don't own their resources you used to do your work.
I don't think the university is outside of their rights to claim the work of students using university resources.
The fact is, they're not making a profit off the US version and if they buy it now, it does cause significant loss of profit when they do release an official German version. The fact remains, there was nothing malicious in the intent of Kai to translate the game, and I don't think the response was malicious, either. They didn't sue him for his efforts, just sent him a legal notice to stop and asked him to pay a relatively small legal fee. Annoying as it may be to be asked to pay lawyers' fees, it's a lot more of a fair response to what happened than what they could've done. It's a slap on the wrist and their reasons for asking him to stop were legitimate. So what's the problem here?
In reading over who signed this treaty, two important nations that were left off were Russia and China. Recently, China and Russia have tried to conform to pressure from western nations, especially the United States, in cracking down on things such as distribution of intellectual property. They've shut down warez and music download sites operating in these countries with pressure from the west. Does anyone know why China and Russia didn't take part in this?
Actually they tried to preserve some rights in this draft left out any language dealing with racial hatred because they felt it would violate the first amendment. I don't agree with it, but leave it to your media to make arguments that are pretty much slander to try to get people in favor of it.
Pass interference can't be challenged, though. Only some calls can be challenged, and that's not one of them. Some games only have seven cameras, though, so if you want instant replay to be effective, use all the camera angles they have in nationally televised games.
My apologies about Charon, I know better than to say it's a planet.;) My point is neither Pluto nor any other small fragment of material that didn't form a planet has any business being considered a planet. Another thing is that Pluto's orbit is out of the plane of any of the orbits of the other planets not to mention its odd shape. This particular discovery adds nothing to the argument, I think, but the discovery of the belt in 1992 adds something to the argument against Pluto being considered a planet. That's what I was trying to argue for.
I think you forget the many users who use shells either for BitchX clients, eggdrop bots, bncs, and who knows what else. Clones eat up IRC server resources and thus the ident shows that multiple connections from the same host/IP aren't clones and shouldn't be d:lined or k:lined from the server. And at least in the past, most abusive clients didn't have ident. I'm not sure anymore, but I suspect this is still mostly true. And maybe this isn't a problem for small networks, but when it's big IRC networks such as EFnet with 60,000+ users, this can become a problem. It's not paranoia; the servers do get attacked quite frequently whether it be in the form of a DoS attack, clonebots, IP hijacking, or another attack. Just read efnet.org if you don't think I'm right about all the attacks that happen.
According to this link, Pluto and Charon are (were?) considered to be the largest of the objects in the Kuiper Belt. There's actually many objects in this belt and more information can be found here and here. And, IMO, the best site for information about this, and the most complete is this site at NASA.
This suggests that Pluto and Charon are simply bodies within another asteriod belt and shouldn't have been classified as planets. And thus we shouldn't make the mistake of classifying this, too, as a planet, even though it is larger.
Other information on this project can be found here, here (Caltech), or here. This link to Princeton University seems to explain the project much better, at least to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really. The Commodore 64 was the best selling personal computer ever. Commodore died because they produced a better product (the Amiga) but didn't market it well. It's unfortunate, but marketing gives an edge of an inferior product over one that is superior. I'm not referring so much to the Apple ][ so much as to the early Macintosh and the IBM PCs of the time. IBM has always been successful because of their marketing, even before PCs. They won out in the 1960s for the same reason. The Commodore 64 had superior graphics and it cost less than the Apple ][. That was the height of Commodore. You can't blame Apple for Commodore's marketing failures, though.
I'm one of those people who insists on compiling everything myself and not using packages. I do this because I like to have some control over what options are used when compiling and that everything is optimized to run on my machine.
:)
Unfortunately, there's no consistent way to cleanly remove things that I compile. And keeping track of the dependencies is next to impossible to do. I don't like to clutter up my directories with files and directories that aren't needed anymore.
I'm a big fan of the ports collection in any BSD because it solves both of those problems. Everything is compiled on my machine and later it's simple to cleanly remove stuff I'm no longer using.
Gentoo also has a ports collection, which is why I chose it over other Linux distros. Debian is quite nice but I have yet to find a way to use some packages from stable, some from testing, and some from unstable, while still having everything getting along. I like almost everything else about Debian, but that's what frustrates me about it, and why I give Gentoo the nod.
It would be nice, however, to have a more automated install process in Gentoo. I'd like to be able to choose being doing it myself and starting from any stage, or being able to use an automated install program like other distros have. I'm not asking for a lot, but just something as simple as Slackware's install program would be a nice touch.
That being said, I use Gentoo, and I like it a lot.
I'm a storm spotter. I'm in Saint Louis County (MO).
Anyways, to answer your question, doppler radar has a radial velocity mode which detects the velocity of winds moving towards or away from the radar site. This is the tool used mostly to identify tornadoes by radar.
Sometimes the reflectivity will indicate a "hook echo" which is also used to identify possible tornadoes.
Anyways, through computers, the inbound and outbound velocities are added together in areas of rotation. If it exceeds 70 knots, it's considered a Tornado Vortex Signature (TVS). The TVS is not an actual tornado, but the parent circulation that can produce a tornado.
Not every tornado will have a hook echo on radar. On the other hand, every tornado will have the parent circulation, which can be detected on radar. Not every TVS will spawn a tornado, though.
To correct your points about communication, the NSSL (National Severe Storms Laboratory) does not issue watches or warnings. The SPC (Storm Prediction Center) in Norman issues all watches, but not warnings. The SPC was formerly the NSSFC (National Severe Storms Forecast Center), located in Kansas City.
Your local NWS office issues the warnings. While storm spotters are very important (and will be necessary for a long time, even with better radar), the ability to detect potential tornadoes and severe storms has greatly improved in recent years. It's a lot better than you might think.
If you look through tornado warnings issued by NWS offices, you'll note that most of them say that a storm with strong rotation has been indicated on radar. Rarely, if ever, will you see that a tornado warning has been issued because of spotter reports. It'd be more likely in the case of land/waterspouts and gustnadoes, but those aren't as dangerous as the usual tornadoes.
The solution isn't to make it difficult to patent stupid things by making the price prohibitively high. The solution is for the patent offices to do their homework and actually review prior patents, get a clue as to what they're granting patents to, and make better attempts to verify that there isn't prior art out there already. Raising the price of the patents doesn't screw over the large companies. To them, $7,000 is a drop in the bucket. It hurts the small companies and independent inventors that don't have the money just sitting around. If the patent system were globalized and one large patent office replaced the ones for every country, and each country helped fund it, it might be possible to have a reasonable price and still be able to have the money for the office to do their homework and check up on things before granting patents.
First of all, I suspect that some of the more "user-friendly" distributions already support most of those features. What I'd like to have is a nice front-end to know what packages do what and to be able to easily install them. This means having a utility in X to automatically download and install packages.
.TXT files, or .PDF files. This means a book. While the author of the article doesn't seem to consider it important, it can be invaluable.
Second of all, I'd like to suggest Lindows or Xpde. Neither is perfect, but they tend to do a reasonably good job of simulating the Windows interface once installed. I know next ot nothing about either, otherwise, though, except from what I've read in various accounts on this site and others.
As for the part about setting up a dual boot, even Slackware 7.0 will attempt to configure LILO. It's not that hard to do. It'll even attempt to set it up automatically for you. What I would like to see is some utility such as GNU Parted included in the setup program for resizing existing FAT partitions. I don't know if it does NTFs. It's useful for people who already have Windows on their computers and don't really want to mess with installing it again from scratch to also install Linux.
Also, to be easily installed by the average user, consise, easy to read, and clear documentation is needed. This means a short user's manual needs to come packaged with any Linux distribution intended for the passes. It needs to be printed. This doesn't mean README files,
Lastly, Microsoft provides technical support over the phone. If a Linux distribution is to be used by the masses, it should provide this as well.
It's not just in the quality of the installation program, it's the overall experience and what's offered that makes a new operating system friendly to users. A little effort in these areas will do wonders for getting Linux on the desktop.
The FCC also needs to raise or completely remove the limits on transmitter power. Allow stations to broadcast farther, so if maybe I can't get programming from one of the major networks in my area, I'd be able to get it from another station.
Second, I very much doubt that this will be a big deal. It's to the advantage of the networks to have an affiliate in all of the areas of the US with a sizable TV audience. The more area they cover, the more people there are viewing their ads, and the more revenue they get.
Who really gets screwed out of this is smaller networks that can't afford to have affiliations with stations in every city. In markets that have many stations, smaller networks have an opportunity to own or affiliate with stations that haven't already been taken by the major networks.
I interchangably refer to affiliates and stations owned by the networks, because the effects are mostly the same. There's no way a station owned by FOX would affiliate with NBC.
It's my understanding that this same family of viruses is responsible for measles and mumps in humans and distemper in dogs. For a little information about this virus, check here. All of those have vaccines for them. So would it be possible to prepare a vaccine for this virus, too?
First of all, I agree that publishing houses suck. I know the context of this article relates to middle school, but textbook publishers are lousy at all levels.
As a college student, I get frustrated with math textbooks that present few examples, a lot of derivations, and problems that don't necessarily follow the examples. It's rather difficult to learn from that. If I'm stuck on a homework problem, I'm pretty much screwed no matter how many times I go back and read it. There's also an attempt to ruin the used book business by publishing minor revisions with different problems every couple of years. As a victim of this, I'm all for anything that opposes the large publishing houses.
It's an interesting way to teach science, and the approach sounds a lot like reading A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking. I learned a lot from that book that I certainly would never have picked up from a classic textbook. It's a good idea.
I'd also like to add a suggestion. In a lot of schools, textbooks are being replaced with CDs containing the text. It's a nice idea, but I think a combination of both is the best idea. Consider a book that has the text, PDF files on a CD, and interactive examples or at least videos to supplement the text. It seems like a good way to learn, especially for the audience these books are intended, that being middle school.
I don't like that one of the linked articles suggests an end of IRC. Any server can be DDoS'd and there's nothing that makes IRC more vulnerable than any other service being provided. In general, the IP addresses of hubs are hidden from ordinary users, the the worst damage that can be done is taking some client servers offline.
/links. There's now a +x mode which if a user is logged into X/W, hides the user's host.
Yes, the kiddies get large botnets, but that doesn't mean they win. There were times a few years ago that most EFnet servers were offline for days, and that EFnet logs many servers during that time. But the kiddies were never able to destroy the network, and it's come back stronger than ever. If anything, the kiddies didn't hurt the network, they made it better. There's a chanfix, inspired by the attacks, to restore opless and some taken-over channels. This goes a long way to preventing attacks. Most of the EFnet attacks were motivated by channel disputes.
Undernet has hid which server a user is connected to and has disabled commends such as
Where I'm going with this is the best IRC networks generally survive the attacks and are stronger in the end. I don't think an attack on Dalnet is the end of IRC.
While I'm no expert on this, as a longtime user of IRC, in the past couple years I've seen a huge rise in the number of users who send you a website to visit upon joining a channel. Some networks take the steps of helping these users remove the trojan, or removing them from the network. On the other hand, some networks do nothing to solve these problems. If these are the same trojans that provide DDoS bots, opers could be doing a lot more to track down and solve the problems. I, for one, often report these to EFnet opers, and the opers are almost always quick to remove the user from the network.
What's my point in all of this? With some common sense, some coding skills, and opers who are willing to help, a network can solve a lot of its problems. If EFnet and Undernet managed to overcome DDoS attacks many times in the past, one wonders why Dalnet wasn't able to.
And the end of Dalnet doesn't mean the end of IRC. Other networks are better prepared to deal with this sort of thing, and can survive much more than Dalnet has. While the article raises valid concerns, it's written from the standpoint of someone who doesn't seem to know much about other networks.
Anyway, I hope Dalnet doesn't just cease to exist. Somehow I doubt it will, though.
You pay to be there but you use their facilities to do your work. I'd tend to think if were a student there but used only resources independent of the university that they'd have no right to something you'd do. You could say so what that you used their resources but I don't think you can pretend that the resources of the university weren't necessary to your work.
You may be paying to be there but you used resources owned by them. If you purchased the resources yourself and didn't go through a university, then you would own your work yourself. In a lot of cases, perhaps not with computers so much but in other areas of research, it's simply impossible for the average person to purchase the needed resources. My point is you may have paid to attend the university but you don't own their resources you used to do your work.
I don't think the university is outside of their rights to claim the work of students using university resources.
The fact is, they're not making a profit off the US version and if they buy it now, it does cause significant loss of profit when they do release an official German version. The fact remains, there was nothing malicious in the intent of Kai to translate the game, and I don't think the response was malicious, either. They didn't sue him for his efforts, just sent him a legal notice to stop and asked him to pay a relatively small legal fee. Annoying as it may be to be asked to pay lawyers' fees, it's a lot more of a fair response to what happened than what they could've done. It's a slap on the wrist and their reasons for asking him to stop were legitimate. So what's the problem here?
In reading over who signed this treaty, two important nations that were left off were Russia and China. Recently, China and Russia have tried to conform to pressure from western nations, especially the United States, in cracking down on things such as distribution of intellectual property. They've shut down warez and music download sites operating in these countries with pressure from the west. Does anyone know why China and Russia didn't take part in this?
Actually they tried to preserve some rights in this draft left out any language dealing with racial hatred because they felt it would violate the first amendment. I don't agree with it, but leave it to your media to make arguments that are pretty much slander to try to get people in favor of it.
Pass interference can't be challenged, though. Only some calls can be challenged, and that's not one of them. Some games only have seven cameras, though, so if you want instant replay to be effective, use all the camera angles they have in nationally televised games.
My apologies about Charon, I know better than to say it's a planet. ;) My point is neither Pluto nor any other small fragment of material that didn't form a planet has any business being considered a planet. Another thing is that Pluto's orbit is out of the plane of any of the orbits of the other planets not to mention its odd shape. This particular discovery adds nothing to the argument, I think, but the discovery of the belt in 1992 adds something to the argument against Pluto being considered a planet. That's what I was trying to argue for.
I think you forget the many users who use shells either for BitchX clients, eggdrop bots, bncs, and who knows what else. Clones eat up IRC server resources and thus the ident shows that multiple connections from the same host/IP aren't clones and shouldn't be d:lined or k:lined from the server. And at least in the past, most abusive clients didn't have ident. I'm not sure anymore, but I suspect this is still mostly true. And maybe this isn't a problem for small networks, but when it's big IRC networks such as EFnet with 60,000+ users, this can become a problem. It's not paranoia; the servers do get attacked quite frequently whether it be in the form of a DoS attack, clonebots, IP hijacking, or another attack. Just read efnet.org if you don't think I'm right about all the attacks that happen.
According to this link, Pluto and Charon are (were?) considered to be the largest of the objects in the Kuiper Belt. There's actually many objects in this belt and more information can be found here and here. And, IMO, the best site for information about this, and the most complete is this site at NASA.
This suggests that Pluto and Charon are simply bodies within another asteriod belt and shouldn't have been classified as planets. And thus we shouldn't make the mistake of classifying this, too, as a planet, even though it is larger.
Other information on this project can be found here, here (Caltech), or here. This link to Princeton University seems to explain the project much better, at least to me.
You can read the text of the .eu registry proposal here. It seems to answer at least a few questions asked.