The Daily Kos link in TFS explains how it works. Bills generally get unanimous consent to be voted upon, even when people intend to vote against them. Dodd isn't giving his consent for this to come to vote. Since there's no unanimous consent to vote on the bill, someone needs to motion for a vote over it if they want to hold the vote.
That motion to hold the vote then has to be debated and voted upon. A senator could filibuster that debate, and it takes 60% of all current Senators (not just 60% of those present to vote) to break the filibuster (referred to as cloture). Then the vote over the motion to vote on the bill can proceed if there's no filibuster or if the filibuster is broken. Only if a majority vote to hold the vote on the bill will the bill actually be voted upon.
Once the bill itself is up for a vote, there's still the chance it could be defeated.
Maybe if Google paid them a large percentage of the ad money, they'd consider it. Probably a lot larger percentage than the folks at Google would ever listen to without laughing.
What needs to happen for us to get quality programming online is that people like John Kricfalusi who hate how TV networks are run need to do exactly what he did with The Goddamn George Liquor Program and some of his other work. They need to self-distribute online or direct to DVD. If Google let people with professionally produced, serialized shows capable of getting a following out of the draconian YouTube user policy then it might be the online distribution network of choice. The show's producers could put ads in the video stream. Google would have the page ads, and it's worth everyone's while.
Well, to be pedantic, you'd need either NAT or an HTTP proxy. DHCP might be used to assign the off-network addresses to the machines behind that single routeable IP, but that's not necessary.
To Microsoft, apps are marketing. People know Windows isn't that great. Even most people with little clue that there are alternatives know that Windows sucks. What they don't know is how to do the things on other systems they can do on Windows. The apps are different. They're sometimes harder to install (but sometimes, IMO, easier) on some of the alternatives. Sometimes you can't find a suitable alternative at all. There are training issues and issues with re-acquiring things already bought. There's data transfer problems with incompatible file types, undocumented file formats, and insufficient export from the Windows apps and insufficient import on the OS X, Solaris, or Linux apps. There's not a cardboard-box market for most non-Windows applications.
Quite simply, when Steve Ballmer yells, "Developers, developers, developers!", it's because that's Microsoft's ticket to keeping its huge installed base. If you get the application developers in a company won over to your OS exclusively, the applications from that company will be written for your OS exclusively. When people find enough of those applications that are Windows-only difficult to cut loose, how in the world are they going to cut Windows loose?
There are great applications for OS X, Linux, and Solaris. Likewise for the BSDs, MorphOS, Amiga OS3, Plan9, AIX, OS/2, and more. The application stacks for all these systems are strong and deep. What they're not is broad. Final Cut Pro rocks. Apache is wonderful. Ardour is great. Blender and Lightwave are really nice. There are some killer games on Linux and OS X. There's just not much. There's great stuff, but there's just not enough of it to compare to what you can get for Windows. If you're running servers or doing narrowly defined work, that's great. If it's for a hobby or for a second or third computer, that's great. If, however, you need the broadest possible access to strange, non-portable or unported, shrink-wrapped random crap, at least one desktop needs to be Windows. That situation may change, and I hope it will. That's just the truth right now, though.
Thanks for specifying those. Certainly, having a paper of questionable age tat can't be verified wouldn't be much good. Either publication or registration of the copyright would be necessary to establish a date. Publication would make it more widely known and more obvious, too. So publishing being the key does make sense.
The point about claims vs. specifications is even more subtle. It's sure not clear from the article which is what. It's no wonder there are people who specialize in patent matters.
That article makes it pretty clear, I think, that the rejections doesn't mean all these things are ruled obvious enough not to be patentable. Some of the claims were rejected because they were covered by other patents still in force. That some of the claims can't be claims in this patent because they had already were patented by others does not mean they were rejected for lack of novelty nor that they are not patented by the other parties holding those patents.
Eight of them did fall, in fact, from a Steven Levy article in NewsWeek, so that's a good thing. A good way to keep obvious things from being patented is to have an expression of the idea copyrighted first.
I like your idea. I'm not sure why in the connected, knowledge-based, service economy we have that Congress would not have done this by now anyway were it not for lobbying from these big telecom companies. The market is great when it works, but obviously the market has not worked that well so far. The government-enforced Bell System monopoly followed by the government-demanded Bell divestiture followed by most of Bell being back together, all with the US falling further and further behind in affordable broadband deployment is proof of that.
With ANSI, ISO, and other standards bodies putting out great interoperability standards for equipment and data formats, and the success of the Internet often despite the actions of the big telcos, it's pretty clear that Mom and Pop, municipal, or small regional -- like part of a state not regional like SBC/BellSouth/Nynex -- phone and data companies could operate pretty damn well if not for the level of regulation involved.
Honestly, I think if we're not going the way of telecom co-ops then we should seriously consider municipal fiber plants with anyone willing to either rent racks in a city CO or buy dedicated bandwidth to it allowed to offer data services on the fiber. I'm not talking about a single winning bidder, either. I mean every house gets a 10/8 address within the city's network with data transport to the CO paid by taxes. They can VPN or tunnel to whichever provider they want that has a rack in that CO for server space and outside bandwidth to the rest of the world. They can also communicate within the municipal network for free, without buying outside routing and bandwidth. Now that's something cities should be looking at and applying for grants to do.
They don't have to be sued by the Executive. They can be ordered to testify in front of Congress. If they refuse, they can be found in contempt of Congress.
All the following is a summary of info from Wikipedia: Both houses can initiate criminal proceeding which can bring up to a year in confinement. The Senate also has procedures to initiate civil action against someone the Senate considers to be in contempt, but that only applies to Executive branch personnel.
Just hit A+B+Start when the whiteshirts start coming after you. You'll be fine. And you want to fly over trucks, especially once you have the wide cannon or Super Joe's machine gun. You can't continue if you don't.
Pi pi pi. We have found an intruder. We are going to attack...
Actually, microwave beam energy from ground to air successfully powered the flight of a small plane back in the 80's. So have laser beams a bit more recently. Tesla was working on beaming energy directly to houses a neighborhood at a time using towers back when he was alive. The main reason Tesla historians claim that never happened was that the investors wanted to meter the power.
BTW, using focusing EM radiation for use as a power source is what solar power and radio reception do already. This is a refinement and scale-up of what Marconi did, not some radically new idea in getting power from one place to another. We just have never seen it done on this scale. Instead of enough power to carry a voice or data signal there's talking about megawatts, but the idea isn't exactly brand new.
As for vulnerability, I'd bet it's actually quite a bit harder to knock out a power station in geosynchronous orbit than to knock out a solar farm or wind farm on terra firma. EMP or fuel-air explosives just require one plane or one ICBM. EMP could be done from the ground with some effect. It'd be a bit more of an undertaking to do the same thing 22,500 miles up.
There are lots of established forum packages out there, and most people will use what they know or what Fantastico includes on their cheap web hosting. The way to get known isn't to take up space on SF.net and never get your code downloaded.
What you want to do if your software is to be debugged and iterated into newer versions is for people to use it. If it's powering some sites that people like, they'll consider it for their own sites. If people are using it, someone will invest some time in fixing issues with it.
Nobody wants to work with your code if there's no userbase. They can start from scratch themselves for that. If they want to work on something that's got user feedback, there are plenty of people using PHPBB, Postnuke, PHPNuke, miniBB, punBB, and more. Hell, would you ever have heard of Slashcode or Everything if some sites weren't using them?
If your code takes a different approach to something that makes a difference on the front end or is more scalable than the existing solutions then that's what interests users and developers. Implementing the same features in a slightly different but equivalent way on the back end just isn't important to anyone. Better security, a cleaner plug-in/module interface, better performance on the same system, easier administration, more options, simpler customization of layouts and colors, broader database support, and better docs are big things. Doing a merge sort instead of a quicksort when sorting your posts just isn't.
In short, differentiate your offering, get people to use it, and let your userbase decide what needs to be improved. Get someone involved who's going to be responsive to implement changes as needed so the users don't all migrate away. That's how you build a developer community around a project -- by making the developers care because they can see their work doing something.
So go to MadTux and get a real PC for less. 512MB of RAM, 16x DVD+-RW, 80 GB hard drive, Vector Linux installed, and 60 days of email support for $281.99 with a Sempron 3000+.
There are other models and they can all be configured somewhat, too. What you get from MadTux is bigger and uses more power, but it's a lot more computer for the money. It's also vastly more expandable.
If you really need silent, low-power, and small, this FitPC is quicker than building your own EPIA case but not as fun. There are lots of PC/104 and EBX systems out there that don't cost much more. It appears that this is very similar to what Ampro, Winsystems, Via, and others are already doing, but at a good price. EMAC's PCM-5893 isn't much more in single unit quantities.
It looks like they (Compulab) are making the boards themselves since they are SBC builders. In quantity they probably could get close to these final prices by OEMing the boards and sticking them in project cases.
Well, it'd take a long time for many of us to get acclimated that far north. Why don't you guys and a few like-minded countries just come in and free us from our oppressive regime... oh, wait, that's our government that does that. Never mind.;-)
I've not been around much of Canada, but I've found the Canadians I've met in Ontario and here in the States to be mostly very friendly, sociable, intelligent, and sensible. I'd consider being a Canadian, but nearly everyone I know IRL is here in the States, and I'd probably have to convince my wife since we're not planning on splitting up.
In all, I doubt most of our government is actually malicious. They seem to be out of touch with the American people and with reality in general. There are some real asshats in our government that do the things that asshats do with a lot of power at their disposal. What needs to be done is for Americans to take the power from the asshats and put those people away somewhere. Maybe Guantanamo. The clueless and out of touch need to be removed from power until they have a clue and are in touch.
I'm always reminded whenever American national politics get mentioned about the interviews with Republican primary candidates someone did a few Presidential elections ago. One of the questions was about how much a gallon jug of milk cost at the store. One out of about 8 candidates trying to become the Republican candidate for the office of President even had a clue, and he quoted what he'd paid at the store himself the day before. Predictably, he got nowhere in the race. The strong back-scratching club called the Two-Party System favors those in touch with the political elite, who are by definition out of touch with the people. The political elite don't buy groceries. They pay people to pay other people who buy groceries and probably couldn't tell you the name of the store their food comes from.
Surely you can be cleared for that flight and any makeup flights for it. Now if you have to do the alternate air carrier seat swap, that might be another story. Most of the airlines will put you on a flight with another carrier if they have no more flights of their own to a certain location when a flight is canceled. They trade seats that way all the time, or at least they used to. This could be the end of that.
I think it's more likely the information being stored on hard drives that could be considered a matter of national security. The Mac was for a time banned from export and the Playstation 2 was banned from re-export from the US to certain countries. Information is power. As the G.I. Joe cartoons used to say, "knowing is half the battle". When you're busy spying on the world, knowing your info means bulk data storage. I guess the NSA could switch over entirely to SSDs, though.
Anyway, as for velocity and weight, velocity and acceleration do matter. I'm pretty sure a bale of hay is heavier than the 5.56mm round from an M16, but damn if I can fit it into the chamber, let alone 30 in the clip.;-)
From here down is my contribution to making/. a little more silly today. If I made some error somewhere, who cares? It's a nonsensical idea anyway.
Care to figure the linear velocity of the outside edge of something 3.5" across turning 15k rpm? Let's see, circumference is pi times diameter. 8.89 cm * pi is roughly 27.93cm. 418,931 cm per minute, give or take. 4189.3 m/minute. 69.8 m/s or 4.1893 km/minute. 251 or so km/hour. 156 or so miles/hour. 13,744 feet or so per second. That's over 4 times the muzzle velocity on an M16, M4, or K2 using NATO M855 rounds.
p = mv
Since momentum equals mass times velocity, a piece of a hard drive platter can weigh a fourth of what an M855 5.56mm round can and have the same momentum. An M855 round is 62 grains. That's 64.79891 milligrams * 62, or a bit less than 4 grams. So a piece of hard drive platter coming apart could do real damage at, say, 1 gram. A hard drive platter from a 3.5" drive is typically about half a US dry ounce (check scrap dealers or eBay), so say 15 grams on the slightly lighter side.
So about 1/15 of a drive platter breaking off from a 15k rpm drive at full spindle speed has more than enough momentum to seriously injure someone. It might even be deadly if it hits certain spots. Call it 1/7 of a 7200 rpm drive platter. And it doesn't have to stay in one piece after breaking apart from the rest of the platter, either. Flechette ammunition is know to be pretty effective against soft targets, like unarmored humans.
BTW, a round fired from a rifle is effective at quite a range, so even slower or a smaller piece would be dangerous at closer range, like under your desk next to your legs. Thankfully this kind of breaking apart shouldn't happen and the platters are inside a metal casing if it ever does. I've never heard of anyone trying to turn a hard drive into an actual weapon, but I'm sure it'd be more effective to throw one at someone than to try taking the casing off and scoring the platter. That's not to say it necessarily couldn't be done, but it sounds like a major waste of time compared to just putting some explosives inside the computer case. This is especially true since you can't control which direction the break-apart would fling stuff and it'd be difficult to make sure the platter came apart at the right spindle speed.;-)
I imagine the taxes are for things like SkypeIn and SkypeOut where people are placing calls and generating revenue for Skype, not for Ventrilo. It's easy to track what you pay Skype, no matter whether you use their software or an OSS clone of it.
Besides, the summary title really should say "would" rather than "will". A bill being approved by a committee may never come to a vote by the full House if the Speaker doesn't like it. It may not pass that vote if it gets it. It may fail to be approved by the Senate, or their version may take out the amendment. The two houses of Congress must approve the same version of the bill for it to go to the President for signing. If they can't agree on the exclusions, they'll probably still agree to extend the tax moratorium. How long to extend it for is probably a hot topic for debate anyway, so look for that to change. Then, if the FCC, the White House staff and the President decide that the bill doesn't look good, the President can veto it. In order to override a veto two-thirds (66%) of both houses must vote to override the veto after it has already taken place. It can be more difficult to get votes for a veto override than the bill originally received, although that's not necessarily the case.
In short, a bill won't make any changes at all as a bill. It only would if it becomes a law. The Clerk of the House has a nice gentle intro on how bills become laws, and for anyone who hasn't seen or heard the School House Rock clip (or who hasn't for 20 years and doesn't remember it), there's a lyrics page and wave file for "I'm Just a Bill", and someone stuck the video clip (with low audio volume) on YouTube. It's all part of the Three-Ring Government, after all.
TFA doesn't say a thing about authentication, authorization, or accounting. How does this know who's checking the data? How does it decide to allow them? Where and how does it store the facts about who accessed what and when? The AAA process is a cornerstone of security -- computer or otherwise.
Yes, I know physical security is paramount. A building needs more than one cornerstone, obviously.;-) But other systems require the drive to be taken out or the machine to be booted at least. It's a lot easier to make sure no one can boot your machine (startup password, bootloader password, no booting from CD etc.) than to make sure they can't hook up a USB cable to it. It's also a lot harder to catch someone hooking up a cable for a couple of minutes than tearing down your laptop and taking the drive (or sliding the drive out if it's easily removable like some are -- taking it to another system and hooking it up are still time-consuming and conspicuous).
BTW, the other cornerstones are secure design (again, in software/hardware or outside computers altogether) and data hiding (encryption, shredding paper, window shades, closed doors, setting proper permissions so that AAA actually matters, etc).
Those are features of newer 3D accelerated cards, though. It'll apply to other people, but probably not to the OP. If this is an older server-class machine with on-board graphics, it may well not have those features.
I still doubt the RAM is overly faulty (if it's even separate from system RAM) since most video memory is soldered in place. A random bit in an image flipping is one thing, but enough of those and it's a whole card or motherboard being RMAed and not just a chip. Reliability would still seem to be of some importance to the video device makers for that simple reason.
I guess he's not used the new Yahoo Mail interface
on
High Performance Web Sites
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The new interface is a joke for performance compared to the old server-generated HTML one. Sure, they might be saving some hardware resources, but it's slow, and the message bodies are the bulk of the data anyway. The main transfers they cut out using JavaScript and dynamic loading seem to be updates to the message list when you delete a bunch of spam. That would be better handled by putting it in the spam folder where it belongs. OTOH, I often delete non-spam messages without reading them as I do subscribe to a few legit mailing lists from my Yahoo address but don't want to read every message.
The first 8 are a hit with me. I'm not sure about 9. I definitely don't think 10 is a big deal unless jumping out of the game engine is entirely disruptive.
An in-game tutorial is a good idea for lots of games. Sometimes an out-of-game tutorial as a separate program or perhaps a manual and web site make more sense.
For a FPS, stay in the game engine and allow the respwan from there. That's standard. If it's a memory or logic puzzle, then the player shouldn't be allowed extra time outside the level to look at the screen. In a RTS, your game is often over if you've lost, and there's no point to staying in. The choice to kibitz, if available, can be just as effective from a menu as from over the top of your headquarters exploding.
It feels much like many other "Top 10" lists. It feels like it started out strong and was rounded out to finish with mediocre follow-ons. That's a shame, because the title didn't even say anything about 10 things, and the subtitle/synopsis could have left that word out.
Another thing that's a bit silly, but understandable, is the console-specific tilt. I'd say the first 8 features they list make as much sense on the PC or any other platform, but they don't mention that.
I'm left wondering if a smaller motorcycle or a Vespa-style street scooter could have a designated cargo spot in a small plane without raising the weight too high. Lightweight plane? Fine, haul a lightweight ground vehicle with you.
I thought the Mandrake to Mandriva change was the combination of the words "Mandrake" and "Connectiva" after the two merged. In fact, lots of references to "Mandrake" are still found within the distribution. I guess I'd never heard about this lawsuit, but I found information quickly with a Google search after reading your post. It seems I was right about how the name came about, but that they changed at all was indeed prompted by the suit.
I also keep seeing references to an appeal, but never the results for it or any information about it continuing either. I'm wondering if Mandriva dropped the appeal after changing names. It might be silly to change back anyway, with all the disruption a name change can cause.
Thanks for your informative post. I'm a long-time Mandrake/Mandriva user and I didn't know this. I was just flipping through my collection of Linux distros the other night and I have 7.0, 8.0-8.2, 9.0-9.1, 10.0-10.1, 2006 Community, and 2008 One CD RC2. My 8.0 is even PowerPack retail box. I also use some other distros from time to time, but Mandriva seems to have the most consistent hardware detection across all the odd stuff on which I've tried installing Linux. It's a shame I missed this tidbit about the company behind the distro until now.
Slashdot Mirror
The Daily Kos link in TFS explains how it works. Bills generally get unanimous consent to be voted upon, even when people intend to vote against them. Dodd isn't giving his consent for this to come to vote. Since there's no unanimous consent to vote on the bill, someone needs to motion for a vote over it if they want to hold the vote.
That motion to hold the vote then has to be debated and voted upon. A senator could filibuster that debate, and it takes 60% of all current Senators (not just 60% of those present to vote) to break the filibuster (referred to as cloture). Then the vote over the motion to vote on the bill can proceed if there's no filibuster or if the filibuster is broken. Only if a majority vote to hold the vote on the bill will the bill actually be voted upon.
Once the bill itself is up for a vote, there's still the chance it could be defeated.
Maybe if Google paid them a large percentage of the ad money, they'd consider it. Probably a lot larger percentage than the folks at Google would ever listen to without laughing.
What needs to happen for us to get quality programming online is that people like John Kricfalusi who hate how TV networks are run need to do exactly what he did with The Goddamn George Liquor Program and some of his other work. They need to self-distribute online or direct to DVD. If Google let people with professionally produced, serialized shows capable of getting a following out of the draconian YouTube user policy then it might be the online distribution network of choice. The show's producers could put ads in the video stream. Google would have the page ads, and it's worth everyone's while.
Well, to be pedantic, you'd need either NAT or an HTTP proxy. DHCP might be used to assign the off-network addresses to the machines behind that single routeable IP, but that's not necessary.
To Microsoft, apps are marketing. People know Windows isn't that great. Even most people with little clue that there are alternatives know that Windows sucks. What they don't know is how to do the things on other systems they can do on Windows. The apps are different. They're sometimes harder to install (but sometimes, IMO, easier) on some of the alternatives. Sometimes you can't find a suitable alternative at all. There are training issues and issues with re-acquiring things already bought. There's data transfer problems with incompatible file types, undocumented file formats, and insufficient export from the Windows apps and insufficient import on the OS X, Solaris, or Linux apps. There's not a cardboard-box market for most non-Windows applications.
Quite simply, when Steve Ballmer yells, "Developers, developers, developers!", it's because that's Microsoft's ticket to keeping its huge installed base. If you get the application developers in a company won over to your OS exclusively, the applications from that company will be written for your OS exclusively. When people find enough of those applications that are Windows-only difficult to cut loose, how in the world are they going to cut Windows loose?
There are great applications for OS X, Linux, and Solaris. Likewise for the BSDs, MorphOS, Amiga OS3, Plan9, AIX, OS/2, and more. The application stacks for all these systems are strong and deep. What they're not is broad. Final Cut Pro rocks. Apache is wonderful. Ardour is great. Blender and Lightwave are really nice. There are some killer games on Linux and OS X. There's just not much. There's great stuff, but there's just not enough of it to compare to what you can get for Windows. If you're running servers or doing narrowly defined work, that's great. If it's for a hobby or for a second or third computer, that's great. If, however, you need the broadest possible access to strange, non-portable or unported, shrink-wrapped random crap, at least one desktop needs to be Windows. That situation may change, and I hope it will. That's just the truth right now, though.
Thanks for specifying those. Certainly, having a paper of questionable age tat can't be verified wouldn't be much good. Either publication or registration of the copyright would be necessary to establish a date. Publication would make it more widely known and more obvious, too. So publishing being the key does make sense.
The point about claims vs. specifications is even more subtle. It's sure not clear from the article which is what. It's no wonder there are people who specialize in patent matters.
That article makes it pretty clear, I think, that the rejections doesn't mean all these things are ruled obvious enough not to be patentable. Some of the claims were rejected because they were covered by other patents still in force. That some of the claims can't be claims in this patent because they had already were patented by others does not mean they were rejected for lack of novelty nor that they are not patented by the other parties holding those patents.
Eight of them did fall, in fact, from a Steven Levy article in NewsWeek, so that's a good thing. A good way to keep obvious things from being patented is to have an expression of the idea copyrighted first.
I like your idea. I'm not sure why in the connected, knowledge-based, service economy we have that Congress would not have done this by now anyway were it not for lobbying from these big telecom companies. The market is great when it works, but obviously the market has not worked that well so far. The government-enforced Bell System monopoly followed by the government-demanded Bell divestiture followed by most of Bell being back together, all with the US falling further and further behind in affordable broadband deployment is proof of that.
With ANSI, ISO, and other standards bodies putting out great interoperability standards for equipment and data formats, and the success of the Internet often despite the actions of the big telcos, it's pretty clear that Mom and Pop, municipal, or small regional -- like part of a state not regional like SBC/BellSouth/Nynex -- phone and data companies could operate pretty damn well if not for the level of regulation involved.
Honestly, I think if we're not going the way of telecom co-ops then we should seriously consider municipal fiber plants with anyone willing to either rent racks in a city CO or buy dedicated bandwidth to it allowed to offer data services on the fiber. I'm not talking about a single winning bidder, either. I mean every house gets a 10/8 address within the city's network with data transport to the CO paid by taxes. They can VPN or tunnel to whichever provider they want that has a rack in that CO for server space and outside bandwidth to the rest of the world. They can also communicate within the municipal network for free, without buying outside routing and bandwidth. Now that's something cities should be looking at and applying for grants to do.
They don't have to be sued by the Executive. They can be ordered to testify in front of Congress. If they refuse, they can be found in contempt of Congress.
All the following is a summary of info from Wikipedia:
Both houses can initiate criminal proceeding which can bring up to a year in confinement. The Senate also has procedures to initiate civil action against someone the Senate considers to be in contempt, but that only applies to Executive branch personnel.
Just hit A+B+Start when the whiteshirts start coming after you. You'll be fine. And you want to fly over trucks, especially once you have the wide cannon or Super Joe's machine gun. You can't continue if you don't.
Pi pi pi. We have found an intruder. We are going to attack...
Actually, microwave beam energy from ground to air successfully powered the flight of a small plane back in the 80's. So have laser beams a bit more recently. Tesla was working on beaming energy directly to houses a neighborhood at a time using towers back when he was alive. The main reason Tesla historians claim that never happened was that the investors wanted to meter the power.
BTW, using focusing EM radiation for use as a power source is what solar power and radio reception do already. This is a refinement and scale-up of what Marconi did, not some radically new idea in getting power from one place to another. We just have never seen it done on this scale. Instead of enough power to carry a voice or data signal there's talking about megawatts, but the idea isn't exactly brand new.
As for vulnerability, I'd bet it's actually quite a bit harder to knock out a power station in geosynchronous orbit than to knock out a solar farm or wind farm on terra firma. EMP or fuel-air explosives just require one plane or one ICBM. EMP could be done from the ground with some effect. It'd be a bit more of an undertaking to do the same thing 22,500 miles up.
There are lots of established forum packages out there, and most people will use what they know or what Fantastico includes on their cheap web hosting. The way to get known isn't to take up space on SF.net and never get your code downloaded.
What you want to do if your software is to be debugged and iterated into newer versions is for people to use it. If it's powering some sites that people like, they'll consider it for their own sites. If people are using it, someone will invest some time in fixing issues with it.
Nobody wants to work with your code if there's no userbase. They can start from scratch themselves for that. If they want to work on something that's got user feedback, there are plenty of people using PHPBB, Postnuke, PHPNuke, miniBB, punBB, and more. Hell, would you ever have heard of Slashcode or Everything if some sites weren't using them?
If your code takes a different approach to something that makes a difference on the front end or is more scalable than the existing solutions then that's what interests users and developers. Implementing the same features in a slightly different but equivalent way on the back end just isn't important to anyone. Better security, a cleaner plug-in/module interface, better performance on the same system, easier administration, more options, simpler customization of layouts and colors, broader database support, and better docs are big things. Doing a merge sort instead of a quicksort when sorting your posts just isn't.
In short, differentiate your offering, get people to use it, and let your userbase decide what needs to be improved. Get someone involved who's going to be responsive to implement changes as needed so the users don't all migrate away. That's how you build a developer community around a project -- by making the developers care because they can see their work doing something.
So go to MadTux and get a real PC for less. 512MB of RAM, 16x DVD+-RW, 80 GB hard drive, Vector Linux installed, and 60 days of email support for $281.99 with a Sempron 3000+.
There are other models and they can all be configured somewhat, too. What you get from MadTux is bigger and uses more power, but it's a lot more computer for the money. It's also vastly more expandable.
If you really need silent, low-power, and small, this FitPC is quicker than building your own EPIA case but not as fun. There are lots of PC/104 and EBX systems out there that don't cost much more. It appears that this is very similar to what Ampro, Winsystems, Via, and others are already doing, but at a good price. EMAC's PCM-5893 isn't much more in single unit quantities.
It looks like they (Compulab) are making the boards themselves since they are SBC builders. In quantity they probably could get close to these final prices by OEMing the boards and sticking them in project cases.
This PC is actually a rebranding of the ENC-iGLX it seems. You can also buy just the innards from Compulab, too. If you don't mind XScale instead of Geode and can handle 312Mhz, they have a system with 1 ethernet and wifi for $199.
Gumstix is much more interesting IMO, but this is a nice little box as far as PC compatibles go.
Well, it'd take a long time for many of us to get acclimated that far north. Why don't you guys and a few like-minded countries just come in and free us from our oppressive regime... oh, wait, that's our government that does that. Never mind. ;-)
I've not been around much of Canada, but I've found the Canadians I've met in Ontario and here in the States to be mostly very friendly, sociable, intelligent, and sensible. I'd consider being a Canadian, but nearly everyone I know IRL is here in the States, and I'd probably have to convince my wife since we're not planning on splitting up.
In all, I doubt most of our government is actually malicious. They seem to be out of touch with the American people and with reality in general. There are some real asshats in our government that do the things that asshats do with a lot of power at their disposal. What needs to be done is for Americans to take the power from the asshats and put those people away somewhere. Maybe Guantanamo. The clueless and out of touch need to be removed from power until they have a clue and are in touch.
I'm always reminded whenever American national politics get mentioned about the interviews with Republican primary candidates someone did a few Presidential elections ago. One of the questions was about how much a gallon jug of milk cost at the store. One out of about 8 candidates trying to become the Republican candidate for the office of President even had a clue, and he quoted what he'd paid at the store himself the day before. Predictably, he got nowhere in the race. The strong back-scratching club called the Two-Party System favors those in touch with the political elite, who are by definition out of touch with the people. The political elite don't buy groceries. They pay people to pay other people who buy groceries and probably couldn't tell you the name of the store their food comes from.
Attention the rest of the world ... this isn't the people of America trying to do this stupid shit. Sincerely, an ordinary American.
Attention TSA, what that guy said. Sincerely, regular Americans (and apparently the rest of the world, too).
Surely you can be cleared for that flight and any makeup flights for it. Now if you have to do the alternate air carrier seat swap, that might be another story. Most of the airlines will put you on a flight with another carrier if they have no more flights of their own to a certain location when a flight is canceled. They trade seats that way all the time, or at least they used to. This could be the end of that.
At least you got that it was a joke, AC. At least that's something.
And taking the hard drive out of most laptops is more time-consuming and more conspicuous than hooking up a USB cable, yes? Kind of like my post said?
Thanks for the supporting argument about data hiding being one of the other cornerstones of security, too.
I think it's more likely the information being stored on hard drives that could be considered a matter of national security. The Mac was for a time banned from export and the Playstation 2 was banned from re-export from the US to certain countries. Information is power. As the G.I. Joe cartoons used to say, "knowing is half the battle". When you're busy spying on the world, knowing your info means bulk data storage. I guess the NSA could switch over entirely to SSDs, though.
;-)
/. a little more silly today. If I made some error somewhere, who cares? It's a nonsensical idea anyway.
;-)
Anyway, as for velocity and weight, velocity and acceleration do matter. I'm pretty sure a bale of hay is heavier than the 5.56mm round from an M16, but damn if I can fit it into the chamber, let alone 30 in the clip.
From here down is my contribution to making
Care to figure the linear velocity of the outside edge of something 3.5" across turning 15k rpm? Let's see, circumference is pi times diameter. 8.89 cm * pi is roughly 27.93cm. 418,931 cm per minute, give or take. 4189.3 m/minute. 69.8 m/s or 4.1893 km/minute. 251 or so km/hour. 156 or so miles/hour. 13,744 feet or so per second. That's over 4 times the muzzle velocity on an M16, M4, or K2 using NATO M855 rounds.
p = mv
Since momentum equals mass times velocity, a piece of a hard drive platter can weigh a fourth of what an M855 5.56mm round can and have the same momentum. An M855 round is 62 grains. That's 64.79891 milligrams * 62, or a bit less than 4 grams. So a piece of hard drive platter coming apart could do real damage at, say, 1 gram. A hard drive platter from a 3.5" drive is typically about half a US dry ounce (check scrap dealers or eBay), so say 15 grams on the slightly lighter side.
So about 1/15 of a drive platter breaking off from a 15k rpm drive at full spindle speed has more than enough momentum to seriously injure someone. It might even be deadly if it hits certain spots. Call it 1/7 of a 7200 rpm drive platter. And it doesn't have to stay in one piece after breaking apart from the rest of the platter, either. Flechette ammunition is know to be pretty effective against soft targets, like unarmored humans.
BTW, a round fired from a rifle is effective at quite a range, so even slower or a smaller piece would be dangerous at closer range, like under your desk next to your legs. Thankfully this kind of breaking apart shouldn't happen and the platters are inside a metal casing if it ever does. I've never heard of anyone trying to turn a hard drive into an actual weapon, but I'm sure it'd be more effective to throw one at someone than to try taking the casing off and scoring the platter. That's not to say it necessarily couldn't be done, but it sounds like a major waste of time compared to just putting some explosives inside the computer case. This is especially true since you can't control which direction the break-apart would fling stuff and it'd be difficult to make sure the platter came apart at the right spindle speed.
I imagine the taxes are for things like SkypeIn and SkypeOut where people are placing calls and generating revenue for Skype, not for Ventrilo. It's easy to track what you pay Skype, no matter whether you use their software or an OSS clone of it.
Besides, the summary title really should say "would" rather than "will". A bill being approved by a committee may never come to a vote by the full House if the Speaker doesn't like it. It may not pass that vote if it gets it. It may fail to be approved by the Senate, or their version may take out the amendment. The two houses of Congress must approve the same version of the bill for it to go to the President for signing. If they can't agree on the exclusions, they'll probably still agree to extend the tax moratorium. How long to extend it for is probably a hot topic for debate anyway, so look for that to change. Then, if the FCC, the White House staff and the President decide that the bill doesn't look good, the President can veto it. In order to override a veto two-thirds (66%) of both houses must vote to override the veto after it has already taken place. It can be more difficult to get votes for a veto override than the bill originally received, although that's not necessarily the case.
In short, a bill won't make any changes at all as a bill. It only would if it becomes a law. The Clerk of the House has a nice gentle intro on how bills become laws, and for anyone who hasn't seen or heard the School House Rock clip (or who hasn't for 20 years and doesn't remember it), there's a lyrics page and wave file for "I'm Just a Bill", and someone stuck the video clip (with low audio volume) on YouTube. It's all part of the Three-Ring Government, after all.
TFA doesn't say a thing about authentication, authorization, or accounting. How does this know who's checking the data? How does it decide to allow them? Where and how does it store the facts about who accessed what and when? The AAA process is a cornerstone of security -- computer or otherwise.
;-) But other systems require the drive to be taken out or the machine to be booted at least. It's a lot easier to make sure no one can boot your machine (startup password, bootloader password, no booting from CD etc.) than to make sure they can't hook up a USB cable to it. It's also a lot harder to catch someone hooking up a cable for a couple of minutes than tearing down your laptop and taking the drive (or sliding the drive out if it's easily removable like some are -- taking it to another system and hooking it up are still time-consuming and conspicuous).
Yes, I know physical security is paramount. A building needs more than one cornerstone, obviously.
BTW, the other cornerstones are secure design (again, in software/hardware or outside computers altogether) and data hiding (encryption, shredding paper, window shades, closed doors, setting proper permissions so that AAA actually matters, etc).
Those are features of newer 3D accelerated cards, though. It'll apply to other people, but probably not to the OP. If this is an older server-class machine with on-board graphics, it may well not have those features.
I still doubt the RAM is overly faulty (if it's even separate from system RAM) since most video memory is soldered in place. A random bit in an image flipping is one thing, but enough of those and it's a whole card or motherboard being RMAed and not just a chip. Reliability would still seem to be of some importance to the video device makers for that simple reason.
The new interface is a joke for performance compared to the old server-generated HTML one. Sure, they might be saving some hardware resources, but it's slow, and the message bodies are the bulk of the data anyway. The main transfers they cut out using JavaScript and dynamic loading seem to be updates to the message list when you delete a bunch of spam. That would be better handled by putting it in the spam folder where it belongs. OTOH, I often delete non-spam messages without reading them as I do subscribe to a few legit mailing lists from my Yahoo address but don't want to read every message.
The first 8 are a hit with me. I'm not sure about 9. I definitely don't think 10 is a big deal unless jumping out of the game engine is entirely disruptive.
An in-game tutorial is a good idea for lots of games. Sometimes an out-of-game tutorial as a separate program or perhaps a manual and web site make more sense.
For a FPS, stay in the game engine and allow the respwan from there. That's standard. If it's a memory or logic puzzle, then the player shouldn't be allowed extra time outside the level to look at the screen. In a RTS, your game is often over if you've lost, and there's no point to staying in. The choice to kibitz, if available, can be just as effective from a menu as from over the top of your headquarters exploding.
It feels much like many other "Top 10" lists. It feels like it started out strong and was rounded out to finish with mediocre follow-ons. That's a shame, because the title didn't even say anything about 10 things, and the subtitle/synopsis could have left that word out.
Another thing that's a bit silly, but understandable, is the console-specific tilt. I'd say the first 8 features they list make as much sense on the PC or any other platform, but they don't mention that.
I'm left wondering if a smaller motorcycle or a Vespa-style street scooter could have a designated cargo spot in a small plane without raising the weight too high. Lightweight plane? Fine, haul a lightweight ground vehicle with you.
I thought the Mandrake to Mandriva change was the combination of the words "Mandrake" and "Connectiva" after the two merged. In fact, lots of references to "Mandrake" are still found within the distribution. I guess I'd never heard about this lawsuit, but I found information quickly with a Google search after reading your post. It seems I was right about how the name came about, but that they changed at all was indeed prompted by the suit.
Internet News has the story from 2005 and the info is in Wikipedia's Mandriva article.
I also keep seeing references to an appeal, but never the results for it or any information about it continuing either. I'm wondering if Mandriva dropped the appeal after changing names. It might be silly to change back anyway, with all the disruption a name change can cause.
Thanks for your informative post. I'm a long-time Mandrake/Mandriva user and I didn't know this. I was just flipping through my collection of Linux distros the other night and I have 7.0, 8.0-8.2, 9.0-9.1, 10.0-10.1, 2006 Community, and 2008 One CD RC2. My 8.0 is even PowerPack retail box. I also use some other distros from time to time, but Mandriva seems to have the most consistent hardware detection across all the odd stuff on which I've tried installing Linux. It's a shame I missed this tidbit about the company behind the distro until now.