Stromlo and other optical observatories would not have to move were it not for the light haze.
Many universities that are at least 50 years old have an observatory or two downtown or near the downtown. These generally predate modern, inefficient, poorly arranged outdoor lighting. It's a shame that so much of the electricity bought to light the streets ends up lighting the sky instead.
Eliminating waste light would not only decrease costs, but restore the usefulness of these observatories. Then there are the quality of life issues form being able to see the stars. Also the stars and other celestial bodies have been important to many cultures and, in some cases, sacred.
Three with one stone -- or BB-pellet;) -- cost savings/efficiency, quality of life, culture.
However, I prefer LCD screens for reading text. The square pixels and sharp edges lend themselves to that sort of purpose.
LCDs are better for reading text. CRTs quickly give you eyestrain. The CRT image aslo shakes, even if only slightly on the better models. When LCD producers have had time to put as much time, effort and funding into color as the CRTs manufactures, then there will be no need to keep the CRTs around.
Right now, the best compromise is to have dual-head: one CRT for sensitive color work, one LCD for the other work.
Rumors like this are often a smoke screen to misdirect attention away from something that would be shameful when viewed under the light of day or to take attention away from competitors. Companies and politicians all use the technique -- look what slide through the U.S. while the press was arguing about whether or not Clinton got knob from Monica -- or what slide through each time Bush Sr. sent Quayle out to spell tomato[e]|potato[e]
Look elsewhere. See what's happening with Apple, Linux, BSD, QNX, Sun, IBM, and so on. Or check what's going on abroad.
The article also glossed over the introduction of Richard Stallman, skipping his contributions to computer science, culture and society. In addition to his contributions with Emacs and other software, his drafting the GNU General Public License (GPL), he is the recipient of the Takeda Award for Techno-Entrepreneurial Achievement for Social/Economic Well-Being and the recipient of a fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (aka a "genius grant.") Calling him just an "American programmer" would be like calling Steve Jobs an "American interested in computers".
Stallman doesn't wear a tie. Get over it already.
However, more importantly, The Financial Times and many others seem to intentionally obfuscate or misinform their readers regarding the Freedom part of the GPL. Peddling misinformation does a heavy disservice to any that might be trying to make an informed decision regarding their IT strategies.
Hate to say this, but most users will do whatever you tell them to. You start off with a normal http page and then say something like "After you click, you'll be asked to accept a certificate, click yes to continue" and they will.
It certainly looks like most users just say "Yo" and do it. Look at the spread of the worm with a click-through EULA. There ought to be plenty of data there.
Until there is a written, legally binding agreement or guarantee that Mono is free from encumbering patents, it's best to keep at a great distance. Or else you risk ending up with far worse problems than we had with the GIF format when UNISYS decided to uncloak their patents. With Mono, Microsoft would be holding the leash. Then again, this is a company that has a hideous track record with binding agreements.
It would seem to me that the whole reason for.Net was to port vendor lock-in to new platforms in case Windows died and also to try to compete with Java. Now that Microsoft is being forced to stop distributing a sabotaged variant of Java and to instead distribute Java as specified in the original contract, Java is even more useful.
Does anyone know the name for the logical fallacy of incorrectly attributing a logical fallacy to an argument as a counter argument?
Many university and highschool philosophy classes have online material covering all manner of logical fallacy. Logical fallacies are common enough in both advertising and astroturfing that everyone working in IT has seen them.
Or maybe Microsoft has to include Java in order to prolong their stay in the market -- either MS-Windows is dropping MS-.Net or MS-.Net is dropping MS-Windows.
"More explosions: From Wipro's rooftop, you can see a string of holes blown out of farmland nearby. Wipro is excavating the foundation for an 8-acre third phase of its Electronic City facility,..."
What ever happened to distance independent work / telecommuting, and so on? That was the Next Big Thing(tm) in the 1990's. Instead, part of this globalization trend seems to be to turn the best farmland into the best business parks. In the U.S., the asphalt of Chicago covers some of the richest farm land in the nation. Places like Sweden have be enthusiasticly paving the Mälar river valley and the plains of Scania. Germany and most other countries are doing the same? It's not possible for every country to import food and certainly not economically feasible (yet) for India to think about it.
It would be more effective to knock down the Indian variants of the late Cabrini Green -- urban renewal would be good for the people living in the city, and it would keep the programmers closer to the cafés.
Exposing Microsoft's code to scrutiny may just put them out of business. Coders may take a look at it and say, "we can't do anything with this junk."
On the other hand, since those allowed access to the code probably had to sign the NDA-from-Hell, the schools, agencies, companies and individuals involved would probably be sued six ways from Sunday if they ever even though about touching competitor's code, specifically Linux. This risk, and a probably one based on past behaviour, could generate a rousing yawn similar to the original shared source announcement.
Or it is possible that Microsoft trying to line up more victims for the Sendo treatment.
Why? Because most end users are cheap. Imho they don't care what operating system they're using, as long as they can get it to do what they need: writing, finances, websurfing, etc. Free software is rapidly improving, and it'll soon be (if it isn't already) usable enough that even Aunt Betty will balk at paying hundreds of dollars extra for Windows and Office.
MS-Windows and MS-Office currently bring in about 5 times what they would in a free market due to monopoly rents. Each desktop on Linux or OS X counts as one for Linux or OS X, but MS-Windows currently counts as 5 economically. As the monopoly erodes, Microsoft will only be able to overcharge 4 times, then 3, then 2.
The rate at which Free and Open Source desktop applications, suggest that unless business models change or vendor lock-in can be ported over to.NET, Microsoft's ability to charge may diminish non-linearly.
It would be interesting to know the right math to predict when the tipping effect will occur.
Which is a clear indication that the game is already lost.
Other, heavier, indications that Microsoft is out of the race for good are the prohibition against publishing benchmark results and that they seem to be running heavy losses in except for the two products which the collect monopoly rents on...
The Grateful Dead let fans copy and swap recordings as much as they like. In terms of both popularity and money, they were quite successful. Being heard is the essence of music performace and builds your fan base. The larger the better/profitable.
I beg to differ. The CNN article looks terribly biased.
Why is there no mention of the intensive lobbying effort even needed to bring the case to trial?
Also, if one is simply going to copy DVDs, there's no reason to decrypt them, just copy the bit stream from one disc to another.
DeCSS seems to be about viewing or decrypting DVDs. If decrypting, in my ignorance of DVDs, is completely unnecessary when making duplicate DVDs then the core of the case is about control of the platform on which the DVDs are viewed.
Well not in this case. It did take a few months of pressure from the MPAA on the Norwegian government to first agree to try to charge with something, anything, and second to find something to charge him with.
Just out of interest has anyone ever tried the Mandrake or Redhat graphical installers run on a low spec machine?
I've tried RedHat 8.0 on a Pentium 133 w/88MB of RAM. The graphical installer does not work, there's not enough resources. However, the text based install works just fine.
I've also used Debian 3.0. I'll try the new installer when I get a chance this week. The old install is not as hard as everyone makes it out to be, just skip tasksel and dselect.
Getting the right disk / CD, however, is the hard part of the install process. Maybe this new installer will fix that.
"We know that (an attack) could bring down the network of this country very quickly. Once you're on the network, it doesn't matter where you got in."
Sounds like more of a case to freeze what's left of Microsoft's assets and liquidate. Obviously everyone should be running OpenBSD on their workstations, not just in their server rooms.
I use Debian on several of my servers and once I get hold of the right disc/CD the install goes much faster and easily than any other Linux distro. It's also much very much faster and easier than any of the Windows distros I used to have to deal with. Granted OS X is easier to install, but not faster.
I highly recommend Debian for servers, especially when stability and ease of maintenance is called for.
That said, I've not tried Debian on the workstation. For that I use OS X or RedHat or Mandrake. All three of which install very painlessly and automatically (granted not on the same architecture).
Longhorn. vaporware or segue to Palladium lockin
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· Score: 2
Longhorn could just be vaporware a la Win95. The DOS market had just about played itself out and then, like now, Microsoft was far behind the technology of potential competitors.
1. Stop fixing win95 problems when they pop up... Eventually retire the OS
2. Use those billions in the bank to pay a few companies to make software that requires features in newer versions of windows, i.e., not backwards-compatible with win98/ME any more.
You're right on point 1, but Win95/98 gets the axe already this year, 31 Dec 2002. WinNT 3.5x also gets axed at the same time. MS-Windows 98, 98SE, and MS-Windows NT 4.x have a 6 month stay. The timing of all this does look like MS is tryng to box customers into Palladium.
IANAA (I am not an auditor), but point 2 seems an issue for alt.folklore.urban. Microsoft's lost money on every thing but MS-Windows and MS-Office. In the past, Microsoft has has a more than $10 billion discrepancy between the initial accounting report and what they actually lost. Since they've been dropping projects left and right and, at the risk of alienating customers and reducing future sales, sent the Business Software Alliance out to collect extra money. The new license 6.0 was no market winner either. All those actions look like a desparate scamble for cash.
Even MBAs are starting to realize the value of interoperability and that's where Microsoft is historically (and legally) weakest.
Plus on the desktop, OS X beats Windows on ease of use and flexibility and has the apps needed today. The ease of use for the end user, low technical maintenance overhead, and greater security saves support staff. On the server side, even the Microsoft execs admit publicly their products can't compete on price, security, or stability with the regular server OS's like BSD, GNU/Linux, Solaris, QNX, & co.
Workstation != Server/infrastructure
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One of the issues spun these days is Workstation versus server. People have been using and relying on Free Software and Open Source Software for decades (long before either those names). They're still doing it, especially for mission critical services.
However, the enormous ocean of novice users created in the late 1990's is not producing more than a trickle of learned users. These novices are easy marks for sales teams because of their inability to tell the difference between workstations and infrastructure.
Don't forget the MS balance sheet that was released a month or so ago - it showed their leading source of revenue was Windows, followed by Office. Everything else was negligible or lost money.
Microsoft can probably smell the gradual decline of both Windows and Office as their desktop monopoly diminishes. Thus the push for.NET and the dropping of the earlier, Java-supporting Windows versions.
Also, in August, the SEC told Microsoft that it had to start telling the truth about the functionality and security of MS-Passport. For some reason, we haven't heard about MS-Passport lately. Funny that.
If you don't want to go as far as rolling your own distro, then Debian is quite nice. Just skip dselect and tasksel and you have the bare bones. Add what you need/want in seconds with Apt-get.
Another advantage is the wide number of platforms it's available for.
Some years ago two guys built a full scale trebuchet big enough to launch VW beetles, dead cows. After launching nearly anything and everything they or anyone they knew could think of, they got bore and were looking to sell it to a new home. Like I said, that was a few years ago, so maybe it's on the market again.
Me, I'd like to get some leaf springs and javelins and make a whomping big crossbow.
Slashdot Mirror
Either way the real difficulty is to discern real opinions from rented ones and real citizens from astroturfers.
Many universities that are at least 50 years old have an observatory or two downtown or near the downtown. These generally predate modern, inefficient, poorly arranged outdoor lighting. It's a shame that so much of the electricity bought to light the streets ends up lighting the sky instead.
Eliminating waste light would not only decrease costs, but restore the usefulness of these observatories. Then there are the quality of life issues form being able to see the stars. Also the stars and other celestial bodies have been important to many cultures and, in some cases, sacred.
Three with one stone -- or BB-pellet ;) -- cost savings/efficiency, quality of life, culture.
However, I prefer LCD screens for reading text. The square pixels and sharp edges lend themselves to that sort of purpose.
LCDs are better for reading text. CRTs quickly give you eyestrain. The CRT image aslo shakes, even if only slightly on the better models. When LCD producers have had time to put as much time, effort and funding into color as the CRTs manufactures, then there will be no need to keep the CRTs around.Right now, the best compromise is to have dual-head: one CRT for sensitive color work, one LCD for the other work.
Look elsewhere. See what's happening with Apple, Linux, BSD, QNX, Sun, IBM, and so on. Or check what's going on abroad.
Stallman doesn't wear a tie. Get over it already.
However, more importantly, The Financial Times and many others seem to intentionally obfuscate or misinform their readers regarding the Freedom part of the GPL. Peddling misinformation does a heavy disservice to any that might be trying to make an informed decision regarding their IT strategies.
It would seem to me that the whole reason for .Net was to port vendor lock-in to new platforms in case Windows died and also to try to compete with Java. Now that Microsoft is being forced to stop distributing a sabotaged variant of Java and to instead distribute Java as specified in the original contract, Java is even more useful.
Does anyone know the name for the logical fallacy of incorrectly attributing a logical fallacy to an argument as a counter argument?
Many university and highschool philosophy classes have online material covering all manner of logical fallacy. Logical fallacies are common enough in both advertising and astroturfing that everyone working in IT has seen them.Or maybe Microsoft has to include Java in order to prolong their stay in the market -- either MS-Windows is dropping MS-.Net or MS-.Net is dropping MS-Windows.
What ever happened to distance independent work / telecommuting, and so on? That was the Next Big Thing(tm) in the 1990's. Instead, part of this globalization trend seems to be to turn the best farmland into the best business parks. In the U.S., the asphalt of Chicago covers some of the richest farm land in the nation. Places like Sweden have be enthusiasticly paving the Mälar river valley and the plains of Scania. Germany and most other countries are doing the same? It's not possible for every country to import food and certainly not economically feasible (yet) for India to think about it.
It would be more effective to knock down the Indian variants of the late Cabrini Green -- urban renewal would be good for the people living in the city, and it would keep the programmers closer to the cafés.
On the other hand, since those allowed access to the code probably had to sign the NDA-from-Hell, the schools, agencies, companies and individuals involved would probably be sued six ways from Sunday if they ever even though about touching competitor's code, specifically Linux. This risk, and a probably one based on past behaviour, could generate a rousing yawn similar to the original shared source announcement.
Or it is possible that Microsoft trying to line up more victims for the Sendo treatment.
The rate at which Free and Open Source desktop applications, suggest that unless business models change or vendor lock-in can be ported over to .NET, Microsoft's ability to charge may diminish non-linearly.
It would be interesting to know the right math to predict when the tipping effect will occur.
Which is a clear indication that the game is already lost.
Other, heavier, indications that Microsoft is out of the race for good are the prohibition against publishing benchmark results and that they seem to be running heavy losses in except for the two products which the collect monopoly rents on...The Grateful Dead let fans copy and swap recordings as much as they like. In terms of both popularity and money, they were quite successful. Being heard is the essence of music performace and builds your fan base. The larger the better/profitable.
Also, if one is simply going to copy DVDs, there's no reason to decrypt them, just copy the bit stream from one disc to another.
DeCSS seems to be about viewing or decrypting DVDs. If decrypting, in my ignorance of DVDs, is completely unnecessary when making duplicate DVDs then the core of the case is about control of the platform on which the DVDs are viewed.
Well not in this case. It did take a few months of pressure from the MPAA on the Norwegian government to first agree to try to charge with something, anything, and second to find something to charge him with.
Just out of interest has anyone ever tried the Mandrake or Redhat graphical installers run on a low spec machine?
I've tried RedHat 8.0 on a Pentium 133 w/88MB of RAM. The graphical installer does not work, there's not enough resources. However, the text based install works just fine.I've also used Debian 3.0. I'll try the new installer when I get a chance this week. The old install is not as hard as everyone makes it out to be, just skip tasksel and dselect.
Getting the right disk / CD, however, is the hard part of the install process. Maybe this new installer will fix that.
"We know that (an attack) could bring down the network of this country very quickly. Once you're on the network, it doesn't matter where you got in."
Sounds like more of a case to freeze what's left of Microsoft's assets and liquidate. Obviously everyone should be running OpenBSD on their workstations, not just in their server rooms.Rectionary measures like these are expensive and inneffective, more theatrical than functional.
I highly recommend Debian for servers, especially when stability and ease of maintenance is called for.
That said, I've not tried Debian on the workstation. For that I use OS X or RedHat or Mandrake. All three of which install very painlessly and automatically (granted not on the same architecture).
IANAA (I am not an auditor), but point 2 seems an issue for alt.folklore.urban. Microsoft's lost money on every thing but MS-Windows and MS-Office. In the past, Microsoft has has a more than $10 billion discrepancy between the initial accounting report and what they actually lost. Since they've been dropping projects left and right and, at the risk of alienating customers and reducing future sales, sent the Business Software Alliance out to collect extra money. The new license 6.0 was no market winner either. All those actions look like a desparate scamble for cash.
Even MBAs are starting to realize the value of interoperability and that's where Microsoft is historically (and legally) weakest.
Plus on the desktop, OS X beats Windows on ease of use and flexibility and has the apps needed today. The ease of use for the end user, low technical maintenance overhead, and greater security saves support staff. On the server side, even the Microsoft execs admit publicly their products can't compete on price, security, or stability with the regular server OS's like BSD, GNU/Linux, Solaris, QNX, & co.
However, the enormous ocean of novice users created in the late 1990's is not producing more than a trickle of learned users. These novices are easy marks for sales teams because of their inability to tell the difference between workstations and infrastructure.
Don't forget the MS balance sheet that was released a month or so ago - it showed their leading source of revenue was Windows, followed by Office. Everything else was negligible or lost money.
Microsoft can probably smell the gradual decline of both Windows and Office as their desktop monopoly diminishes. Thus the push forAlso, in August, the SEC told Microsoft that it had to start telling the truth about the functionality and security of MS-Passport. For some reason, we haven't heard about MS-Passport lately. Funny that.
Another advantage is the wide number of platforms it's available for.
Some years ago two guys built a full scale trebuchet big enough to launch VW beetles, dead cows. After launching nearly anything and everything they or anyone they knew could think of, they got bore and were looking to sell it to a new home. Like I said, that was a few years ago, so maybe it's on the market again.
Me, I'd like to get some leaf springs and javelins and make a whomping big crossbow.