Have you checked fan prices? They're very cheap, in the region of $3 including the connector and the heat sink for a good one. I'd certainly pay $10 for a noticeably quieter fan, if it's at least as reliable as the current fans. The CPU fan is the noisiest part of some PCs.
Adults under 35 are, not surprisingly, more skilled at confronting tech problems. For example, 77 per cent of those surveyed age 18 to 34 are confident in their ability to operate their VCR, while 54 per cent of adults older than 35 said the same.
Actually I do find this surprising, because people are not as well educated as they used to be - at least here in Europe; maybe the US is different. As kids, my generation read books for entertainment; nowadays kids watch TV. In fact I'm so surprised that I question the methodology of the survey. What did people of different ages understand by "operate"? Set it to record a program on channel 45 from 11pm to 1am? Or just stick in a rented tape and press the button with the little triangle? If Johnny can't read the manual, maybe he doesn't even know that the other buttons do anything.
No administration (that can actually get elected) is going to gleefully attack them, because they fear the economic effects (yes, I realize that any negative effect would likely be short-lived
Monopolies are bad for the economy, period. It is not just a matter of money going to Microsoft or to someone else; a monopoly causes a misallocation of resources which reduces the total wealth generated in the economy. The details are a bit technical, but this is one of the few matters on which practically all economists are agreed.
For the Debian end user, getting stuff like OpenSSH has been very easy, contrary to what some posters have said. There is little or no benefit for most end users in this change; and a huge increase in trouble and inconvenience for some end users, who happen to be citizens or residents of a country like Cuba that the Bush regime doesn't currently like.
US crypto regulations are not only a nuisance, they're also volatile. "Things are getting better", we hear. Bullshit. Things are changing unpredictably. Few people (and certainly no software developers) have any idea what US policy will be next year.
The only sensible policy is to keep the crypto archive in a country that has never had export regulations for crypto software (there are many).
I realize that 1% of 10000 emails sent out is an acceptable return rate, but I wouldn't call it thriving.
Actually 1% is many times higher than the response rate a spammer needs. A response rate of one hundredth of 1%, i.e. one response out of 10000 recipients, is enough. Do the math. you send 20,000,000 emails at tiny cost (to you), and if you make $50 profit out of each person who responds and one person in 10,000 responds, you've just made 2,000 times $50 which is $100,000. Do it once a month and you're pulling in a million per year. That's why there's a lot of spam - because it's extremely profitable.
The fact that your spamming makes more than 99.9% of the people who receive it very angry, is completely irrelevant if all you're interested in is making money.
I get more phone spam than anything. They have ruined my phone totally. Ever day I gotta run downstairs to grab the phone and look that the number is 'out of area' before I Ignore it.
Get an answering machine, the kind that has a speaker so that you can hear your caller while he/she is being recorded - then you know whether it's someone you want to talk to or not. There are so many junk phone calls in the US nowadays that I don't understand why everybody doesn't have one of these. There is the additional micro-benefit that the junk caller pays for the call without getting to talk to you.
For most people who administer a host, this is not practical because firewalls only filter on the originating IP address and low-level protocol. Therefore, if you have one friend who uses Yahoo or AOL to send email, you have to accept all email from those services - you're basically filtering by ISP. Also if one of your friends sends you an email saying "Hi, I just changed my ISP", you'll filter out the unfamiliar ISP and probably never hear from that friend again.
A fact which may not be apparent to people aged under 55: the cleanliness of the environment in developed countries has improved enormously in the last 50 years. I grew up near an industrial city. The rivers were filthy, the air was filthy (you blew your nose, and what came out was black - sorry to be disgusting, but it's true). The word "smog" originally referred, I believe, to London fogs which were so thick that visibility was about one meter (cause was smoke from burning coal). Using the same word for the thin haze from automobile exhausts is a bit of a joke.
It was worth cleaning the place up, and it is worthwhile to continue to clean it up. But the trend over the last 50 years has been one of vast improvement. People who claim otherwise sound either dishonest or unobservant to me.
Americans are not renowned for knowing anything about other cultures. Guess whether cutting off all email communication with the continent where over half the world's people live, is going to improve that. Personally, if my ISP blocked mail from Asia I'd have to change ISP immediately, because I have a friend in Beijing, a friend in Tokyo, and a friend in Kuala Lumpur. Email is by far the most practical way of communicating with them regularly.
You can reduce spam by (1) getting a Yahoo (or similar) email address - they have a pretty good bulk-mail filter - and (2) changing your email address every couple of years.
At least this kind of thing should make it blindingly obvious to even the most blinkered redneck that all the old rubbish about America being "the land of the free", "we have more freedom here and now than anywhere else in the world" etc etc is just that, a pile of rubbish. Very, very few developed countries have laws as oppressive of the little guy as the DMCA.
Sadly, it's possible that the USA will use its huge economic power to diminish freedom for others, by "persuading" other governments to pass DMCA-like laws. It has a very dirty history of doing such things.
I happen to live in a country where it's possible to go the ticket counter at an airport, ask to buy a ticket to go halfway around the world, and pay for it in cash, without being questioned. You can't do that in the US, and if the current Washington regime ever fulfils its dream of ruling the entire planet, no doubt that measure of privacy would be wiped out everywhere.
I'm surprised that nobody has expressed outrage at the appalling conditions in which accused (not convicted) people are detained.
Whatever the law says, the practical position in the USA appears to be:
Being accused of a crime by Law Enforcement is held to justify severe punishment. In this case, a 145-pound defendant was incarcerated, wearing a T-shirt, in an inadequately heated facility. His attorney told the court that every time she went to visit him, he was shivering. On later visits he evidently had a cold (surprise). His attorney also raises the possibility that he will be held with violent convicts and may well suffer violence from other prisoners. This is not seriously contested, it's routine. The rednecks always say, "Yeah, tough, that's part of the punishment." Like, it's part of the punishment for someone who has never committed a violent crime, to be beaten and/or raped by thugs, and it's part of the "punishment" for violent thugs, to get the opportunity to beat up 145-pound kids.
This guy has never been convicted of anything more serious than "failing to disperse".
Where's the justification for treating him the way he has been treated? Is this what American justice comes down to?
Wasn't legal then either. Thoreau got tossed in jail for non-payment of taxes
The tax he was jailed for not paying was not a modern property tax (i.e. a substantial amount of money, on the order of 2% of the market value of a house), it was a poll tax. The poll tax was levied on everyone at a flat rate; I don't know what the amount was in Massachusetts in the 1840s, but it was a trivial amount, that even the poorest citizen could easily pay. Having to pay the poll tax was not something that would have prevented Thoreau from living the life he describes in Walden. His refusal to pay the poll tax had nothing to do with inability to pay, it was a protest against the legality of slavery. By the way, Walden and Thoreau's essay Civil Disobedience (in which he discusses the matter of his refusal to pay the poll tax) are far more worth reading than the URL you gave. They're available from Amazon, or from second-hand bookstores.
In the original interview, he parrots phrases like:
We are - even after 9/11 - toweringly safer and freer than any other people in history.
...
no government ever knew more about its people than ours does - and no people have ever been so free.
Obviously he has never lived outside the USA for any significant length of time, and obviously he doesn't know much history.
Even in the United States in the last couple of centuries, some people at some times were freer than they are now. Could Thoreau have done what he describes in Walden today? Of course not - or at least, not legally. He had no means to pay the property taxes that would be levied on his "house in the woods".
Why don't you go to NYC, visit a firestation, and explain to the (surviving) firemen how the US doesn't face any serious external threats.
Why don't you go to NYC, visit a firestation, and explain how all those billions spent on the NSA did such a great job preventing the events that killed the firemen?
Alternatively you could think before posting replies... nah...
National security be damned, this is echelon for political gain. Is it happening anywhere else?
The normal use of "intelligence services" et al in peacetime is to further the aims of the politicians in power, and hide things from citizens. It should really be obvious that Australia faces no serious external threats. Its spying agencies could be disbanded without any adverse effect on Australians. Pretty much the same is true of the US. The NSA absorbs a staggering amount of resources, and since the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has served little purpose.
Could someone summarize what Immersion's patent really covers?
Prior use of force feedback in computer control systems goes back at least 35 years. In the 1970s, CERN developed a control system for a synchrotron which used it. The operator could control many currents and voltages using a small number of knobs (which you turned like volume controls). First you had to tell the computer to assign a knob to the desired quantity to be controlled, then you twiddled the knob.
Where the force feedback came in, was that the control system made the knob "stiffer" to turn if you were using it to control a large amount of current (hundreds of amperes) than if you were using it to control tiny currents (milliamperes). This was found to reduce the likelihood of damaging blunders.
I don't understand why this nasty little smear got modded up. Prostitutes supply a service that people want and are willing to pay for. They do no harm to anybody, except possibly to the bigots who just can't stand the thought that somebody, somewhere, might be having a good time.
Putting them into the same category as the telemarketer scum who interrupt my meals and tie up my phone line is despicable.
This whole story is BS. No crackdown on spam is intended or proposed. Only a crackdown on "deceptive" spam. So instead of getting 50 emails a day which I delete without reading, I will get 50 "non-deceptive" emails a day which I will delete without reading. They still take space on my storage media, they still cost me time to delete. Absolutely no change from the present situation.
He deserved and got a slap on the wrist. Not a bad settlement all round
I find this kind of comment distasteful and disturbing. For something that did no damage of any kind to anyone or anything, he was fined $2100 and sentenced to 80 hours of community service, that's 80 hours deprivation of his freedom. There are people convicted of theft who get much lower sentences.
My personal reaction is that somebody who describes this or a similar sentence as a "slap on the wrist" should be convicted of insensitivity and sentenced to exactly the same penalty. That might give them a sense of proportion.
The restrictions that MSFT might well make on open source use of technology they own the patents to would be requiring reciprocal licenses and prohibiting what they call viral licenses
Yet another Microsoft fan blathering about "viral licenses" - why did this rant get modded up?
"Viral license" is Microsoft-speak for the standard GPL license, which makes the perfectly reasonable provision that if you use code which the community has given to you, you have to contribute any changes you make back to the community, if you distribute the result. Without that provision, anyone who tries to contribute source code to the community can turn out to be working (unpaid of course) for Microsoft. Microsoft will take your code, make some changes, and use it in a product that you cannot legally copy. This is not paranoia, this is reality - MS did it with TCP/IP implementations. What they have done with Kerberos implementations is even worse.
the early idea behind Apple was revolutionary -- make computing accessible to everyone
"Accessible" primarily means "affordable", and that has never been an Apple strength since the introduction of the Lisa. The Mac has always cost more than an Intel/AMD box of similar power, and that's why it has a tiny market share. Why is that so difficult to understand?
I do believe the use of these houses is a Good Thing.... First of all, it provides a way to distribute money from the US to countries that have a lower standard of living
This comment reveals a major misunderstanding of economics. Reallocating work to where it can be done at lower cost does not merely re-distribute wealth. It creates wealth. Economics is not a zero-sum game. This seems to be a difficult concept for most people to grasp.
"For mission-critical functions, Linux still needs to catch up... "
Gartner's comment was carelessly worded, but the substance is correct. The Linux desktop experience does have some catching-up to do. By the way, I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Linux user and advocate, but we won't succeed by fooling ourselves.
Still, I think it's great that Linux (for whatever reason) is doing well in China. It means more users to tell us what needs fixing... and more smart developers to help us fix it.
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Have you checked fan prices? They're very cheap, in the region of $3 including the connector and the heat sink for a good one. I'd certainly pay $10 for a noticeably quieter fan, if it's at least as reliable as the current fans. The CPU fan is the noisiest part of some PCs.
I want a PDA with good communications, but I'm not going to buy one that forces me to buy Micros**t software along with it.
Adults under 35 are, not surprisingly, more skilled at confronting tech problems. For example, 77 per cent of those surveyed age 18 to 34 are confident in their ability to operate their VCR, while 54 per cent of adults older than 35 said the same.
Actually I do find this surprising, because people are not as well educated as they used to be - at least here in Europe; maybe the US is different. As kids, my generation read books for entertainment; nowadays kids watch TV. In fact I'm so surprised that I question the methodology of the survey. What did people of different ages understand by "operate"? Set it to record a program on channel 45 from 11pm to 1am? Or just stick in a rented tape and press the button with the little triangle? If Johnny can't read the manual, maybe he doesn't even know that the other buttons do anything.
No administration (that can actually get elected) is going to gleefully attack them, because they fear the economic effects (yes, I realize that any negative effect would likely be short-lived
Monopolies are bad for the economy, period. It is not just a matter of money going to Microsoft or to someone else; a monopoly causes a misallocation of resources which reduces the total wealth generated in the economy. The details are a bit technical, but this is one of the few matters on which practically all economists are agreed.
For the Debian end user, getting stuff like OpenSSH has been very easy, contrary to what some posters have said. There is little or no benefit for most end users in this change; and a huge increase in trouble and inconvenience for some end users, who happen to be citizens or residents of a country like Cuba that the Bush regime doesn't currently like.
US crypto regulations are not only a nuisance, they're also volatile. "Things are getting better", we hear. Bullshit. Things are changing unpredictably. Few people (and certainly no software developers) have any idea what US policy will be next year.
The only sensible policy is to keep the crypto archive in a country that has never had export regulations for crypto software (there are many).
I realize that 1% of 10000 emails sent out is an acceptable return rate, but I wouldn't call it thriving.
Actually 1% is many times higher than the response rate a spammer needs. A response rate of one hundredth of 1%, i.e. one response out of 10000 recipients, is enough. Do the math. you send 20,000,000 emails at tiny cost (to you), and if you make $50 profit out of each person who responds and one person in 10,000 responds, you've just made 2,000 times $50 which is $100,000. Do it once a month and you're pulling in a million per year. That's why there's a lot of spam - because it's extremely profitable.
The fact that your spamming makes more than 99.9% of the people who receive it very angry, is completely irrelevant if all you're interested in is making money.
I get more phone spam than anything. They have ruined my phone totally. Ever day I gotta run downstairs to grab the phone and look that the number is 'out of area' before I Ignore it.
Get an answering machine, the kind that has a speaker so that you can hear your caller while he/she is being recorded - then you know whether it's someone you want to talk to or not. There are so many junk phone calls in the US nowadays that I don't understand why everybody doesn't have one of these. There is the additional micro-benefit that the junk caller pays for the call without getting to talk to you.
For most people who administer a host, this is not practical because firewalls only filter on the originating IP address and low-level protocol. Therefore, if you have one friend who uses Yahoo or AOL to send email, you have to accept all email from those services - you're basically filtering by ISP. Also if one of your friends sends you an email saying "Hi, I just changed my ISP", you'll filter out the unfamiliar ISP and probably never hear from that friend again.
A fact which may not be apparent to people aged under 55: the cleanliness of the environment in developed countries has improved enormously in the last 50 years. I grew up near an industrial city. The rivers were filthy, the air was filthy (you blew your nose, and what came out was black - sorry to be disgusting, but it's true). The word "smog" originally referred, I believe, to London fogs which were so thick that visibility was about one meter (cause was smoke from burning coal). Using the same word for the thin haze from automobile exhausts is a bit of a joke.
It was worth cleaning the place up, and it is worthwhile to continue to clean it up. But the trend over the last 50 years has been one of vast improvement. People who claim otherwise sound either dishonest or unobservant to me.
Americans are not renowned for knowing anything about other cultures. Guess whether cutting off all email communication with the continent where over half the world's people live, is going to improve that.
Personally, if my ISP blocked mail from Asia I'd have to change ISP immediately, because I have a friend in Beijing, a friend in Tokyo, and a friend in Kuala Lumpur. Email is by far the most practical way of communicating with them regularly.
You can reduce spam by (1) getting a Yahoo (or similar) email address - they have a pretty good bulk-mail filter - and (2) changing your email address every couple of years.
At least this kind of thing should make it blindingly obvious to even the most blinkered redneck that all the old rubbish about America being "the land of the free", "we have more freedom here and now than anywhere else in the world" etc etc is just that, a pile of rubbish. Very, very few developed countries have laws as oppressive of the little guy as the DMCA.
Sadly, it's possible that the USA will use its huge economic power to diminish freedom for others, by "persuading" other governments to pass DMCA-like laws. It has a very dirty history of doing such things.
I happen to live in a country where it's possible to go the ticket counter at an airport, ask to buy a ticket to go halfway around the world, and pay for it in cash, without being questioned. You can't do that in the US, and if the current Washington regime ever fulfils its dream of ruling the entire planet, no doubt that measure of privacy would be wiped out everywhere.
I'm surprised that nobody has expressed outrage at the appalling conditions in which accused (not convicted) people are detained.
Whatever the law says, the practical position in the USA appears to be:
Being accused of a crime by Law Enforcement is held to justify severe punishment. In this case, a 145-pound defendant was incarcerated, wearing a T-shirt, in an inadequately heated facility. His attorney told the court that every time she went to visit him, he was shivering. On later visits he evidently had a cold (surprise). His attorney also raises the possibility that he will be held with violent convicts and may well suffer violence from other prisoners. This is not seriously contested, it's routine. The rednecks always say, "Yeah, tough, that's part of the punishment." Like, it's part of the punishment for someone who has never committed a violent crime, to be beaten and/or raped by thugs, and it's part of the "punishment" for violent thugs, to get the opportunity to beat up 145-pound kids.
This guy has never been convicted of anything more serious than "failing to disperse".
Where's the justification for treating him the way he has been treated? Is this what American justice comes down to?
Wasn't legal then either. Thoreau got tossed in jail for non-payment of taxes
The tax he was jailed for not paying was not a modern property tax (i.e. a substantial amount of money, on the order of 2% of the market value of a house), it was a poll tax. The poll tax was levied on everyone at a flat rate; I don't know what the amount was in Massachusetts in the 1840s, but it was a trivial amount, that even the poorest citizen could easily pay. Having to pay the poll tax was not something that would have prevented Thoreau from living the life he describes in Walden. His refusal to pay the poll tax had nothing to do with inability to pay, it was a protest against the legality of slavery. By the way, Walden and Thoreau's essay Civil Disobedience (in which he discusses the matter of his refusal to pay the poll tax) are far more worth reading than the URL you gave. They're available from Amazon, or from second-hand bookstores.
In the original interview, he parrots phrases like:
We are - even after 9/11 - toweringly safer and freer than any other people in history.
...
no government ever knew more about its people than ours does - and no people have ever been so free.
Obviously he has never lived outside the USA for any significant length of time, and obviously he doesn't know much history.
Even in the United States in the last couple of centuries, some people at some times were freer than they are now. Could Thoreau have done what he describes in Walden today? Of course not - or at least, not legally. He had no means to pay the property taxes that would be levied on his "house in the woods".
What a load of crap.
... nah ...
Why don't you go to NYC, visit a firestation, and explain to the (surviving) firemen how the US doesn't face any serious external threats.
Why don't you go to NYC, visit a firestation, and explain how all those billions spent on the NSA did such a great job preventing the events that killed the firemen?
Alternatively you could think before posting replies
I think it's a bad idea to host a service like Sourceforge in a country which has laws like the DMCA.
National security be damned, this is echelon for political gain. Is it happening anywhere else?
The normal use of "intelligence services" et al in peacetime is to further the aims of the politicians in power, and hide things from citizens. It should really be obvious that Australia faces no serious external threats. Its spying agencies could be disbanded without any adverse effect on Australians. Pretty much the same is true of the US. The NSA absorbs a staggering amount of resources, and since the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has served little purpose.
Could someone summarize what Immersion's patent really covers?
Prior use of force feedback in computer control systems goes back at least 35 years. In the 1970s, CERN developed a control system for a synchrotron which used it. The operator could control many currents and voltages using a small number of knobs (which you turned like volume controls). First you had to tell the computer to assign a knob to the desired quantity to be controlled, then you twiddled the knob.
Where the force feedback came in, was that the control system made the knob "stiffer" to turn if you were using it to control a large amount of current (hundreds of amperes) than if you were using it to control tiny currents (milliamperes). This was found to reduce the likelihood of damaging blunders.
I don't understand why this nasty little smear got modded up. Prostitutes supply a service that people want and are willing to pay for. They do no harm to anybody, except possibly to the bigots who just can't stand the thought that somebody, somewhere, might be having a good time.
Putting them into the same category as the telemarketer scum who interrupt my meals and tie up my phone line is despicable.
This whole story is BS. No crackdown on spam is intended or proposed. Only a crackdown on "deceptive" spam. So instead of getting 50 emails a day which I delete without reading, I will get 50 "non-deceptive" emails a day which I will delete without reading. They still take space on my storage media, they still cost me time to delete. Absolutely no change from the present situation.
He deserved and got a slap on the wrist. Not a bad settlement all round
I find this kind of comment distasteful and disturbing. For something that did no damage of any kind to anyone or anything, he was fined $2100 and sentenced to 80 hours of community service, that's 80 hours deprivation of his freedom. There are people convicted of theft who get much lower sentences.
My personal reaction is that somebody who describes this or a similar sentence as a "slap on the wrist" should be convicted of insensitivity and sentenced to exactly the same penalty. That might give them a sense of proportion.
The restrictions that MSFT might well make on open source use of technology they own the patents to would be requiring reciprocal licenses and prohibiting what they call viral licenses
Yet another Microsoft fan blathering about "viral licenses" - why did this rant get modded up?
"Viral license" is Microsoft-speak for the standard GPL license, which makes the perfectly reasonable provision that if you use code which the community has given to you, you have to contribute any changes you make back to the community, if you distribute the result. Without that provision, anyone who tries to contribute source code to the community can turn out to be working (unpaid of course) for Microsoft. Microsoft will take your code, make some changes, and use it in a product that you cannot legally copy. This is not paranoia, this is reality - MS did it with TCP/IP implementations. What they have done with Kerberos implementations is even worse.
the early idea behind Apple was revolutionary -- make computing accessible to everyone
"Accessible" primarily means "affordable", and that has never been an Apple strength since the introduction of the Lisa. The Mac has always cost more than an Intel/AMD box of similar power, and that's why it has a tiny market share. Why is that so difficult to understand?
I do believe the use of these houses is a Good Thing.... First of all, it provides a way to distribute money from the US to countries that have a lower standard of living
This comment reveals a major misunderstanding of economics. Reallocating work to where it can be done at lower cost does not merely re-distribute wealth. It creates wealth. Economics is not a zero-sum game. This seems to be a difficult concept for most people to grasp.
"For mission-critical functions, Linux still needs to catch up... "
... and more smart developers to help us fix it.
Gartner's comment was carelessly worded, but the substance is correct. The Linux desktop experience does have some catching-up to do.
By the way, I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Linux user and advocate, but we won't succeed by fooling ourselves.
Still, I think it's great that Linux (for whatever reason) is doing well in China. It means more users to tell us what needs fixing