I realize it is popular Slashdot dogmatism to insist that filesharing doesn't harm CD sales, and this may be true now, but what about in the future as bandwidth increases?? The RIAA might be evil, but they are not completely stupid. Right now, downloading songs one by one and tracking down every song of an album is time-consuming. But the RIAA realize that it is only a matter of time until it is faster and more convenient to download an entire album then go to a music store. When that time comes, their current business model will be borked. Other than distribution, the only service the record companies provide is marketing. When P2P distribution beats them out, they will die. Bands don't need a record company to finance the making of their album (with ever-cheaper home recording equipment). They can distribute music by themselves. So the only value the record company gives the band is marketing (and this doesn't add any value for the listener). So the RIAA realizes that in the long-term, they could be fucked. They might be able to retain the business of folks willing to listen to pap fed to them by marketing reps, but that is about it. (Not that this isn't a sizable source of revenue though....) I hope eventually artists will be able to build online music communities of people willing to support them, and then the RIAA will wither and die.
Did you even RTFA? The Americans didn't blow up anything. The Soviets bought computer chips and used them to control the operations of the pipeline.
Shockingly...yes. Why is sabotaging the computer chips any different from sabotaging the physical gas lines?? Blowing shit up, is blowing shit up - doesn't matter how you do it.
Now is a time to remember that sometimes our spooks get it right in a big way.
Let's get this straight - Safire is bragging about the Americans blowing up gas pipelines???? I thought that was terrorism, at least if it is in Iraq. Lucky many weren't killed.
If you wanna mess with SCO, apply for the job! Let them try to sort out real applicants from those who have no intention of extorting money. And if you get the job, you'll be getting paid to have an insider's view of the shit SCO is attempting, and the opportunity to throw a bit of a wrench in there extortion scheme.
business vs tech presss
on
SCO Roundup
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The fact that SCO stock increased while there
case was shown to suck, really shows we are not
kicking SCO in the right place. We need to hit
them where it hurts.
We finally got to see
what was presumably their best evidence, and it was
a steaming turd of
donkeyshit. They were either lying
or were unbelievably negligent.
While this was all over geek websites, it didn't make much of a
ripple in the business press, and as the last article points out, SCO stock actually got pumped
in the business press after the bogus code was
released. And the business press is the place to hit SCO -- all they care about is their stock price, and
the corporate hacks who determine stock prices don't read Slashdot.
Playing on the defensive as the EFF is doing is
good, but we also need to go on the offense more.
People and organizations should contact biz journalists, or write
letters to the editors. Send out press releases.
Post the information at stock sites -- wherever.
If stock traders know how bogus SCO's claims are, it will hurt the
fuckwads at SCO. While the SCO story may not be of interest to the
general public, it is of interest to the business community.
I am sick of seeing unbalanced articles in businessweek or whatever,
which contain no viewpoint from the free software software community.
And hackers can go on the offensive by filing lawsuits or threatening
such. Send out cease and desist letters and make it public with a press
release. Specific people and development teams have been libeled. They
have accused the kernel team of theft. Now that code snippets have
been made public, further lies by SCO can even be considered as slander
against the specific people who contributed that code. And those
who are the public face of the kernel team can claim damages as well.
While the damages one could claim would not be enough to retire on,
it can damage SCO's stock price with the publicity.
SCum needs to be told to put up or shut the fuck up.
I keep hearing this, and so, some time ago, I tried to find information on claims of "global cooling". I didn't find any claims in newspapers or the literature from the past, nor do those who talk today about the "global cooling hysteria" ever offer any citations to back up their claim that there were environmentalists and scientists saying such things.
So my question: can anyone point me to scientists who claimed 25 years ago that we were about to enter a period of global cooling?
actually, this is kinda what is going on here
and it is why the article is misleading.
an ideal heat engine extracts work by operating
between two heat baths of different temperature.
the ideal efficiency of the engines
is given in terms of the two temperatures
of these heat baths.
if the temperature difference is large, then
the engine can extract more work.
so one way of "improving" the "ideal efficiency"
is to add a second heat bath of either very low
temerature (a fridge) or very high temperature.
to claim that this improves the amount of work
that can be extracted is true, but to claim
that this improves the efficiency above that
of an ideal engine is crap because you are cheating by adding a third temperature bath.
in the case of the quantum afterburner described
in the article, the maser/laser acts as a zero
temperature heat bath (sometimes called negentropy) which allows one to extract work
from the exhaust. of course, in doing so, you
use up the negentropy so it is acting more like a type of fuel.
the article (both the nature one, and the original
in Phys. Rev. Lett.) are interesting, but I wish
physicists wouldn't try to sensationalize things
just to make their results appear more interesting
than they really are.
I've been running Mandrake for some time (with no
Winblowz partition), and while I initially loved
it, I am starting to get a bit frustrated by the
fact that it is rather hard to upgrade a particular piece of the distribution (say KDE, XFree, or whatever), without upgrading the entire
distribution. It seems that each new version
uses a completely different compiler, and every program is patched like crazy, so that rpm's for
one version of the distribution, don't work for
another.
You could of course, upgrade a particular piece
of software by compiling from source, but often
I find that this results in craziness because the
distribution has done some non-standard things.
It also seems that Redhat is falling into this
behaviour, but would be interested in other people's experience. I kinda wish they would just go slower, and use more standard compilers
and stop extra-patching every program.
I dunno, maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, but I think you should just need to
install a distro once, and then from then on,
you should be able to do kernel upgrades, etc.
(when you really need to)
without having to upgrade the whole distro.
I'm not saying you can't do this, but it seems
that it is becoming harder and harder to do.
I also find that Mandrake is getting a bit too Windowz-esque. I don't mind it if they dumb things down and automate certain configurations,
as long as they still leave room for people to hack and configure things themselves.
But sometimes I find that Mandrake makes it hard to do the configuration manually. Their
crazy menuing system was one example. And their
kernel (at least in 7.0) did not even automatically come with
the original.config file).
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if there is no CowboyNeal option, then Destroy your ballot. Might be a bit hard with E-voting though...
Don't vote, it only encourages them!
I realize it is popular Slashdot dogmatism to insist that filesharing doesn't harm CD sales, and this may be true now, but what about in the future as bandwidth increases?? The RIAA might be evil, but they are not completely stupid. Right now, downloading songs one by one and tracking down every song of an album is time-consuming. But the RIAA realize that it is only a matter of time until it is faster and more convenient to download an entire album then go to a music store. When that time comes, their current business model will be borked. Other than distribution, the only service the record companies provide is marketing. When P2P distribution beats them out, they will die. Bands don't need a record company to finance the making of their album (with ever-cheaper home recording equipment). They can distribute music by themselves. So the only value the record company gives the band is marketing (and this doesn't add any value for the listener). So the RIAA realizes that in the long-term, they could be fucked. They might be able to retain the business of folks willing to listen to pap fed to them by marketing reps, but that is about it. (Not that this isn't a sizable source of revenue though....) I hope eventually artists will be able to build online music communities of people willing to support them, and then the RIAA will wither and die.
Did you even RTFA? The Americans didn't blow up anything. The Soviets bought computer chips and used them to control the operations of the pipeline.
Shockingly...yes. Why is sabotaging the computer chips any different from sabotaging the physical gas lines?? Blowing shit up, is blowing shit up - doesn't matter how you do it.
Now is a time to remember that sometimes our spooks get it right in a big way.
Let's get this straight - Safire is bragging about the Americans blowing up gas pipelines???? I thought that was terrorism, at least if it is in Iraq. Lucky many weren't killed.
If you wanna mess with SCO, apply for the job!
Let them try to sort out real applicants from those who have no intention of extorting money. And if you get the job, you'll be getting paid to have an insider's view of the shit SCO is attempting, and the opportunity to throw a bit of a wrench in there extortion scheme.
The fact that SCO stock increased while there case was shown to suck, really shows we are not kicking SCO in the right place. We need to hit them where it hurts.
We finally got to see what was presumably their best evidence, and it was a steaming turd of donkeyshit. They were either lying or were unbelievably negligent. While this was all over geek websites, it didn't make much of a ripple in the business press, and as the last article points out, SCO stock actually got pumped in the business press after the bogus code was released. And the business press is the place to hit SCO -- all they care about is their stock price, and the corporate hacks who determine stock prices don't read Slashdot.
Playing on the defensive as the EFF is doing is good, but we also need to go on the offense more.
People and organizations should contact biz journalists, or write letters to the editors. Send out press releases. Post the information at stock sites -- wherever. If stock traders know how bogus SCO's claims are, it will hurt the fuckwads at SCO. While the SCO story may not be of interest to the general public, it is of interest to the business community. I am sick of seeing unbalanced articles in businessweek or whatever, which contain no viewpoint from the free software software community.
And hackers can go on the offensive by filing lawsuits or threatening such. Send out cease and desist letters and make it public with a press release. Specific people and development teams have been libeled. They have accused the kernel team of theft. Now that code snippets have been made public, further lies by SCO can even be considered as slander against the specific people who contributed that code. And those who are the public face of the kernel team can claim damages as well. While the damages one could claim would not be enough to retire on, it can damage SCO's stock price with the publicity. SCum needs to be told to put up or shut the fuck up.
Stick it to the bastards!
> "25 years ago it was global cooling"
I keep hearing this, and so, some time ago, I tried to find information on claims of "global cooling". I didn't find any claims in newspapers or the literature from the past, nor do those who talk today about the "global cooling hysteria" ever offer any citations to back up their claim that there were environmentalists and scientists saying such things.
So my question: can anyone point me to scientists who claimed 25 years ago that we were about to enter a period of global cooling?
I can see why they are worried. Ewoks are known to use cellphones.
an ideal heat engine extracts work by operating between two heat baths of different temperature.
the ideal efficiency of the engines is given in terms of the two temperatures of these heat baths.
if the temperature difference is large, then the engine can extract more work. so one way of "improving" the "ideal efficiency" is to add a second heat bath of either very low temerature (a fridge) or very high temperature.
to claim that this improves the amount of work that can be extracted is true, but to claim that this improves the efficiency above that of an ideal engine is crap because you are cheating by adding a third temperature bath.
in the case of the quantum afterburner described in the article, the maser/laser acts as a zero temperature heat bath (sometimes called negentropy) which allows one to extract work from the exhaust. of course, in doing so, you use up the negentropy so it is acting more like a type of fuel.
the article (both the nature one, and the original in Phys. Rev. Lett.) are interesting, but I wish physicists wouldn't try to sensationalize things just to make their results appear more interesting than they really are.
I've been running Mandrake for some time (with no
.config file).
Winblowz partition), and while I initially loved
it, I am starting to get a bit frustrated by the
fact that it is rather hard to upgrade a particular piece of the distribution (say KDE, XFree, or whatever), without upgrading the entire
distribution. It seems that each new version
uses a completely different compiler, and every program is patched like crazy, so that rpm's for
one version of the distribution, don't work for
another.
You could of course, upgrade a particular piece
of software by compiling from source, but often
I find that this results in craziness because the
distribution has done some non-standard things.
It also seems that Redhat is falling into this
behaviour, but would be interested in other people's experience. I kinda wish they would just go slower, and use more standard compilers
and stop extra-patching every program.
I dunno, maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, but I think you should just need to
install a distro once, and then from then on,
you should be able to do kernel upgrades, etc.
(when you really need to)
without having to upgrade the whole distro.
I'm not saying you can't do this, but it seems
that it is becoming harder and harder to do.
I also find that Mandrake is getting a bit too Windowz-esque. I don't mind it if they dumb things down and automate certain configurations,
as long as they still leave room for people to hack and configure things themselves.
But sometimes I find that Mandrake makes it hard to do the configuration manually. Their
crazy menuing system was one example. And their
kernel (at least in 7.0) did not even automatically come with
the original