The article is just full of utter nonsense that should be clear to anyone knowing anything about the internet. The ONLY way to gaurantee that ISPs will not censor the net is to gaurantee that they dont, in the only truly enforceable way, with law. It is all too easy for the ISPs to implement hardware and software that will restrict access to or impede access to certain content. The consumers, given the near monopoly position of the ISPs, would have little other choice than to put up with this. It could also be that only exorbitantly priced service tiers would offer unrestricted access to the internet, meaning access to the full internet would only be available to a small, wealthier segment of the population. Furthermore, even though an uncensored common carrier, whether it is postal or electronic, is essential to free speech, I am unsure if enough consumers would realise the great importance of this to take demand a change of their ISPs behaviour. ISPs of course can just reject that request and leave consumers without recourse.
Net neutrality can only be assured, adn free speech therefore, with it being required by law and ISPs being recognised for what they, as common carriers and that they should be required to carry all information over their networks unmodified. To allow otherwise is to open the door to censorship, and to make these corporations the functional equivalent of the Chinese government, blocking whichever sites which suit them. This would have an effect exactly equivalent to government censorship that it should be considered the same as government censorship.
Net nuetrality is also unnecessary for the ISP. They claim it is needed to raise revenue to maintain the network. This is utterly incorrect as they can use bandwidth tiers to do this. Speed and performance levels should apply without discrimination to all content flowing over the network.
Net neutrality is to protect consumers rights and free speech rights, by assuring every person can access all information made avialable on the internet and publish their own content which can be accessed to anyone else, without it being blocked.
We can expect conservative organisations to be prejudiced against the interests of free speech and the people and to be high biased towards large corporate interest whom they represent and who finances them. They are highly ideologically biased to an approach which endangers individuals freedoms in favour of large corporations, by dismantling the voice of the people, our democracy, and removing all restrictions from corporations which turns them into an unelected plutocracy which takes the functional role of a totalitarian government. I oppose totalitarianism in the form of corporation or government, often either which are different in name only, and therefore I oppose censorship of the internet by corporations or government, and I support Net Neutrality laws passed by our democratic government to assure that ISPs are not permitted to block access to content.
I believe that we should work to make sure a replacement for the shuttle is developed, however I do think the manned mars and moon missions should be delayed. I do not believe they are worth the money and cannot accomplish much we can do cheaper with an unmanned probe. Manned missions are more for ego, rather than real science and I am not sure the benefit is worth the enormous costs.
We have so many other huge problems here, like global warming, energy, the environment, and education and research funding so we can encourage children to go into science and research to find solutions for this problems. We desperately need to find solutions to these problems or the astronauts might not have a very nice planet to come back to. We are losing our quality of life due to our destruction of this planets ecosystems because of our present broken technological systems, who knows what kind of cures for cancer are being lost in the loss of rainforests, and the damage to human and environmental health incurred from the use of pesticides and geneitically modified organisms. We have the incalculable value of quality of life issues related to clean water, air and land, and scenic beauty which add quality and value that makes life worth living. Our present technology has a difficult time existing in balance with other quality of life issues and priorities.
I think the true leader in science and technology will the country that solves these energy and technology problems, that develops technology and systems that allow us to generate energy and sustainable ways to benefit from technology while we protect the environment, our access to clean, organic foods not laced with pesticides or toxic GMOs, clean water, clean air, biodiversity, and simple basic pleasures like the scenic beauty and wilderness.
Really, the only way to get ISPs to offer secure DNS protocols is to require it by law. Otherwise, its just their nature not to do, to be lazy and ignore it, as they do with IPv6. So mandate it by law I say.
CD-Rs have a shorter lifespan from mass produced CDs due to different manufacturing techniques. Mass produced CDs last much, much longer. I have CDs that are 15-20 years old and still are perfectly fine. Regular CDs are mass produced by stamping a pattern into a layer in the CD, this yields something much more reliable than the burn in used in CD-Rs. the average age of CD-R is 3-5 years it seems. CDs can last for decades, maybe even centuries.
I have not noticed performance problems from Ubuntu. Sometimes I think these small differences are pretty much unnoticeable to the common user. I would say that while Linux always seems fast and snappy to me, its Windows which has a truly noticeable sluggish feel.
I certainly do not think it is a good trade off in an OS to sacrifice features for an increase in speed which really is not noticeable. In most cases this is not necessary as many parts of a system can be made optional. The schedular and some core kernel systems effect the speed of the whole system, but most other components are optional, like X, like drivers, like Gnome, and so on.
Which also is the nice thing about X: the designers of X decided not to try to build in a bunch of heavy user interface junk into the X server, ironically which many people criticise. Excluding memory leaks in some drivers not related to X itself, the X protocol and server system is actually very efficient by todays standards and does not use much memory. Most memory usage is in caching and in bad drivers full of crappy code. Therefore you can run our own window manager without carrying a bunch of stuff you wont use. But the eye candy is there if you want it. People should choose how many features and memory or how little they wish to use.
Quite indeed. I mentioned that everything should be able to be done via a CLI also a programming interface particularly because these things can be programatically accessed to automate tasks easily.
You are indeed correct. I had MBS and CDS confused. i find the whole issue to be very interesting since I do prefer and strive to undersrtand the mechanics of this disaster. Only with such understanding can we hope to understand causes and thus solutions. Would you happen to know of any good explanations and sources of information on these topics?
What I like is being able to choose for myself whether to have a GUI tool or use the CLI tool. Which tool I use depends on what i am doing. Often GUIs can save time. But its nice to be able to SSH in from somewhere else and just issue a few commands. I prefer to give people the choice on how much or how little hand holding they want. I think GUIs are great but Gnome philosophy is misguided, actually restricting user freedom out an insulting notion that they wont understand some features. The key is to make it so software works out of tbe box, and does not need configuration, but then to allow people to configure as little or as much as they like, and allow everything to be done by both CLI and GUI, and designing systems to be expert or user friendly as one wants. This can mean putting advanced configurations settings in an "advanced" tab for instance, instead of not including them. A feature that an advanced user might need does not have to be excluded to not confuse new users, just placed in an advanced area where expert users can get to it. Gnome has always been too inflexible and brain damaged. Like Torvalds, I stay away from it as I cannot configure it to do what i want. The system is a useless memory hogging waste of space that tries to dictate its developers preferences on you rather than let you determine how it should work. I prefer to be able to configure software the way I want it.
I thought an MBS is similar to an insurance policy. The bank purchases an MBS, if the mortgage the bank has fails, the seller of the MBS pays the bank money. True, maybe after the banks started having large numbers of foreclosures, they could no longer find people who wanted to do an MBS with them, and as well CDOs. CDOs basically bundled up some mortgage debt and sold them off to third parties. This would mean banks end up with cash which they can then loan out. After the mortgages began foreclosing, people no longer wanted to buy CDOs. They got burned, the rating system was messed up (mark to market) and valued CDOs at far more than they were worth, and it backfired. banks could no longer sell them so they were no longer able to obtain money from selling them. This contributed to the banks financial mess. It was not that CDOs or MBSs were necessarily bad, but that the underlying mortgages were bad and the real estate market is overvalued, thus it was destined to collapse. CDOs are not really THAT hard to understand. I think its a problem that the media for some reason does not even TRY to explain them and that there is no transparency in the banks so we can see and scrutinise what these institutions are doing.
Fix things so banks are more transparent and that there are stronger rules who to give loans to. We have to find a way to shore up banks and homeowners while home prices fall like a rock. If we implement policies that cause an bubble of home prices again, we will end up with housing people cant afford, bad mortgages or homelessness, a wrecked economy, right back where started. Letting housing prices skyrocket and encourage banks to subsidise this, giving bad mortgages to people who cant afford them supporting the overblown market is really stupid. Letting house prices fall will prevent another round of bad mortgages and at the same time solve the affordability problem. We just have to figure out a way to let them drop, but shore up banks and help homeowners, working things out in a way that revitalises our economy. Really we always hear about how terrible it is that housing prices are low. WTH? In regard to most things, gas, food, etc, if the price goes up, its a bad thing, it means you have a harder time affording things and it hurts the economy since it locks up more money in certain places and pulls money out of other areas of the economy. When will we realise that high cost of housing led to this crisis, high mortgages people couldnt afford, then foreclosures, and people spending so much on housing it is killing the rest of the economy. Republicans and democrats are both responsible, Republicans for lax regulation, democrats for encouraging fannie may and banks to encourage dangerous subprime loaning.
I think this project is overrated and the notion that there is anything wrong with the current X server is basically based on misconceptions by people who dont really understrand what they are talking about. The current X server is actually pretty useable, does not take a lot of ram, is efficient, and has been kept up to date with new technology while maintaining backwards compatability. Anyone who actually believes you have to sacrifice backwards compatability to be able to implement new features and improve the system should not be involved with software design. All sorts of new features have been added to X through extensions whhile assuring old and new clients and servers can interoperate. Binary compatability is of great value as I am often using older X terminals with new Linux systems. The last thing we want is a million incompatable versions which cant talk to each other.
Also the idea that things should be moved into kernel space is a bad idea. The bare minumum of the GUI should be in the kernel space. The kernel should be able to reset the video card in case X crashes, but I do not believe we should move video drivers and such into the kernel. Instead of just having X crash because of a bad driver, you can take down the whole operating system. Again people really dont understand the issues and how X works. X uses highly efficient shared memory communication between X server and clients and there is no substaintail benefit to placing the X server in the kernel or not having a client server module. The benefits of being able to use X over a network is great and there is no real downside to client server model.
With so many small mobile devices out there I cant imagine that anyone would argue against X supporting low resolutions. Seems awfully shortsighted and would greatly impede X usefulness except on a desktop machine. X needs to scale to different kinds of hardware rather thna assume everyone has massive uber power video card and huge 20" displays.
I wonder if they can track where this stuff will end up falling to earth. Given the earth is 70% ocean, there is a good chance that it wont hit land. Still. the idea of a refridgerator sized piece of toxic metal slamming down, perhaps anywhere, does make one a little nervous. Still ones chance of getting hit by lightning is greater than having this fall on top of you.
There are ways canonical could try to raise revenue. One is by selling versions to desktop users with technical support or extras like a user guide. It could also sell t-shirts, mugs and other such things to bring in more revenue. It could even sell third party Linux books.
I have not noticed any speed issues with Firefox. I have noticed it uses 100+ mb of ram. That seems to be the bigger issue. Maybe some control of the allowed size of memory cache would be nice.
I would certainly second this, its far easier and just as good to use the language on its own VM and just use RPC or write an interface to external libraries via XS. Trying to reimplement the whole language is way overkill if you just want to access some foreign libraries from perl.
Clearly the high price of the players, and the lack of a significant, big reason to upgrade, has slowed acceptance. I think its just too expensive and especially with a flaky economy we have right now, people are reluctant to spend that kind of money on it. Maybe when prices come down to $100 there will be more sales. I think as well a big potential part of the market, computer storage, is probably not being emphasized very well. It could also be that consumers are just fed up with DRM, wasting their money on these stupid discs and not being able to play them on their computer or to make a backup copy. So perhaps the consumer avoidance of the technology is a good thing if it is being done to send a message we wont tolerate brain damaged DRMed technology, where we fork over such large sums of money to have to put up with this insulting treatment, being told we cant use this technology for private use how we see fit, having a corporation dictate to us how we can play it like this is some sort of police state.
When we have people who are starving to death and cant afford a place to live anymore, losing their jobs, dont have healthcare, and so on, what does congress do? Throws more money on expensive weapons to kill people. Just what we need. Society always is shocked and dismayed when someone commits suicide, "oh, how could they do such a thing". But then implement policies which place people in such desperation that it seems to be the only way out, and cut back safety net programs which are the only thing that keeps some people lives, refusing to help those who are in need. There is always enough money to kill people, but never enough money to save them. We have a society that sees state sanctioned killing of people as totally acceptable but helping people and keeping people out of desperation that drives them to suicide is unacceptable. How dare we try to help people make sure they have enough to eat when we have trillion dollar corporate welfare and trillion dollar wars and giveaways to defence industry and tax breaks to the wealthy to pay for? When we have wealthy billionaires who cant be bothered with taxes, so they can afford their dozens of mansions, yacht and private islands to escape the havoc they have wreaked on society?
"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death" --Martin Luther King
The Iphone is an orwellian police state where everything you do on it is carefully censored and controlled by Apple. Certainly i would never use one. I wish Google or someone would come out with a phone which is based on a completely open OS like Linux and where people can write their own programs and so on for it. People often fear government as a threat to their freedom, but right here we see with Apple, an obvious violation of peoples rights to use a device that they purchased in a way they wish, and a corporation deciding what people can and cant use it for. This leads in fact to stagnation, a lack of innovation. Many interesting developments and innovations come from innovation and improving and tinkering with an existing platform. A platform that allows a person to develop software provides excellent conditions for new innovations, like new games or mail apps to be developed.
"With such widespread use of titanium dioxide, it is important to understand that the IARC conclusions are based on very specific evidence. This evidence showed that high concentrations of pigment-grade (powdered) and ultrafine titanium dioxide dust caused respiratory tract cancer in rats exposed by inhalation and intratracheal instillation*"
Lab studies indicate that both of those nano-ingredients create free radicals that damage the DNA of cells and possibly cause other harm as well. And even low exposure to nanoparticles of titanium dioxide can damage the lungs of animals if inhaled
Who knows, what else this can do? Perhaps give you lung cancer or some other toxicity issue. The last thing we need is more pollutants and toxins in our environment. If the nanoparticles got on you they would kill bacteria on or in you probably to, that is bacteria that is necessary and essential to keep you alive. No thanks, id rather have a few bacteria rather than this risky stuff.
They would work on developing WINE. Just another Linux distribution would only be another OS that cant compete with Windows because it cant do wht most people need to do, run windows apps. If HP really was interested in defeating Windows it would help develop Wine, so everyone would be able to compete in the OS marketplace on an even playing field. Microsoft only keeps its market share because apps and drivers which only run on Windows. Allow people to run Windows apps and drivers and then you have an OS that really can make headway against MS.
I am surprised such systems are directly connected to the Internet at all. Why does a particle collider need internet access?
With it seems every computer system on the planet hackable, one wonders how we got to this situation. Perhaps it is due to the overuse of C rather than better protected languages like Perl or Ruby for instance, and thus buffer overruns
Article is written by someone who doesnt know what the hell they are talking about. Gecko has better memory usage than any other modern browser i have seen and excellent standards support
Instead of a professional organisation, instead the purpose of an IT union should NOT be to set standards or any of that, instead, it should be a collective bargaining force that works to improve IT workers welfare, to improve their conditions and to work on their behalf to represent their best interests and needs. It should be an advocacy group for IT people, not some sort of an organisation that makes them jump through hoops or set standards. The only requirement for membership is employment in the IT field. So I dont think this should be a standards organisation but a worker advocacy organisation which is what a union is supposed to be. You can have a union without having the whole testing thing. Testing has already been taken care of with the varioys existing IT cerification. But one should not have to have such a certification to belong to an IT union, only work in the IT field. IT unions and certification programs should be seperate entities completely.
Slashdot Mirror
The article is just full of utter nonsense that should be clear to anyone knowing anything about the internet. The ONLY way to gaurantee that ISPs will not censor the net is to gaurantee that they dont, in the only truly enforceable way, with law. It is all too easy for the ISPs to implement hardware and software that will restrict access to or impede access to certain content. The consumers, given the near monopoly position of the ISPs, would have little other choice than to put up with this. It could also be that only exorbitantly priced service tiers would offer unrestricted access to the internet, meaning access to the full internet would only be available to a small, wealthier segment of the population. Furthermore, even though an uncensored common carrier, whether it is postal or electronic, is essential to free speech, I am unsure if enough consumers would realise the great importance of this to take demand a change of their ISPs behaviour. ISPs of course can just reject that request and leave consumers without recourse.
Net neutrality can only be assured, adn free speech therefore, with it being required by law and ISPs being recognised for what they, as common carriers and that they should be required to carry all information over their networks unmodified. To allow otherwise is to open the door to censorship, and to make these corporations the functional equivalent of the Chinese government, blocking whichever sites which suit them. This would have an effect exactly equivalent to government censorship that it should be considered the same as government censorship.
Net nuetrality is also unnecessary for the ISP. They claim it is needed to raise revenue to maintain the network. This is utterly incorrect as they can use bandwidth tiers to do this. Speed and performance levels should apply without discrimination to all content flowing over the network.
Net neutrality is to protect consumers rights and free speech rights, by assuring every person can access all information made avialable on the internet and publish their own content which can be accessed to anyone else, without it being blocked.
We can expect conservative organisations to be prejudiced against the interests of free speech and the people and to be high biased towards large corporate interest whom they represent and who finances them. They are highly ideologically biased to an approach which endangers individuals freedoms in favour of large corporations, by dismantling the voice of the people, our democracy, and removing all restrictions from corporations which turns them into an unelected plutocracy which takes the functional role of a totalitarian government. I oppose totalitarianism in the form of corporation or government, often either which are different in name only, and therefore I oppose censorship of the internet by corporations or government, and I support Net Neutrality laws passed by our democratic government to assure that ISPs are not permitted to block access to content.
I believe that we should work to make sure a replacement for the shuttle is developed, however I do think the manned mars and moon missions should be delayed. I do not believe they are worth the money and cannot accomplish much we can do cheaper with an unmanned probe. Manned missions are more for ego, rather than real science and I am not sure the benefit is worth the enormous costs.
We have so many other huge problems here, like global warming, energy, the environment, and education and research funding so we can encourage children to go into science and research to find solutions for this problems. We desperately need to find solutions to these problems or the astronauts might not have a very nice planet to come back to. We are losing our quality of life due to our destruction of this planets ecosystems because of our present broken technological systems, who knows what kind of cures for cancer are being lost in the loss of rainforests, and the damage to human and environmental health incurred from the use of pesticides and geneitically modified organisms. We have the incalculable value of quality of life issues related to clean water, air and land, and scenic beauty which add quality and value that makes life worth living. Our present technology has a difficult time existing in balance with other quality of life issues and priorities.
I think the true leader in science and technology will the country that solves these energy and technology problems, that develops technology and systems that allow us to generate energy and sustainable ways to benefit from technology while we protect the environment, our access to clean, organic foods not laced with pesticides or toxic GMOs, clean water, clean air, biodiversity, and simple basic pleasures like the scenic beauty and wilderness.
Really, the only way to get ISPs to offer secure DNS protocols is to require it by law. Otherwise, its just their nature not to do, to be lazy and ignore it, as they do with IPv6. So mandate it by law I say.
If only that were cheap. The process of making a master and a die is pretty expensive, and only really feasible with runs of thousands of disks.
CD-Rs have a shorter lifespan from mass produced CDs due to different manufacturing techniques. Mass produced CDs last much, much longer. I have CDs that are 15-20 years old and still are perfectly fine. Regular CDs are mass produced by stamping a pattern into a layer in the CD, this yields something much more reliable than the burn in used in CD-Rs. the average age of CD-R is 3-5 years it seems. CDs can last for decades, maybe even centuries.
I have not noticed performance problems from Ubuntu. Sometimes I think these small differences are pretty much unnoticeable to the common user. I would say that while Linux always seems fast and snappy to me, its Windows which has a truly noticeable sluggish feel.
I certainly do not think it is a good trade off in an OS to sacrifice features for an increase in speed which really is not noticeable. In most cases this is not necessary as many parts of a system can be made optional. The schedular and some core kernel systems effect the speed of the whole system, but most other components are optional, like X, like drivers, like Gnome, and so on.
Which also is the nice thing about X: the designers of X decided not to try to build in a bunch of heavy user interface junk into the X server, ironically which many people criticise. Excluding memory leaks in some drivers not related to X itself, the X protocol and server system is actually very efficient by todays standards and does not use much memory. Most memory usage is in caching and in bad drivers full of crappy code. Therefore you can run our own window manager without carrying a bunch of stuff you wont use. But the eye candy is there if you want it. People should choose how many features and memory or how little they wish to use.
Quite indeed. I mentioned that everything should be able to be done via a CLI also a programming interface particularly because these things can be programatically accessed to automate tasks easily.
You are indeed correct. I had MBS and CDS confused. i find the whole issue to be very interesting since I do prefer and strive to undersrtand the mechanics of this disaster. Only with such understanding can we hope to understand causes and thus solutions. Would you happen to know of any good explanations and sources of information on these topics?
What I like is being able to choose for myself whether to have a GUI tool or use the CLI tool. Which tool I use depends on what i am doing. Often GUIs can save time. But its nice to be able to SSH in from somewhere else and just issue a few commands. I prefer to give people the choice on how much or how little hand holding they want. I think GUIs are great but Gnome philosophy is misguided, actually restricting user freedom out an insulting notion that they wont understand some features. The key is to make it so software works out of tbe box, and does not need configuration, but then to allow people to configure as little or as much as they like, and allow everything to be done by both CLI and GUI, and designing systems to be expert or user friendly as one wants. This can mean putting advanced configurations settings in an "advanced" tab for instance, instead of not including them. A feature that an advanced user might need does not have to be excluded to not confuse new users, just placed in an advanced area where expert users can get to it. Gnome has always been too inflexible and brain damaged. Like Torvalds, I stay away from it as I cannot configure it to do what i want. The system is a useless memory hogging waste of space that tries to dictate its developers preferences on you rather than let you determine how it should work. I prefer to be able to configure software the way I want it.
I thought an MBS is similar to an insurance policy. The bank purchases an MBS, if the mortgage the bank has fails, the seller of the MBS pays the bank money. True, maybe after the banks started having large numbers of foreclosures, they could no longer find people who wanted to do an MBS with them, and as well CDOs. CDOs basically bundled up some mortgage debt and sold them off to third parties. This would mean banks end up with cash which they can then loan out. After the mortgages began foreclosing, people no longer wanted to buy CDOs. They got burned, the rating system was messed up (mark to market) and valued CDOs at far more than they were worth, and it backfired. banks could no longer sell them so they were no longer able to obtain money from selling them. This contributed to the banks financial mess. It was not that CDOs or MBSs were necessarily bad, but that the underlying mortgages were bad and the real estate market is overvalued, thus it was destined to collapse. CDOs are not really THAT hard to understand. I think its a problem that the media for some reason does not even TRY to explain them and that there is no transparency in the banks so we can see and scrutinise what these institutions are doing.
Fix things so banks are more transparent and that there are stronger rules who to give loans to. We have to find a way to shore up banks and homeowners while home prices fall like a rock. If we implement policies that cause an bubble of home prices again, we will end up with housing people cant afford, bad mortgages or homelessness, a wrecked economy, right back where started. Letting housing prices skyrocket and encourage banks to subsidise this, giving bad mortgages to people who cant afford them supporting the overblown market is really stupid. Letting house prices fall will prevent another round of bad mortgages and at the same time solve the affordability problem. We just have to figure out a way to let them drop, but shore up banks and help homeowners, working things out in a way that revitalises our economy. Really we always hear about how terrible it is that housing prices are low. WTH? In regard to most things, gas, food, etc, if the price goes up, its a bad thing, it means you have a harder time affording things and it hurts the economy since it locks up more money in certain places and pulls money out of other areas of the economy. When will we realise that high cost of housing led to this crisis, high mortgages people couldnt afford, then foreclosures, and people spending so much on housing it is killing the rest of the economy. Republicans and democrats are both responsible, Republicans for lax regulation, democrats for encouraging fannie may and banks to encourage dangerous subprime loaning.
I think this project is overrated and the notion that there is anything wrong with the current X server is basically based on misconceptions by people who dont really understrand what they are talking about. The current X server is actually pretty useable, does not take a lot of ram, is efficient, and has been kept up to date with new technology while maintaining backwards compatability. Anyone who actually believes you have to sacrifice backwards compatability to be able to implement new features and improve the system should not be involved with software design. All sorts of new features have been added to X through extensions whhile assuring old and new clients and servers can interoperate. Binary compatability is of great value as I am often using older X terminals with new Linux systems. The last thing we want is a million incompatable versions which cant talk to each other.
Also the idea that things should be moved into kernel space is a bad idea. The bare minumum of the GUI should be in the kernel space. The kernel should be able to reset the video card in case X crashes, but I do not believe we should move video drivers and such into the kernel. Instead of just having X crash because of a bad driver, you can take down the whole operating system. Again people really dont understand the issues and how X works. X uses highly efficient shared memory communication between X server and clients and there is no substaintail benefit to placing the X server in the kernel or not having a client server module. The benefits of being able to use X over a network is great and there is no real downside to client server model.
With so many small mobile devices out there I cant imagine that anyone would argue against X supporting low resolutions. Seems awfully shortsighted and would greatly impede X usefulness except on a desktop machine. X needs to scale to different kinds of hardware rather thna assume everyone has massive uber power video card and huge 20" displays.
I wonder if they can track where this stuff will end up falling to earth. Given the earth is 70% ocean, there is a good chance that it wont hit land. Still. the idea of a refridgerator sized piece of toxic metal slamming down, perhaps anywhere, does make one a little nervous. Still ones chance of getting hit by lightning is greater than having this fall on top of you.
There are ways canonical could try to raise revenue. One is by selling versions to desktop users with technical support or extras like a user guide. It could also sell t-shirts, mugs and other such things to bring in more revenue. It could even sell third party Linux books.
I have not noticed any speed issues with Firefox. I have noticed it uses 100+ mb of ram. That seems to be the bigger issue. Maybe some control of the allowed size of memory cache would be nice.
I would certainly second this, its far easier and just as good to use the language on its own VM and just use RPC or write an interface to external libraries via XS. Trying to reimplement the whole language is way overkill if you just want to access some foreign libraries from perl.
Clearly the high price of the players, and the lack of a significant, big reason to upgrade, has slowed acceptance. I think its just too expensive and especially with a flaky economy we have right now, people are reluctant to spend that kind of money on it. Maybe when prices come down to $100 there will be more sales. I think as well a big potential part of the market, computer storage, is probably not being emphasized very well. It could also be that consumers are just fed up with DRM, wasting their money on these stupid discs and not being able to play them on their computer or to make a backup copy. So perhaps the consumer avoidance of the technology is a good thing if it is being done to send a message we wont tolerate brain damaged DRMed technology, where we fork over such large sums of money to have to put up with this insulting treatment, being told we cant use this technology for private use how we see fit, having a corporation dictate to us how we can play it like this is some sort of police state.
When we have people who are starving to death and cant afford a place to live anymore, losing their jobs, dont have healthcare, and so on, what does congress do? Throws more money on expensive weapons to kill people. Just what we need. Society always is shocked and dismayed when someone commits suicide, "oh, how could they do such a thing". But then implement policies which place people in such desperation that it seems to be the only way out, and cut back safety net programs which are the only thing that keeps some people lives, refusing to help those who are in need. There is always enough money to kill people, but never enough money to save them. We have a society that sees state sanctioned killing of people as totally acceptable but helping people and keeping people out of desperation that drives them to suicide is unacceptable. How dare we try to help people make sure they have enough to eat when we have trillion dollar corporate welfare and trillion dollar wars and giveaways to defence industry and tax breaks to the wealthy to pay for? When we have wealthy billionaires who cant be bothered with taxes, so they can afford their dozens of mansions, yacht and private islands to escape the havoc they have wreaked on society?
"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on
military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching
spiritual death" --Martin Luther King
The Iphone is an orwellian police state where everything you do on it is carefully censored and controlled by Apple. Certainly i would never use one. I wish Google or someone would come out with a phone which is based on a completely open OS like Linux and where people can write their own programs and so on for it. People often fear government as a threat to their freedom, but right here we see with Apple, an obvious violation of peoples rights to use a device that they purchased in a way they wish, and a corporation deciding what people can and cant use it for. This leads in fact to stagnation, a lack of innovation. Many interesting developments and innovations come from innovation and improving and tinkering with an existing platform. A platform that allows a person to develop software provides excellent conditions for new innovations, like new games or mail apps to be developed.
Actually i think i heard of evidence that the titanium dioxide particles in sunscreens, especially nano particles are harmful.
http://www.ccohs.ca/headlines/text186.html
"With such widespread use of titanium dioxide, it is important to understand that the IARC conclusions are based on very specific evidence. This evidence showed that high concentrations of pigment-grade (powdered) and ultrafine titanium dioxide dust caused respiratory tract cancer in rats exposed by inhalation and intratracheal instillation*"
http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/health-fitness/nanotechnology-7-07/nanoparticles-in-sunscreens/0707_nano_sunscreen_1.htm
Lab studies indicate that both of those nano-ingredients create free radicals that damage the DNA of cells and possibly cause other harm as well. And even low exposure to nanoparticles of titanium dioxide can damage the lungs of animals if inhaled
http://locokazoo.com/2008/08/05/the-sun-screen-health-disaster/
http://www.nanowerk.com/spotlight/spotid=6838.php
Who knows, what else this can do? Perhaps give you lung cancer or some other toxicity issue. The last thing we need is more pollutants and toxins in our environment. If the nanoparticles got on you they would kill bacteria on or in you probably to, that is bacteria that is necessary and essential to keep you alive. No thanks, id rather have a few bacteria rather than this risky stuff.
They would work on developing WINE. Just another Linux distribution would only be another OS that cant compete with Windows because it cant do wht most people need to do, run windows apps. If HP really was interested in defeating Windows it would help develop Wine, so everyone would be able to compete in the OS marketplace on an even playing field. Microsoft only keeps its market share because apps and drivers which only run on Windows. Allow people to run Windows apps and drivers and then you have an OS that really can make headway against MS.
I am surprised such systems are directly connected to the Internet at all. Why does a particle collider need internet access?
With it seems every computer system on the planet hackable, one wonders how we got to this situation. Perhaps it is due to the overuse of C rather than better protected languages like Perl or Ruby for instance, and thus buffer overruns
Article is written by someone who doesnt know what the hell they are talking about. Gecko has better memory usage than any other modern browser i have seen and excellent standards support
Instead of a professional organisation, instead the purpose of an IT union should NOT be to set standards or any of that, instead, it should be a collective bargaining force that works to improve IT workers welfare, to improve their conditions and to work on their behalf to represent their best interests and needs. It should be an advocacy group for IT people, not some sort of an organisation that makes them jump through hoops or set standards. The only requirement for membership is employment in the IT field. So I dont think this should be a standards organisation but a worker advocacy organisation which is what a union is supposed to be. You can have a union without having the whole testing thing. Testing has already been taken care of with the varioys existing IT cerification. But one should not have to have such a certification to belong to an IT union, only work in the IT field. IT unions and certification programs should be seperate entities completely.