I think you must have hit the submit button too early. You were going to give us the contact info for all these helpful people, right?
Re:Lights out for PPC?
on
IBM Opts for AMD
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I don't think so, but I think IBM has realized that there is just a big market out there for x86-based server hardware, and if they don't provide it to the customer, somebody else (Dell/HPaq) will.
My understanding is that their new generation of blade servers will let you mix and match Power and x86/Opteron blades on the same backplane, so that you can mix and match whatever you want, in order to fill your needs.
Frankly, this might be a good thing for Power if it's true, since it might allow customers who aren't ready to jump to Power completely (as in, buy a system that's exclusively Power based) to get a system that's mixed. Or get a predominantly x86 based system, but pop in a few Power boards to see how they work and really compare them apples-to-apples under whatever their business workload is. If Power is as good as IBM says it is, that can't be anything but a good thing.
IBM not offering an x86-based blade system would be just suicidal; they have a great brand name but it's not enough to keep people buying their RISC stuff if what they really want is x86.
Then, if you can't get anything there (and you're sure it's not because you're {being rude|being vague|asking a dumb question|etc.}), try to see if there are forums specific to the product you're having problems with (e.g. KDE, SANE) and ask there. Lastly, if you're still having trouble, see if there's a mailing list.
I say go for the mailing lists last, because I think it's polite if you ask a question on a list, to become a member for a few days and try to get an idea of the personalities involved, and then once you've gotten your question answered to stay on the list for a while and try to give back. That just seems polite.
That said, I've actually gotten much more help from the distro forums than from most mailing lists... although I can't tell whether this is because the lists are actually less helpful than the forums, or if it's just because since I never go to mailinglists except as a last resort, the problems I ask there are generally much more complicated, and more often that that just stump everyone. But I'd say about 75% of the questions I've ever posted to mailing lists have gone totally unanswered and are currently unsolved, while only a very small percentage of the questions I've posted to forums like UbuntuForums or KDE-Forum are.
I've never used IRC much for support (or at all, really), so I can't say anything about that.
I don't know what you're doing, but if you're going through computer equipment so quickly that everything is less than 24 months old, that's one expensive hobby that you've found for yourself.
There's no reason why most equipment shouldn't last longer than that. Heck, I have a Netgear wireless router that's been running continuously for more than five years now (MR314, released in 2001; it's had the same uptime as the power company since then). I have a keyboard that's vintage 1994 (Apple Keyboard II) and until I finally upgraded about six months ago when I ran into a bit of money, a reasonably-well upgraded computer from 2000 was doing me just fine, and that includes for stuff like DV and audio editing work.
There is absolutely no reason to replace things that quickly, unless you're in the business of reviewing hardware for some sort of publication, or doing testing. It's just plain wasteful -- but hey, it's your money.
I'd much rather have more stuff, that lasts longer, than have to re-buy the same crap every 24 to 36 months. By not getting a new CPU for five years, I could afford stuff like a better camcorder, film scanner, data projector, and audio system. All of them are going to last years, and will let me do more than I could if I had just had some brand-new desktop and nothing to hook up to it. A computer to me isn't very much by itself, it's really only valuable when connected up to other stuff (or at least more valuable that way). Wasting all my income on new CPUs just seems limiting.
I don't know of anyone in the pre-email world who used fax machines for personal correspondence.
I never wrote a whole lot of letters just because I didn't live that much of my life before email was available, but my parents certainly had whole files of paper letters and would write all the time. Probably still not as often as they send personal emails, so I'd say the amount of communication that people do today via email is greater than what they ever did via mail, but I think you're exaggerating the lengths to which people went to avoid writing letters.
It's not that much harder to write a letter than it is to send an email, when you're used to it. People had inboxes and outboxes and typing desks and stationery; people were set up to write letters and manage paper documents. Executives and lawyers had professional secretaries who managed correspondence and took dictation. Firing off a letter to someone in a paper-based office wasn't that involved or hard -- everyone was used to it.
Actually, I would bet that it probably takes less time to turn on a typewriter, insert a sheet of stationery, and start typing a letter, than it does to power up a computer, connect to the Internet via dialup, start an email program, and start writing an email. For the un-technically inclined, it's also a lot less intimidating. It's only recently, with the ubiquitity of always-on computers and Internet connections, that we've clearly achieved greater ease-of-use than the paper-based systems we perfected for decades did (and even then there's room for argument).
When people think about writing letters today, they think of how much of a pain it would be now, where most of the home and office infrastructure for managing paper has disappeared. People don't have desks with lots of empty space for reading and responding to mail, or file drawers for personal correspondence, or Rolodexes for managing postal addresses. Without that infrastructure, letter-writing is a PITA. Most people today, if they want to write a letter, have to either type it using a computer (making it just as involved as an email), or hand-write it (PITA), find an envelope, find stamps, find a mailbox, etc.
But that's not really fair. Writing an email would be a pain in the ass too, if you didn't have ready access to a computer, email program, and Internet connection. The way we write paper letters now would be like writing an email by Telnetting into a SMTP server -- we don't use any of the tools or infrastructure that was designed to facilitate that mode of communication.
I don't think your correct about the margin being that much higher on packages. Where the money really is, is with pre-sorted, barcoded, mass mailings.
The discount that's given on presorted mail is substantial, but the cost savings to the USPS of all that presorting is even more than the discount; thus they make more money on it. When you do a mass mailing, in order to get the best rate you basically have to presort the mail all the way down (in some cases) to the ZIP+4 or even down below that to the carrier/route level. All the postal service has to do at that point is take the whole sack or bundle and transport it to the end post office, and actually deliver it (which they're doing anyway). All the time-consuming sorting is done. That's their milk and honey.
Packages are a pain because they're tough to automate, particularly when you let people just hand-write the address on. (And don't do what UPS does, which is require a machine-printed, barcoded address label, or charge $5 for reading a hand-written one.) With envelopes at least you can run them through mechanical systems to read the front of the mailpiece and try to determine the address (and failing that, send the image to a human being for interpretation), large packages and irregularly sized mailpieces take a lot of manual labor to get through the system, and require much more expensive sorting equipment (meaning that you have to have more centralized "hubs" for sorting). Not to mention that heavy packages are much more sensitive to variable costs (particularly fuel) while you can pack enough letters onto a truck to make them more dependent on fixed costs. When you have a rate structure that's difficult to change (i.e. you can't just tack on a "Fuel Surcharge" like UPS does), package delivery gets even riskier as a major line of business.
I think you're correct in that the USPS needs to look hard at what's being delivered today, and what's going to move to electronic "delivery" in the future and what's going to remain physical. But right now, they're basically in the letter-delivery business, with a sideline into packages that's probably a lot less profitable. (Or only made profitable because they're already moving large volumes of stuff around, so they can afford to take the packages along for the ride.) The USPS would have to fundamentally alter a lot of its operations if it was to become a package carrier similar to UPS or DHL.
You've got that backwards. The USPS doesn't own any planes, and they have a relatively small fleet of trucks for the volume of stuff that they deliver. It's the Postal Service that uses a lot of other people's trucks and planes, not the other way around.
In particular, a lot of US Mail is shipped on FedEx aircraft. It used to be that a lot of mail was hauled on passenger airplanes (and the passenger airlines used to compete for these contracts, which is a story in itself) but they no longer allow packages on passenger flights for safety/security reasons, so they now put most air mail onto other freight aircraft. FedEx has one of the largest fleets of air-freight craft in the world, so it's natural that they actually do a lot of the transportation.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_ Service#Airline_and_rail_division. All of the air and rail transportation of US Mail is handled under contract, and a fair bit of the over-the-road trucking is as well. It's not cost effective for the USPS to maintain their own fleet of aircraft, when they can just have private companies compete to provide that service to them as contractors.
Well the monopoly they have over mail delivery is a pretty big non-cash subsidy, in my book.
I'm not saying that the USPS isn't pretty good at what it does, and I use them all the time, but let's be honest: they have a market that's protected from competition by law. No private corporation is allowed to carry letters for anything less than (IIRC) twice the USPS rate or $3, whichever is lower.
That they're self-supporting is good, but they'd really better be considering that nobody is allowed to touch their business area.
The fact that D2L existed before Blackboard was even a gleam in the eye of its writer is 98% of the case.
As much as I'd like to believe this, 98% percent of the case is who can throw more money at it. I hope D2L is passing the hat around at the user's conference, because they are going to need a big pile of cash if they want to survive a patent-infringement suit.
I also hope that they're privately held; an infringement suit -- even a baseless one -- would be a nice way of driving the share price down low enough to make a hostile takeover feasible.
Just remember, when the RIM/NTP suit started, a lot of people said that was baseless, too. How did that end up? $680M, and the threat of injunctions? Facts are basically irrelevant in cases like this, it's the arguments that matter, and how you make them. A skilled lawyer can drag even the most lopsided, painfully obvious case out forever, in order to run the would-be winners into the ground financially.
It sounds like D2L is whistling through the graveyard; I wouldn't be so confident if I were them right now.
Just because this was one of the first borderline on-topic posts in this discussion so far...
Can anyone explain to me how you'd use this thing? The Register article says "The machines are controlled from a PC or workstation - 32- or 64-bit, Windows or Linux - connected across a network. Nvidia reckons the boxes will interest not only content creators but folk doing scientific modelling and simulation work." That makes it sound almost like a standalone system of some sort, not just a graphics card. I mean, what kind of 'network' do you use to connect the host PC to an array of graphics cards? Usually you attach a graphics card to the PCI or AGP bus, which obviously has far more bandwidth than any networking connection I've ever heard (except for maybe some high-end clustering/HPPC interconnects). They must be using some more loose definition of network than I'm thinking, unless you deliver the data that's to be rendered to the unit in some highly-compressed, extremely high-level form, almost like a remote desktop protocol, and then it renders and displays them. That could make sense for vector graphics, where you can describe what's being displayed with only a few equations and it's really the rasterization and display that's hard, but that wouldn't fly for video and raster graphics.
I'm just going to go on the assumption that the product isn't quite that revolutionary, and the Register article is using the term 'network' a little more loosely than I'd think is particularly proper.
NVidia's page on the Quadroplex mentions on the System Requirements sub-page that a PCI Express x16 slot is required in the host system, and that each system can have a maximum of two Quadroplexes attached. No mention of any 'network;' just PCI express. I can only guess that it comes with some type of dummy header-card that you insert into the machine, which breaks out the PCI Express connection externally, so that you can connect it up to the big external box with the graphic cards in it? Is it that simple? Nothing but a box with a power supply and an external cable and a breakout card?
I've basically described two extremes of possibility. On one hand, the Register article might lead one to speculate wildly that this thing is some sort of purpose-built rasterization server, while NVidia's own site make it seem like merely two graphics cards in a pretty external case, hardly justifying the price they're asking even considering that they're probably high-end cards. I can only guess that the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
Anyone want to clue me in on exactly what this thing does and how it does it?
He didn't say "major in math and you'll end up unemployed," he said basically that someone with a 4-year degree in math probably isn't going to get a job doing math after they graduate. Basically, they're going to be using that math degree as a proof that they have a few brain cells to rub together, in order to get access to the same pool of jobs that most grads with a 4-year B.S. degree are probably eligible for.
I agree with you that there are quite a few jobs that are open to basically anyone with a degree, if it's from the right place (i.e. probably not Podunk Com-Tech). Lots of introductory jobs in the corporate world are like this. But don't think for a moment that you'll really end up doing the same kind of stuff you were doing in school in most of these jobs; even if it's an aerospace/tech company, they're not hiring you for your degree, they're hiring you because they think your degree is evidence that you're not stupid and are probably trainable.
In my experience, it's really not until you've completed graduate school that people start to be interested in actually hiring you for your training.
The other big field I'd encourage someone who's recently graduated college and looking for a job to do, is consulting. Most companies aren't too picky as to what your major is as long as it's something perceived as useful (i.e. not Poetry or Turf Grass Management); what really matters is your GPA, social skills, and to a lesser extent, where your degree is from. They money is usually decent and you move from one "job" to the next every few months, which if you get good projects can mean a lot of exposure to different things and opportunities for networking. Think of it as the $40+k/year, white-collar version of temping.
While I don't agree that using open wireless networks is unethical or, heaven forbid, "stealing", I would never use one for something that would affect the network owner, whether it's illegal or just bandwidth-intensive. BUT, if I move into a new apartment and don't have internet connectivity yet, is it unethical for me to pop on to a neighbor's open network for a minute to check my e-mail?
I've got a bigger question: Does anyone care?
I mean really, outside of this discussion, which as gone further into Bad Analogy Land than anything I've seen on Slashdot recently, nobody seems to give a crap. This is as far from a major public issue than anything I can think of.
Regular folks don't sit around moralizing about whether they should or shouldn't use that anonymous "Linksys" entry that pops up in the list of available wireless networks to check their email -- they just do it, if it's available and they need to use it. If you're racked with guilt every time you do it, don't do it. And if the idea of other people using your AP bugs you, put a password on it. Either way, it's a simple solution. But I really don't think it's a qualm that many people are losing sleep over in either direction.
Even if it is, technically, immoral on some level, it's so far down the list of Bad Things that a person could and probably does do in an average day, anyone who's bitching at others about doing it better be nothing less than a paragon of human existance and morality, or else they're a bloody fucking hypocrite. Seriously, I can't think of anyone that I know, who lives such a virtuous life that they should really be worrying about the morality or lack thereof, of the publicly-available/unsecured AP they might use once in a while.
If you're smart, you would have already chiseled the dealer down as low as he was willing to go before you mentioned that you wanted to finance it.
By the time you get to asking about financing options, the price negotiation stage of things ought to be finished.
Basically you should go through the whole transaction up until you're sitting in the business manager's office, implying that it's going to be a cash sale; at that point once the price has been hammered out and you're confident that you've wrung every last cent out of them that you can, and they're crying about how they have children to feed, then would be a good time to just casually ask what kind of interest rate they can get you. They will naturally choke and splutter and say they didn't know you were going to finance it, but I've never had one of them refuse to give me whatever the manufacturers' bank (GM Credit, VW Credit) preferred interest rate is.
Some dealers actually make this easy on you, by making the person who determines the selling price of the car a different person than the guy who deals with financing. It's a little tougher if they're the same person but still not impossible.
Alternately you can go into one dealership and pretend to be a rube and ask what the best rate is they can get you on a particular loan, and then when you go to actually make the sale at another dealer, you'll know what the rate is they can give you (since generally the rates don't vary from dealer to dealer).
Of course, when you start negotiating, the first thing they'll try to pin down is whether you're a cash sale customer or financing customer; if you say finance, they'll immediately start playing number games with you and trying to negotiate based on "monthly payments" rather than on the bottom-line price. The correct response is to be as vague as possible and give the subtext that you have money to spend right away.
Plus, by getting a hard ("cash sale") price out of them before discussing financing, it makes it easier to compare their financing offer to one you might get from a bank, credit union, or by loaning yourself the money (opportunity cost).
As my father used to say, "God never punished anyone for lying to a car salesman."
Well, I knew I was going to take flak for saying that.:)
I'm aware of the difference between the GNU toolset/userland and the kernel. However, the GNU utilities are, collectively, a clone of a sort of generic UNIX userspace. That's the joke behind the name "GNU's Not UNIX," because just by looking at it, it looks a whole lot like UNIX. (This is freely admitted by the FSF: "We decided to make the operating system compatible with Unix because the overall design was already proven and portable, and because compatibility makes it easy for Unix users to switch from Unix to GNU.")
We can argue as to whether or not Linux (the kernel) was a clone of a Unix kernel or not; I suppose it's probably a stretch to call it a 'clone,' but it's definitely reinventive, if a few generations removed from any actual Unix. Torvalds had studied Minix, and Minix is certainly "Unix-like," at least on the surface. That none of them (Linux, Minix, UNIX) shared any code (initially--they may now) underscores my point about the re-inventiveness of each effort.
Note that I'm not alleging any sort of plagarism or intellectual dishonesty here; on the contrary I was trying to use Linux as an example of how sometimes reinvention can be a good thing. I'm quite sure (because I heard it first-hand) that a lot of UNIX users thought that GNU/Linux was unnecessary and redundant when it first was developed, but in retrospect they were wrong. That's the point I was getting at: sometimes it can seem like people are reinventing the wheel, but in doing so may be doing something rather terribly important. (Although it may not be evident until later.)
That said, they might just be reinventing the wheel. It's tough to say until later, which is why I said projects that seem to do the same thing ought to be carefully considered before a lot of duplicate effort is expended.
On the whole Linux/GNU/"GNU-Linux" thing: I think it's pretty well accepted by now that "Linux" is not just the name of a kernel, but the name of an entire family of operating systems, which have in common a particular kernel. I certainly don't mean any disrespect to RMS and the rest of the GNU people, but GNU/Linux doesn't exactly roll off either the tongue or the keyboard. The only time I write out "GNU/Linux" is when I think there's a chance that the whole OS and the kernel by itself are going to be confused, or where the userspace and kernel are being discussed independently. (Actually I think it's most common today to use "Linux" to refer to the OS or OS family collectively, GNU to refer to the toolset, and "Linux kernel" to refer to the kernel.) In my original post I was referring to Linux collectively, both the GNU userland and Torvalds' kernel, as a Unix-like OS (which it is, or at least was; in many ways it's surpassed Unix now) which is reinventive in nature. But you're right, I should have been more clear.
I don't think they're planning on offering internet access for free.
My understanding of this whole transition is that part of dropping the "subscription model" includes getting rid of ISP operations, or drastically scaling them back. That's probably a lot of the staff they're thinking of firing; all the people that manage the dialup infrastructure and customer service / support.
The key here is that AOL doesn't want to be an ISP anymore. They want to be a content provider, not an access provider. Access is a commodity nowadays, or at least a utility, doled out by a few regional monopolies in each area.
As their subscriber base dimishes, they'll cut capacity and concentrate more on being an 'Internet company' and not a private-network one. At the end of it all, what they want to be is just a very big web-site and -services operation, using their vast reserves of content, previously used as a lure to get customers onto the AOL service proper, to get viewers to look at advertising. Those users won't be using AOL dialup, they'll be using cable and DSL from other companies.
Anyone trying to be an ISP in today's market would have to be insane. Dialup is a declining niche market; it has no future.
I've set up VMWare Server (which is FAIB) on my Kubuntu Dapper system and it was quite easy. Basically you just follow the instructions, I didn't run into any major installation gotchas. You register with VMWare and they email you a serial number and a link to the download site; you run the installer and choose where you want things to be installed (I use/var/vmware/) and you're pretty much off. It took me longer and was more of a PITA to install Windows on the resulting VM than it was to install VMWare itself.
Only thing I ran into though: be careful of the networking option that you choose. The default is 'Bridged,' which creates a virtual interface using your machine's same network card, which then gets a DHCP address from your LAN router. This is nice because it means your virtual machine doesn't use the same IP as your host machine's native OS. This caused me some problems with services that I had running on the host, netatalk in particular. (The default configuration of netatalk is to try to automatically find the correct network interface, and it got confused by the virtual one apparently; explicitly defining which one to use solved the problem.)
Long story short: consider using the 'NAT' networking option until you know what you're doing; this does IP masquerading so that the VM uses your machine's regular network interface and IP address. It means there's an extra layer of NAT to punch through if you wanted to run services on the VM, but it keeps most of the complexity hidden inside VMWare.
After you get VMWare installed, you can either create a bare virtual hard disk and install whichever x86 OS you want, or you can download pre-configured virtual machines; I don't know if Edgy is one of these, but it might be.
Well, that's kind of to be expected: when you get right down to it, the whole premise of Linux was a reinvention of the wheel. It's a clone of an operating system that already existed -- it doesn't get much more re-inventive than that.
However, if there's anything we can learn from that, it's that sometimes there are benefits to re-inventing something that already exists, and in some cases may already seem to work okay. What seems like a complete waste of time to one person might create a result that's just different enough in some way to be really useful to somebody. (In the case of Linux, to a lot of us anyway, it was Unix but without the high cost and crappy licensing, and with the ability to see the source; hugely significant to some people but I'm sure it looked totally redundant to Unix people.)
Sometimes reinvention is necessary. You make a good point though, that there does seem to be a lot of it going on at any given time, and maybe that doesn't need to be the case here -- in any event, it seems like the reasons for taking parallel roads to the same place rather than working together should be carefully considered.
Your comment got me thinking about how much information you could squeeze into one of those barcodes.
At most, a 320x240 tag would give you 76,800 bits of information, or slightly less than 11,000 7-bit ASCII characters. That's assuming you could match the pixels of the tag to the camera's sensor exactly.
I assume you probably wouldn't want to use any more than half of the camera's vertical and horizontal resolution though, which leaves you with 160x120 (for 2,700 characters), and I assume you'd need to have a few rows blacked-out on at least two sides to identify the border of the tag (so subtract (160+120)*2 pixels for bordering...that leaves 2662 characters) and you'd probably want to have a hash or checksum (lose 128 bits).
Still, that leaves about 2,643 characters in an image, which is about a page and a half of typed text using the old guideline of approximately 1,500 characters per page.
That's pretty impressive; provided you could make your reader focus on objects near to the lens, so that you could make the tag suitably small (less than an inch or so across), that's a lot more efficent way to convey textual information than actually writing it out. Instead of just embedding a URL link, you could put written information on there; maybe stuff that would clutter up the packaging / display / poster if you wrote it all down. If these things became ubiquitious, I could see whole advertising campaigns in urban areas (e.g. subways) where the "ad" got you interested, and then you could get more information via the tag.
They say a picture's worth a thousand words, and it sounds like it may not be far off from that.
This is quite true, and every current implementation of rsync that I've run across (not that I'm exactly a scholar on the topic or anything, but I've used it on Mac OS X and a bunch of Linux distros) uses SSH as the default shell when the address is specified with a single colon ('rsync -avz ~/Documents jdoe@foobar.com:/var/backup/'), although I suppose its probably best practice to specify the shell explicitly in a script.
So just to restate what I should have said: the only thing you'd need to have running on your remote server is sshd; if you don't care about WebDAV access you could lock down everything else. That would give you scp and sftp as well which seems like it ought to be good enough for most people.
I wouldn't recommend logging in as root when doing the backups though (since it has to have an un-passworded private key on the client machine to login as part of a cron job).
Anyway, given that you can use most features of the rsync daemon via a shell (including named modules), there doesn't seem to be any good reason to run the daemon on a machine that's exposed to the public net. In retrospect, I have no idea why I mentioned it.
If you're going to turn out a few million identical machines to people who don't have a whole lot of backwards-compatibility requirements, you can suddenly do a lot of things that mainstream PC manufacturers can't. I'd really like to see them blank-slate design the architecture, within the requirements of cost (i.e. using off-the-shelf parts).
I guess the only problem is that you don't want to stray too far from 'conventional' PCs, because you want the experience that kids get working on these machines to be easily translatable to what the rest of the world uses; however, maybe using a slightly different architecture will teach a valuable lesson about the benefits of writing agnostic code for standard toolsets.
I'll be perfectly honest here: I'm rather cynical about the OLPC project ever actually accomplishing its goals. But despite that, I think it's a noble effort and I wish them well, if just because it's a hell of a technical question, and the engineer in me thinks that any project that really puts a lot of minds to work on a problem like that is pretty neat. Even if the majority of the laptops end up getting sold to us First Worlders on eBay, the fact that they will have designed such a machine and produced it -- provided they can do it, naturally -- will keep me from calling it a total failure. Regardless of the outcome, OLPC is going to be a case study for anyone thinking big in technology.
There are some states here where they're allowed to vote as well (I know it's the case in Maine; I always thought it was bizarre), in general when you're convicted of a felony you lose a lot of rights that you'd otherwise enjoy as a full citizen. You lose physical freedom, usually, by virtue of being in jail; you lose your 2nd Amendment right to own a firearm; you usually can't hold public office; depending on circumstance you may lose other things as well.
To put it bluntly, when you're in jail it's basically because you've demonstrated for one reason or another that you can't handle the responsibilies of a citizen in free society. Therefore, I see no reason why they should be allowed to participate in the democratic process.
Voting isn't something that should be taken lightly; if you're so highly irresponsible so as to have to be locked up for the safety of others, if your judgement is that bad, then you certainly have no business participating in something as fundamentally important to the operation of our country as voting is.
With that said, I don't think it's appropriate to permanently take away someone's voting rights for commiting a crime; once you've been released from the penal system and are otherwise a free person, then you should be able to vote again.
The law doesn't require a rating in order for a film to be exhibited; it just requires a rating for the film to be exhibited to an audience.
Huh? What are you talking about? The law does no such thing. Yes, most of the movies advertised on television are rated by the MPAA, and yes, producers and directors are known to gerrymander their films around in order to make them fit into a certain ratings category, in order to attract a larger audience. But there's no law making it so. You could make a totally unrated movie, and then run it in theaters that didn't mind playing an unrated film (art houses, mostly), and advertise it. Assuming your advertisement itself isn't offensive, I can almost guarantee you that no broadcaster or other media outlet is going to turn you down, provided you can put cash on the barrel-head. (They run ads for Girls Gone Wild on late-night TV, you know.)
There are lots of "unrated" movies advertised all the time! Just a few days ago I saw an advertisement for an unrated version of some teen movie (something American Pie-ish) on television. It's advertising the fact that it's unrated; basically using the term 'unrated' as a euphemism for smutty.
The movie rating system works fairly well, I think, and could be a good example of what video games will probably end up going with, in the absence of unnecessary and heavy-handed government interference. The ratings and standards are handled by a private body, the retailers cooperate and limit their sales to minors based on those ratings, everyone is basically happy.
The only government regulation of movies is where it gets into true obscenity law (but it's pretty rare), or over-the-air broadcast regulations and the FCC rules. The justification for the FCC regulations -- and I'm not convinced it's a great justification -- is that the airwaves are a "public resource," and there's a resulting mandate for regulation as to what you can say there. [1] But there's no such regulation of non-broadcast TV, hence we have HBO and Cinemax running soft-core porn at night and shows that wouldn't past muster on the broadcast networks during the day. [2]
The movie system, for the most part anyway, works. It does so without a lot of regulation or government oversight, and it's a mistake to just ignore that when thinking about video games. Games already have most of the framework there; the ESRB does the ratings, and most of the stores honor them in terms of sales. If the few stores selling "M" games to minors is a problem that concerns that many people, then arrange boycotts or letter-writing campaigns to the stores. Using the governement to do the job is employing a bludgeon when a screwdriver (thumb screw?) would have worked just as well, and with less collateral damage to others' rights.
[1] I don't disagree with this sentiment on principle; actually I think it's a good one. But if the airwaves truly are a 'public resource,' then I think the FCC is doing an absolutely shit job of managing them for the greatest public good in other respects. I'd just like some consistency here. [2] The limits of what's shown on cable is basically governed only by public opinion and not regulation; hence why I'm pretty sure what's on late-night cable in Utah is different from Las Vegas, Nevada -- as it should be.
Actually cigarette smuggling is a fairly big operation in some regions of the United States.
Generally it involves Indian Reservations in some way, although I'm not exactly sure of the mechanics of it. It could just be that people buy up large quantities of discount cigarettes on a tribal reservation, and then sell them at slightly below the going price on the open market, taking the difference (the cigarette tax, which would normally go to the Fed) as profit.
I have definitely heard about substantial busts of smuggled cigarettes, though -- truckloads full. This was in New England a few years ago; I think that their destination was New York City and they were coming down from somewhere in Connecticut/Mass/Upstate NY. Don't remember the details exactly.
The government really hates it when other people start skimming from their income stream. There's a certain amount of truth in that old bumper sticker: "Don't Steal, The Government Hates Competition."
If the Science Museum is as cautious, non-controversial, and inoffensive as you make it out to be (and IMO I agree with you, it certainly does seem like they're pretty clean), who says they'd want anything to do with the project?
Frankly something like this could go south in a hurry. There are a huge number of uncertainties, ranging from sheer technical feasibility (that's one of the easy questions) to much more complex issues of maintainance budgeting, operating a huge service fleet, and all the associated logistics. If I was in a leadership or advisory position at the Science Museum, I'd probably tell them to run far and fast in the opposite direction. They have too much going for them to play with something that could easily become a political hand grenade.
After all, it only takes one election for one administration's 'pet project' to become the next one's 'red-headed stepchild.' I could easily see something like this being intentionally sabotaged politically, after a turnover in Boston, in order to make the previous guys who supported it look bad. Stuff like that is pretty common in politics, and Massachusetts politics in general (and Boston in even more particular) has a history of ugliness and finger-pointing.
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I think you must have hit the submit button too early. You were going to give us the contact info for all these helpful people, right?
I don't think so, but I think IBM has realized that there is just a big market out there for x86-based server hardware, and if they don't provide it to the customer, somebody else (Dell/HPaq) will.
My understanding is that their new generation of blade servers will let you mix and match Power and x86/Opteron blades on the same backplane, so that you can mix and match whatever you want, in order to fill your needs.
Frankly, this might be a good thing for Power if it's true, since it might allow customers who aren't ready to jump to Power completely (as in, buy a system that's exclusively Power based) to get a system that's mixed. Or get a predominantly x86 based system, but pop in a few Power boards to see how they work and really compare them apples-to-apples under whatever their business workload is. If Power is as good as IBM says it is, that can't be anything but a good thing.
IBM not offering an x86-based blade system would be just suicidal; they have a great brand name but it's not enough to keep people buying their RISC stuff if what they really want is x86.
Yeah I'll second (third, fourth?) that as well.
... although I can't tell whether this is because the lists are actually less helpful than the forums, or if it's just because since I never go to mailinglists except as a last resort, the problems I ask there are generally much more complicated, and more often that that just stump everyone. But I'd say about 75% of the questions I've ever posted to mailing lists have gone totally unanswered and are currently unsolved, while only a very small percentage of the questions I've posted to forums like UbuntuForums or KDE-Forum are.
Start off with distro-specific forums.
Then, if you can't get anything there (and you're sure it's not because you're {being rude|being vague|asking a dumb question|etc.}), try to see if there are forums specific to the product you're having problems with (e.g. KDE, SANE) and ask there. Lastly, if you're still having trouble, see if there's a mailing list.
I say go for the mailing lists last, because I think it's polite if you ask a question on a list, to become a member for a few days and try to get an idea of the personalities involved, and then once you've gotten your question answered to stay on the list for a while and try to give back. That just seems polite.
That said, I've actually gotten much more help from the distro forums than from most mailing lists
I've never used IRC much for support (or at all, really), so I can't say anything about that.
I don't know what you're doing, but if you're going through computer equipment so quickly that everything is less than 24 months old, that's one expensive hobby that you've found for yourself.
There's no reason why most equipment shouldn't last longer than that. Heck, I have a Netgear wireless router that's been running continuously for more than five years now (MR314, released in 2001; it's had the same uptime as the power company since then). I have a keyboard that's vintage 1994 (Apple Keyboard II) and until I finally upgraded about six months ago when I ran into a bit of money, a reasonably-well upgraded computer from 2000 was doing me just fine, and that includes for stuff like DV and audio editing work.
There is absolutely no reason to replace things that quickly, unless you're in the business of reviewing hardware for some sort of publication, or doing testing. It's just plain wasteful -- but hey, it's your money.
I'd much rather have more stuff, that lasts longer, than have to re-buy the same crap every 24 to 36 months. By not getting a new CPU for five years, I could afford stuff like a better camcorder, film scanner, data projector, and audio system. All of them are going to last years, and will let me do more than I could if I had just had some brand-new desktop and nothing to hook up to it. A computer to me isn't very much by itself, it's really only valuable when connected up to other stuff (or at least more valuable that way). Wasting all my income on new CPUs just seems limiting.
I don't know of anyone in the pre-email world who used fax machines for personal correspondence.
I never wrote a whole lot of letters just because I didn't live that much of my life before email was available, but my parents certainly had whole files of paper letters and would write all the time. Probably still not as often as they send personal emails, so I'd say the amount of communication that people do today via email is greater than what they ever did via mail, but I think you're exaggerating the lengths to which people went to avoid writing letters.
It's not that much harder to write a letter than it is to send an email, when you're used to it. People had inboxes and outboxes and typing desks and stationery; people were set up to write letters and manage paper documents. Executives and lawyers had professional secretaries who managed correspondence and took dictation. Firing off a letter to someone in a paper-based office wasn't that involved or hard -- everyone was used to it.
Actually, I would bet that it probably takes less time to turn on a typewriter, insert a sheet of stationery, and start typing a letter, than it does to power up a computer, connect to the Internet via dialup, start an email program, and start writing an email. For the un-technically inclined, it's also a lot less intimidating. It's only recently, with the ubiquitity of always-on computers and Internet connections, that we've clearly achieved greater ease-of-use than the paper-based systems we perfected for decades did (and even then there's room for argument).
When people think about writing letters today, they think of how much of a pain it would be now, where most of the home and office infrastructure for managing paper has disappeared. People don't have desks with lots of empty space for reading and responding to mail, or file drawers for personal correspondence, or Rolodexes for managing postal addresses. Without that infrastructure, letter-writing is a PITA. Most people today, if they want to write a letter, have to either type it using a computer (making it just as involved as an email), or hand-write it (PITA), find an envelope, find stamps, find a mailbox, etc.
But that's not really fair. Writing an email would be a pain in the ass too, if you didn't have ready access to a computer, email program, and Internet connection. The way we write paper letters now would be like writing an email by Telnetting into a SMTP server -- we don't use any of the tools or infrastructure that was designed to facilitate that mode of communication.
I don't think your correct about the margin being that much higher on packages. Where the money really is, is with pre-sorted, barcoded, mass mailings.
The discount that's given on presorted mail is substantial, but the cost savings to the USPS of all that presorting is even more than the discount; thus they make more money on it. When you do a mass mailing, in order to get the best rate you basically have to presort the mail all the way down (in some cases) to the ZIP+4 or even down below that to the carrier/route level. All the postal service has to do at that point is take the whole sack or bundle and transport it to the end post office, and actually deliver it (which they're doing anyway). All the time-consuming sorting is done. That's their milk and honey.
Packages are a pain because they're tough to automate, particularly when you let people just hand-write the address on. (And don't do what UPS does, which is require a machine-printed, barcoded address label, or charge $5 for reading a hand-written one.) With envelopes at least you can run them through mechanical systems to read the front of the mailpiece and try to determine the address (and failing that, send the image to a human being for interpretation), large packages and irregularly sized mailpieces take a lot of manual labor to get through the system, and require much more expensive sorting equipment (meaning that you have to have more centralized "hubs" for sorting). Not to mention that heavy packages are much more sensitive to variable costs (particularly fuel) while you can pack enough letters onto a truck to make them more dependent on fixed costs. When you have a rate structure that's difficult to change (i.e. you can't just tack on a "Fuel Surcharge" like UPS does), package delivery gets even riskier as a major line of business.
I think you're correct in that the USPS needs to look hard at what's being delivered today, and what's going to move to electronic "delivery" in the future and what's going to remain physical. But right now, they're basically in the letter-delivery business, with a sideline into packages that's probably a lot less profitable. (Or only made profitable because they're already moving large volumes of stuff around, so they can afford to take the packages along for the ride.) The USPS would have to fundamentally alter a lot of its operations if it was to become a package carrier similar to UPS or DHL.
Er, no.
_ Service#Airline_and_rail_division. All of the air and rail transportation of US Mail is handled under contract, and a fair bit of the over-the-road trucking is as well. It's not cost effective for the USPS to maintain their own fleet of aircraft, when they can just have private companies compete to provide that service to them as contractors.
You've got that backwards. The USPS doesn't own any planes, and they have a relatively small fleet of trucks for the volume of stuff that they deliver. It's the Postal Service that uses a lot of other people's trucks and planes, not the other way around.
In particular, a lot of US Mail is shipped on FedEx aircraft. It used to be that a lot of mail was hauled on passenger airplanes (and the passenger airlines used to compete for these contracts, which is a story in itself) but they no longer allow packages on passenger flights for safety/security reasons, so they now put most air mail onto other freight aircraft. FedEx has one of the largest fleets of air-freight craft in the world, so it's natural that they actually do a lot of the transportation.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal
Well the monopoly they have over mail delivery is a pretty big non-cash subsidy, in my book.
I'm not saying that the USPS isn't pretty good at what it does, and I use them all the time, but let's be honest: they have a market that's protected from competition by law. No private corporation is allowed to carry letters for anything less than (IIRC) twice the USPS rate or $3, whichever is lower.
That they're self-supporting is good, but they'd really better be considering that nobody is allowed to touch their business area.
The fact that D2L existed before Blackboard was even a gleam in the eye of its writer is 98% of the case.
As much as I'd like to believe this, 98% percent of the case is who can throw more money at it. I hope D2L is passing the hat around at the user's conference, because they are going to need a big pile of cash if they want to survive a patent-infringement suit.
I also hope that they're privately held; an infringement suit -- even a baseless one -- would be a nice way of driving the share price down low enough to make a hostile takeover feasible.
Just remember, when the RIM/NTP suit started, a lot of people said that was baseless, too. How did that end up? $680M, and the threat of injunctions? Facts are basically irrelevant in cases like this, it's the arguments that matter, and how you make them. A skilled lawyer can drag even the most lopsided, painfully obvious case out forever, in order to run the would-be winners into the ground financially.
It sounds like D2L is whistling through the graveyard; I wouldn't be so confident if I were them right now.
Nothing, as the patent isn't even worth the paper it's written on.
You must be new here. Even a baseless patent gains value when it's backed up by an army of lawyers and a few million dollars.
The actual truth or falsehood of facts dim in relative importance compared to who can afford to defend them in court.
Just because this was one of the first borderline on-topic posts in this discussion so far...
Can anyone explain to me how you'd use this thing? The Register article says "The machines are controlled from a PC or workstation - 32- or 64-bit, Windows or Linux - connected across a network. Nvidia reckons the boxes will interest not only content creators but folk doing scientific modelling and simulation work." That makes it sound almost like a standalone system of some sort, not just a graphics card. I mean, what kind of 'network' do you use to connect the host PC to an array of graphics cards? Usually you attach a graphics card to the PCI or AGP bus, which obviously has far more bandwidth than any networking connection I've ever heard (except for maybe some high-end clustering/HPPC interconnects). They must be using some more loose definition of network than I'm thinking, unless you deliver the data that's to be rendered to the unit in some highly-compressed, extremely high-level form, almost like a remote desktop protocol, and then it renders and displays them. That could make sense for vector graphics, where you can describe what's being displayed with only a few equations and it's really the rasterization and display that's hard, but that wouldn't fly for video and raster graphics.
I'm just going to go on the assumption that the product isn't quite that revolutionary, and the Register article is using the term 'network' a little more loosely than I'd think is particularly proper.
NVidia's page on the Quadroplex mentions on the System Requirements sub-page that a PCI Express x16 slot is required in the host system, and that each system can have a maximum of two Quadroplexes attached. No mention of any 'network;' just PCI express. I can only guess that it comes with some type of dummy header-card that you insert into the machine, which breaks out the PCI Express connection externally, so that you can connect it up to the big external box with the graphic cards in it? Is it that simple? Nothing but a box with a power supply and an external cable and a breakout card?
I've basically described two extremes of possibility. On one hand, the Register article might lead one to speculate wildly that this thing is some sort of purpose-built rasterization server, while NVidia's own site make it seem like merely two graphics cards in a pretty external case, hardly justifying the price they're asking even considering that they're probably high-end cards. I can only guess that the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
Anyone want to clue me in on exactly what this thing does and how it does it?
I think you're kind of proving his point.
He didn't say "major in math and you'll end up unemployed," he said basically that someone with a 4-year degree in math probably isn't going to get a job doing math after they graduate. Basically, they're going to be using that math degree as a proof that they have a few brain cells to rub together, in order to get access to the same pool of jobs that most grads with a 4-year B.S. degree are probably eligible for.
I agree with you that there are quite a few jobs that are open to basically anyone with a degree, if it's from the right place (i.e. probably not Podunk Com-Tech). Lots of introductory jobs in the corporate world are like this. But don't think for a moment that you'll really end up doing the same kind of stuff you were doing in school in most of these jobs; even if it's an aerospace/tech company, they're not hiring you for your degree, they're hiring you because they think your degree is evidence that you're not stupid and are probably trainable.
In my experience, it's really not until you've completed graduate school that people start to be interested in actually hiring you for your training.
The other big field I'd encourage someone who's recently graduated college and looking for a job to do, is consulting. Most companies aren't too picky as to what your major is as long as it's something perceived as useful (i.e. not Poetry or Turf Grass Management); what really matters is your GPA, social skills, and to a lesser extent, where your degree is from. They money is usually decent and you move from one "job" to the next every few months, which if you get good projects can mean a lot of exposure to different things and opportunities for networking. Think of it as the $40+k/year, white-collar version of temping.
While I don't agree that using open wireless networks is unethical or, heaven forbid, "stealing", I would never use one for something that would affect the network owner, whether it's illegal or just bandwidth-intensive. BUT, if I move into a new apartment and don't have internet connectivity yet, is it unethical for me to pop on to a neighbor's open network for a minute to check my e-mail?
I've got a bigger question: Does anyone care?
I mean really, outside of this discussion, which as gone further into Bad Analogy Land than anything I've seen on Slashdot recently, nobody seems to give a crap. This is as far from a major public issue than anything I can think of.
Regular folks don't sit around moralizing about whether they should or shouldn't use that anonymous "Linksys" entry that pops up in the list of available wireless networks to check their email -- they just do it, if it's available and they need to use it. If you're racked with guilt every time you do it, don't do it. And if the idea of other people using your AP bugs you, put a password on it. Either way, it's a simple solution. But I really don't think it's a qualm that many people are losing sleep over in either direction.
Even if it is, technically, immoral on some level, it's so far down the list of Bad Things that a person could and probably does do in an average day, anyone who's bitching at others about doing it better be nothing less than a paragon of human existance and morality, or else they're a bloody fucking hypocrite. Seriously, I can't think of anyone that I know, who lives such a virtuous life that they should really be worrying about the morality or lack thereof, of the publicly-available/unsecured AP they might use once in a while.
Talk about a tempest in a teapot.
If you're smart, you would have already chiseled the dealer down as low as he was willing to go before you mentioned that you wanted to finance it.
By the time you get to asking about financing options, the price negotiation stage of things ought to be finished.
Basically you should go through the whole transaction up until you're sitting in the business manager's office, implying that it's going to be a cash sale; at that point once the price has been hammered out and you're confident that you've wrung every last cent out of them that you can, and they're crying about how they have children to feed, then would be a good time to just casually ask what kind of interest rate they can get you. They will naturally choke and splutter and say they didn't know you were going to finance it, but I've never had one of them refuse to give me whatever the manufacturers' bank (GM Credit, VW Credit) preferred interest rate is.
Some dealers actually make this easy on you, by making the person who determines the selling price of the car a different person than the guy who deals with financing. It's a little tougher if they're the same person but still not impossible.
Alternately you can go into one dealership and pretend to be a rube and ask what the best rate is they can get you on a particular loan, and then when you go to actually make the sale at another dealer, you'll know what the rate is they can give you (since generally the rates don't vary from dealer to dealer).
Of course, when you start negotiating, the first thing they'll try to pin down is whether you're a cash sale customer or financing customer; if you say finance, they'll immediately start playing number games with you and trying to negotiate based on "monthly payments" rather than on the bottom-line price. The correct response is to be as vague as possible and give the subtext that you have money to spend right away.
Plus, by getting a hard ("cash sale") price out of them before discussing financing, it makes it easier to compare their financing offer to one you might get from a bank, credit union, or by loaning yourself the money (opportunity cost).
As my father used to say, "God never punished anyone for lying to a car salesman."
Well, I knew I was going to take flak for saying that. :)
I'm aware of the difference between the GNU toolset/userland and the kernel. However, the GNU utilities are, collectively, a clone of a sort of generic UNIX userspace. That's the joke behind the name "GNU's Not UNIX," because just by looking at it, it looks a whole lot like UNIX. (This is freely admitted by the FSF: "We decided to make the operating system compatible with Unix because the overall design was already proven and portable, and because compatibility makes it easy for Unix users to switch from Unix to GNU.")
We can argue as to whether or not Linux (the kernel) was a clone of a Unix kernel or not; I suppose it's probably a stretch to call it a 'clone,' but it's definitely reinventive, if a few generations removed from any actual Unix. Torvalds had studied Minix, and Minix is certainly "Unix-like," at least on the surface. That none of them (Linux, Minix, UNIX) shared any code (initially--they may now) underscores my point about the re-inventiveness of each effort.
Note that I'm not alleging any sort of plagarism or intellectual dishonesty here; on the contrary I was trying to use Linux as an example of how sometimes reinvention can be a good thing. I'm quite sure (because I heard it first-hand) that a lot of UNIX users thought that GNU/Linux was unnecessary and redundant when it first was developed, but in retrospect they were wrong. That's the point I was getting at: sometimes it can seem like people are reinventing the wheel, but in doing so may be doing something rather terribly important. (Although it may not be evident until later.)
That said, they might just be reinventing the wheel. It's tough to say until later, which is why I said projects that seem to do the same thing ought to be carefully considered before a lot of duplicate effort is expended.
On the whole Linux/GNU/"GNU-Linux" thing: I think it's pretty well accepted by now that "Linux" is not just the name of a kernel, but the name of an entire family of operating systems, which have in common a particular kernel. I certainly don't mean any disrespect to RMS and the rest of the GNU people, but GNU/Linux doesn't exactly roll off either the tongue or the keyboard. The only time I write out "GNU/Linux" is when I think there's a chance that the whole OS and the kernel by itself are going to be confused, or where the userspace and kernel are being discussed independently. (Actually I think it's most common today to use "Linux" to refer to the OS or OS family collectively, GNU to refer to the toolset, and "Linux kernel" to refer to the kernel.) In my original post I was referring to Linux collectively, both the GNU userland and Torvalds' kernel, as a Unix-like OS (which it is, or at least was; in many ways it's surpassed Unix now) which is reinventive in nature. But you're right, I should have been more clear.
I don't think they're planning on offering internet access for free.
My understanding of this whole transition is that part of dropping the "subscription model" includes getting rid of ISP operations, or drastically scaling them back. That's probably a lot of the staff they're thinking of firing; all the people that manage the dialup infrastructure and customer service / support.
The key here is that AOL doesn't want to be an ISP anymore. They want to be a content provider, not an access provider. Access is a commodity nowadays, or at least a utility, doled out by a few regional monopolies in each area.
As their subscriber base dimishes, they'll cut capacity and concentrate more on being an 'Internet company' and not a private-network one. At the end of it all, what they want to be is just a very big web-site and -services operation, using their vast reserves of content, previously used as a lure to get customers onto the AOL service proper, to get viewers to look at advertising. Those users won't be using AOL dialup, they'll be using cable and DSL from other companies.
Anyone trying to be an ISP in today's market would have to be insane. Dialup is a declining niche market; it has no future.
No, it does not.
/var/vmware/) and you're pretty much off. It took me longer and was more of a PITA to install Windows on the resulting VM than it was to install VMWare itself.
I've set up VMWare Server (which is FAIB) on my Kubuntu Dapper system and it was quite easy. Basically you just follow the instructions, I didn't run into any major installation gotchas. You register with VMWare and they email you a serial number and a link to the download site; you run the installer and choose where you want things to be installed (I use
Only thing I ran into though: be careful of the networking option that you choose. The default is 'Bridged,' which creates a virtual interface using your machine's same network card, which then gets a DHCP address from your LAN router. This is nice because it means your virtual machine doesn't use the same IP as your host machine's native OS. This caused me some problems with services that I had running on the host, netatalk in particular. (The default configuration of netatalk is to try to automatically find the correct network interface, and it got confused by the virtual one apparently; explicitly defining which one to use solved the problem.)
Long story short: consider using the 'NAT' networking option until you know what you're doing; this does IP masquerading so that the VM uses your machine's regular network interface and IP address. It means there's an extra layer of NAT to punch through if you wanted to run services on the VM, but it keeps most of the complexity hidden inside VMWare.
After you get VMWare installed, you can either create a bare virtual hard disk and install whichever x86 OS you want, or you can download pre-configured virtual machines; I don't know if Edgy is one of these, but it might be.
Well, that's kind of to be expected: when you get right down to it, the whole premise of Linux was a reinvention of the wheel. It's a clone of an operating system that already existed -- it doesn't get much more re-inventive than that.
However, if there's anything we can learn from that, it's that sometimes there are benefits to re-inventing something that already exists, and in some cases may already seem to work okay. What seems like a complete waste of time to one person might create a result that's just different enough in some way to be really useful to somebody. (In the case of Linux, to a lot of us anyway, it was Unix but without the high cost and crappy licensing, and with the ability to see the source; hugely significant to some people but I'm sure it looked totally redundant to Unix people.)
Sometimes reinvention is necessary. You make a good point though, that there does seem to be a lot of it going on at any given time, and maybe that doesn't need to be the case here -- in any event, it seems like the reasons for taking parallel roads to the same place rather than working together should be carefully considered.
Your comment got me thinking about how much information you could squeeze into one of those barcodes.
At most, a 320x240 tag would give you 76,800 bits of information, or slightly less than 11,000 7-bit ASCII characters. That's assuming you could match the pixels of the tag to the camera's sensor exactly.
I assume you probably wouldn't want to use any more than half of the camera's vertical and horizontal resolution though, which leaves you with 160x120 (for 2,700 characters), and I assume you'd need to have a few rows blacked-out on at least two sides to identify the border of the tag (so subtract (160+120)*2 pixels for bordering...that leaves 2662 characters) and you'd probably want to have a hash or checksum (lose 128 bits).
Still, that leaves about 2,643 characters in an image, which is about a page and a half of typed text using the old guideline of approximately 1,500 characters per page.
That's pretty impressive; provided you could make your reader focus on objects near to the lens, so that you could make the tag suitably small (less than an inch or so across), that's a lot more efficent way to convey textual information than actually writing it out. Instead of just embedding a URL link, you could put written information on there; maybe stuff that would clutter up the packaging / display / poster if you wrote it all down. If these things became ubiquitious, I could see whole advertising campaigns in urban areas (e.g. subways) where the "ad" got you interested, and then you could get more information via the tag.
They say a picture's worth a thousand words, and it sounds like it may not be far off from that.
This is quite true, and every current implementation of rsync that I've run across (not that I'm exactly a scholar on the topic or anything, but I've used it on Mac OS X and a bunch of Linux distros) uses SSH as the default shell when the address is specified with a single colon ('rsync -avz ~/Documents jdoe@foobar.com:/var/backup/'), although I suppose its probably best practice to specify the shell explicitly in a script.
So just to restate what I should have said: the only thing you'd need to have running on your remote server is sshd; if you don't care about WebDAV access you could lock down everything else. That would give you scp and sftp as well which seems like it ought to be good enough for most people.
I wouldn't recommend logging in as root when doing the backups though (since it has to have an un-passworded private key on the client machine to login as part of a cron job).
Anyway, given that you can use most features of the rsync daemon via a shell (including named modules), there doesn't seem to be any good reason to run the daemon on a machine that's exposed to the public net. In retrospect, I have no idea why I mentioned it.
This is a pretty interesting idea, I think.
If you're going to turn out a few million identical machines to people who don't have a whole lot of backwards-compatibility requirements, you can suddenly do a lot of things that mainstream PC manufacturers can't. I'd really like to see them blank-slate design the architecture, within the requirements of cost (i.e. using off-the-shelf parts).
I guess the only problem is that you don't want to stray too far from 'conventional' PCs, because you want the experience that kids get working on these machines to be easily translatable to what the rest of the world uses; however, maybe using a slightly different architecture will teach a valuable lesson about the benefits of writing agnostic code for standard toolsets.
I'll be perfectly honest here: I'm rather cynical about the OLPC project ever actually accomplishing its goals. But despite that, I think it's a noble effort and I wish them well, if just because it's a hell of a technical question, and the engineer in me thinks that any project that really puts a lot of minds to work on a problem like that is pretty neat. Even if the majority of the laptops end up getting sold to us First Worlders on eBay, the fact that they will have designed such a machine and produced it -- provided they can do it, naturally -- will keep me from calling it a total failure. Regardless of the outcome, OLPC is going to be a case study for anyone thinking big in technology.
There are some states here where they're allowed to vote as well (I know it's the case in Maine; I always thought it was bizarre), in general when you're convicted of a felony you lose a lot of rights that you'd otherwise enjoy as a full citizen. You lose physical freedom, usually, by virtue of being in jail; you lose your 2nd Amendment right to own a firearm; you usually can't hold public office; depending on circumstance you may lose other things as well.
To put it bluntly, when you're in jail it's basically because you've demonstrated for one reason or another that you can't handle the responsibilies of a citizen in free society. Therefore, I see no reason why they should be allowed to participate in the democratic process.
Voting isn't something that should be taken lightly; if you're so highly irresponsible so as to have to be locked up for the safety of others, if your judgement is that bad, then you certainly have no business participating in something as fundamentally important to the operation of our country as voting is.
With that said, I don't think it's appropriate to permanently take away someone's voting rights for commiting a crime; once you've been released from the penal system and are otherwise a free person, then you should be able to vote again.
The law doesn't require a rating in order for a film to be exhibited; it just requires a rating for the film to be exhibited to an audience.
Huh? What are you talking about? The law does no such thing. Yes, most of the movies advertised on television are rated by the MPAA, and yes, producers and directors are known to gerrymander their films around in order to make them fit into a certain ratings category, in order to attract a larger audience. But there's no law making it so. You could make a totally unrated movie, and then run it in theaters that didn't mind playing an unrated film (art houses, mostly), and advertise it. Assuming your advertisement itself isn't offensive, I can almost guarantee you that no broadcaster or other media outlet is going to turn you down, provided you can put cash on the barrel-head. (They run ads for Girls Gone Wild on late-night TV, you know.)
There are lots of "unrated" movies advertised all the time! Just a few days ago I saw an advertisement for an unrated version of some teen movie (something American Pie-ish) on television. It's advertising the fact that it's unrated; basically using the term 'unrated' as a euphemism for smutty.
The movie rating system works fairly well, I think, and could be a good example of what video games will probably end up going with, in the absence of unnecessary and heavy-handed government interference. The ratings and standards are handled by a private body, the retailers cooperate and limit their sales to minors based on those ratings, everyone is basically happy.
The only government regulation of movies is where it gets into true obscenity law (but it's pretty rare), or over-the-air broadcast regulations and the FCC rules. The justification for the FCC regulations -- and I'm not convinced it's a great justification -- is that the airwaves are a "public resource," and there's a resulting mandate for regulation as to what you can say there. [1] But there's no such regulation of non-broadcast TV, hence we have HBO and Cinemax running soft-core porn at night and shows that wouldn't past muster on the broadcast networks during the day. [2]
The movie system, for the most part anyway, works. It does so without a lot of regulation or government oversight, and it's a mistake to just ignore that when thinking about video games. Games already have most of the framework there; the ESRB does the ratings, and most of the stores honor them in terms of sales. If the few stores selling "M" games to minors is a problem that concerns that many people, then arrange boycotts or letter-writing campaigns to the stores. Using the governement to do the job is employing a bludgeon when a screwdriver (thumb screw?) would have worked just as well, and with less collateral damage to others' rights.
[1] I don't disagree with this sentiment on principle; actually I think it's a good one. But if the airwaves truly are a 'public resource,' then I think the FCC is doing an absolutely shit job of managing them for the greatest public good in other respects. I'd just like some consistency here.
[2] The limits of what's shown on cable is basically governed only by public opinion and not regulation; hence why I'm pretty sure what's on late-night cable in Utah is different from Las Vegas, Nevada -- as it should be.
Actually cigarette smuggling is a fairly big operation in some regions of the United States.
Generally it involves Indian Reservations in some way, although I'm not exactly sure of the mechanics of it. It could just be that people buy up large quantities of discount cigarettes on a tribal reservation, and then sell them at slightly below the going price on the open market, taking the difference (the cigarette tax, which would normally go to the Fed) as profit.
I have definitely heard about substantial busts of smuggled cigarettes, though -- truckloads full. This was in New England a few years ago; I think that their destination was New York City and they were coming down from somewhere in Connecticut/Mass/Upstate NY. Don't remember the details exactly.
The government really hates it when other people start skimming from their income stream. There's a certain amount of truth in that old bumper sticker: "Don't Steal, The Government Hates Competition."
If the Science Museum is as cautious, non-controversial, and inoffensive as you make it out to be (and IMO I agree with you, it certainly does seem like they're pretty clean), who says they'd want anything to do with the project?
Frankly something like this could go south in a hurry. There are a huge number of uncertainties, ranging from sheer technical feasibility (that's one of the easy questions) to much more complex issues of maintainance budgeting, operating a huge service fleet, and all the associated logistics. If I was in a leadership or advisory position at the Science Museum, I'd probably tell them to run far and fast in the opposite direction. They have too much going for them to play with something that could easily become a political hand grenade.
After all, it only takes one election for one administration's 'pet project' to become the next one's 'red-headed stepchild.' I could easily see something like this being intentionally sabotaged politically, after a turnover in Boston, in order to make the previous guys who supported it look bad. Stuff like that is pretty common in politics, and Massachusetts politics in general (and Boston in even more particular) has a history of ugliness and finger-pointing.