Just to elaborate. The GP was thinking of the "old" SCO, aka the Santa Cruz Operation, which was more recently known as Tarantella, Inc. They were the Xenix and UnixWare people. According to Wikipedia, lately they made some sort of secure thin client that was a competitor to Citrix and were bought up by Sun for $25M back in July after their stock tanked (this was news to me, I guess I missed it).
The "new" SCO -- the one whose business model seems to consist of suing anyone with deep pockets who's ever heard of Linux -- was formerly known as Caldera Systems, made a commercial distro of the same name, and eventually bought the rights to some Unix stuff from the Santa Cruz Organization and changed their name to SCO.
The easiest way to tell, IMO, which SCO is being talked about in an article is to see if the state its based out of is mentioned. SCO/Caldera is Utah-based, while SCO/Tarantella was California-based.
This is very true. A "command line" program which uses ncurses for an interface is still a GUIed program, even though it may not use a windowing environment (xwindows, Aqua, MS Windows) to do it.
We have gotten to the point today where we dismiss anything that doesn't use a window manager as a program without a graphical interface, but that's simply not true. It is quite possible, and was very common in the past (before said window managers existed) to create GUIs in an entirely fixed-width, text-based environment.
I think the difference is that a true "commandline" program takes in and produces data in a strictly linear fashion. A graphical program produces a great deal of information on the screen, which the user then interprets and not necessarily in any particular order.
While personally I probably won't buy a PC from Dell one way or the other, at least not a desktop, I'm happy to see that they've taken this small step.
I could see this model appealing to people (admittedly, a small market) who are interested in playing with Linux but don't want to assemble their own system, for either technical or personal reasons, e.g. it's not worth their time for the money saved.
Rather than viewing it as a half-step less than Dell should have taken, I'd prefer to view it as a half-step more than they could have. After all, if they hadn't done this, we never would have noticed. It just would have been business as usual.
To me personally, I hope that it will encourage other models to be sold like this as well, particularly from other vendors (IBM/Lenovo, do you hear me?). This is mostly because I'm more in the market for a notebook right now than another desktop, and I prefer IBM to Dell, but I'm still not going to slam Dell for doing the right thing, even in a small way. That just seems counterproductive.
But then again, this is Slashdot -- counterproductivity is the name of the game.:)
Just my opinion, but even to my not-particularly-well-trained ears and wearing ear protection, firecrackers don't sound that much like gunshots. At least not the little strings of snappers that I think you're thinking of. I'm pretty certain that I could tell you the difference between the two in an A-B-X test. Especially since in the case of someone shooting at you with any degree of accuracy, you'd also have the noise of the bullet passing (not a good thing to be hearing, certainly).
Firecrackers might confuse a human being in a battlefield scenario, but this has more to do with the fact that the person is psychologically on edge and the 'abrupt onset' stimulus of the firecrackers triggers a threat response before they even do any evaluation of what the noise is. As a machine wouldn't have these psychological factors, it seems like it would be (reasonably) trivial to give it sound recordings of weapons noises and common sound-alikes (car backfiring, balloon popping, firecrackers, thunder, etc.) so the machine could discriminate.
I think though that it would be far more useful than having a standalone 'robot' that did this type of counter-sniper function, would be to miniturize the technology, ideally to something that could be mounted on a soldier's helmet. But if that technology is far away, then having it in a separate unit which could then relay targeting data to other systems would be a start.
Regarding others who have said that a system like this would be hampered by a shooter who just runs away, I think that is more a criticism of the possible retailitory systems than of the detection system. If you can identify the location of a shooter in, say, 1.5s, then you simply need to calculate the distance that a person can possibly move in 1.5s, and respond with a weapons system having a kill radius equal to that distance. Although I'm not sure that anything like them are currently used by U.S. forces, the Russians have a thermobaric version of the RPG-7 which was designed for this sort of thing, and might be a good match for an identification system like this.
I think you're correct. The problem is that most people don't wait long enough for the semi-sealed internals of electrical devices to dry out completely before they plug them back in, and the resulting short circuit through the water zaps them.
Unless a device is temperature sensitive or contains parts with hydroscopic chemicals (electrolytic capacitors), things which store significant amount of charge, or moving parts, it shouldn't be that bothered by water, as long as the water is completely removed before power is reapplied.
I don't know if they have them for small electronics, but there are actually guidelines for industrial equipment on how long it must be left to dry in certain humidities before power can be reapplied after exposure to water. I've seen pictures of stuff which was underwater due to flooding basically cleaned, dried out, and put back to use, when you'd never have thought it was possible.
It only uses email for the uploading part of the chain, I believe.
So you upload your file to their server network over email -- which is fine, since there's nothing bad about email as long as you're only using it ONCE, as a point to point transfer -- but then the other people go to their server to download the file again, thereby saving storage space.
I think the OP's comment about email being a very bad way to distribute files is not because of the network traffic, but because of the redundant stored information. If I distribute a 100MB file to 10 friends over email, it gets copied 10 times (once in each of their mailboxes). There's no "sharing" or caching of the stored information. Versus a system like PutFile (or any traditional method like FTP) which only keeps one copy of the file and lets a number of clients download it at will.
I see his point, but I wonder with the dramatic cheapening (is that a word?) of storage space recently, if the storage redundancy is as much an issue as the amount of network traffic that these large file transfers take.
I think you found out the very hard way a lesson that I was told a while back, by someone who was being forcibly retired out of the military after having been in for his entire adult life. His story isn't really germane here, but his overall point is:
"Don't ever fall in love with anything that can't love you back. An institution is not capable of experiencing loyalty. The only thing worthy of your loyalty are people and relationships. Loyalty to an institution will only hurt you, because in the end it will just dump you when you're too old/slow/expensive/old-fashioned for somebody younger/faster/cheaper/more modern. And you'll have nothing."
This has always rung true for me. Especially in large corporations it's easy to get sucked in by the institutional culture (especially ones that have a cult-like group ethos, which many do) and end up feeling loyal to this vague amorphous institution. And the companies themselves play into this as much as you can, with everything from touchy-feely mission statements to executive personality cults, to better keep you from jumping ship the second you get a better offer.
Don't ever think that a company -- which at the end is driven by one thing and one thing only, and that's profit -- gives a shit about your loyalty to it. If you have feelings of loyalty to other people, that's your business, because at least you have a shot of judging them correctly and maybe they'll have similar feelings back. But a large organization will reward only performance, and at the end of the day your loyalty will just hold you back from seeing the writing on the wall when it's time to go.
Although I'm being slightly humorous, I really do appreciate this aspect of Debian, and I was a little sad (although I realize it was completely necessary) when they finally got around to dropping some of the lesser-used architectures. But it is nice to know that if I ever get a masochistic urge to run Linux on a Motorola 68LC040 that I know right where to get it.
I think IA64 will probably linger around for a while. Eventually it will just become a question of how much effort you or your company want to put into compiling your own code, once people stop building binaries for it off the shelf. I also don't know much about the applicability of a desktop OS like Debian to a clustered system, so maybe it's of no consequence at all in your situation.
Just wondering, what do you think needs to be improved?
I've browsed./ using Lynx from time to time, and found it rather annoying, but not impossible to manage. I would imagine that a Braille terminal (which I've only ever seen once in my life) would 'see' the internet in about the same way that Lynx does, one text line at a time.
I suspect if I switched over to simple HTML mode, it would make the Lynx experience more bearable also. Certainly it would be better than a lot of other sites -- after all,./ is mainly a lot of plain text, without in most cases even inline graphics. It's really just the navigation that's a bit of a pain in the ass.
Anyway, I'm not taking issue with you, I'm just curious what would need to change to make the site really accessible to someone who's blind and uses some sort of alternative input device (Braille terminal or screenreader) to access it.
It's true. They have 12V power outlets, but they use a rather strange connector called the "Empower" socket and plug.
I don't know why the airlines chose this as opposed to some more standard type of low-voltage connector (I have a sneaking suspicion the design is probably patented, and somebody is making money), but in order to use one you need to buy a power adaptor that has the plug and usually a DC-to-DC converter to produce whatever your laptop uses to run, in my case 16V.
Alternately if you already have an automotive adaptor for your device, you can get an Empower-to-cigar-lighter socket adaptor like this one for $10.
Or do what I do, and take the train whenever you can. I do a lot of traveling up and down the Northeast coast and I've found that when you include the time it takes to get from a city to the airport (which are invariably located somewhere inconvenient), get through security, check in, wait around, fly, and then get back to the city on the other end, I waste almost as much time as I would have just taking the train from one downtown to the other. I suppose it's not an option if you're going cross-country or internationally, but anytime I can work it I'm all for staying on the ground.
Actually what your request should hinge on is the cost to the company of maintaining your cube in the office. The company where I work actually divides out the cost per square foot of office space, and then your department gets to decide whether to give you a desktop computer and a cube or a mobile computer and have you as a home employee. Guess what -- except for the dept heads, we're all home employees. They maintain a few pool cubicles for people to use when they need to come in, like for a meeting or something, but I doubt there's enough for more than 25% of the office to come in at once. Mostly I only come in when I'm running low on office supplies and need to steal more.
I never realized it until I saw the numbers myself, but a 8x8 cubicle in a decent office building which is rented by floor costed more than my downtown single bedroom apartment. If your company can make enough employees home-based to give up a floor of their building or relocate to a smaller facility, they can save a ton of money. And you get to do whatever it is you do in your underwear from bed, and your boss is none the wiser.
Actually, I've always been suspicious of this. Not the firecracker-in-the-hand thing, that one I believe you on.
But this theory that it would be better to blow an asteroid into chunks than it would be to deflect it. If you split an asteroid, most of your energy would go just into the act of splitting, and I doubt you'd have much of a net effect on the path of the resulting components' center of momentum. So if it was going to hit the planet before, the average position of the resulting chunks still would. It becomes a question of whether the pieces are going to do as much damage than the whole thing would.
The analogy I'm thinking of is like splitting a log. If you take the axe and use it like you normally would, straight into the top of the log, it splits into two pieces, which just fall away from each other. They don't go far. But if you take the same axe, and swing it like a baseball bat horizontally, and hit the log with the reverse of the head, it's going to fly away. Same energy, dramatically different results.
It seems that a much better plan (and I think what this whole experiment is going to test) is to use some sort of surface detonation in order to change the object's orbital path. That way the entire thing would be moved onto a less dangerous path, rather than playing russian roulette with the chunks you'd get from breaking it up.
I always thought the "Armageddon strategy" was flawed in this regard: without some really intimate knowledge of the asteroid, I certainly wouldn't want to bet my planet's survival on how the thing is going to break up after being blown apart from the center. There are just a ton of things that could happen. It could separate on a plane that's perpendicular to the path of motion, making two objects following the same path, one with slightly less velocity than the other. It seems like the odds of it breaking up and having all the resulting significant bits miss, or breaking into insignificant chunks, is a long shot.
Anyway, I just thought I would bring that up for people to think about. It seems like applying a whole lot of energy to the single object as a whole and trying to deflect it, even when you factor in all the myriad variables like outgassing and rotational stability, you'd still be getting involved in less of a craps-shoot than you would trying to break it up.
Actually, even if you just detonated it on the surface, you would probably vaporize a large chunk of the rock. That alone if carefully placed might be enough to cause an orbital instability.
Plus the radiation and thermal energy is going to warm half of the object, and that might result in outgassing that imparts some thrust to it, especially if the object is comprised significantly of water or other frozen liquids.
Honestly I'm not sure anyone knows exactly what a nuclear detonation would do to an asteroid, and it's only through experiment that we're going to find out.
What I've wondered though is whether it's a better idea to use a nuclear weapon to deflect an asteroid, or just use some mass-based collision device. At the speeds we're talking about, an asteroid hitting a (relative to the earth frame) stationary object of significant mass is going to seem like a nuclear detonation. I guess it becomes a question of whether it's easier to position a small mass of plutonium and explosives in front of it, or a larger mass of some inert material.
I think you're absolutely correct. And because I think you're correct, I also think this experiment is very important. It seems that, given so many unknowns, several of which you touched on in your post, the first time we try to deflect an asteroid ought not to be when it's bearing down on us and the rest of life on Earth.
I think the chances of trying to deflect the asteroid and having it somehow end up hitting the planet, when the asteroid is (assumedly) chosen specifically to prevent this, would certainly be outweighed by the risk of someday being in the path of an asteroid and not having any idea how our attempts to move it are going to change its path.
All experiments have risk. I could go up onto the roof to drop some rocks and baseballs off to test gravity, and by some freak accident end up falling off and dying. Therefore I stay off the roof, mostly because I don't need to do that experiment to know how it's going to work out. However if the results of that experiment might someday save the planet, I'd probably reconsider the risk. Likewise, I'm sure the people planning this experiment will pick an asteroid sufficiently distant from our planet in terms of orbital path that the risk of it coming around and hitting us is outweighed by the knowledge gained.
I agree with you to a certain extent. If he's got a good relationship with his manager, then he doesn't want to make it at all adversarial. And to a lot of people, when you start bringing lawyers into the equation, that suddenly makes everything a contest where someone's going to win and somebody's going to lose.
However if this guy puts any value on his own Intellectual Property, he needs to have a good contract. And a good contract requires a good lawyer, in the same sense that good software requires a good programmer.
If a lawyer needed his financial software rewritten, and posted a question about it on a lawyer's discussion forum somewhere, he'd probably be told to go find someone who knows financial software. Likewise when a computer programmer needs a good contract written to protect what he produces, it makes sense for him to go to a contracts lawyer to write one.
It may turn out that the contract is just standard boilerplate, but we don't know enough about the guy's situation to say that. There might be some special considerations involved, and the person best equipped to handle that is someone who does it for a living. If it does turn out to be something fairly standard, then it won't take more than a few hours for the lawyer, and the cost (obviously not cheap in absolute terms, but relative to the value of the property and income it will protect) will be negligible. And if it does turn out to be more complicated and require Serious Money, then he just needs to be glad that he hired someone capable of dealing with those complications rather than going it alone and finding out later that his contract's not valid or has some huge hole or unforeseen consequence in it.
I'll summarize (skipping the irrelevant subsections):
A discharge under section 727, 1141, 1228 (a), 1228 (b), or 1328 (b) of this title does not discharge an individual debtor from any debt-- (19) that-- (B) results from-- (i) any judgment, order, consent order, or decree entered in any Federal or State judicial or administrative proceeding; (ii) any settlement agreement entered into by the debtor; or (iii) any court or administrative order for any damages, fine, penalty, citation, restitutionary payment, disgorgement payment, attorney fee, cost, or other payment owed by the debtor.
So pretty much, if any court orders you to pay something, or you agree to a settlement, you're SOL as far as declaring bankruptcy to discharge it goes. And unlike some of the other subsections, which have "outs" for things like inability to pay, or the benefit to the debtor outweighing the benefit to the creditor by discharging it, that section has no outs.
Sure, but a university education at $1 a song is only about twenty-five bucks off of allofmp3.com...:)
Actually, I'm surprised that the RIAA hasn't taken any notice of that particular site. It seems to be coasting in just enough of a grey area (or be kicking back just enough money to the right people) to have stayed off the RIAA's hit list.
Frankly I think if a person in the U.S. did get sued for using it, you could build a pretty strong case for plausible deniability of the fact you were doing anything wrong -- if in fact you are doing anything wrong under U.S. copyright law, which I'm not sure of. You're effectively legally purchasing something in Russia, but then importing it into the U.S. I don't know whether there's a limit on the dollar amount you can 'import' like there is with foreign-bought booze or what. But where it's hard to tell a judge with a straight face and your hand on the Bible that you really thought downloading that Britney Spears song off of Kazaa was legit, I think most people could say that about allofmp3.com. Plus it's not banned at most Universities either, so it doesn't have that aura of illegitimacy that surrounds P2P.
I agree, that would be a better system. It would really cut down on the junk lawsuits.
However it might also make it easier for the RIAA and other corporations to bully people around, because they have extremely expensive lawyers, and that would just make the bill that they'd threaten people with even more catastropic if they should lose. It would create a situation where the RIAA could say "If we lose, we'll pay your lawyer's fees, we've got millions. But if you lose, then you have to pay ours. Hope you have a box down by the river picked out to live in, peasant."
The way it works in current U.S. jurisprudence is that the assignment of legal costs can be done retroactively, through a separate lawsuit, by the defendant of the first one if the original suit was obviously frivolous. Judges tend to be fairly cautious in allowing this though, so it only happens when the cases are really frivolous (and sometimes not even then). Guess they're afraid it might have a "chilling effect" on lawsuits...(wouldn't that be a shame).
I don't think that you can get yourself out of court-imposed debts through bankruptcy. Otherwise you'd have deadbeat dads, drunk drivers, and other scum doing it all the time to avoid paying up. I'm not sure exactly what kind of legal language prevents you from being able to do it, but my recollection is that even if you declare bankruptcy, that satisfies only PRIVATE debts -- as soon as you start making money again, the courts will garnish your wages to pay off the PUBLIC ones.
OT: The other interesting place they'll do this is if you owe a financial debt to the Military, e.g. for college tuition, and then skip out without paying or render yourself unable to serve. You can go bankrupt for as long as you want, but the second you start making any real money they'll come and take it to start paying off your debt. I don't know if it works this way for government-backed standard school loans or not, but I'm positive that it's this way with military scholarships.
I have had two hard drives die on me, one Maxtor and one Western Digital, and both of them did this same process with me. Send out a new drive (with CC as a "deposit") then transfer the data and send the old one back in the new one's packaging. I can't remember which company, but at least one of them paid the return shipping with an ARS label.
The only other company that's been halfway decent to me on warranty repairs is Apple. I had a iBook with a known display issue, and after talking to a rep on the phone they sent me a big padded box full of foam with prepaid mailing labels, so all I had to do was put the laptop inside, seal it (some tape strips were even included), and call Fedex to have it picked up. Few weeks later I got it back in the same box, fixed.
Frankly I'd be pretty annoyed if I bought a product and had it break on me and the company wanted me to ship it to them at my expense. I guess I've just been lucky so far.
I think that's the point: in large part this reads like a critique of IBM itself, from the point of view of one of it's systems consultants. However to avoid coming under fire for actually criticizing anyone in particular within IBM, it's instead written as an external publication.
This makes it a lot more palatable for internal IBM managers to read and apply, without getting immediately defensive. If it's advisory and critical of some vaguely defined external audience, then an IBM manager can go 'hey, that's a great idea. We should do that.' As opposed to if it were an internal memo, which would imply a lot of seriousness and engender a lot of ass-covering and denial.
Until it got slashdotted, I'll bet that the majority of the actual readership of any given publication like this is predominantly by IBM-ers (especially because it probably pops up on their portal webpage), not other people who just stumble into the site from the outside.
Slashdot Mirror
Just to elaborate. The GP was thinking of the "old" SCO, aka the Santa Cruz Operation, which was more recently known as Tarantella, Inc. They were the Xenix and UnixWare people. According to Wikipedia, lately they made some sort of secure thin client that was a competitor to Citrix and were bought up by Sun for $25M back in July after their stock tanked (this was news to me, I guess I missed it).
The "new" SCO -- the one whose business model seems to consist of suing anyone with deep pockets who's ever heard of Linux -- was formerly known as Caldera Systems, made a commercial distro of the same name, and eventually bought the rights to some Unix stuff from the Santa Cruz Organization and changed their name to SCO.
The easiest way to tell, IMO, which SCO is being talked about in an article is to see if the state its based out of is mentioned. SCO/Caldera is Utah-based, while SCO/Tarantella was California-based.
This is very true. A "command line" program which uses ncurses for an interface is still a GUIed program, even though it may not use a windowing environment (xwindows, Aqua, MS Windows) to do it.
We have gotten to the point today where we dismiss anything that doesn't use a window manager as a program without a graphical interface, but that's simply not true. It is quite possible, and was very common in the past (before said window managers existed) to create GUIs in an entirely fixed-width, text-based environment.
I think the difference is that a true "commandline" program takes in and produces data in a strictly linear fashion. A graphical program produces a great deal of information on the screen, which the user then interprets and not necessarily in any particular order.
I've noticed the same thing.
:)
While personally I probably won't buy a PC from Dell one way or the other, at least not a desktop, I'm happy to see that they've taken this small step.
I could see this model appealing to people (admittedly, a small market) who are interested in playing with Linux but don't want to assemble their own system, for either technical or personal reasons, e.g. it's not worth their time for the money saved.
Rather than viewing it as a half-step less than Dell should have taken, I'd prefer to view it as a half-step more than they could have. After all, if they hadn't done this, we never would have noticed. It just would have been business as usual.
To me personally, I hope that it will encourage other models to be sold like this as well, particularly from other vendors (IBM/Lenovo, do you hear me?). This is mostly because I'm more in the market for a notebook right now than another desktop, and I prefer IBM to Dell, but I'm still not going to slam Dell for doing the right thing, even in a small way. That just seems counterproductive.
But then again, this is Slashdot -- counterproductivity is the name of the game.
Etch? Ha. Real Men use point-to-point wiring.
Just my opinion, but even to my not-particularly-well-trained ears and wearing ear protection, firecrackers don't sound that much like gunshots. At least not the little strings of snappers that I think you're thinking of. I'm pretty certain that I could tell you the difference between the two in an A-B-X test. Especially since in the case of someone shooting at you with any degree of accuracy, you'd also have the noise of the bullet passing (not a good thing to be hearing, certainly).
Firecrackers might confuse a human being in a battlefield scenario, but this has more to do with the fact that the person is psychologically on edge and the 'abrupt onset' stimulus of the firecrackers triggers a threat response before they even do any evaluation of what the noise is. As a machine wouldn't have these psychological factors, it seems like it would be (reasonably) trivial to give it sound recordings of weapons noises and common sound-alikes (car backfiring, balloon popping, firecrackers, thunder, etc.) so the machine could discriminate.
I think though that it would be far more useful than having a standalone 'robot' that did this type of counter-sniper function, would be to miniturize the technology, ideally to something that could be mounted on a soldier's helmet. But if that technology is far away, then having it in a separate unit which could then relay targeting data to other systems would be a start.
Regarding others who have said that a system like this would be hampered by a shooter who just runs away, I think that is more a criticism of the possible retailitory systems than of the detection system. If you can identify the location of a shooter in, say, 1.5s, then you simply need to calculate the distance that a person can possibly move in 1.5s, and respond with a weapons system having a kill radius equal to that distance. Although I'm not sure that anything like them are currently used by U.S. forces, the Russians have a thermobaric version of the RPG-7 which was designed for this sort of thing, and might be a good match for an identification system like this.
I think you're correct. The problem is that most people don't wait long enough for the semi-sealed internals of electrical devices to dry out completely before they plug them back in, and the resulting short circuit through the water zaps them.
Unless a device is temperature sensitive or contains parts with hydroscopic chemicals (electrolytic capacitors), things which store significant amount of charge, or moving parts, it shouldn't be that bothered by water, as long as the water is completely removed before power is reapplied.
I don't know if they have them for small electronics, but there are actually guidelines for industrial equipment on how long it must be left to dry in certain humidities before power can be reapplied after exposure to water. I've seen pictures of stuff which was underwater due to flooding basically cleaned, dried out, and put back to use, when you'd never have thought it was possible.
I always knew that those script kiddies with the see-thru lexan cases would come to a bad end...
Let's call it ...
Linspire.
It only uses email for the uploading part of the chain, I believe.
So you upload your file to their server network over email -- which is fine, since there's nothing bad about email as long as you're only using it ONCE, as a point to point transfer -- but then the other people go to their server to download the file again, thereby saving storage space.
I think the OP's comment about email being a very bad way to distribute files is not because of the network traffic, but because of the redundant stored information. If I distribute a 100MB file to 10 friends over email, it gets copied 10 times (once in each of their mailboxes). There's no "sharing" or caching of the stored information. Versus a system like PutFile (or any traditional method like FTP) which only keeps one copy of the file and lets a number of clients download it at will.
I see his point, but I wonder with the dramatic cheapening (is that a word?) of storage space recently, if the storage redundancy is as much an issue as the amount of network traffic that these large file transfers take.
I think you found out the very hard way a lesson that I was told a while back, by someone who was being forcibly retired out of the military after having been in for his entire adult life. His story isn't really germane here, but his overall point is:
"Don't ever fall in love with anything that can't love you back. An institution is not capable of experiencing loyalty. The only thing worthy of your loyalty are people and relationships. Loyalty to an institution will only hurt you, because in the end it will just dump you when you're too old/slow/expensive/old-fashioned for somebody younger/faster/cheaper/more modern. And you'll have nothing."
This has always rung true for me. Especially in large corporations it's easy to get sucked in by the institutional culture (especially ones that have a cult-like group ethos, which many do) and end up feeling loyal to this vague amorphous institution. And the companies themselves play into this as much as you can, with everything from touchy-feely mission statements to executive personality cults, to better keep you from jumping ship the second you get a better offer.
Don't ever think that a company -- which at the end is driven by one thing and one thing only, and that's profit -- gives a shit about your loyalty to it. If you have feelings of loyalty to other people, that's your business, because at least you have a shot of judging them correctly and maybe they'll have similar feelings back. But a large organization will reward only performance, and at the end of the day your loyalty will just hold you back from seeing the writing on the wall when it's time to go.
Don't worry, Debian will support it. :)
Although I'm being slightly humorous, I really do appreciate this aspect of Debian, and I was a little sad (although I realize it was completely necessary) when they finally got around to dropping some of the lesser-used architectures. But it is nice to know that if I ever get a masochistic urge to run Linux on a Motorola 68LC040 that I know right where to get it.
I think IA64 will probably linger around for a while. Eventually it will just become a question of how much effort you or your company want to put into compiling your own code, once people stop building binaries for it off the shelf. I also don't know much about the applicability of a desktop OS like Debian to a clustered system, so maybe it's of no consequence at all in your situation.
Just wondering, what do you think needs to be improved?
./ using Lynx from time to time, and found it rather annoying, but not impossible to manage. I would imagine that a Braille terminal (which I've only ever seen once in my life) would 'see' the internet in about the same way that Lynx does, one text line at a time.
./ is mainly a lot of plain text, without in most cases even inline graphics. It's really just the navigation that's a bit of a pain in the ass.
I've browsed
I suspect if I switched over to simple HTML mode, it would make the Lynx experience more bearable also. Certainly it would be better than a lot of other sites -- after all,
Anyway, I'm not taking issue with you, I'm just curious what would need to change to make the site really accessible to someone who's blind and uses some sort of alternative input device (Braille terminal or screenreader) to access it.
It's true. They have 12V power outlets, but they use a rather strange connector called the "Empower" socket and plug.
I don't know why the airlines chose this as opposed to some more standard type of low-voltage connector (I have a sneaking suspicion the design is probably patented, and somebody is making money), but in order to use one you need to buy a power adaptor that has the plug and usually a DC-to-DC converter to produce whatever your laptop uses to run, in my case 16V.
Alternately if you already have an automotive adaptor for your device, you can get an Empower-to-cigar-lighter socket adaptor like this one for $10.
Or do what I do, and take the train whenever you can. I do a lot of traveling up and down the Northeast coast and I've found that when you include the time it takes to get from a city to the airport (which are invariably located somewhere inconvenient), get through security, check in, wait around, fly, and then get back to the city on the other end, I waste almost as much time as I would have just taking the train from one downtown to the other. I suppose it's not an option if you're going cross-country or internationally, but anytime I can work it I'm all for staying on the ground.
Actually what your request should hinge on is the cost to the company of maintaining your cube in the office. The company where I work actually divides out the cost per square foot of office space, and then your department gets to decide whether to give you a desktop computer and a cube or a mobile computer and have you as a home employee. Guess what -- except for the dept heads, we're all home employees. They maintain a few pool cubicles for people to use when they need to come in, like for a meeting or something, but I doubt there's enough for more than 25% of the office to come in at once. Mostly I only come in when I'm running low on office supplies and need to steal more.
I never realized it until I saw the numbers myself, but a 8x8 cubicle in a decent office building which is rented by floor costed more than my downtown single bedroom apartment. If your company can make enough employees home-based to give up a floor of their building or relocate to a smaller facility, they can save a ton of money. And you get to do whatever it is you do in your underwear from bed, and your boss is none the wiser.
Actually, I've always been suspicious of this. Not the firecracker-in-the-hand thing, that one I believe you on.
But this theory that it would be better to blow an asteroid into chunks than it would be to deflect it. If you split an asteroid, most of your energy would go just into the act of splitting, and I doubt you'd have much of a net effect on the path of the resulting components' center of momentum. So if it was going to hit the planet before, the average position of the resulting chunks still would. It becomes a question of whether the pieces are going to do as much damage than the whole thing would.
The analogy I'm thinking of is like splitting a log. If you take the axe and use it like you normally would, straight into the top of the log, it splits into two pieces, which just fall away from each other. They don't go far. But if you take the same axe, and swing it like a baseball bat horizontally, and hit the log with the reverse of the head, it's going to fly away. Same energy, dramatically different results.
It seems that a much better plan (and I think what this whole experiment is going to test) is to use some sort of surface detonation in order to change the object's orbital path. That way the entire thing would be moved onto a less dangerous path, rather than playing russian roulette with the chunks you'd get from breaking it up.
I always thought the "Armageddon strategy" was flawed in this regard: without some really intimate knowledge of the asteroid, I certainly wouldn't want to bet my planet's survival on how the thing is going to break up after being blown apart from the center. There are just a ton of things that could happen. It could separate on a plane that's perpendicular to the path of motion, making two objects following the same path, one with slightly less velocity than the other. It seems like the odds of it breaking up and having all the resulting significant bits miss, or breaking into insignificant chunks, is a long shot.
Anyway, I just thought I would bring that up for people to think about. It seems like applying a whole lot of energy to the single object as a whole and trying to deflect it, even when you factor in all the myriad variables like outgassing and rotational stability, you'd still be getting involved in less of a craps-shoot than you would trying to break it up.
Actually, even if you just detonated it on the surface, you would probably vaporize a large chunk of the rock. That alone if carefully placed might be enough to cause an orbital instability.
Plus the radiation and thermal energy is going to warm half of the object, and that might result in outgassing that imparts some thrust to it, especially if the object is comprised significantly of water or other frozen liquids.
Honestly I'm not sure anyone knows exactly what a nuclear detonation would do to an asteroid, and it's only through experiment that we're going to find out.
What I've wondered though is whether it's a better idea to use a nuclear weapon to deflect an asteroid, or just use some mass-based collision device. At the speeds we're talking about, an asteroid hitting a (relative to the earth frame) stationary object of significant mass is going to seem like a nuclear detonation. I guess it becomes a question of whether it's easier to position a small mass of plutonium and explosives in front of it, or a larger mass of some inert material.
I think you're absolutely correct. And because I think you're correct, I also think this experiment is very important. It seems that, given so many unknowns, several of which you touched on in your post, the first time we try to deflect an asteroid ought not to be when it's bearing down on us and the rest of life on Earth.
I think the chances of trying to deflect the asteroid and having it somehow end up hitting the planet, when the asteroid is (assumedly) chosen specifically to prevent this, would certainly be outweighed by the risk of someday being in the path of an asteroid and not having any idea how our attempts to move it are going to change its path.
All experiments have risk. I could go up onto the roof to drop some rocks and baseballs off to test gravity, and by some freak accident end up falling off and dying. Therefore I stay off the roof, mostly because I don't need to do that experiment to know how it's going to work out. However if the results of that experiment might someday save the planet, I'd probably reconsider the risk. Likewise, I'm sure the people planning this experiment will pick an asteroid sufficiently distant from our planet in terms of orbital path that the risk of it coming around and hitting us is outweighed by the knowledge gained.
I agree with you to a certain extent. If he's got a good relationship with his manager, then he doesn't want to make it at all adversarial. And to a lot of people, when you start bringing lawyers into the equation, that suddenly makes everything a contest where someone's going to win and somebody's going to lose.
However if this guy puts any value on his own Intellectual Property, he needs to have a good contract. And a good contract requires a good lawyer, in the same sense that good software requires a good programmer.
If a lawyer needed his financial software rewritten, and posted a question about it on a lawyer's discussion forum somewhere, he'd probably be told to go find someone who knows financial software. Likewise when a computer programmer needs a good contract written to protect what he produces, it makes sense for him to go to a contracts lawyer to write one.
It may turn out that the contract is just standard boilerplate, but we don't know enough about the guy's situation to say that. There might be some special considerations involved, and the person best equipped to handle that is someone who does it for a living. If it does turn out to be something fairly standard, then it won't take more than a few hours for the lawyer, and the cost (obviously not cheap in absolute terms, but relative to the value of the property and income it will protect) will be negligible. And if it does turn out to be more complicated and require Serious Money, then he just needs to be glad that he hired someone capable of dealing with those complications rather than going it alone and finding out later that his contract's not valid or has some huge hole or unforeseen consequence in it.
I am not a bankruptcy lawyer either, but I did ask one where I could find the list of "non-dischargable" debts:
You'll find it here: TITLE 11 > CHAPTER 5 > SUBCHAPTER II > 523. A more verbose discussion is available here, which you might find interesting, if not exactly light reading.
I'll summarize (skipping the irrelevant subsections):
A discharge under section 727, 1141, 1228 (a), 1228 (b), or 1328 (b) of this title does not discharge an individual debtor from any debt-- (19) that-- (B) results from-- (i) any judgment, order, consent order, or decree entered in any Federal or State judicial or administrative proceeding; (ii) any settlement agreement entered into by the debtor; or (iii) any court or administrative order for any damages, fine, penalty, citation, restitutionary payment, disgorgement payment, attorney fee, cost, or other payment owed by the debtor.
So pretty much, if any court orders you to pay something, or you agree to a settlement, you're SOL as far as declaring bankruptcy to discharge it goes. And unlike some of the other subsections, which have "outs" for things like inability to pay, or the benefit to the debtor outweighing the benefit to the creditor by discharging it, that section has no outs.
Sure, but a university education at $1 a song is only about twenty-five bucks off of allofmp3.com ... :)
Actually, I'm surprised that the RIAA hasn't taken any notice of that particular site. It seems to be coasting in just enough of a grey area (or be kicking back just enough money to the right people) to have stayed off the RIAA's hit list.
Frankly I think if a person in the U.S. did get sued for using it, you could build a pretty strong case for plausible deniability of the fact you were doing anything wrong -- if in fact you are doing anything wrong under U.S. copyright law, which I'm not sure of. You're effectively legally purchasing something in Russia, but then importing it into the U.S. I don't know whether there's a limit on the dollar amount you can 'import' like there is with foreign-bought booze or what. But where it's hard to tell a judge with a straight face and your hand on the Bible that you really thought downloading that Britney Spears song off of Kazaa was legit, I think most people could say that about allofmp3.com. Plus it's not banned at most Universities either, so it doesn't have that aura of illegitimacy that surrounds P2P.
I agree, that would be a better system. It would really cut down on the junk lawsuits.
However it might also make it easier for the RIAA and other corporations to bully people around, because they have extremely expensive lawyers, and that would just make the bill that they'd threaten people with even more catastropic if they should lose. It would create a situation where the RIAA could say "If we lose, we'll pay your lawyer's fees, we've got millions. But if you lose, then you have to pay ours. Hope you have a box down by the river picked out to live in, peasant."
The way it works in current U.S. jurisprudence is that the assignment of legal costs can be done retroactively, through a separate lawsuit, by the defendant of the first one if the original suit was obviously frivolous. Judges tend to be fairly cautious in allowing this though, so it only happens when the cases are really frivolous (and sometimes not even then). Guess they're afraid it might have a "chilling effect" on lawsuits...(wouldn't that be a shame).
I don't think that you can get yourself out of court-imposed debts through bankruptcy. Otherwise you'd have deadbeat dads, drunk drivers, and other scum doing it all the time to avoid paying up. I'm not sure exactly what kind of legal language prevents you from being able to do it, but my recollection is that even if you declare bankruptcy, that satisfies only PRIVATE debts -- as soon as you start making money again, the courts will garnish your wages to pay off the PUBLIC ones.
OT: The other interesting place they'll do this is if you owe a financial debt to the Military, e.g. for college tuition, and then skip out without paying or render yourself unable to serve. You can go bankrupt for as long as you want, but the second you start making any real money they'll come and take it to start paying off your debt. I don't know if it works this way for government-backed standard school loans or not, but I'm positive that it's this way with military scholarships.
I have had two hard drives die on me, one Maxtor and one Western Digital, and both of them did this same process with me. Send out a new drive (with CC as a "deposit") then transfer the data and send the old one back in the new one's packaging. I can't remember which company, but at least one of them paid the return shipping with an ARS label.
The only other company that's been halfway decent to me on warranty repairs is Apple. I had a iBook with a known display issue, and after talking to a rep on the phone they sent me a big padded box full of foam with prepaid mailing labels, so all I had to do was put the laptop inside, seal it (some tape strips were even included), and call Fedex to have it picked up. Few weeks later I got it back in the same box, fixed.
Frankly I'd be pretty annoyed if I bought a product and had it break on me and the company wanted me to ship it to them at my expense. I guess I've just been lucky so far.
So basically, some marine biologist read "Ender's Game," and wrote a really good budget proposal....
I think that's the point: in large part this reads like a critique of IBM itself, from the point of view of one of it's systems consultants. However to avoid coming under fire for actually criticizing anyone in particular within IBM, it's instead written as an external publication.
This makes it a lot more palatable for internal IBM managers to read and apply, without getting immediately defensive. If it's advisory and critical of some vaguely defined external audience, then an IBM manager can go 'hey, that's a great idea. We should do that.' As opposed to if it were an internal memo, which would imply a lot of seriousness and engender a lot of ass-covering and denial.
Until it got slashdotted, I'll bet that the majority of the actual readership of any given publication like this is predominantly by IBM-ers (especially because it probably pops up on their portal webpage), not other people who just stumble into the site from the outside.