It appears that the existing 1.3.29 (+ patches) apache will remain in the base OpenBSD install indefinitely. The OpenBSD folks have audited it for security, and it does what a basic web server needs to do. Anything beyond that is not really the OS vendor's problem anyway.
As always, if the end users need more features, they can install a newer version. But note the warning on the openbsd-misc list:
Subject: Re: no more apache updates From: Henning Brauer
let me add one more thing.
it is of course possible to install an apache 1.3.31 or future ones from source on OpenBSD.
however, doing so is one of the dumbest things you can do.
there is a number of serious security problems in apache that we have fixed, and that have been offered them back, and they refused.
My biggest complaint about this is that the non-natives are funding this venture through the USDA Rural Utilities Service... Why doesn't their own tribe fund this effort?
Good point. Let's just give 'em back their land and call it even.
I never mentioned White Knight in my description of a 2-stage system because White Knight is a launch PLATFORM, not a booster or a stage. I was referring specifically to SS1, which could be scaled up and have a second stage added.
If it helps the vehicle gain altitude, it amounts to a stage. Feel free to brush it off as semantics if you like, reality will take care of itself.:)
Besides, I don't think that Scaled sees WK as just a launch platform. They've always referred to this whole thing as an integrated system. Remember that WK and SS1 have all their avionics in common, and it looks as if their crew cabins are all but identical. I know they can flight-qualify components and pilots for SS1 on WK, and that's a Big Deal in terms of safety and operational costs.
It looks to me that Scaled's goal is to sell what amounts to a turnkey suborbital space tourism operation, with everything you'd need but a business plan. Simulator, fueling truck, test stand, vehicles... the works. Check out this photo, and especially its title: Space Program Elements. That's all there is, that's the whole program in five neat packages. I think they hope to make a small production run of these systems for companies that want to do suborbital space tourism on the barnstorming model.
Now, I might be wrong about that... but if I'm not, then Rutan optimized this design for that very purpose. He surely optimized it heavily for some purpose; he always does with his designs. (That's his real genius as an engineer, I think... he is the world's greatest aeronautical optimizer.)
Any other use of the vehicle is likely to be very sub-optimal. Sure, maybe you could strap a huge rocket on the ass of SS1, launch it from a bigger aircraft, and get it into orbit. But since, in the process, you'd replace about 90% of the equipment involved (by mass), why not design a whole new aircraft instead of modifying SS1 to handle re-entry from orbit?
It was all about payload and lift
If you want to colonize up the gravity well, that's what you need most.
I am being quite realistic.
Excellent! I look forward to reading about your entry into the X-Prize 2 contest.
A scaled-up SS1 with a two-stage system could accomplish this goal in due time.
Space Ship One is already part of a two-stage system. The first stage is the White Knight. What you're talking about is adding a third stage.
It would be about 5-10 times as heavy as SS1, but it could definitely make the trip up.
Wow. You know, 5-10 times more mass is kind of a lot. That sort of difference is significant in engineering on the ground, let alone in aeronautics. I don't think you're being realistic, here. White Knight is highly unlikely to be capable of lifting that much additional mass off the ground, let alone to launch altitude.
The slower you enter the atmosphere, the less heat you generate. The only problem with this concept is carrying up extra fuel just to slow yourself down.
I may be going out on a limb here, but I expect that the thought has occured to the folks over at NASA. Why do you suppose they haven't done it?
The added power and heat dissipation involved are not exactly trivial problems. Space really is hard.
(On the bright side, it seems to me that people stopped laughing about the idea of a space elevator about two or three years ago. So maybe in 48 years, we'll be able to ride up the slow and easy way.)
Sorry, I should have said 100km flight, not X-prize-class. I knew better, just got carried away.:-/
My point was that I'm surprised they're pre-announcing this flight... they must be supremely confident in their vehicle to go for 100km so publicly, after being secretive all the way up until this announcement.
I think this is the first Space Ship One flight that Scaled has announced in advance. I'm more than a bit surprised. I thought that they would do their first X-Prize-class flight quietly, then announce the next day that they were going for the prize officially.
Good luck to them in any case... I'm sure it'll be a heck of a ride!
On the other hand, if I steal a piece of music I cannot truly see the value of it.
I agree, and I'd go further: The value of any art is dramatically less tangible than the value of any engineering. Not less valuable, necessarily, but the value is a lot harder to define. I always saw that as kinda the strong point of art, myself... but I'm more of the engineering type. I can't do art worth beans.:-/
I got TV for free but I grew tired of what the networks were bringing me. So I decided to pay for HBO to get the content I want instead.
As a music consumer I got tired of what radio stations were bringing me. So I decided to go on the internet and get the content I want for free?!?!
What other options existed a few years ago for a person dissatisfied with radio?
Before Napster and such, there were only three music delivery infrastructures in place that actually paid artists: live performance, radio and record stores. Live performance has limited reach in space and time, but is otherwise great. Radio did (and does) not offer the end user much freedom of choice, but it's free. Record stores offer a wide selection, but it's expensive and the perception is that most of the money goes to middlemen, not artists. (Oh, yeah, there was a fourth: MTV and VH1. But how long has it been since they actually played music?)
When Napster came along it filled an unserved niche very well.
Some people did not see it as stealing at all; they were downloading and listening to things that they would not otherwise have paid for, thus giving the artist exposure to more potential customers. Others saw it as theft, but figured they were taking maybe a buck out of the artist's pocket with each album, but the rest would have gone to middlemen anyway. (And why not steal from thieving middlemen?) Still others saw it as theft, and didn't care.
Now there's iTunes, a legal market for electronic distruibution of music. Artists actually get paid, people actually get choice, Apple actually makes some money providing a useful service. And it's not the only such service. Why did it take so long for these services to appear?
Partly there were techinical obstacles, but mostly it was a lack of vision. The evidence suggests that it took Napster's wild success to jolt the recording industry into action, that they were perfectly content with the status quo. The music industry, like so many before it, was blindsided by change. If the labels or RIAA had been proactive about it, had they looked at Napster and said "Gee, here's a way to make more money with a new service" instead of just entrenching behind their lawyers, I think they would still be in the driver's seat. As it is, large portions of both the artist community and the public see the RIAA as unnecessary friction in the music transaction, and would be delighted to cut them out of the deal at every opportunity.
(That's the true power of e-commerce, you know... reduction in middlemen. Good middlemen make new opportunities for everyone, but bad ones are just friction. When goods move from producers to consumers in the fewest number of steps, the producer can get better profits and the consumer can get lower prices. I think iTunes and ebay are strong examples of this theory.)
If I were an artist looking to distribute, I'd try to cut the middlemen to the minimum and go straight to iTunes. Maybe print a coupon for a free download of one of my songs on every concert ticket stub. Sell CDs, sure, but as a supplement to a live performance and iTunes strategy.
I am so tired of non-musicians saying that musicians are millionaires and musicians that aren't shouldn't care about money
To be fair, a lot of the people here on slashdot are channeling their creative efforts into software that is freely given away. They think it is philosophically a good idea, and they're putting their talent where their mouth is. I think those people have some standing to offer their opinion on the music business from their own perspective.
Whether those are the same people who are bitching about musicians is, of course, another question entirely. For the record, I am regrettably not one of these people, from lack of expertise. ("I may not have the tunic, but I have the heart of a musketeer!") I like to think I'm good at explaining different perspectives, though, so try this:
One argument you hear is that recording is what made the music industry rich; before recording there was only live performance. Smaller audiences, smaller profits, very few rich musicians out of many that played, very few middlemen. Now that digital recording and distribution is available, the argument goes, the flow of music from musicians to listeners will inevitably jump its previous channel and find a new path. What that path will be is up for debate.
Digital recording and distribution is analagous to the advent of FOSS. Software originally was produced one-off for particular applications, in an analogue to live performances. Someone realized that software could be "recorded" and "played" on machines worldwide, and the software biz was born and made zillions of dollars. Scads of middlemen and a few programmers got rich, many others make a living. Now, some hackers are electing to give away their "recordings" for free, and perhaps charge for custom services... or in the analogy, for live performances.
The analogy has some flaws: Software is a lot more reusable than music, although with sampling I guess that's changing. Software typically involves a lot more man-hours in the actual production. (Although if you count practice time maybe the musicians use more overall.) Software is a lot more combinable over many contributors... it's hard to get hundreds of musicians in a simultaneous work. It's a lot harder to objectively define good music than good software. The list goes on.
But even with the flaws, the analogy seems pretty strong to me. Unless the government steps in to preserve the status quo, live performance and custom services seem likely to once again become the bread-and-butter for the artists in question. Occasionally one will produce something so popular that it can be profitably distributed, but that will be the exception, not the norm.
I didn't say I was gonna do it, I'm just predicting it. I don't live anywhere near a rapeseed-growing region, nor do I advocate violence. (Read my nick, eh?)
Since what seems like simple justice has been denied in the courts, I predict we'll see some radical folks start trying to wipe this stuff out... errr... proactively. But of course, it's not like "eco-terrorists" can just roundup(tm) the fields of the stuff, is it?
I guess that'll leave them only one option... at least until Monsanto develops and patents brushfire-ready crops, anyway.
If I were growing this stuff, I'd be sure to keep a nice fire-defensible zone around my house from now on.
Don't go with OpenBSD. OpenBSD has many noble design philosophies however "make the system usable" is possibly at the bottom of their list.
Nice bit of flamebait. What you leave out is that they have excellent man pages.
(OpenBSD has been my first *nix-ish system, and the major trouble I've run into is knowing which manpage to look up. Google is my friend, because inevitably some other poor newbie has recieved an RTFM "foo" flame for just the task I'm looking to do. It pays to lurk sometimes.:-/ )
I find OpenBSD works pretty well so far. I'm not using it for general desktop use as yet, but my X and Mozilla-Firefox installs Just Worked on the random old hardware I scrounged up.
If those plants were very cheap, I'd guess they'd cost about 300-400 million, putting your figure of oil independance at 3-4 trillion $, just to build the plants
Which, if it is spent to end dependence on foreign oil (and reduce the environmental footprint of our economy as a side effect) would be cheap at the price. It's not an expense, it's an investment with potentially huge benefits economically, evironmentally, diplomatically, and militarily.
For comparison, the Manhattan Project cost $20 billion or thereabouts in 1945. In 2004 dollars, that's about $1.25 trillion. Add in the expense of our nuclear arsenal over the years, and it comes to about $6.4 trillion. (In 2004 dollars.) We're talking about a similarly large strategic and economic benefit. If this process really works as described, it's worth the investment.
Remember also, this process can be used to reform practically any organic waste, including plastics and even PCB's.
So here's a private business plan for you: Aquire the mineral rights to a huge old landfill. Build one of these plants nearby. Mine it to feed your waste-to-oil converter, seperating the metals and other inorganics as you go and selling what you can as raw materials.
Continue until the landfill site is empty, then keep digging and processing to clean the contaminated earth under it. Cover it with remediated or remanufactured soil, and open a park or a turkey ranch. Meanwhile, keep operating your plant with waste from the city that created the landfill in the first place.
Sure, you're left with a pile of nasty heavy metals and inorganics that no one wants, but now they're in some much more pure form and can be appropriately processed and sequestered.
If this technology is any good at all, it should be possible to turn at least a modest profit over the long haul.
This is closer to the wierdest solution ever, but what the hell.
I witnessed a housemate of mine who worked from home have an amazing issue with an early Logitech optical-tracking mouse. (The kind that still used a ball... this was back in '95 or so.)
It would stop working after six hours of use or so. Specifically, it would no longer track left. Up, down, right were all fine, but left failed. He was a tech himself, and tried all the usual stuff... installed latest drivers, checked the cabling, cleaned the ball and rollers, everything. Nothing worked. Being a patient guy, mostly he lived with it. When it happened, he'd walk away from his computer and go have a late lunch, and when it came back it would usually work.
But eventually, that last straw arrived and he couldn't stand it anymore. He called Logitech support. He went through the whole business on the phone, and the whole Logitech troubleshooting script. Eventually the tech basically gave up, and put him on hold while he found a mouse guru to ask.
So my friend is sitting there on hold, toying with this mouse that's not tracking left, shifting restlessly because his ass is sore from sitting there for hours, and suddenly it starts working again right before his eyes. He sits up straight in disbelief, and it stops working. He slumps in disappointment, and it works again. He resorts to handwaving.
From across the room, amidst the cussing, I practically hear the little *ding* as he finally figured it out.
He started work around noon, and in the late afternoon in that season the sunlight would come in under his arm, hit that part of his desk just right, bounce through the seams in the mouse buttons, and dazzle the "left" part of the optical sensor. If he kept it in shadow, it worked fine.
Upon asking why, I was informed that it "had something to do with data harmonics".
My brother once explained a firewall's operation to a non-tech as "rotating the shield harmonics." The explainee (while obviously not believing it literally) considered this a good enough analogy for his purposes.
I read Michael Pollan's Botany of Desire a while back. In it, he points out that apples don't breed true. That is, if you plant the five seeds from, say, a Braeburn apple you get in the store, you'll end up with five very different trees producing five very different fruits, and in all likelihood none of them strongly resemble the Braeburn. Consistency in a variety is achieved exclusively through grafting.
Apple varieties are often discovered, and occasionally developed. Red Delicious was found on some guy's farm in Iowa back around 1870... he made a mint selling cuttings. Braeburn was a chance find in New Zealand.
Congress obtains the power to establish patents via Artilce 1 Section 8: "[...] promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries [...]"
I think it's not clear. No one ever invented or authored any variety of apple, but it is a discovery with substantial economic value. The potential for a patent on apple varieties probably does promote the growing of test orchards to find new varieties, so that probably counts as promoting useful arts.
I don't much like the idea of patentable life, but I suppose it's within the power we grant to Congress.
I'm glad it's a patent and not a copyright, though.:)
An excellent suggestion! We can create a market for sidewalk credits, wherein large people can purchase extra sidewalk-space credits from smaller people, thereby letting the market optimize sidewalk usage.
The whole point of free software is user control. Free software is big enough for you and I to agree to dissagree about it, you do things your way and I'll do them mine.
Fair enough, but I'm talking about default behavior, not required behavior.
Anyone running a development branch of anything can be assumed to know enough to disable the automatic updater. So can administrators of qualified systems. A new user of a free *nix cannot be assumed to know enough to get updates at all, so it seems to me it'd be right neighborly to help 'em out.
The dialup problem is a good point, but easily addressed. Have the auto update tool check to see what sort of connection the machine has to the internet, and give the user a range of appropriate options for dealing with a slow connection. (Or, just mimic the Fedora method described here.)
It'd be a relatively easy feature for many distros to add, it'd positively impact usability, and it'd demolish this particular FUD.
[...] apt-get update seems to count as free updates to me [...]
Sure, they're free, but they're not automatic. This may be spurious, hairsplitting FUD, but what the hell... let's get rid of it:
In the default installation, have the installer create a tool to run the update from a random server chosen from a list of approved servers for the distro. Assign it to run at a random time, then repeat it weekly as a cron job called something obvious like weeklyupdate.
The SCO attacks against Linux IP are very much akin to the attacks a system sees when sitting on an unfiltered network. They each have the effect of exposing areas of vulnerability, and generating fixes. Sure, there are some casualties on the way, but it's a productive process. ("That which does not kill us...")
I don't have the time to flesh out the idea properly, but I expect y'all get my drift.
If not, here's a comparison sure to annoy several people: The FSF is to free *nix legal issues what OpenBSD.org is to free *nix security issues.
From the Slashdot story: "Can we really trust closed-source vendors, such as Cisco, to develop secure products that are free of backdoors?"
This should be shortened to: "Can we trust closed-source vendors?"
I can shorten it still further:
Can we trust?
The answer, of course, is that at some level we have to. We trust unreliable people with our lives every time we run a green light. It is important to remember that "choosing to trust" is not the same thing as "ensuring we won't get burned".
Not to say that it's unreasonable to withdraw trust from a closed-source vendor who has behaved badly; it could be a good choice. But to function at all, at some level we must choose to trust in another's competence and goodwill. That's just the way the world works.
(As for my network, though, I put my trust in OpenBSD.)
Server-centric operation will be helpful for compliance with the HIPAA security standard. (Not required, just helpful.)
The less you need to transmit Electronic Personally-identifiable Healthcare Information, the simpler your security problem will be.
Storing ePHI on the local machines raises all sorts of complications regarding physical security of (and data destruction upon) the point-of-use devices that are a real pain in the arse. If the end user gets the ePHI through a browser, it's a much simpler matter to ensure that sensitive data doesn't persist... just make sure the browser cache time is really short.:)
It might be better to talk about "HIPAA Capable" or "HIPAA Ready". As another poster said, HIPAA compliance is a much more complicated matter than just software. It is no more correct to say that a piece of software is "HIPAA compliant" than it is to say it is "ISO-9000 compliant". Both are broad standards that cover a range of practices well beyond the scope of any possible software.
HIPAA has three sections: Transactions, Privacy, and Security. I'm more familiar with the Privacy and Security regs than Transaction standards... but I think it might be possible for y'all to claim that the software "fully supports HIPAA compliant transactions".
You'll have to do some research on the final rules.
Slashdot Mirror
As always, if the end users need more features, they can install a newer version. But note the warning on the openbsd-misc list:
My biggest complaint about this is that the non-natives are funding this venture through the USDA Rural Utilities Service... Why doesn't their own tribe fund this effort?
Good point. Let's just give 'em back their land and call it even.
I never mentioned White Knight in my description of a 2-stage system because White Knight is a launch PLATFORM, not a booster or a stage. I was referring specifically to SS1, which could be scaled up and have a second stage added.
:)
If it helps the vehicle gain altitude, it amounts to a stage. Feel free to brush it off as semantics if you like, reality will take care of itself.
Besides, I don't think that Scaled sees WK as just a launch platform. They've always referred to this whole thing as an integrated system. Remember that WK and SS1 have all their avionics in common, and it looks as if their crew cabins are all but identical. I know they can flight-qualify components and pilots for SS1 on WK, and that's a Big Deal in terms of safety and operational costs.
It looks to me that Scaled's goal is to sell what amounts to a turnkey suborbital space tourism operation, with everything you'd need but a business plan. Simulator, fueling truck, test stand, vehicles... the works. Check out this photo, and especially its title: Space Program Elements. That's all there is, that's the whole program in five neat packages. I think they hope to make a small production run of these systems for companies that want to do suborbital space tourism on the barnstorming model.
Now, I might be wrong about that... but if I'm not, then Rutan optimized this design for that very purpose. He surely optimized it heavily for some purpose; he always does with his designs. (That's his real genius as an engineer, I think... he is the world's greatest aeronautical optimizer.)
Any other use of the vehicle is likely to be very sub-optimal. Sure, maybe you could strap a huge rocket on the ass of SS1, launch it from a bigger aircraft, and get it into orbit. But since, in the process, you'd replace about 90% of the equipment involved (by mass), why not design a whole new aircraft instead of modifying SS1 to handle re-entry from orbit?
It was all about payload and lift
If you want to colonize up the gravity well, that's what you need most.
I am being quite realistic.
Excellent! I look forward to reading about your entry into the X-Prize 2 contest.
A scaled-up SS1 with a two-stage system could accomplish this goal in due time.
Space Ship One is already part of a two-stage system. The first stage is the White Knight. What you're talking about is adding a third stage.
It would be about 5-10 times as heavy as SS1, but it could definitely make the trip up.
Wow. You know, 5-10 times more mass is kind of a lot. That sort of difference is significant in engineering on the ground, let alone in aeronautics. I don't think you're being realistic, here. White Knight is highly unlikely to be capable of lifting that much additional mass off the ground, let alone to launch altitude.
The slower you enter the atmosphere, the less heat you generate. The only problem with this concept is carrying up extra fuel just to slow yourself down.
I may be going out on a limb here, but I expect that the thought has occured to the folks over at NASA. Why do you suppose they haven't done it?
It is likely that before they accomplish that, the commercial industry will catch up and have a 4-man orbital vehicle by the end of this decade.
That's great if so, I'm all for it. But I think you're underestimating the engineering difficulties involved.
SS1 is a great little craft and a tremendous technical achievement, but it is not even close to being an orbital vehicle. They are achieving a great part of the height necessary, but very little of the horizontal velocity. Orbital velocity is "[...] approximately 17,000 mph (27,359 kph) at an altitude of 150 miles (242 km)." What's more, the lower you are, the the faster you have to go.
The added power and heat dissipation involved are not exactly trivial problems. Space really is hard.
(On the bright side, it seems to me that people stopped laughing about the idea of a space elevator about two or three years ago. So maybe in 48 years, we'll be able to ride up the slow and easy way.)
Sorry, I should have said 100km flight, not X-prize-class. I knew better, just got carried away. :-/
My point was that I'm surprised they're pre-announcing this flight... they must be supremely confident in their vehicle to go for 100km so publicly, after being secretive all the way up until this announcement.
I think this is the first Space Ship One flight that Scaled has announced in advance. I'm more than a bit surprised. I thought that they would do their first X-Prize-class flight quietly, then announce the next day that they were going for the prize officially.
Good luck to them in any case... I'm sure it'll be a heck of a ride!
On the other hand, if I steal a piece of music I cannot truly see the value of it.
:-/
:)
I agree, and I'd go further: The value of any art is dramatically less tangible than the value of any engineering. Not less valuable, necessarily, but the value is a lot harder to define. I always saw that as kinda the strong point of art, myself... but I'm more of the engineering type. I can't do art worth beans.
I got TV for free but I grew tired of what the networks were bringing me. So I decided to pay for HBO to get the content I want instead.
As a music consumer I got tired of what radio stations were bringing me. So I decided to go on the internet and get the content I want for free?!?!
What other options existed a few years ago for a person dissatisfied with radio?
Before Napster and such, there were only three music delivery infrastructures in place that actually paid artists: live performance, radio and record stores. Live performance has limited reach in space and time, but is otherwise great. Radio did (and does) not offer the end user much freedom of choice, but it's free. Record stores offer a wide selection, but it's expensive and the perception is that most of the money goes to middlemen, not artists. (Oh, yeah, there was a fourth: MTV and VH1. But how long has it been since they actually played music?)
When Napster came along it filled an unserved niche very well.
Some people did not see it as stealing at all; they were downloading and listening to things that they would not otherwise have paid for, thus giving the artist exposure to more potential customers. Others saw it as theft, but figured they were taking maybe a buck out of the artist's pocket with each album, but the rest would have gone to middlemen anyway. (And why not steal from thieving middlemen?) Still others saw it as theft, and didn't care.
Now there's iTunes, a legal market for electronic distruibution of music. Artists actually get paid, people actually get choice, Apple actually makes some money providing a useful service. And it's not the only such service. Why did it take so long for these services to appear?
Partly there were techinical obstacles, but mostly it was a lack of vision. The evidence suggests that it took Napster's wild success to jolt the recording industry into action, that they were perfectly content with the status quo. The music industry, like so many before it, was blindsided by change. If the labels or RIAA had been proactive about it, had they looked at Napster and said "Gee, here's a way to make more money with a new service" instead of just entrenching behind their lawyers, I think they would still be in the driver's seat. As it is, large portions of both the artist community and the public see the RIAA as unnecessary friction in the music transaction, and would be delighted to cut them out of the deal at every opportunity.
(That's the true power of e-commerce, you know... reduction in middlemen. Good middlemen make new opportunities for everyone, but bad ones are just friction. When goods move from producers to consumers in the fewest number of steps, the producer can get better profits and the consumer can get lower prices. I think iTunes and ebay are strong examples of this theory.)
If I were an artist looking to distribute, I'd try to cut the middlemen to the minimum and go straight to iTunes. Maybe print a coupon for a free download of one of my songs on every concert ticket stub. Sell CDs, sure, but as a supplement to a live performance and iTunes strategy.
But I'm not, so I'll shut up about it now.
I am so tired of non-musicians saying that musicians are millionaires and musicians that aren't shouldn't care about money
To be fair, a lot of the people here on slashdot are channeling their creative efforts into software that is freely given away. They think it is philosophically a good idea, and they're putting their talent where their mouth is. I think those people have some standing to offer their opinion on the music business from their own perspective.
Whether those are the same people who are bitching about musicians is, of course, another question entirely. For the record, I am regrettably not one of these people, from lack of expertise. ("I may not have the tunic, but I have the heart of a musketeer!") I like to think I'm good at explaining different perspectives, though, so try this:
One argument you hear is that recording is what made the music industry rich; before recording there was only live performance. Smaller audiences, smaller profits, very few rich musicians out of many that played, very few middlemen. Now that digital recording and distribution is available, the argument goes, the flow of music from musicians to listeners will inevitably jump its previous channel and find a new path. What that path will be is up for debate.
Digital recording and distribution is analagous to the advent of FOSS. Software originally was produced one-off for particular applications, in an analogue to live performances. Someone realized that software could be "recorded" and "played" on machines worldwide, and the software biz was born and made zillions of dollars. Scads of middlemen and a few programmers got rich, many others make a living. Now, some hackers are electing to give away their "recordings" for free, and perhaps charge for custom services... or in the analogy, for live performances.
The analogy has some flaws: Software is a lot more reusable than music, although with sampling I guess that's changing. Software typically involves a lot more man-hours in the actual production. (Although if you count practice time maybe the musicians use more overall.) Software is a lot more combinable over many contributors... it's hard to get hundreds of musicians in a simultaneous work. It's a lot harder to objectively define good music than good software. The list goes on.
But even with the flaws, the analogy seems pretty strong to me. Unless the government steps in to preserve the status quo, live performance and custom services seem likely to once again become the bread-and-butter for the artists in question. Occasionally one will produce something so popular that it can be profitably distributed, but that will be the exception, not the norm.
Geez, get a grip.
I didn't say I was gonna do it, I'm just predicting it. I don't live anywhere near a rapeseed-growing region, nor do I advocate violence. (Read my nick, eh?)
Since what seems like simple justice has been denied in the courts, I predict we'll see some radical folks start trying to wipe this stuff out... errr... proactively. But of course, it's not like "eco-terrorists" can just roundup(tm) the fields of the stuff, is it?
I guess that'll leave them only one option... at least until Monsanto develops and patents brushfire-ready crops, anyway.
If I were growing this stuff, I'd be sure to keep a nice fire-defensible zone around my house from now on.
Oh, well heck. I didn't realizing you were flamebaiting on purpose.
Carry on, then!
Don't go with OpenBSD. OpenBSD has many noble design philosophies however "make the system usable" is possibly at the bottom of their list.
:-/ )
Nice bit of flamebait. What you leave out is that they have excellent man pages.
(OpenBSD has been my first *nix-ish system, and the major trouble I've run into is knowing which manpage to look up. Google is my friend, because inevitably some other poor newbie has recieved an RTFM "foo" flame for just the task I'm looking to do. It pays to lurk sometimes.
I find OpenBSD works pretty well so far. I'm not using it for general desktop use as yet, but my X and Mozilla-Firefox installs Just Worked on the random old hardware I scrounged up.
If those plants were very cheap, I'd guess they'd cost about 300-400 million, putting your figure of oil independance at 3-4 trillion $, just to build the plants
Which, if it is spent to end dependence on foreign oil (and reduce the environmental footprint of our economy as a side effect) would be cheap at the price. It's not an expense, it's an investment with potentially huge benefits economically, evironmentally, diplomatically, and militarily.
For comparison, the Manhattan Project cost $20 billion or thereabouts in 1945. In 2004 dollars, that's about $1.25 trillion. Add in the expense of our nuclear arsenal over the years, and it comes to about $6.4 trillion. (In 2004 dollars.) We're talking about a similarly large strategic and economic benefit. If this process really works as described, it's worth the investment.
Remember also, this process can be used to reform practically any organic waste, including plastics and even PCB's.
So here's a private business plan for you: Aquire the mineral rights to a huge old landfill. Build one of these plants nearby. Mine it to feed your waste-to-oil converter, seperating the metals and other inorganics as you go and selling what you can as raw materials.
Continue until the landfill site is empty, then keep digging and processing to clean the contaminated earth under it. Cover it with remediated or remanufactured soil, and open a park or a turkey ranch. Meanwhile, keep operating your plant with waste from the city that created the landfill in the first place.
Sure, you're left with a pile of nasty heavy metals and inorganics that no one wants, but now they're in some much more pure form and can be appropriately processed and sequestered.
If this technology is any good at all, it should be possible to turn at least a modest profit over the long haul.
This is closer to the wierdest solution ever, but what the hell.
:)
I witnessed a housemate of mine who worked from home have an amazing issue with an early Logitech optical-tracking mouse. (The kind that still used a ball... this was back in '95 or so.)
It would stop working after six hours of use or so. Specifically, it would no longer track left. Up, down, right were all fine, but left failed. He was a tech himself, and tried all the usual stuff... installed latest drivers, checked the cabling, cleaned the ball and rollers, everything. Nothing worked. Being a patient guy, mostly he lived with it. When it happened, he'd walk away from his computer and go have a late lunch, and when it came back it would usually work.
But eventually, that last straw arrived and he couldn't stand it anymore. He called Logitech support. He went through the whole business on the phone, and the whole Logitech troubleshooting script. Eventually the tech basically gave up, and put him on hold while he found a mouse guru to ask.
So my friend is sitting there on hold, toying with this mouse that's not tracking left, shifting restlessly because his ass is sore from sitting there for hours, and suddenly it starts working again right before his eyes. He sits up straight in disbelief, and it stops working. He slumps in disappointment, and it works again. He resorts to handwaving.
From across the room, amidst the cussing, I practically hear the little *ding* as he finally figured it out.
He started work around noon, and in the late afternoon in that season the sunlight would come in under his arm, hit that part of his desk just right, bounce through the seams in the mouse buttons, and dazzle the "left" part of the optical sensor. If he kept it in shadow, it worked fine.
Sometimes it's the little things that get ya.
Upon asking why, I was informed that it "had something to do with data harmonics".
My brother once explained a firewall's operation to a non-tech as "rotating the shield harmonics." The explainee (while obviously not believing it literally) considered this a good enough analogy for his purposes.
Bloody brilliant. Wish I'd thought of it.
I read Michael Pollan's Botany of Desire a while back. In it, he points out that apples don't breed true. That is, if you plant the five seeds from, say, a Braeburn apple you get in the store, you'll end up with five very different trees producing five very different fruits, and in all likelihood none of them strongly resemble the Braeburn. Consistency in a variety is achieved exclusively through grafting.
:)
Apple varieties are often discovered, and occasionally developed. Red Delicious was found on some guy's farm in Iowa back around 1870... he made a mint selling cuttings. Braeburn was a chance find in New Zealand.
Congress obtains the power to establish patents via Artilce 1 Section 8: "[...] promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries [...]"
I think it's not clear. No one ever invented or authored any variety of apple, but it is a discovery with substantial economic value. The potential for a patent on apple varieties probably does promote the growing of test orchards to find new varieties, so that probably counts as promoting useful arts.
I don't much like the idea of patentable life, but I suppose it's within the power we grant to Congress.
I'm glad it's a patent and not a copyright, though.
I completely empathize with you for speaking out against apostrophe abuse. We all have our breaking points, and sometimes ya just gotta let fly.
But while you were at it, shouldn't you have taken the opportunity to correct his spelling, too? His spelling of "rediculous" is just... ridiculous.
An excellent suggestion! We can create a market for sidewalk credits, wherein large people can purchase extra sidewalk-space credits from smaller people, thereby letting the market optimize sidewalk usage.
Note for the sarcasm impaired: Yep, I'm kidding.
The whole point of free software is user control. Free software is big enough for you and I to agree to dissagree about it, you do things your way and I'll do them mine.
Fair enough, but I'm talking about default behavior, not required behavior.
Anyone running a development branch of anything can be assumed to know enough to disable the automatic updater. So can administrators of qualified systems. A new user of a free *nix cannot be assumed to know enough to get updates at all, so it seems to me it'd be right neighborly to help 'em out.
The dialup problem is a good point, but easily addressed. Have the auto update tool check to see what sort of connection the machine has to the internet, and give the user a range of appropriate options for dealing with a slow connection. (Or, just mimic the Fedora method described here.)
It'd be a relatively easy feature for many distros to add, it'd positively impact usability, and it'd demolish this particular FUD.
[...] apt-get update seems to count as free updates to me [...]
Sure, they're free, but they're not automatic. This may be spurious, hairsplitting FUD, but what the hell... let's get rid of it:
In the default installation, have the installer create a tool to run the update from a random server chosen from a list of approved servers for the distro. Assign it to run at a random time, then repeat it weekly as a cron job called something obvious like weeklyupdate.
Do this for all free *nix distros. Move on.
The SCO attacks against Linux IP are very much akin to the attacks a system sees when sitting on an unfiltered network. They each have the effect of exposing areas of vulnerability, and generating fixes. Sure, there are some casualties on the way, but it's a productive process. ("That which does not kill us...")
I don't have the time to flesh out the idea properly, but I expect y'all get my drift.
If not, here's a comparison sure to annoy several people: The FSF is to free *nix legal issues what OpenBSD.org is to free *nix security issues.
I can shorten it still further:
Can we trust?
The answer, of course, is that at some level we have to. We trust unreliable people with our lives every time we run a green light. It is important to remember that "choosing to trust" is not the same thing as "ensuring we won't get burned".
Not to say that it's unreasonable to withdraw trust from a closed-source vendor who has behaved badly; it could be a good choice. But to function at all, at some level we must choose to trust in another's competence and goodwill. That's just the way the world works.
(As for my network, though, I put my trust in OpenBSD.)
Server-centric operation will be helpful for compliance with the HIPAA security standard. (Not required, just helpful.)
:)
The less you need to transmit Electronic Personally-identifiable Healthcare Information, the simpler your security problem will be.
Storing ePHI on the local machines raises all sorts of complications regarding physical security of (and data destruction upon) the point-of-use devices that are a real pain in the arse. If the end user gets the ePHI through a browser, it's a much simpler matter to ensure that sensitive data doesn't persist... just make sure the browser cache time is really short.
It might be better to talk about "HIPAA Capable" or "HIPAA Ready". As another poster said, HIPAA compliance is a much more complicated matter than just software. It is no more correct to say that a piece of software is "HIPAA compliant" than it is to say it is "ISO-9000 compliant". Both are broad standards that cover a range of practices well beyond the scope of any possible software.
HIPAA has three sections: Transactions, Privacy, and Security. I'm more familiar with the Privacy and Security regs than Transaction standards... but I think it might be possible for y'all to claim that the software "fully supports HIPAA compliant transactions".
You'll have to do some research on the final rules.