It only produces 4 pictures per day because it's run off of solar power; they're being smart and conserving electricity. Besides, it has to upload the pictures over a 2400-baud modem through a satellite uplink, which is bound to take up more juice than the CCD and JPEG compression combined.
Overall, I'd say they're being pretty smart -- you're not going to run streaming video through 802.11b running on a nine volt battery at the north pole.
The existence of a standard, open format for this kind of data/calculation is a godsend.
Yes, something that is easily accessible from virtually any programming language on any platform. Something that can be easily implemented, assuming no pre-existing implementation exists. Such a standard would be great for shuffling data between disparate and otherwise incompatible programs.
we must first get them to use alternatives to MS Office
I strongly agree. But, the problem is, there's no good reason to switch. Everyone and their mother (well, most people's mothers) has Word on the desktop. Open-source equivalents must not simply "cooperate with" Microsoft products (by reading their file formats correctly) but, to give people an incentive to switch, must have things that Microsoft Office doesn't.
People like the look and feel of Office. (Really. Microsoft hires UI people.) Office has a good help system (once you disable Clippy, it is actually useful). The Office suite is tightly-integrated and actually pulls it off well. Office does VBA. Office puts little squigglies underneath mis-spelled words. People can figure out how to do a "mail merge" pretty easily -- make a list under Access, point the Mail Merge Wizard to it, and point and click your way to a set of letters and matching envelopes.
So, to be successful, an open-source office suite must do all of these things, as well as offer something that Microsoft Office doesn't. For some, that may be easy licensing. For others, that may be speed. For others still, that may be size. Or compatibility. Open-source Office alternatives face a tough road.
The only thing that can stop Linux from eventually succeeding Windows on the desktop is either laws to prevent it from happening or not enforcing laws that will allow it to happen.
No, quite simply, the only thing that can stop Linux from taking over the desktop is the end-user. Laws are a pesky matter, yes, but if the end-user doesn't like it, it doesn't matter. If they can't open up their e-mail attachments it doesn't matter. If they can't copy-and-paste between programs it doesn't matter. Besides, some -- lots of people don't want to know about the insides of their computers; they don't care about file permissions, latency-reducing kernel patches, or IP multicast. They want their computer to "work". When they click on that spreadsheet, it had better open.
Think about it this way. The Unix folks decided that three mouse buttons would be the most funcitonal way to use a computer. Microsoft came along and reduced the number to two. Apple, then, decided that it could get along with one. (Okay, so it didn't happen exactly that way, but you get the idea.)
It's only a matter of time until we can get along without clicking, or moving the mouse at all!
I have a hard copy right here and it has another section (that's not in the PDF, sorry) with all the numbers you would ever want. Request one (it's free), and you'll get it by snail mail in a week or so.
VA Software owns OSDN, and VA is a publicly-held company. In the US, having stockholders means you have to publish an annual report, which (among other things) must provide financial information. So, by viewing said annual report, you can see what their costs are, where their income originates, and what they use it for.
"if... we could see what their costs are... I'd be glad to contribute."
And, you know, the whole industrial age thing... that was a fluke. All that land, hundreds of thousands of miles of railroads, abundant natural resources, a decent educational system, and lots of people... yeah, it must be that the US won by default.
</sarcasm>
The US was, indeed, a major world player, prior even to World War I.
Actually, there's truth here. When an MS-DNS server requests a zone transfer, it puts some garbage (ASCII: "MS") at the end of the packet that tells the nameserver at the other end "Hey, I'm a Microsoft DNS server, I'm special!". Then, they do their little zone transfer dance and the world is happy.
But yes, MS did/does embrance and extend DNS. Who cares if it's not standard? It's Microsoft -- it is now.
I'm using Gentoo Linux right now, and it certainly is fast. I'm on a dual-P3 system, so running KDE3 (which is da bomb), reading Slashdot, checking my mail, and compiling KDevelop in the background isn't too bad. Things have gotten a bit easier with the addition of stage 2/3 tarballs, meaning that the build gcc/glibc rebuild binutils/gcc/glibc cycle is eliminated, cutting down the installation time a lot.
Gentoo is a lean distro, to be sure. Everything uses MMX/SSE, which is nice, though the performance gain of that is probably marginal. What really gives it a good kick is that the base install contains only a handful of apps (the *bare* minimum) and everything else is installed as necessary. That's certainly not unique to Gentoo, but it's a plus. (Why have eject if you don't have a CD-ROM?)
The only downside, though, is the lengthy compiles; a dual-P3 box is decent, but a full recompile of XFree86 still takes time. But hey, in my opinion, it's worth it.
There's no need to "morph jabber into a middleware message router" -- it already is. The core of jabberd is an XML routing engine called EtherX, which is pretty cool stuff.
Basically, the Jabber instant messaging protocol is a bunch of messages that are routed across EtherX, much like TCP routes over IP. To make use of EtherX as middleware, just use libetherx, connect to an EtherX router (i.e. a Jabber server), and talk XML back and forth. The presence, authentication, and messaging aspects of Jabber are independent of routing.
Jabber, AIM, MSN, and others use TCP. In fact, the only client I know of that ever used UDP was ICQ, but that was an older protocol that is no longer being used.
Here's what goes on -- the pair of copper going to a house gets a digital signal modulated over it. Equipment at both ends is able to reconstruct two independent "streams" from the same line -- one at or below 8 KHz, the other one in a much higher frequency band. This line runs directly to the CO, so there's no bandwidth sharing there.
Going out of the CO, it runs through a large networks, eventually getting data to the ISP. This one signal is sent along with a lot of other data, so technically, bandwidth is being shared. I can't say about where you live, I can't say about your ISP, I can't say about your regional telecom network, but I know that where I live I always have a full pipe between me and my ISP. I can constantly saturate my DSL line with as much data as the computer on the other end can give me (chargen, anyone?)
That's not to say that the ISP has allocated a lot of bandwidth for you -- but mine does a pretty good job of that making sure that there's room for everyone.
Anyway, let's step back a little. Think about this, for a minute: DSL users share bandwidth too, just in a slightly different fashion.Everyone on the 'net shares bandwidth -- one ISP gets service from another ISP, the Tier 1 ISPs have exchanges, and everyone shares bandwidth at some point -- just further down the line. The advantage of DSL is that this bandwidth-sharing point is significantly further away from the end-user.
Wait, this is a patent over search result placement. Of course, this is a dumb patent, but... it doesn't apply to Google. The AdWords don't influence search result placement, but rather an extra little bar saying "this might be relevant" on the top.
Demo: search for tennis rackets. The DealTime.com link is the AdWord, which is nothing like a search result.
How can they do this? And why not go over some search engine that does sell placement, rather than Google?
Great -- inserting random words can be automated, easily.
The WWL has been designed using the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). McConnell says this should make it possible to integrate the client software into other computer applications.
Excellent... give the abusers an easy way in. And yes, I can pretty much guarantee that it will be abused.
"However, some experts warn that the system may lack the quality of conventional dictionaries."... "McConnell concedes that this could be a problem and hopes to develop an automatic system for peer review, to ensure that translations are accurate."
Duh.
Think about all the 12-year-olds -- script kiddies or not -- who will pretend to know a language and just type in a random collection of letters. What a great way to provide efficient translation!
Not so: anyone can read the document. Go there and download it. (Really, try it.)
According to Microsoft:
To implement the technology described in the Technical Reference, print, sign and return the Royalty-Free CIFS Technical Reference License Agreement to Microsoft
So, we could theoretically read the document all we like and summarize it for the Samba developers. But, it seems that any implementation would require filling out that form...
1.4 "IPR Impairing License" shall mean the GNU General Public License, the GNU Lesser/Library General Public License, and any license that requires in any instance that other software distributed with software subject to such license (a) be disclosed and distributed in source code form; (b) be licensed for purposes of making derivative works; or (c) be redistributable at no charge.
Microsoft seems to have just banned any open source or even free (as in beer) CIFS implementations.
Then, my question becomes: what about interpreted languages? Many languages don't have a compiled form... does the license prohibit those?
Who cares about the license on the CIFS reference? The folks behind Samba obviously got along without this new document... how can the license be in any way legally binding?
Or is it totally ungrounded? Yeah, I'm leaning towards that.
Actually, I think the Bible is much more anti-jewish than anti-Roman.
Let's think about this for a moment. Who was Jesus? The son of Mary. Mary was a Jew. Jesus was a Jew. The New Testament is centered around Jesus, a Jew, and thus cannot be considered to be anti-Jewish. The Old Testament was written by and for Jews, so it can't by any means be called anti-Jewish. This statement has no validity.
Even though the author was writing the book in exile on the Isle of Patmos by the Romans? Even though the Romans decimated Jerusalem in 70AD and persecuted the Christians for sport
Well, from my undersanding, the gospels were written _after_ 70AD, with Luke (the most neutral to the Romans) written closer to 100AD.
When the Gospels were written makes little difference; what the original poster is saying is that Roman propaganda is unlikely because the writer of Revelation was exiled because of them, and that the Romans destroyed the temple in Jerusalem as well as persecuting Christians for a few hundred years. For that reason, the idea that this is Roman propaganda simply does not make sense.
For these books to gain in popularity (and be supported by the domant power) it would have to be quite favorable to the Romans at the expense of the previous rulers...
This, again, is flat out wrong. Christianity was not favorable to the Romans -- it did not permit emperor worship (which was required by Roman law) and additionally cited a power above Rome. Christianity gained "popularity" in spite of the fact that Christians were getting tortured and killed daily.
First, no, Linux does not have to be in everything. But, since Linux is a great operating system, and it has things that make an operating system successful (good software, active development, stability, and so on), integrating Linux into various strange places may not be a bad idea. Personally, I think a Linux-powered cell phone would be flat-out cool; if Linux is both accessible and integrated into the device well, the software could be easily modified to suit pretty much any needs. Also, a Linux-powered cell phone could have many advantages, like auto-hanging up if you're about to over-use your minutes, or preventing from dialing except to certian numbers ("emergency use only")... parents would love it.
I agree with you in that Linux is not the one-size-fits-all solution, but it is a pretty darn good one. But, even Microsoft recognizes that it's better to let developers use tools they already know, so they produced Windows CE, which includes a stripped-down (yet still pretty full) Windows API. For that reason, embedded Linux is a viable market.
Also, VMware isn't an operating system. VMware Workstation is user-mode software that emulates a BIOS, and their server software simply allows multiple operating systems to operate in "partitions" of an Intel-based machine. Neither of these products are designed for an embedded market.
Re:Why not post it to Usenet?
on
KDE 3.0 is Out
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Or, you could post it to Freenet. It's designed to be an efficient distributed caching and load balancing system and is architecturally built to counter the dreaded Slashdot Effect.
Basically, the idea is that people run a Freenet node and data gets passed around from node to node. If no one requests a file, it eventually gets dropped from nodes that are "far away" in the keyspace, and eventually from the only node that remains carrying it. But, if a bunch of people request it, the file will be cached at a large number of intermediate nodes, effectively giving the requester a whole lot more bandwidth to work from.
Also, it would be an example of how Freenet can serve an important and legal purpose, instead of just a haven for software pirates and child pornographers.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the article states that it does, indeed run off of solar power.
What, you're going to take pictures in total darkness? That's a bright idea :-)
It only produces 4 pictures per day because it's run off of solar power; they're being smart and conserving electricity. Besides, it has to upload the pictures over a 2400-baud modem through a satellite uplink, which is bound to take up more juice than the CCD and JPEG compression combined.
Overall, I'd say they're being pretty smart -- you're not going to run streaming video through 802.11b running on a nine volt battery at the north pole.
You seem to have missed the news articles from March and April... unless, of course, we are still living in Quake II times.
Yes, something that is easily accessible from virtually any programming language on any platform. Something that can be easily implemented, assuming no pre-existing implementation exists. Such a standard would be great for shuffling data between disparate and otherwise incompatible programs.
Wait a minute... it's called CSV :-)
I strongly agree. But, the problem is, there's no good reason to switch. Everyone and their mother (well, most people's mothers) has Word on the desktop. Open-source equivalents must not simply "cooperate with" Microsoft products (by reading their file formats correctly) but, to give people an incentive to switch, must have things that Microsoft Office doesn't.
People like the look and feel of Office. (Really. Microsoft hires UI people.) Office has a good help system (once you disable Clippy, it is actually useful). The Office suite is tightly-integrated and actually pulls it off well. Office does VBA. Office puts little squigglies underneath mis-spelled words. People can figure out how to do a "mail merge" pretty easily -- make a list under Access, point the Mail Merge Wizard to it, and point and click your way to a set of letters and matching envelopes.
So, to be successful, an open-source office suite must do all of these things, as well as offer something that Microsoft Office doesn't. For some, that may be easy licensing. For others, that may be speed. For others still, that may be size. Or compatibility. Open-source Office alternatives face a tough road.
No, quite simply, the only thing that can stop Linux from taking over the desktop is the end-user. Laws are a pesky matter, yes, but if the end-user doesn't like it, it doesn't matter. If they can't open up their e-mail attachments it doesn't matter. If they can't copy-and-paste between programs it doesn't matter. Besides, some -- lots of people don't want to know about the insides of their computers; they don't care about file permissions, latency-reducing kernel patches, or IP multicast. They want their computer to "work". When they click on that spreadsheet, it had better open.
It's all those free coasters, frisbees, and clock parts they keep sending out. No wonder they're going downhill.
:)
Yes, I'm aware that the free CDs help AOL greatly, but still
Think about it this way. The Unix folks decided that three mouse buttons would be the most funcitonal way to use a computer. Microsoft came along and reduced the number to two. Apple, then, decided that it could get along with one. (Okay, so it didn't happen exactly that way, but you get the idea.)
It's only a matter of time until we can get along without clicking, or moving the mouse at all!
Wait a minute, that's the keyboard.
I have a hard copy right here and it has another section (that's not in the PDF, sorry) with all the numbers you would ever want. Request one (it's free), and you'll get it by snail mail in a week or so.
VA Software owns OSDN, and VA is a publicly-held company. In the US, having stockholders means you have to publish an annual report, which (among other things) must provide financial information. So, by viewing said annual report, you can see what their costs are, where their income originates, and what they use it for.
I'm sure they look forward to your check.
And, you know, the whole industrial age thing... that was a fluke. All that land, hundreds of thousands of miles of railroads, abundant natural resources, a decent educational system, and lots of people... yeah, it must be that the US won by default.
</sarcasm>
The US was, indeed, a major world player, prior even to World War I.
Actually, there's truth here. When an MS-DNS server requests a zone transfer, it puts some garbage (ASCII: "MS") at the end of the packet that tells the nameserver at the other end "Hey, I'm a Microsoft DNS server, I'm special!". Then, they do their little zone transfer dance and the world is happy.
But yes, MS did/does embrance and extend DNS. Who cares if it's not standard? It's Microsoft -- it is now.
Ugh.
I'm using Gentoo Linux right now, and it certainly is fast. I'm on a dual-P3 system, so running KDE3 (which is da bomb), reading Slashdot, checking my mail, and compiling KDevelop in the background isn't too bad. Things have gotten a bit easier with the addition of stage 2/3 tarballs, meaning that the build gcc/glibc rebuild binutils/gcc/glibc cycle is eliminated, cutting down the installation time a lot.
Gentoo is a lean distro, to be sure. Everything uses MMX/SSE, which is nice, though the performance gain of that is probably marginal. What really gives it a good kick is that the base install contains only a handful of apps (the *bare* minimum) and everything else is installed as necessary. That's certainly not unique to Gentoo, but it's a plus. (Why have eject if you don't have a CD-ROM?)
The only downside, though, is the lengthy compiles; a dual-P3 box is decent, but a full recompile of XFree86 still takes time. But hey, in my opinion, it's worth it.
There's no need to "morph jabber into a middleware message router" -- it already is. The core of jabberd is an XML routing engine called EtherX, which is pretty cool stuff.
Basically, the Jabber instant messaging protocol is a bunch of messages that are routed across EtherX, much like TCP routes over IP. To make use of EtherX as middleware, just use libetherx, connect to an EtherX router (i.e. a Jabber server), and talk XML back and forth. The presence, authentication, and messaging aspects of Jabber are independent of routing.
In fact, with Jabber, multiple IP addresses may be using the same username. Look into the concept of resources.
Jabber, AIM, MSN, and others use TCP. In fact, the only client I know of that ever used UDP was ICQ, but that was an older protocol that is no longer being used.
Here's what goes on -- the pair of copper going to a house gets a digital signal modulated over it. Equipment at both ends is able to reconstruct two independent "streams" from the same line -- one at or below 8 KHz, the other one in a much higher frequency band. This line runs directly to the CO, so there's no bandwidth sharing there.
Going out of the CO, it runs through a large networks, eventually getting data to the ISP. This one signal is sent along with a lot of other data, so technically, bandwidth is being shared. I can't say about where you live, I can't say about your ISP, I can't say about your regional telecom network, but I know that where I live I always have a full pipe between me and my ISP. I can constantly saturate my DSL line with as much data as the computer on the other end can give me (chargen, anyone?)
That's not to say that the ISP has allocated a lot of bandwidth for you -- but mine does a pretty good job of that making sure that there's room for everyone.
Anyway, let's step back a little. Think about this, for a minute: DSL users share bandwidth too, just in a slightly different fashion. Everyone on the 'net shares bandwidth -- one ISP gets service from another ISP, the Tier 1 ISPs have exchanges, and everyone shares bandwidth at some point -- just further down the line. The advantage of DSL is that this bandwidth-sharing point is significantly further away from the end-user.
Wait, this is a patent over search result placement. Of course, this is a dumb patent, but... it doesn't apply to Google. The AdWords don't influence search result placement, but rather an extra little bar saying "this might be relevant" on the top.
Demo: search for tennis rackets. The DealTime.com link is the AdWord, which is nothing like a search result.
How can they do this? And why not go over some search engine that does sell placement, rather than Google?
Great -- inserting random words can be automated, easily.
Excellent... give the abusers an easy way in. And yes, I can pretty much guarantee that it will be abused.
Duh.
Think about all the 12-year-olds -- script kiddies or not -- who will pretend to know a language and just type in a random collection of letters. What a great way to provide efficient translation!
Not so: anyone can read the document. Go there and download it. (Really, try it.)
According to Microsoft:
So, we could theoretically read the document all we like and summarize it for the Samba developers. But, it seems that any implementation would require filling out that form...
This is kinda creepy.
Microsoft seems to have just banned any open source or even free (as in beer) CIFS implementations.
Then, my question becomes: what about interpreted languages? Many languages don't have a compiled form... does the license prohibit those?
Who cares about the license on the CIFS reference? The folks behind Samba obviously got along without this new document... how can the license be in any way legally binding?
Or is it totally ungrounded? Yeah, I'm leaning towards that.
Actually, I think the Bible is much more anti-jewish than anti-Roman.
Let's think about this for a moment. Who was Jesus? The son of Mary. Mary was a Jew. Jesus was a Jew. The New Testament is centered around Jesus, a Jew, and thus cannot be considered to be anti-Jewish. The Old Testament was written by and for Jews, so it can't by any means be called anti-Jewish. This statement has no validity.
Well, from my undersanding, the gospels were written _after_ 70AD, with Luke (the most neutral to the Romans) written closer to 100AD.
When the Gospels were written makes little difference; what the original poster is saying is that Roman propaganda is unlikely because the writer of Revelation was exiled because of them, and that the Romans destroyed the temple in Jerusalem as well as persecuting Christians for a few hundred years. For that reason, the idea that this is Roman propaganda simply does not make sense.
For these books to gain in popularity (and be supported by the domant power) it would have to be quite favorable to the Romans at the expense of the previous rulers...
This, again, is flat out wrong. Christianity was not favorable to the Romans -- it did not permit emperor worship (which was required by Roman law) and additionally cited a power above Rome. Christianity gained "popularity" in spite of the fact that Christians were getting tortured and killed daily.
First, no, Linux does not have to be in everything. But, since Linux is a great operating system, and it has things that make an operating system successful (good software, active development, stability, and so on), integrating Linux into various strange places may not be a bad idea. Personally, I think a Linux-powered cell phone would be flat-out cool; if Linux is both accessible and integrated into the device well, the software could be easily modified to suit pretty much any needs. Also, a Linux-powered cell phone could have many advantages, like auto-hanging up if you're about to over-use your minutes, or preventing from dialing except to certian numbers ("emergency use only")... parents would love it.
I agree with you in that Linux is not the one-size-fits-all solution, but it is a pretty darn good one. But, even Microsoft recognizes that it's better to let developers use tools they already know, so they produced Windows CE, which includes a stripped-down (yet still pretty full) Windows API. For that reason, embedded Linux is a viable market.
Also, VMware isn't an operating system. VMware Workstation is user-mode software that emulates a BIOS, and their server software simply allows multiple operating systems to operate in "partitions" of an Intel-based machine. Neither of these products are designed for an embedded market.
Or, you could post it to Freenet. It's designed to be an efficient distributed caching and load balancing system and is architecturally built to counter the dreaded Slashdot Effect.
Basically, the idea is that people run a Freenet node and data gets passed around from node to node. If no one requests a file, it eventually gets dropped from nodes that are "far away" in the keyspace, and eventually from the only node that remains carrying it. But, if a bunch of people request it, the file will be cached at a large number of intermediate nodes, effectively giving the requester a whole lot more bandwidth to work from.
Also, it would be an example of how Freenet can serve an important and legal purpose, instead of just a haven for software pirates and child pornographers.