Oh, didnt you hear?
Its another one of John Howard's "NON-CORE" promises!
(For non-Australians, non-core promises are the promises the current retards in power call the election commitments they break after they are brought (back) into power. Yes, "non-core" is a direct quote of John Howard.:^)
This is called sarcasm btw, but you never know when moderators are gonna smoke the crack.
Ofcourse, what people forget is that Australia witholds the right to let in, or not let in, who we please.
So the government used its own intelligence-gathering arm to get as much information on the situation as possible, before making decisions. And this is bad, uh, how? Its well founded that it was spying and intelligence that helped prevent the cold war turning into WWIII. The Cuban missile crisis proved how invaluable intelligence is in a crisis.
Personally, I think my tax dollars are well spent, thanks anyway.
If you think $1500 (latest Fujitsu sub-notebook with internal DVD reader, does 10h on max batteries) is too expensive, then youre in the wrong game, honestly. Buy a few 32GB 2.5" HD's if the 20GB included isnt enough, and simply use the audio-out. Buy a Pro-quality type-2 audio card if you want quality, but dont bother using lossy compression in that case.
Unless ofcourse, you needed to burn the DVD-R's when you went out for your gigs. But uh, I thought DJ's were the ones that supplied the music, no?
Your first priority is to ditch Raid5.
By the looks of your post, you have money to spend, so invest in more disks and go RAID 0+1. You'll notice a speed increace right there. If youre worried about PCI latency, get a system with 2 or 3 PCI busses.
Infact, Whoever set up this configuration needs a slap, if they were going for performance. Raid 5 has more and more overhead penalty the more disks you add to a stripe set. Even knocking back the sets to 4 or 3 disks would help, I would never use more than 4 disks in a raid5 set.
That said, if your app is mostly db reads, 0+1 on good controllers should give you 4* the average disk throughput, thanks to striping, and round-robin mirror reads. Also, make sure your OS and filesystem are well tuned. Often you see people spending money on hardware, because they havent bothered to optomise the software. (Kernel variable, filesystem tuning, etc.)
To all the Linux zealots, proclaiming the death of Sun, who have never been inside a large data centre with expensive Sun kit inside it, I'll give you a hint:
Sun's Core Business has nothing to do with Linux on cheap, commodity X86!
Sun sells high-end systems, big-iron that competes with other high-end vendors. They make all the profit off hardware, JUST LIKE IBM, when IBM sells a big-iron server with either AIX, or Linux. So remember, these vendors are competeing with Hardware, not Software. Cheap commodity X86 isnt in the race for the very high-end.
I use Solaris for SPARC, its great, but Solaris X86 was half-baked from the start. The writing was on the wall for a LONG time, but when Sun finally canned it, I for one had to endure both the cries of "abandonware!" as well as generic sun bashing from the local Linux people I have to deal with.
It should be obvious now, Sun is doing the right thing by ceeding the X86 market to Linux, and infact helping the transition, for those that were in the Solaris X86 crowd. Win-win situation, as far as I can see.
Katz says: "An idea very close to the heart of the Net -- an open medium -- died, probably for good.
"
Tell that to anyone on usenet, freely sending email to each other, IRC, anyone still using nTalk, there are loads of ways still to freely use the net openly.
Is it just me, or is this just anti-commercialism being beaten-up, and presented here because it goes with the reputation of this site? Katz, if I can give you any hint for your writing, try not to be so emotional and vague. It just looks evasive and manipulative, like you dont have a real point to get across and are writing for the sake of a post.
Retailers dont want to be seen my the public as being stodgy and old-fashioned, so supporting things like eBooks has some PR and convenience value.
As people are mentioning though, There is the competition with the traditional paper format. Add to that, I think, no business enters a risky new business unless there is profit to be made. Atleast if some profit is made, even if the format dies, they havent wasted their entire investment, an investment they are pushed to make, because if they dont, and the format takes off, they will be overtaken by their competitors.
Like a lot of other commodity products, early adopters of new technology pay a premium. Wether it is worthwhile, all depends on how much the product is worth to you. (Or your business.)
Governments should be using software they can trust, and trust is earned, never gained.
Windows has some good technology in it, and it is nowdays a halfway-decent product. The problem isnt windows, its Microsoft.
You just plain cant trust Microsoft, one bit. You dont evven have to ascribe to malevolence. I'm not saying they are nessesarily evil, I am saying they are unreliable. Their attitude to fixing their broken and insecure software (whatever proportion of it you think fits that description) is poor to non-existant, and getting worse. And if they arent going to take the US government seriously (DoJ) then we know they dont even care about any other government, once the licence fees have been paid up.
Yeah, but if you brush up on your Quantum Mechanics, you'll know that the shorter the wavelength, the more energy youre hitting your target with, with the photons.
This is no good as it disturbs the target too much (the old problem of quantum uncertainty) whereas I imagine that if the pulse is short enough and of something weaker than gamma rays, they can atleast get an image before the target is unusably perturbed.
BTW, they were talking about molecules and imaging chemical reactions, which may not be totally beyond light/soft-xrays wavelengths to do, arguably.
Where if you go over some defined limit, they kick you off or suspend your account.
I would MUCH MUCH rather feel safe in the knowledge that going over my limit would only mean i'd pay some more for that month (Ca$80 isnt much!) rather than be all worried that the cable-nazis at Optus might suspend or terminate my account without warning, thus devaluing overnight all the money I paid over 18 months that paid for the cable modem I cant use on any other service.
People who have always had unlimited for nothing extra than basic service will whine, but there are WORSE ways they can handle the.iso traders that hog and bog down the network for everyone else. And if it means the cable operator has a better chance of staying in business long term, then good.
As prople have explained here to the masses that never had the chance, the Amiga had some really, really good ideas. Here is some:
Assignments. You can assign a label "label:" to a drive or an arbitary path. This label can then be accessed rather like a device. Now I know unix people will be like "So what! Big deal." But THINK about it. You can assign say AmiTCP: to sys:amitcp1.2 and all scripts and programs are written to use AmiTCP:. Later you can install sys:amitcp1.3 and reassign AmiTCP: to that, and NOTHING BREAKS! Its an EXCELLENT mechanism for software. It also makes env variables like PATH a lot shorter and simpler, especially when you have your favourite well-known assignments. (And no, its NOT the same as exported env variables, as assignments are system wide, and you can access them almost like a device.)
Another neat feature of AmigaDOS: You can label a drive, and access the label name very much like a device. Say you have dh0: (/dev/hda1) now you can write all your scripts and programs to access dh0: but what happens if that changes? On most OS's, youre stuck, especially if your SCSI and IDE devices arent hard wired down, and even if they are, youre screwed if you swap disks between machines and ther eis an id conflict. AmigaDOS to the rescue, instead of writing scripts and programs to the hardware name dh0: you label the disk and that disk can be accessed as the label, label: instead of dh0: Now, no matter what ID the disk comes up as, anything that wants to acces THAT DISK, will work! it gets better, the boot disk on AmigaDOS is also always aliased to sys: so if you always have to write your program to access the bootdisk, use sys:. THe only caveat about using the label is if you need to change the label, but the label is only cosmetic, so I have never seen the need.
Those 2 features are just 2 of the many things I miss about the Amiga since I went to Windows and Unix. It would be fantastic if someone could take these old ideas and improve other OS's with them. There are many other. (Can someone please write a good Workbench knockoff WM? AmiWM is okay, but kinda old and crufty now.)
Unfortunatly, in the global drug and medical industires, money talks.
Those who wish to be granted monopolizing patents in order to extract wealth out of the rest of the world, will get what they need, as long as everything is driven by money. (It takes money to make money.)
Good point. Infrastructure does depend on population, though I feel there is a limit. Plus, Population dosent nessesarily imply infrastructure. Its more dependant on natural reasources and technology. Therefore while some population growth is nessesary, there is still not good reason for unrestraind population explosion.
BTW, I didnt mod your reply down, I though it was a good counterpoint. I dont think it should have been modded down, but thats CSM's for you.
Tell that to the Africans that starve en-masse every few years.
Dont you remember Live-Aid? See, different areas of the planet can sustain humans better than others. This means that yes, there is parts of the planet that ARE overpopulated, for the local conditions, even if the MidWest is grossly underpopulated as compared to its potential output.
What is interesting scientifically is that often the Aid programs that help starving populations living in untenable areas dont really help at all, they jsut delay the inevitible. (Move to another area, or starve.) That said, why should we rush to try and fill the planet with all the humans it can possibly contain? Conditions onthe planet are only going to get worse, and any theoretical total is only going to get lower. Lets get used to the idea of being able to sensibly control our population *before* nature does it for us.
Anyone who did the insect-population experiment should remember, ALL the flies died when resources ran out.
Perhaps for some other societies, ones that have different values than the US, a collapse of the US Corporacy (The US isnt a democracy) and global industrial-based control of other countries, will be seen as a good thing. (Remember, the US pressures most other countries into doing what it wants, wether its copyright laws, criminalization of natural drugs, or propping up US industry over international competition.)
US citizens never hold back on how great they feel their nation is (and it is, in other respects, but recognise it does have flaws please) and how powerfull it is. Totally ignoring how the corporations that control it (that the US is ultimatly reponsible for) are raping and pillaging the third world, and patronising and profiteering the rest of the world, all in the name of globalisation.
A collapse of US global dominance, would probably be seen as a good thing, to all the rational governments of the world that arent utterly and totally controlled by commercial interests. Just an alternate viewpoint, that even if the USA crumbles, life for the rest of the planet will go on.
Please? That would rock, having a GBA-type handheld that could play MAME, or atleast some of the less memory/CPU intensive MAME titles. MAME needs a game-oriented low-cost handheld platform.
(I cant see wether this is wishfull thinking or not, as the links seem to be down.)
No, it wasnt funny. Not after you jsut took the piss outta the Georgians for being dumbasses. (Which was atleast amusing.)
As for a power source, it wouldnt work. These things might be fairly hot in that they are putting out a large amount of radiation, but thats not a usefull form of energy. What happens is the radioactive decay of Strontium (the products of which, are probably also dangerous, and possibly gaseous) is composed of various particles. Heat is produced when these particles smash into outside particles and release their kinetic energy.
So the conversion to heat is already inefficient, but heat has very poor energy concentration, so converting this into electricity is far less efficient as well.
I doubt youd get more than a few milliwatts through radioactive decay. Fission is different ofcourse, but Strontium-90 cant undergo fission.
It depends on wether the element is chemically toxic as well as radioactive.
When you hear about plutonium being used as a dirty bomb, its not because its radioactive. Plutonium is HIGHLY toxic chemically, and can cause sickness and death even in small amounts.
Of course, the radioactivity isnt healthy either, and even if diluted to the volume of Lake superior, if you ate fish for a year from the lake, you would end up with a far higher concentration in your thyroid than the lake concentration. That is of course, if there was any fish left.
Okay, so the two guys that found this crap got severe radiation burns. These cylinders ahve enough intense radioactivity to burn them, and you wanna try putting it into your PC. (And no, it wasnt a funny suggestion.)
On a more practical note, This sort of technology was used to power space probes by generating heat and converting that (very inefficiently) to electricity. But that application isnt practical earthbound, where other forms of energy are plentyfull and far safer.
The only constructive earthbound use I can see for this material is nuclear research in the laborotory. Maybe. I wonder if it is possible to use it in reprocessing, even just to convert the material to something safer.
Everyone considering auth inside the corporate structure should already know that the kernel is not the place for any-and-all auth schemes. Sun know this, thats why PAM is part of Solaris, and that seems good enough for the Solaris commercial environments.
This is the whole idea behind PAM. Give the hooks needed to implement your own modules, that is the simplest and best thing *LINUX* can do for auth. Let other groups, like Samba, and those who work on Netware, and other groups who concentrate on interoperability, come up with modules for PAM. People who are interested should read the stuff on winbindd in Samba 2.2.2, its good stuff. And that said, nowdays the auth options for Linux-based OS's are good and getting better.
ObSlashdot: "In your mind, what does Linux need to do to improve it's profile in this regard?" Well, why do Slashdot editors wish to insult those posters that have a clue, while patronising everyone else? If you wonder why people troll, your answer is right there. (Watch me get slapped for this!:)
Electricity producing silicon solar-cells actually take more energy and generate more pollution during manufacture, than they will ever generate. The uninformed non-tech green set never seems to understand this point.
This leaves using an intermediary like water or sodium, to be heated by sunlight, and to generate electricity mechanically. This is highly inefficient, and/or dangerous.
The fact is, sunlight is too diffuse to be a practical large-scale energy supply without a hell of a lot of energy being put into it, by traditional means. Unless you count photosynthesis, which I give more creedence to than solar cells, the energy is just in a completely different form.
The nice thing about conversion directly to hydrogen, is that it is definetly an easier way to concentrate the energy.
After reading the article, its not as far fetched as it sounds, atleast at a low efficiency.
The problem as I see it though is this, what is the engine going to do with the laser light anyway? Laser light isnt that usefull in a car as an energy source. And I cant see the intensity of light being enough to do something cool, like dissasociate water to H2 and O. This is probably in the "neat-things" file for quite some time. Though maybe they can use this technology for fixed poer generation (coal, nuclear) where the gasses temperatures are higher and there is more volume.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, didnt you hear?
:^)
Its another one of John Howard's "NON-CORE" promises!
(For non-Australians, non-core promises are the promises the current retards in power call the election commitments they break after they are brought (back) into power. Yes, "non-core" is a direct quote of John Howard.
This is called sarcasm btw, but you never know when moderators are gonna smoke the crack.
Ofcourse, what people forget is that Australia witholds the right to let in, or not let in, who we please.
So the government used its own intelligence-gathering arm to get as much information on the situation as possible, before making decisions. And this is bad, uh, how? Its well founded that it was spying and intelligence that helped prevent the cold war turning into WWIII. The Cuban missile crisis proved how invaluable intelligence is in a crisis.
Personally, I think my tax dollars are well spent, thanks anyway.
Is the way to go. Definetly.
If you think $1500 (latest Fujitsu sub-notebook with internal DVD reader, does 10h on max batteries) is too expensive, then youre in the wrong game, honestly. Buy a few 32GB 2.5" HD's if the 20GB included isnt enough, and simply use the audio-out. Buy a Pro-quality type-2 audio card if you want quality, but dont bother using lossy compression in that case.
Unless ofcourse, you needed to burn the DVD-R's when you went out for your gigs. But uh, I thought DJ's were the ones that supplied the music, no?
Your first priority is to ditch Raid5.
By the looks of your post, you have money to spend, so invest in more disks and go RAID 0+1. You'll notice a speed increace right there. If youre worried about PCI latency, get a system with 2 or 3 PCI busses.
Infact, Whoever set up this configuration needs a slap, if they were going for performance. Raid 5 has more and more overhead penalty the more disks you add to a stripe set. Even knocking back the sets to 4 or 3 disks would help, I would never use more than 4 disks in a raid5 set.
That said, if your app is mostly db reads, 0+1 on good controllers should give you 4* the average disk throughput, thanks to striping, and round-robin mirror reads. Also, make sure your OS and filesystem are well tuned. Often you see people spending money on hardware, because they havent bothered to optomise the software. (Kernel variable, filesystem tuning, etc.)
I bet atleast 50% of the first 100 posts to this thread will be dumbasses; "Dont you remember DIVX?"
Why, YES I DID, THANKS! I didnt need to be reminded more than once.
Proof that people are more interested in posting the obvious for karma, than reading what has already been said.
To all the Linux zealots, proclaiming the death of Sun, who have never been inside a large data centre with expensive Sun kit inside it, I'll give you a hint:
Sun's Core Business has nothing to do with Linux on cheap, commodity X86!
Sun sells high-end systems, big-iron that competes with other high-end vendors. They make all the profit off hardware, JUST LIKE IBM, when IBM sells a big-iron server with either AIX, or Linux. So remember, these vendors are competeing with Hardware, not Software. Cheap commodity X86 isnt in the race for the very high-end.
Can now go and retract all the Sun naysaying.
I use Solaris for SPARC, its great, but Solaris X86 was half-baked from the start. The writing was on the wall for a LONG time, but when Sun finally canned it, I for one had to endure both the cries of "abandonware!" as well as generic sun bashing from the local Linux people I have to deal with.
It should be obvious now, Sun is doing the right thing by ceeding the X86 market to Linux, and infact helping the transition, for those that were in the Solaris X86 crowd. Win-win situation, as far as I can see.
Katz says: "An idea very close to the heart of the Net -- an open medium -- died, probably for good. "
Tell that to anyone on usenet, freely sending email to each other, IRC, anyone still using nTalk, there are loads of ways still to freely use the net openly.
Is it just me, or is this just anti-commercialism being beaten-up, and presented here because it goes with the reputation of this site? Katz, if I can give you any hint for your writing, try not to be so emotional and vague. It just looks evasive and manipulative, like you dont have a real point to get across and are writing for the sake of a post.
Retailers dont want to be seen my the public as being stodgy and old-fashioned, so supporting things like eBooks has some PR and convenience value.
As people are mentioning though, There is the competition with the traditional paper format. Add to that, I think, no business enters a risky new business unless there is profit to be made. Atleast if some profit is made, even if the format dies, they havent wasted their entire investment, an investment they are pushed to make, because if they dont, and the format takes off, they will be overtaken by their competitors.
Like a lot of other commodity products, early adopters of new technology pay a premium. Wether it is worthwhile, all depends on how much the product is worth to you. (Or your business.)
Governments should be using software they can trust, and trust is earned, never gained.
Windows has some good technology in it, and it is nowdays a halfway-decent product. The problem isnt windows, its Microsoft.
You just plain cant trust Microsoft, one bit. You dont evven have to ascribe to malevolence. I'm not saying they are nessesarily evil, I am saying they are unreliable. Their attitude to fixing their broken and insecure software (whatever proportion of it you think fits that description) is poor to non-existant, and getting worse. And if they arent going to take the US government seriously (DoJ) then we know they dont even care about any other government, once the licence fees have been paid up.
The one I used as a seat, anyway.
Pretty bad ergonomics for the price, but it atleast had castors.
Yeah, but if you brush up on your Quantum Mechanics, you'll know that the shorter the wavelength, the more energy youre hitting your target with, with the photons.
This is no good as it disturbs the target too much (the old problem of quantum uncertainty) whereas I imagine that if the pulse is short enough and of something weaker than gamma rays, they can atleast get an image before the target is unusably perturbed.
BTW, they were talking about molecules and imaging chemical reactions, which may not be totally beyond light/soft-xrays wavelengths to do, arguably.
Where if you go over some defined limit, they kick you off or suspend your account.
.iso traders that hog and bog down the network for everyone else. And if it means the cable operator has a better chance of staying in business long term, then good.
I would MUCH MUCH rather feel safe in the knowledge that going over my limit would only mean i'd pay some more for that month (Ca$80 isnt much!) rather than be all worried that the cable-nazis at Optus might suspend or terminate my account without warning, thus devaluing overnight all the money I paid over 18 months that paid for the cable modem I cant use on any other service.
People who have always had unlimited for nothing extra than basic service will whine, but there are WORSE ways they can handle the
As prople have explained here to the masses that never had the chance, the Amiga had some really, really good ideas. Here is some:
Assignments. You can assign a label "label:" to a drive or an arbitary path. This label can then be accessed rather like a device. Now I know unix people will be like "So what! Big deal." But THINK about it. You can assign say AmiTCP: to sys:amitcp1.2 and all scripts and programs are written to use AmiTCP:. Later you can install sys:amitcp1.3 and reassign AmiTCP: to that, and NOTHING BREAKS! Its an EXCELLENT mechanism for software. It also makes env variables like PATH a lot shorter and simpler, especially when you have your favourite well-known assignments. (And no, its NOT the same as exported env variables, as assignments are system wide, and you can access them almost like a device.)
Another neat feature of AmigaDOS: You can label a drive, and access the label name very much like a device. Say you have dh0: (/dev/hda1) now you can write all your scripts and programs to access dh0: but what happens if that changes? On most OS's, youre stuck, especially if your SCSI and IDE devices arent hard wired down, and even if they are, youre screwed if you swap disks between machines and ther eis an id conflict. AmigaDOS to the rescue, instead of writing scripts and programs to the hardware name dh0: you label the disk and that disk can be accessed as the label, label: instead of dh0: Now, no matter what ID the disk comes up as, anything that wants to acces THAT DISK, will work! it gets better, the boot disk on AmigaDOS is also always aliased to sys: so if you always have to write your program to access the bootdisk, use sys:. THe only caveat about using the label is if you need to change the label, but the label is only cosmetic, so I have never seen the need.
Those 2 features are just 2 of the many things I miss about the Amiga since I went to Windows and Unix. It would be fantastic if someone could take these old ideas and improve other OS's with them. There are many other. (Can someone please write a good Workbench knockoff WM? AmiWM is okay, but kinda old and crufty now.)
Unfortunatly, in the global drug and medical industires, money talks.
Those who wish to be granted monopolizing patents in order to extract wealth out of the rest of the world, will get what they need, as long as everything is driven by money. (It takes money to make money.)
Ethics? Pfft.
Good point. Infrastructure does depend on population, though I feel there is a limit. Plus, Population dosent nessesarily imply infrastructure. Its more dependant on natural reasources and technology. Therefore while some population growth is nessesary, there is still not good reason for unrestraind population explosion.
BTW, I didnt mod your reply down, I though it was a good counterpoint. I dont think it should have been modded down, but thats CSM's for you.
Tell that to the Africans that starve en-masse every few years.
Dont you remember Live-Aid? See, different areas of the planet can sustain humans better than others. This means that yes, there is parts of the planet that ARE overpopulated, for the local conditions, even if the MidWest is grossly underpopulated as compared to its potential output.
What is interesting scientifically is that often the Aid programs that help starving populations living in untenable areas dont really help at all, they jsut delay the inevitible. (Move to another area, or starve.) That said, why should we rush to try and fill the planet with all the humans it can possibly contain? Conditions onthe planet are only going to get worse, and any theoretical total is only going to get lower. Lets get used to the idea of being able to sensibly control our population *before* nature does it for us.
Anyone who did the insect-population experiment should remember, ALL the flies died when resources ran out.
Perhaps for some other societies, ones that have different values than the US, a collapse of the US Corporacy (The US isnt a democracy) and global industrial-based control of other countries, will be seen as a good thing. (Remember, the US pressures most other countries into doing what it wants, wether its copyright laws, criminalization of natural drugs, or propping up US industry over international competition.)
US citizens never hold back on how great they feel their nation is (and it is, in other respects, but recognise it does have flaws please) and how powerfull it is. Totally ignoring how the corporations that control it (that the US is ultimatly reponsible for) are raping and pillaging the third world, and patronising and profiteering the rest of the world, all in the name of globalisation.
A collapse of US global dominance, would probably be seen as a good thing, to all the rational governments of the world that arent utterly and totally controlled by commercial interests. Just an alternate viewpoint, that even if the USA crumbles, life for the rest of the planet will go on.
Please? That would rock, having a GBA-type handheld that could play MAME, or atleast some of the less memory/CPU intensive MAME titles. MAME needs a game-oriented low-cost handheld platform.
(I cant see wether this is wishfull thinking or not, as the links seem to be down.)
No, it wasnt funny. Not after you jsut took the piss outta the Georgians for being dumbasses. (Which was atleast amusing.)
As for a power source, it wouldnt work. These things might be fairly hot in that they are putting out a large amount of radiation, but thats not a usefull form of energy. What happens is the radioactive decay of Strontium (the products of which, are probably also dangerous, and possibly gaseous) is composed of various particles. Heat is produced when these particles smash into outside particles and release their kinetic energy.
So the conversion to heat is already inefficient, but heat has very poor energy concentration, so converting this into electricity is far less efficient as well.
I doubt youd get more than a few milliwatts through radioactive decay. Fission is different ofcourse, but Strontium-90 cant undergo fission.
It depends on wether the element is chemically toxic as well as radioactive.
When you hear about plutonium being used as a dirty bomb, its not because its radioactive. Plutonium is HIGHLY toxic chemically, and can cause sickness and death even in small amounts.
Of course, the radioactivity isnt healthy either, and even if diluted to the volume of Lake superior, if you ate fish for a year from the lake, you would end up with a far higher concentration in your thyroid than the lake concentration. That is of course, if there was any fish left.
Okay, so the two guys that found this crap got severe radiation burns. These cylinders ahve enough intense radioactivity to burn them, and you wanna try putting it into your PC. (And no, it wasnt a funny suggestion.)
On a more practical note, This sort of technology was used to power space probes by generating heat and converting that (very inefficiently) to electricity. But that application isnt practical earthbound, where other forms of energy are plentyfull and far safer.
The only constructive earthbound use I can see for this material is nuclear research in the laborotory. Maybe. I wonder if it is possible to use it in reprocessing, even just to convert the material to something safer.
Everyone considering auth inside the corporate structure should already know that the kernel is not the place for any-and-all auth schemes. Sun know this, thats why PAM is part of Solaris, and that seems good enough for the Solaris commercial environments.
:)
This is the whole idea behind PAM. Give the hooks needed to implement your own modules, that is the simplest and best thing *LINUX* can do for auth. Let other groups, like Samba, and those who work on Netware, and other groups who concentrate on interoperability, come up with modules for PAM. People who are interested should read the stuff on winbindd in Samba 2.2.2, its good stuff. And that said, nowdays the auth options for Linux-based OS's are good and getting better.
ObSlashdot: "In your mind, what does Linux need to do to improve it's profile in this regard?" Well, why do Slashdot editors wish to insult those posters that have a clue, while patronising everyone else? If you wonder why people troll, your answer is right there. (Watch me get slapped for this!
How do you convert the sunlight to electricity?
Electricity producing silicon solar-cells actually take more energy and generate more pollution during manufacture, than they will ever generate. The uninformed non-tech green set never seems to understand this point.
This leaves using an intermediary like water or sodium, to be heated by sunlight, and to generate electricity mechanically. This is highly inefficient, and/or dangerous.
The fact is, sunlight is too diffuse to be a practical large-scale energy supply without a hell of a lot of energy being put into it, by traditional means. Unless you count photosynthesis, which I give more creedence to than solar cells, the energy is just in a completely different form.
The nice thing about conversion directly to hydrogen, is that it is definetly an easier way to concentrate the energy.
After reading the article, its not as far fetched as it sounds, atleast at a low efficiency.
The problem as I see it though is this, what is the engine going to do with the laser light anyway? Laser light isnt that usefull in a car as an energy source. And I cant see the intensity of light being enough to do something cool, like dissasociate water to H2 and O. This is probably in the "neat-things" file for quite some time. Though maybe they can use this technology for fixed poer generation (coal, nuclear) where the gasses temperatures are higher and there is more volume.