I then set the string to report the PORT speed and not the modem handshake speed and bobs your uncle!
Err.. I haven't dealt with modems for quite a few years, but I'm pretty sure that the speed reported to the user comes from the users modem, not a string sent my the host modem. Why would the users modem think it connected at 57,600 even though it has to know what speed it connected too because it was part of the negotiation process?
If I recall correctly, AOL and AOL Users were always been considered bad. Even back then.
AOL users were considered to be a mass invasion, especially on the insular world of USENET. There was always a problem with "newbies", often at the beginning of a school year, but the numbers were small, integrated rather quickly, and tended to be a lot more techno-savy than the AOL users turned out to be. Just look at USENET postings from around that era and you'll see people ranting about AOL users and this strange thing people used to call "netiquette".
It's pretty interesting to say the least. It certainly was a culture clash as the net-wisened, mostly academic early adopters were hit with the hard reality of "the rest of the world" that was AOL. (And hell, even AOL was probbably the cream of the "rest of the world" crop). It took a while for the cultures to merge, but today if you post something along the lines of "How do I use my email?" on a forum discussing auto-repair, you'll look like a total moron to everyone.
Flaxseed has several times the amino acids of any animal product.
Sure.. and how many vegetarians sit around and eat flax seed? Not many. It's not all that difficult to find what you need without eating meat.
I didn't say it was difficult, I just said there's a lot of vegetarians that don't do it. Change that to most people are ignorant when it comes to understanding nutrition
True, but when you eat meat you really don't have to understand the concept of a complete protein or amino acids. Not the same thing at all for vegetarians, even more so for vegans since the last I checked they only eat rocks and dirt. As for vegetarians, unless their idea of going vegetarian is going from hamburger and fries and soda to more fries and soda,
Actually I knew one Vegan who's idea of nutrition was frying everything. Also you seem to think all vegetarians/vegans don't eat meat for health reasons. That's simply not the case. The majority I've known have are all political/religious vegetarians that do so for ideological reasons.
She asserts that it's healthier to take the whole plant because of co-evolution; our use of the plant caused the most desirable species to flourish, so that the plants that have medicinal value may have compounds which are undesirable, but she believes they are there in useful quantities.
It sure sounds nice, but without any evidence to back it up, it's just nonsense. Science isn't about convinving sounding arguments, those are a dime a dozen. Science is about testing different arguments and seperating the garbage from the truth. I'd be very wary of basing your medical decisions on arguments that sound convincing, but are completely untested and unsupported by evidence. I am especially concerned about the issue of inserting genes from animals into plants, or vice versa.
That's because you think there's such a thing as a "plant gene" or an "animal gene". Genes are just building blocks, they don't express "animalness" or "plantness" individually. There's tons of genes that both animals and plants both have. Are those"plant genes" or an "animal genes"? It sure sounds scary though when you make it sound like plants are going to become animals, and animals become plants because you put "plantness" in an animal, or vice versa.
I also think his sort of humor can be harmful to intelligent political discourse.
Sure, if your only view of the world is a comedic look at politics. But then too much of ANY viewpoint is harmful to intelligent political discourse. As someone else pointed out, TDS is on a network called "Comedy Central", so expecting them to be some pure news source is really missing the point. As far as young people only getting political news from TDS.. well I guess the alternative is for them to get no news at all and not be interested in politics. I guess if I had to choose, I'd choose some largely accurate knowledge to none at all. This is particularly troubling when his own political leanings are very much to the left
Nonsense. Stewart isn't easy to pin down, and he doesn't exactly state his position on different issues, but it's pretty clear he's not "very much to the left". I'd say if you had to pin him down somewhere on a 2 dimensional scale (a silly and misleading way to represent anyone), most people would say he's somewhat of a moderate democrat. but in many ways he is part of that very same system now...It does not pay to try to express a complex-thought to the media or to make meaningful off the cuff remarks because any small mistatement will be thrown back in your face and your actual statements and any nuance in them will not remain intact for the listeners to hear (especially shows like TDS).
I'd have to strongly disagree. When Stewart interviews anyone political he's constantly letting themselves dig themselves out of a hole they've inadvertantly dug, but he doesn't let them get away with anything either. I'm not sure what you're talking about as far as small miss-statements. The quotes I've seen on TDS are almost all large intentional statements. The closest thing I can think of that TDS has lampooned is Bush referring to himself as "The Decider" (which he's done more than once). Perhaps his language shouldn't be taken too literally, but I find it very interesting that Bush refers to himself as a "Decider" as opposed to a leader.
No, the sad thing is that American companies are still earning that bad reputation by continuing to make poor quality cars! My dad owned a 2003 Chevy Astro that was a total POS.
Sure, there's still some "American" cars (as much as you can assign any nationality to a car anymore) that suck, but in general quality has gone up a LOT. I imagine a 2003 Chevy Aveo (made in Korea) might be better.
I wouldn't be so sure. Consumer Reports recently rated the Aveo in the "least reliable" category.
I simply stated that they'd be fools to mess with things they don't know anything about yet.
See, the thing is we actually DO know a lot about nutrition and proteins. At the very least we know that prions provides us nothing we need in our diet. It sounds like you're the one that knows nothing about it. In the future I'd suggest not talking about things you know nothing about.
I don't know if anyone else has noticed, but vegans tend to have a particularly unhealthy pallor, a kind of pale shiny skin thing going on.
They probbably aren't getting all the amino acids their body requires. If you don't eat meat it's a bit more difficult to make sure you're getting all the essential amino acids your body can't manufacture on it's own. Most vegetarians or vegans are ignorant when it comes to understanding nutrition, they just up and decide that they're not going to eat meat but don't change their diets to make sure they're getting the right nutrition to replace what they're missing in their diet.
Prions... Well, we dunno wtf they are, except that they are a protein.
So you don't know what they are, but you're suddenly making predictions about how we shouldn't "mess with them" because they might be important?
Prions are miss-folded proteins. Your body doesn't need miss-folded proteins. In fact your body doesn't need proteins directly at all, it needs certain amino acids that it can't make on it's own. Proteins are constructed from amino acids.
Hmm... Removing natural things... Nope, doesn't sound like a good idea to me.
If you believe natural==good, I'd suggest a nice big bowl of anthrax this morning. It's 100% natural, so it must be in some way good for you, right? You could also eat some nice castor beans, which contain one of the most toxic poisons known as ricin. The feces in cows is also 100% natural, so you'll probbably get some disease from not eating that, right?
If you think that "messing with nature" is a bad thing, you should probbably stop eating entirely. We've been using selective breeding techniques on basically our entire food supply for thousands of years.
it's not good enough in practice because you can't trust people not to do that.
Farmers don't just cut up some cow and feed it to another cow. They buy feed from the local distributor, and often times don't even know what's in the feed. The distributor gets it from a large manufacturer. It's pretty hard for the large manufacturers to hide it if they're putting cow into cow feed.
The current small number of mad cow incidents results from old feed fed to cows years ago (or at least it can be traced to old feed). Manufacturers were too cheap and probbably weren't required to destroy all the old potentially contaminated feed. The point is that bans DO work, they just should have been more complete and might even now have some holes in them. (I seem to remember someone complaining about not enough restrictions).
There is good news though. It's quite hard to get the human form of BSE from eating infected cow meat. In the UK during the 80s there were hundreds of thousands of infected cattle, and only 160 recorded cases of vJCD (the human form of mad cow).
The parent makes a distinction that's VERY important to understand to know what's going on here.
The only thing I disagree with is the method of distribution of firmware (and is one of the central complaints of the article). Unless distributions have the ability to freely re-distribute firmware, they're sunk. It's just simply too difficult or too much a pain-in-the-ass for end users to go find firmware from a windows CD, a manufacturer, etc. I'm no stranger to Linux and have been using it for 10+ years now all the way from user to administrator to programmer, and even _I_ hate that kind of nonsense. I'd rather just have the damn thing work and not have to screw around with it.
The article is pretty clearly saying that the problem isn't that firmware makers aren't releasing source code to expensively developed firmware (though obviously that would solve the problem). The problem is that many chipset makers aren't providing rights to freely re-distribute firmware, and aren't providing documentation for that firmware so drivers can be written.
If you know of a particular piece of WiFi hardware that works particularly well in Linux or BSD, please follow up here so we all know what to buy.
I've got a laptop with the Intel 3945 chipset in it. And while the article mentions problems with Intel and re-distribution of firmware, this is by far the best Wi-Fi card I've used under linux. My success with this card also might be related to running Ubuntu on it, but whatever the case I can report no problems with this card. It was detected on install, the drivers are included in the Ubuntu kernel, and runs like a champ.
Maybe if these idiots stopped listening their legal teams (and Microsoft!) so much, started worrying less about developers using their oh-so-precious "intellectual property" to make their own products useful to even more customers we wouldn't be in this fix.
Well, there's certainly an aspect of companies trying to protect their IP. But the other problem is that companies are often outsourcing the writing of their firmware, (like the Atmel guy mentioned). With the normal product-development methods of closed source software this isn't a problem.
In general I agree with you that the old methods of protecting IP, outsourcing firmware development without specific requirements to allow it to be re-distributed and provide documentation is a poor business practice. But companies are slow to change. The largest ones only do so when it becomes clear that they're losing money because of the old practices, and then they scramble like hell for years to change.
The same thing happened with American car companies during the 80s and 90s. The sad result is that American companies are STILL suffering from a bad reputation they aquired from the poor quality of cars in the 80s and 90s compared to Japanese cars.
I still get security updates for Windows 2000, even though the last service pack came out in 2003.
Right, because Microsoft has a policy to support a release for something like 8-9 years, and they're a company that's supported by software sales. Windows 2000 is also a production level OS. What was the policy on Fedora? 2 releases? How much did you pay for it? $0? Also, FC has always been understood to be a bleeding edge system that you shouldn't put any kind of production system on.
The point is if you want support for an OS for many years you should choose one that has a long term support policy. Redhat Enterprise Linux supports a release for 7 years. Ubuntu has a release that has 5 years of support. If that's what you want, choose one of those two distributions. But don't complain when a 3rd party support organization with little or no income decides to stop supporting a distribution that's never intended to have long term support.
I hardly think Microsoft really cares. As Bill Gates pointed out, Linux is like the multi-headed hydra. It doesn't really matter of one of the heads is cut off. Anyway, FC had never been about long term support. If you chose it expecting that you'd be able to run the same OS release for years, that's your mistake. This "community" could do a better job supporting these operating systems.
I don't think anyone has said that there's a need to support every OS Microsoft has come out with. I kind of doubt there's many people that want to support DOS 3.0 or Windows 1.0 for instance. Windows 98 might still have a following though. Community support relies on community interest. Try to remember that all distributions of Linux aren't the same in terms of needs, just like all versions of Windows aren't the same in terms of needs.
Open-source software doesn't guarantee support for software for forever, it just makes it possible when there's enough need for it. I'll guarantee you that if there's a big need for someone to support old releases of FC (and that need outweighs people just changing to a different distribution), some people will get together and support it.
I'll give you an example. Currently I have a server running Redhat 9. It runs just great and I've no reason to upgrade to something newer. Support from Fedora Legacy has recently ended. Would I LIKE to keep the machine running on RH9? Sure... why not? But most everyone else has long since moved on. So far I haven't heard of anyone getting together to offer support for RH9, so I'll likely have to spend an afternoon upgrading to Centos 4/5.
So you're really going to spend tens of thousands of dollars to recover non-existant damages to prove a point? The conversation might go something like this:
Judge: I see you're suing for 10 million dollars, but you don't list your damages. How did the defendants actions hurt your business? Was there a security breach? Did the defendant not meet the terms of the contract?
You: Well not really. The contract didn't say anything about what I'm suing about. Nobody broke in and we had a lot of means to prevent it, but someone COULD have broken in. Basically this guy just made me real mad because I didn't agree with his security procedures. Dag-nab-it, the guy slightly increased my risks! We don't have any damages, I just assumed that whenever I don't like something, I just sue the pants off them.
Judge: Umm.. Right. Well sorry, civil courts operate on damage to one party caused by another. Criminal courts operate where criminal laws have been broken. Since there's no damages you can show, and no laws have been broken I'm throwing this case out. Didn't your lawyer tell you all this?
You: Only the first 10 lawyers. Then I found this really good one...or at least so I thought at the time. He charged he $20,000 and told me it'd be thrown out at the first hearing. I guess I should have gotten a better lawyer.
We already know what's out there in our own solar system: we've robotically explored Mars, we've taken high-resolution pictures of the giants,
If you think we know what's out there, then you've got a lot to learn. There's so much more that we don't know it's just stunning. There may be life on Titan or Europa. Hell, it's possible there's still life buried deep on Mars.
The "exploration" aspect of space is basically gone; we've been pretty much as far as we can feasibly go.
That'll be news to all the science that's been done in just the last 5 years or so exploring the solar system. That's also news to the people working on new non-chemical propulsion systems that might allow people to explore the moons of Saturn and beyond.
Your problem is you think "space exploration" is the crap on Star Trek, and if you're not going between stars, it doesn't count. Sorry, but you don't speak well for your generation.
or, rather, have negative feelings) towards NASA doing it. Wasting all kinds of money on projects that are either never finished or are spectacular failures that could be used for more useful things.
Yah, spectacular failures like the Mars Exploration Rovers. Oh, wait.. those were spectacular successes that brought back huge amounts of evidence for water on mars and are still operating nearly 3 years later.. You must be referring to Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.. darn it, again another mission that's worked just as planned. Perhaps you're talking about Mars Express, the probe designed to look under the surface of Mars? oops.. another mission that's working as planned. Hey, maybe it's one of those non-mars missions like the ambitious stardust mission, designed to capture material from a comets tail? Oh wait, another mission that's worked as planned. Of course there's always Cassini, a probe sent to Saturn that's working as planned, gravity probe B which has verified another of Einsteins theories, deep impact which crashed a comet. They all worked though and have produced important science.
Huh. It's funny that when you actually look at the missions that Nasa has done, the vast majority of them are hugely successfull. I could probbably have gone on for several more examples of Nasa's successes, but I hope you get the point. Maybe your problem is you're relying on poor news sources for news that only make a big deal out of the few failures?
And risk that it would not install and run correctly on most of those thousands of computers? That would be a marketing nightmare. Vista is already how many years late?
Actually Microsoft did exactly this. They gave away 20,000 copies of Vista (and Office as well), to anyone willing to watch some developer videos. I got one, and while I don't have a blog, I do make recommendations to businesses. The point is that Microsoft IS willing to take the chance that Vista doesn't work properly, at least with a large portion of non-bloggers.
Though I do think you're right. They gave away the laptops to the top "influencers" exactly to make sure that Vista ran properly on it.
There's a myth out there that the hardest part of technology is understanding the technology. That's certainly a part of it, but there's a lot more too it than that. You have to have funding or know how to get funding. You have to know how to run a company, or find someone that does. You also obviously have to take a lot of personal risk.
Maybe the GP has all those skills and is willing to take the risk, maybe he doesn't. The point is though that the lure of making more money, or having more control over the product isn't necessarily enough.
It's a big problem when you start measuring your laws and law-enforcement techniques in terms of how much PROFIT they generate.
This I totally agree with. Law enforcement isn't a business. The current trend towards looking at everything as something that generates money is destructive to the society. The problem here is there it's the article submitter that's measuring law enforcement through profit, not the actual article or the police.
If they're down to spending their time going after deer poachers, they're already scraping the bottom of the crime barrel.
Well, I have to disagree here. It's important to enforce poaching laws, and hunting laws. Before there were robotic deer I'm guessing it was pretty hard to enforce this law unless you just happened to catch someone shooting at a deer, or doing something idiotic and dangerous like shooting from your car or at night with a spotlight. Poaching laws protect the hunter, the deer, and innocent bystanders. If there's rampant poaching then there won't be any deer for legit hunters to hunt during deer season. I also don't want to get shot by some drunken idiot hunting from his car with a spotlight. Perhaps they need to start making cuts in the police force rather than investing in a $2,000 money-making deer robot.
Well, you've really twisted the statement the article author was trying to make. The statement is:
The life-like creatures with motor-driven heads and tails cost about $1300 apiece. But Gray points out that the poachers they help catch are fined hundreds of dollars, so they pay for themselves soon enough.
Which is an attempt to justify the cost of the expensive equipment by saying it pays for itself. That's not the same thing as saying this is a profit making enterprise. They still have to pay the salary of the cop, so I doubt there's much profit made.
Until about a million people are absolutely, beyond any doubt--beyond even the ability of the most resolutely blind dumbass moron I know's ability to doubt--are going to relocate or drown in their home because of rising sea level...and it has to be a first world country because otherwise, reminder: Nobody Really Gives a Fuck
Don't underestimate the power of people "not giving a fuck". You seem to think that a majority of people need to care about something for change to happen. History has proven time and time again that it's the small, vocal minority that winds up dragging the majority behind it. This isn't always a good thing. Most people support federal funding for Stem Cell research, and yet we now have a ban on it. It's the vocal minority and the President who managed to ban it. Hell, that's even something that can easily affect someone alive today within their lifetime, so it's much harder for the minority to justify.
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I then set the string to report the PORT speed and not the modem handshake speed and bobs your uncle!
Err.. I haven't dealt with modems for quite a few years, but I'm pretty sure that the speed reported to the user comes from the users modem, not a string sent my the host modem. Why would the users modem think it connected at 57,600 even though it has to know what speed it connected too because it was part of the negotiation process?
If I recall correctly, AOL and AOL Users were always been considered bad. Even back then.
AOL users were considered to be a mass invasion, especially on the insular world of USENET. There was always a problem with "newbies", often at the beginning of a school year, but the numbers were small, integrated rather quickly, and tended to be a lot more techno-savy than the AOL users turned out to be. Just look at USENET postings from around that era and you'll see people ranting about AOL users and this strange thing people used to call "netiquette".
It's pretty interesting to say the least. It certainly was a culture clash as the net-wisened, mostly academic early adopters were hit with the hard reality of "the rest of the world" that was AOL. (And hell, even AOL was probbably the cream of the "rest of the world" crop). It took a while for the cultures to merge, but today if you post something along the lines of "How do I use my email?" on a forum discussing auto-repair, you'll look like a total moron to everyone.
Flaxseed has several times the amino acids of any animal product.
Sure.. and how many vegetarians sit around and eat flax seed? Not many.
It's not all that difficult to find what you need without eating meat.
I didn't say it was difficult, I just said there's a lot of vegetarians that don't do it.
Change that to most people are ignorant when it comes to understanding nutrition
True, but when you eat meat you really don't have to understand the concept of a complete protein or amino acids. Not the same thing at all for vegetarians, even more so for vegans since the last I checked they only eat rocks and dirt.
As for vegetarians, unless their idea of going vegetarian is going from hamburger and fries and soda to more fries and soda,
Actually I knew one Vegan who's idea of nutrition was frying everything. Also you seem to think all vegetarians/vegans don't eat meat for health reasons. That's simply not the case. The majority I've known have are all political/religious vegetarians that do so for ideological reasons.
She asserts that it's healthier to take the whole plant because of co-evolution; our use of the plant caused the most desirable species to flourish, so that the plants that have medicinal value may have compounds which are undesirable, but she believes they are there in useful quantities.
It sure sounds nice, but without any evidence to back it up, it's just nonsense. Science isn't about convinving sounding arguments, those are a dime a dozen. Science is about testing different arguments and seperating the garbage from the truth. I'd be very wary of basing your medical decisions on arguments that sound convincing, but are completely untested and unsupported by evidence.
I am especially concerned about the issue of inserting genes from animals into plants, or vice versa.
That's because you think there's such a thing as a "plant gene" or an "animal gene". Genes are just building blocks, they don't express "animalness" or "plantness" individually. There's tons of genes that both animals and plants both have. Are those"plant genes" or an "animal genes"? It sure sounds scary though when you make it sound like plants are going to become animals, and animals become plants because you put "plantness" in an animal, or vice versa.
I also think his sort of humor can be harmful to intelligent political discourse.
Sure, if your only view of the world is a comedic look at politics. But then too much of ANY viewpoint is harmful to intelligent political discourse. As someone else pointed out, TDS is on a network called "Comedy Central", so expecting them to be some pure news source is really missing the point. As far as young people only getting political news from TDS.. well I guess the alternative is for them to get no news at all and not be interested in politics. I guess if I had to choose, I'd choose some largely accurate knowledge to none at all.
This is particularly troubling when his own political leanings are very much to the left
Nonsense. Stewart isn't easy to pin down, and he doesn't exactly state his position on different issues, but it's pretty clear he's not "very much to the left". I'd say if you had to pin him down somewhere on a 2 dimensional scale (a silly and misleading way to represent anyone), most people would say he's somewhat of a moderate democrat.
but in many ways he is part of that very same system now...It does not pay to try to express a complex-thought to the media or to make meaningful off the cuff remarks because any small mistatement will be thrown back in your face and your actual statements and any nuance in them will not remain intact for the listeners to hear (especially shows like TDS).
I'd have to strongly disagree. When Stewart interviews anyone political he's constantly letting themselves dig themselves out of a hole they've inadvertantly dug, but he doesn't let them get away with anything either. I'm not sure what you're talking about as far as small miss-statements. The quotes I've seen on TDS are almost all large intentional statements. The closest thing I can think of that TDS has lampooned is Bush referring to himself as "The Decider" (which he's done more than once). Perhaps his language shouldn't be taken too literally, but I find it very interesting that Bush refers to himself as a "Decider" as opposed to a leader.
No, the sad thing is that American companies are still earning that bad reputation by continuing to make poor quality cars! My dad owned a 2003 Chevy Astro that was a total POS.
Sure, there's still some "American" cars (as much as you can assign any nationality to a car anymore) that suck, but in general quality has gone up a LOT.
I imagine a 2003 Chevy Aveo (made in Korea) might be better.
I wouldn't be so sure. Consumer Reports recently rated the Aveo in the "least reliable" category.
I simply stated that they'd be fools to mess with things they don't know anything about yet.
See, the thing is we actually DO know a lot about nutrition and proteins. At the very least we know that prions provides us nothing we need in our diet. It sounds like you're the one that knows nothing about it. In the future I'd suggest not talking about things you know nothing about.
I don't know if anyone else has noticed, but vegans tend to have a particularly unhealthy pallor, a kind of pale shiny skin thing going on.
They probbably aren't getting all the amino acids their body requires. If you don't eat meat it's a bit more difficult to make sure you're getting all the essential amino acids your body can't manufacture on it's own. Most vegetarians or vegans are ignorant when it comes to understanding nutrition, they just up and decide that they're not going to eat meat but don't change their diets to make sure they're getting the right nutrition to replace what they're missing in their diet.
Prions... Well, we dunno wtf they are, except that they are a protein.
So you don't know what they are, but you're suddenly making predictions about how we shouldn't "mess with them" because they might be important?
Prions are miss-folded proteins. Your body doesn't need miss-folded proteins. In fact your body doesn't need proteins directly at all, it needs certain amino acids that it can't make on it's own. Proteins are constructed from amino acids.
Hmm... Removing natural things... Nope, doesn't sound like a good idea to me.
If you believe natural==good, I'd suggest a nice big bowl of anthrax this morning. It's 100% natural, so it must be in some way good for you, right? You could also eat some nice castor beans, which contain one of the most toxic poisons known as ricin. The feces in cows is also 100% natural, so you'll probbably get some disease from not eating that, right?
If you think that "messing with nature" is a bad thing, you should probbably stop eating entirely. We've been using selective breeding techniques on basically our entire food supply for thousands of years.
it's not good enough in practice because you can't trust people not to do that.
Farmers don't just cut up some cow and feed it to another cow. They buy feed from the local distributor, and often times don't even know what's in the feed. The distributor gets it from a large manufacturer. It's pretty hard for the large manufacturers to hide it if they're putting cow into cow feed.
The current small number of mad cow incidents results from old feed fed to cows years ago (or at least it can be traced to old feed). Manufacturers were too cheap and probbably weren't required to destroy all the old potentially contaminated feed. The point is that bans DO work, they just should have been more complete and might even now have some holes in them. (I seem to remember someone complaining about not enough restrictions).
There is good news though. It's quite hard to get the human form of BSE from eating infected cow meat. In the UK during the 80s there were hundreds of thousands of infected cattle, and only 160 recorded cases of vJCD (the human form of mad cow).
The parent makes a distinction that's VERY important to understand to know what's going on here.
The only thing I disagree with is the method of distribution of firmware (and is one of the central complaints of the article). Unless distributions have the ability to freely re-distribute firmware, they're sunk. It's just simply too difficult or too much a pain-in-the-ass for end users to go find firmware from a windows CD, a manufacturer, etc. I'm no stranger to Linux and have been using it for 10+ years now all the way from user to administrator to programmer, and even _I_ hate that kind of nonsense. I'd rather just have the damn thing work and not have to screw around with it.
The article is pretty clearly saying that the problem isn't that firmware makers aren't releasing source code to expensively developed firmware (though obviously that would solve the problem). The problem is that many chipset makers aren't providing rights to freely re-distribute firmware, and aren't providing documentation for that firmware so drivers can be written.
If you know of a particular piece of WiFi hardware that works particularly well in Linux or BSD, please follow up here so we all know what to buy.
I've got a laptop with the Intel 3945 chipset in it. And while the article mentions problems with Intel and re-distribution of firmware, this is by far the best Wi-Fi card I've used under linux. My success with this card also might be related to running Ubuntu on it, but whatever the case I can report no problems with this card. It was detected on install, the drivers are included in the Ubuntu kernel, and runs like a champ.
Maybe if these idiots stopped listening their legal teams (and Microsoft!) so much, started worrying less about developers using their oh-so-precious "intellectual property" to make their own products useful to even more customers we wouldn't be in this fix.
Well, there's certainly an aspect of companies trying to protect their IP. But the other problem is that companies are often outsourcing the writing of their firmware, (like the Atmel guy mentioned). With the normal product-development methods of closed source software this isn't a problem.
In general I agree with you that the old methods of protecting IP, outsourcing firmware development without specific requirements to allow it to be re-distributed and provide documentation is a poor business practice. But companies are slow to change. The largest ones only do so when it becomes clear that they're losing money because of the old practices, and then they scramble like hell for years to change.
The same thing happened with American car companies during the 80s and 90s. The sad result is that American companies are STILL suffering from a bad reputation they aquired from the poor quality of cars in the 80s and 90s compared to Japanese cars.
I still get security updates for Windows 2000, even though the last service pack came out in 2003.
Right, because Microsoft has a policy to support a release for something like 8-9 years, and they're a company that's supported by software sales. Windows 2000 is also a production level OS. What was the policy on Fedora? 2 releases? How much did you pay for it? $0? Also, FC has always been understood to be a bleeding edge system that you shouldn't put any kind of production system on.
The point is if you want support for an OS for many years you should choose one that has a long term support policy. Redhat Enterprise Linux supports a release for 7 years. Ubuntu has a release that has 5 years of support. If that's what you want, choose one of those two distributions. But don't complain when a 3rd party support organization with little or no income decides to stop supporting a distribution that's never intended to have long term support.
Microsoft must be laughing on hearing such news.
I hardly think Microsoft really cares. As Bill Gates pointed out, Linux is like the multi-headed hydra. It doesn't really matter of one of the heads is cut off. Anyway, FC had never been about long term support. If you chose it expecting that you'd be able to run the same OS release for years, that's your mistake.
This "community" could do a better job supporting these operating systems.
I don't think anyone has said that there's a need to support every OS Microsoft has come out with. I kind of doubt there's many people that want to support DOS 3.0 or Windows 1.0 for instance. Windows 98 might still have a following though. Community support relies on community interest. Try to remember that all distributions of Linux aren't the same in terms of needs, just like all versions of Windows aren't the same in terms of needs.
Open-source software doesn't guarantee support for software for forever, it just makes it possible when there's enough need for it. I'll guarantee you that if there's a big need for someone to support old releases of FC (and that need outweighs people just changing to a different distribution), some people will get together and support it.
I'll give you an example. Currently I have a server running Redhat 9. It runs just great and I've no reason to upgrade to something newer. Support from Fedora Legacy has recently ended. Would I LIKE to keep the machine running on RH9? Sure... why not? But most everyone else has long since moved on. So far I haven't heard of anyone getting together to offer support for RH9, so I'll likely have to spend an afternoon upgrading to Centos 4/5.
2. meeting me in court
So you're really going to spend tens of thousands of dollars to recover non-existant damages to prove a point? The conversation might go something like this:
Judge: I see you're suing for 10 million dollars, but you don't list your damages. How did the defendants actions hurt your business? Was there a security breach? Did the defendant not meet the terms of the contract?
You: Well not really. The contract didn't say anything about what I'm suing about. Nobody broke in and we had a lot of means to prevent it, but someone COULD have broken in. Basically this guy just made me real mad because I didn't agree with his security procedures. Dag-nab-it, the guy slightly increased my risks! We don't have any damages, I just assumed that whenever I don't like something, I just sue the pants off them.
Judge: Umm.. Right. Well sorry, civil courts operate on damage to one party caused by another. Criminal courts operate where criminal laws have been broken. Since there's no damages you can show, and no laws have been broken I'm throwing this case out. Didn't your lawyer tell you all this?
You: Only the first 10 lawyers. Then I found this really good one...or at least so I thought at the time. He charged he $20,000 and told me it'd be thrown out at the first hearing. I guess I should have gotten a better lawyer.
We already know what's out there in our own solar system: we've robotically explored Mars, we've taken high-resolution pictures of the giants,
If you think we know what's out there, then you've got a lot to learn. There's so much more that we don't know it's just stunning. There may be life on Titan or Europa. Hell, it's possible there's still life buried deep on Mars.
The "exploration" aspect of space is basically gone; we've been pretty much as far as we can feasibly go.
That'll be news to all the science that's been done in just the last 5 years or so exploring the solar system. That's also news to the people working on new non-chemical propulsion systems that might allow people to explore the moons of Saturn and beyond.
Your problem is you think "space exploration" is the crap on Star Trek, and if you're not going between stars, it doesn't count. Sorry, but you don't speak well for your generation.
or, rather, have negative feelings) towards NASA doing it. Wasting all kinds of money on projects that are either never finished or are spectacular failures that could be used for more useful things.
Yah, spectacular failures like the Mars Exploration Rovers. Oh, wait.. those were spectacular successes that brought back huge amounts of evidence for water on mars and are still operating nearly 3 years later.. You must be referring to Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.. darn it, again another mission that's worked just as planned. Perhaps you're talking about Mars Express, the probe designed to look under the surface of Mars? oops.. another mission that's working as planned. Hey, maybe it's one of those non-mars missions like the ambitious stardust mission, designed to capture material from a comets tail? Oh wait, another mission that's worked as planned. Of course there's always Cassini, a probe sent to Saturn that's working as planned, gravity probe B which has verified another of Einsteins theories, deep impact which crashed a comet. They all worked though and have produced important science.
Huh. It's funny that when you actually look at the missions that Nasa has done, the vast majority of them are hugely successfull. I could probbably have gone on for several more examples of Nasa's successes, but I hope you get the point. Maybe your problem is you're relying on poor news sources for news that only make a big deal out of the few failures?
And risk that it would not install and run correctly on most of those thousands of computers? That would be a marketing nightmare. Vista is already how many years late?
Actually Microsoft did exactly this. They gave away 20,000 copies of Vista (and Office as well), to anyone willing to watch some developer videos. I got one, and while I don't have a blog, I do make recommendations to businesses. The point is that Microsoft IS willing to take the chance that Vista doesn't work properly, at least with a large portion of non-bloggers.
Though I do think you're right. They gave away the laptops to the top "influencers" exactly to make sure that Vista ran properly on it.
There's a myth out there that the hardest part of technology is understanding the technology. That's certainly a part of it, but there's a lot more too it than that. You have to have funding or know how to get funding. You have to know how to run a company, or find someone that does. You also obviously have to take a lot of personal risk.
Maybe the GP has all those skills and is willing to take the risk, maybe he doesn't. The point is though that the lure of making more money, or having more control over the product isn't necessarily enough.
It's a big problem when you start measuring your laws and law-enforcement techniques in terms of how much PROFIT they generate.
This I totally agree with. Law enforcement isn't a business. The current trend towards looking at everything as something that generates money is destructive to the society. The problem here is there it's the article submitter that's measuring law enforcement through profit, not the actual article or the police.
If they're down to spending their time going after deer poachers, they're already scraping the bottom of the crime barrel.
Well, I have to disagree here. It's important to enforce poaching laws, and hunting laws. Before there were robotic deer I'm guessing it was pretty hard to enforce this law unless you just happened to catch someone shooting at a deer, or doing something idiotic and dangerous like shooting from your car or at night with a spotlight. Poaching laws protect the hunter, the deer, and innocent bystanders. If there's rampant poaching then there won't be any deer for legit hunters to hunt during deer season. I also don't want to get shot by some drunken idiot hunting from his car with a spotlight.
Perhaps they need to start making cuts in the police force rather than investing in a $2,000 money-making deer robot.
Well, you've really twisted the statement the article author was trying to make. The statement is:
Which is an attempt to justify the cost of the expensive equipment by saying it pays for itself. That's not the same thing as saying this is a profit making enterprise. They still have to pay the salary of the cop, so I doubt there's much profit made.
Until about a million people are absolutely, beyond any doubt--beyond even the ability of the most resolutely blind dumbass moron I know's ability to doubt--are going to relocate or drown in their home because of rising sea level...and it has to be a first world country because otherwise, reminder: Nobody Really Gives a Fuck
Don't underestimate the power of people "not giving a fuck". You seem to think that a majority of people need to care about something for change to happen. History has proven time and time again that it's the small, vocal minority that winds up dragging the majority behind it. This isn't always a good thing. Most people support federal funding for Stem Cell research, and yet we now have a ban on it. It's the vocal minority and the President who managed to ban it. Hell, that's even something that can easily affect someone alive today within their lifetime, so it's much harder for the minority to justify.