Isn't that what solar cells are? 'Practical' perpetual energy? I know there are issues with the breakdown of materials, and eventual cooling of the sun, but if you invented the solar cell and called it a 'perpetual energy' machine, then where would you be? Much like where this guy is I suspect, being called a scam artist before you even get a chance to exhibit, being ignored because you weren't in negotiations with governments and pushing for NDAs.
I'm hoping that this will turn out to be something similar. I'm hoping that the demonstration will show way of harnessing energy we previously mostly ignored or didn't use the same way. We've got geothermal energy mostly untapped, wave energy mostly underfunded and immense, practically immeasurable energy flung by the sun into space, benefiting nobody. It isn't as if the energy sources don't exist, we just don't have the technology to tap most of the big ones yet.
The way I understand it, perpetual energy isn't even really impossible, sub-atomic particles pop into and out of existence all the time and sometimes get separated, thus Hawking radiation and for all practical purposes, perhaps all purposes, demonstrate perpetual motion. The trick would be in harnessing them, tricky bit that, what with the black holes and all. If you figure out how to do it you'd get a lot of cool points.
Failing any of the big payoff candidates like black holes or tapping the sun, maybe you could harness the magnetic properties of the earth? I think they're mostly a product of the earth's kinetic and maybe heat energy, they aren't truly perpetual, but it would be a neat trick to actually find a way to use them.
Yes, I know, this has the earmarks of a scam, but why not wait until we get a chance to find out more before we dismiss it entirely? You're not spending anything but your time, and to my way of thinking, anything that makes you think and reconsider your notions of what is possible is not a waste.
One would have to assume from TFA that the plaintif has copyright and trademarks that he feels are being infringed on. He certainly has been making real income from a real business, and feels that someone is unfairly making money off of his ideas and stealing his customers. He feels he has a right to the protection of his intellectual property, whether sold through a virtual world or not.
This might be the best case I've seen for drawing firmer lines around what is reasonably protected IP.
Can this case be extended to software patents? Certainly there are some parallels, but is there any chance that a courts ruling in this can be applied to the other issues that the industry faces?
I think he might mean that he would like to see if he can integrate a modified iPhone as a front end to this as the back end or develoment server (in relationship.)
I hope that is what he means. I am really curious to see somebody put BSD or Linux on an iPhone, heck I'd chuck $5 to that project if I could find someone with a good track record. Anybody planning to purchase $500 worth of "pretty" and then replace the OS?
I think it would be awesome to have a server/client system with a stick like this and a modded iPhone. Maybe you could put a demo webserver on the gumstick and use the iPhone as the client, try different servers when you're pitching a development contract... I dunno, I dont care why you do it, just as long as somebody does it.
My boss is head of the IT department and pretty computer savy; Not uber-geek but he knows what Linux is and has tried Ubuntu for a desktop. His boss knows what machines cost since she approves budgets for various departments but I seriously doubt she has ever sat at a Linux console, she probably sees it as a server OS. Her boss, and the last in our chain, has probably heard of Linux and knows it has to do with computers, maybe even servers. The fact is that only my boss needs to basically understand why we need Linux in some places, Unix in others and Windows in the others. If he understands more, it isn't because he needs to in order to do his job well and the officers he answers to don't need to either. They need to understand people and listen to good advice. Our IT is run pretty well, not because people at the top understand the technology, but because they listen to good advice and hire good staff. I think the same is the most we can ask from our politicians. They're not going to be tech savy and the last thing I want is someone in office who thinks they are geek enough to decide the course. I want someone who knows how to hire and listen to good people, in particular people who understand detailed IT issues.
I suspect these results don't reflect politics of OS nearly as much as they reflect the type of people that the sides tend to employ. If you were to look at who is running most Republican sites, I suspect you'll find older people who have many years of experience in managing IT. They won't be experimenters, won't think of software as politically associated, and still think of Linux as a new thing that might get interesting some day. If you look in the Democratic camps, you'll probably find more students and people with strong ties between their software preferences and their belief systems. More than likely you can tell who is most influential with which age groups by what their IT people choose, but I doubt you'll find out anything about their personal views on software. Politicans are nearly always extroverts with a strong focus on relationships, the computer systems just tell you what kind of relationships they tend to achieve.
Most of us deal with the average Joe computer user at some point. Their perspective often surprises me. They don't care about licensing except that they don't want to break the law or just don't want to get caught, depending on the individual. I'm curious how common this troll's opinion is. Do most people see this as a DRM prevents theft, "only someone who wants to steal dislikes DRM?"
What is your average Joe experience? Mine is limited since I (very very) rarely buy music or videos and don't share that common interest with those who do.
I wonder occassionally why this seems so hard. I could easily set up a MythTV system (see http://www.mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html) and use it with any number of cards (http://www.wifi.com.ar/english/hw-pvr.html) as a way to turn output into input. Then I could use my DVD player or CD player or even my main computer as my player. It could be considered an audio hole, but it would be a pretty high quality system, not relying on something like a hand held camcorder or audio recorder. Sure someday it might be hard to buy that equipment, but I doubt it and of course the software could be made harder to get, but probably neither will be impossible in my lifetime and the hardware available now can handle it and I can't see it being unlikely to handle the same types of recording 20 years from now.
Back on topic with Vista and DRM, I personally think the best bet for virtualizing Vista is on a Xen based installation using the hardware based virtualization. I cannot see how Vista could even identify that it was running in virtualization. With that said, something like using LVM snapshotting would allow someone to set up a base installation, which could be reused anywhere the hardware was a close enough match to handle the Xen config. People wouldn't need to redistribute the base install but once, and the customizations would be the diff files (or partitions to mount and reg files to add.) For example, say that I have my Vista install set up the way I want, with the base install, and I want to create an install with a working IIS setup. I set up a snapshot, enable/install/configure then take another snapshot and then run a diff on the two, saving it as 'post IIS vX.x.x'. Now the VM application of IIS is a 'patch' that could be distributed to anybody who already has the base VM.
A shoplifted copy of Vista, a blockbuster card or a store that allows returns of CDs bought with cash would be sufficient for any of these to be done anonymously. That takes it from gray to black, but then if you're going to those lengths you're probably not worried about the morality. I believe the problem of piracy is insurmountable with technology, and the only hope of dealing with it is through instilling ethics. You can't legislate to force people to be ethical but you can legislate to make them afraid to act otherwise and you can legislate to change a society's norms. Why legislate? I suspect it is the only way to change the behavior of large numbers of people.
None of this addresses the question of whether it should be illegal. I'm not up to that debate.
That's right, because we all know that bullies only beat up other bullies.
</sarcasm>>
I love that people assume that the US is a target because of it's actions. I wonder if these are the same people that assume that Microsoft gets hacked because it is an 'evil' company. Let me say it plainly: The US is a target because the US has a lot of money and influence. Microsoft is a target because they have a large number of users. There may be thousands of other reasons, but that is the real reason there is such a disparity in attacks against the two. I am not saying that MS shouldn't be a moral business or that the US shouldn't improve it's interactions in the world, I'm just saying that doing either one will not make a significant difference in the number of attacks.
Both have a need to do the same thing too, actually. They need to improve security and do it in such a way that it doesn't harm their base.
Back in the late '90s I was infected by my first virus. I had never connected to the internet, I had just used the library and school computers. Somehow, I still managed to get a virus on my floppy diskette.
I don't think it is unlikely that there are people who hook their laptops up to their work network, and I suspect it is even more likely that people plug in a floppy/thumbdrive/cdrom from home. I don't doubt that it would be safer to stay disconnected from the Internet, but a handcrafted virus would be far more likely to avoid detection by most antivirus and probably accomplish just as much in a hacker war. It would have to be a targeted program, but that is really the point isn't it, that hackers could be targeting networks that are supposed to be secured. Of course, it probably doesn't help security that they probably assume their network is safe.
Okay, there are 5 good excuses to release Safari, but I think that is what they are, just excuses.
I think the main reason, the real reason, is advertising. Everybody who reads "Why you don't need Safari" or "Safari vs IE" or anything like that at all is reading the equivilant to "Apple competes with Microsoft." Even people who never read anything more than a headline will think of Apple as a competitor next time they get ready to buy a computer. There are dozens, maybe hundreds of other good effects for Apple, but the core is that their main products, iPods, iPhones and Macs make more sales.
Go Apple.
Disclaimer: I do not own and have never owned a Mac (though I have used and supported them.) I secretly hope that Apple will release an i386 open source release some day.
I started to say something about the feeling that you need to wash your peripherals so often. I really don't feel it is that necessary, but I discussed an idea with my boss the other day and thought it might be proper to run it by somebody more cleanliness minded than myself, so I'll focus on that instead.
Imagine you have a desk with no monitor perched on it but instead it IS a touch sensitive monitor. Yeah, a monitor the size and shape of your desk, an actual desktop computer. Your keyboard would be a displayed on the desktop as would your mouse, if you needed a mouse. Your writing would behave like papers that you could drag around to where they were handy or you could drop into your calendar for follow-up or drop into your filing cabinent to file away or drop into your outbox for sending. If you wanted to do both, you could drag the paper with two fingers to make a link between the two or double-tap then double tap somewhere else on your desk to make a copy. The desktop display would have to be tough enough to take a hot cup of coffee dropped on it, tough enough to take a heavy lysol spraying and have a pretty high resolution.. but we're getting there.
It's just a thought, but I wonder how appealing it is to everybody else. For me it would mean no more papers cluttering up corners. It would mean an awful lot less power lines cluttering up the place and a tremendous improvement in being able to work as a group on a project (no more hauling the projector out, or mirror monitors and eye contact with everyone in the office rather than staring through a monitor at the one (un?)lucky enough to be behind one of them.)
Would that appeal to you as a clean freak? (I mean that as a flattering term.)
Do you think the appeal (assuming there is any) would be enough for you to learn to use a displayed keyboard rather than one with physical keys?
What would you want from it that I haven't mentioned?
Would you use a keyboard if you could scribble and have your scribbles morphed into text (complete with spell-check if you like) behind your handwriting?
What would a mouse be good for?
Would you still need paper (or something like paper, perhaps a portable paper-size display?)
Have you heard of anybody offering such a thing before? (No, I'm not offering, I don't have the capital.)
I'm primarily asking WannaBeGeekGirl, but anyone is welcome to chime in. Disclaimer: I'm not aware of anyone offering or who has patented anything like this concept, but I think it hardly qualifies as an original idea. As much as it does, presuming no previous patents, I hereby release anyone using this concept of any patent infringement onus, but retain all other rights of ownership, to be exercised by the Free Software Foundation in my absence. I have not at this time filed for any patent, nor do I intend to but do wish this post to be considered prior art as much as is possible.
Holy cow, I flipped out for a minute when I saw this. My dander went up and I felt the urge to fight for freedom everywhere and punish the blasphemer. Ignore the license? What the heck? How evil! How horrid! Breaking the license is a capital offense!
In my zeal to fight for the common good I had to consider for a moment who might be hurt and then my dander wilted. I have never personally known anyone who would be offended if their GPL2 code was used in a project by someone trying to use a slightly different license. Not one. I can't rule out the possibility but in the absolute worse case scenario you get a nasty letter that says "stop misusing my code" and you pull it and ask someone else to fill in the blank.
Back to the bat cave Robin, there is no evil here.
I'm quoting a portion of a comment found on Jonathan's site. I found it interesting.
Yet when we turn around and ask Sun to give us documentation for the chips on their machines -- chips Sun themselves designed, not via contractors -- Sun drags their feet. Recently we tried to reopen these 10-year-old repeated requests, and once again nothing positive happened. You may remember, because you and David Yen were in an email conversation with us. Lots of nice open words were exchanged, but no action. However, let me give an example of the duplicity of Sun. (I wish I could use a lighter word). Two operating systems run on Sun's latest PCI-e based (smallish) Ultrasparc-III machines, the v215/v245 -- Solaris and OpenBSD. The latter system runs on those machines because the code to support the non-processor chips on the board had to be written after painstaking reverse engineering, because Sun refuses to make available documentation for how these chips are programmed.
Emphasis mine.
Personally, I like Sun and have for a long time. I think that their hardware is getting pretty good, their service rocks and their company is tending toward doing good things. Here is the rub though, I don't think that the company as a whole is committed to supporting OSS and I think they would dearly love to claim to be. For now I still think of them as a decent hardware company but I'm not ready to jump on any software they have. ZFS? No, not for me yet, probably never. Its a performance thing.
Durn Winder's boxes, sucking up the tubes. I say write a really nasty doomsday type virus that wipes out their internet connectivity. Get it propagated using the bot-net's own systems and any other venue that seems convenient and take em all down so that the virus writers can aim at Unix/Linux/BSD for a while and get us toughened up too. I'm tired of Windows getting all the exercise and leaving Nix fat and lazy.
I should clarify, he turns off the option to install SELinux during installations. He has done this after time and again he experienced trouble that was alleviated by doing temporary disables.
You can set it to temporarily permissive with setenforce 0.
Ironically enough when I install systems I leave it enabled, but our security administrator turns it off. He used to try to leave it on but after pulling out what little hair he had, he is opting for the easy solution these days. Fortunately he doesn't set many machines up. I think he'll go back to using it as we move to RHEL 5 since it seems to be more sanely configured.
You can find a nice note on it at: http://preview.tinyurl.com/yqjmfv which is on an EnGarde Linux page; they're one of the groups who spend some time studying and working with SELinux.
Yes you did read it, and no, sadly, I'm not kidding. With several Linux installs and also with FreeBSD I discovered that if I turned swap off, the system seemed to magically become more responsive. It shocked me to discover that the system seemed almost designed to be sluggish. Instead of using swap when it actually needed it, it used swap in case it might need it which equated to me trading performance for stability even when I really didn't need to make the trade.
It is indeed a sad state of affairs that putting the pagefile in RAM is a potential solution for a questionably designed system. Yes, I know why they do it, and you're taking horrible chances of running out of memory etc; I've ran out of memory and crashed enough systems that I know exactly what the pitfalls are. To be honest though, you have to either do something pretty stupid or work a machine pretty hard to cause that type of crash. Yes, you are trading valuable RAM for the increased performance, and limiting the amount of RAM available to other applications if you don't use disk based swap, but if you can't turn swap off (and I don't think you can in Windows) then it still might be the best alternative. It only becomes a viable alternative to using disk based swap if you have plenty of RAM to spare. If you've got 16G of RAM and most of the time never use more than half that, then you have the option. My machines do not have that much RAM and my RAM drive on Windows is 2MB. I can spare that to keep temp files that I don't want to be retained when my machine is powered off. For me, the loss of 2M is worth the added security. If you have enough then yes, the loss of 2G might be worth the increase in performance.
The real solution is to give users control of how SWAP is used, a slider bar to indicate how long something must be inactive before it is transferred to swap or perhaps just the option to turn it off. I don't have that problem in Linux because I control how much swap I'm using, how responsive it is, and if I want it used at all. With Windows I have far fewer options and if I run out of swap space, suddenly I'm "increasing the size of your pagefile" instead of getting a warning that I am low on memory. When I get the message I'd invariably rather just close some inactive applications than have Windows suck up some more space without any performance improvement.
The response I really hoped for was a link or a simple explanation showing how to actually disable the pagefile. Now that would be cool. (It would be nice to have things crash gracefully rather than BSOD, but I'd take my chances even without grace.)
Humm... nope. I realize they're not technically the same, but I'm not trying to be technical.
I'm saying that, knowing exactly what misunderstandings I might convey, but being willing to convey them by accident rather than make a situation more complex by trying to explain all the technical realities. Most people I've met using Linux have never read the entire GPL. It isn't that they don't understand the gist of it, they just don't need to know the technical points of it most of the time. Most people who read a sig or hear me say that, know that I'm not trying to pretend the two platforms are virtually the same, but they do understand that I'm saying that one will likely meet their needs as well as the other for less money. Money is a great motivator.
I think I will change my sig though to point to a new journal entry where I'll explain myself and point to your link as well. Perhaps it will make it more appealing to people who feel comfortable reading technical details.
When I put 500M RAM in my machine, I thought I was way ahead of the curve, but now I'm falling behind.
I usually run CentOS on my machine so I can play with the system at home, without worrying about toasting the real servers.
When I put CentOS4.4 on, it seemed slow, but the best I'd seen for serious speed was doing Gentoo starting with Stage 1 and static compiles. It flew, but I'm not patient enough these days to get it where I want it. So I use Annvix on my server systems and test with CentOS. When I installed CentOS 5 I knew I had really fallen behind. It drags. So yesterday I decided to get a system that would be snappy for normal day to day use. Something that wouldn't embarrass me to let someone use. And, I have a partial solution. Slax on the disk drive, copy2ram and 1G of swap. I've butchered it a bit, but I'm running the OS and apps from memory and it positively screams in responsiveness. There are other Live CD candidates I could do the same with I suppose, but Slax is so easy to modify and it supported my dual head system with absolutely minimal interaction.
I hate to have a system where I need to reboot to work with the stuff that I deal with professionally, but for now I'm happy to have a blazing fast system for most purposes and a (slow) full blown server install, virtually identical to what we have available at work.
I know you don't have a large investment in making Windows behave better, but I wonder if you could create a RAM disk in Windows and put your pagefile there, thereby eliminating the actual slowdown due to paging.
Maybe people just eventually learn their lessons. When the cell phone was first becoming popular, it weighed a ton and the return on sales was high. Now you sell astronomically more for far less with a much lower profit margin. The same people that bought the bricks now sit back and wait, in no hurry because they see the trend. Newcomers to the market still buy the upper end phones, but less as a percentage than did at first because all the conventional wisdom now says not to.
People flocked to buy '95, but it is twelve years later and all those people who then flocked, do not see a significant difference between XP and Vista. Newcomers to the market will hear people curse Vista if they discuss their plan to purchase it. (As our shop does, we have a couple hundred Windows licenses with two Vista installs and no intent to have any more in the foreseeable future.)
There is an upside to this, now is the time for Linux (or Mac for that matter) to pick up converts. More and more people know what I mean when I say that I use Linux and it takes only a nod and reassurance that it is easy to use now for them to try it. Mac commercials are funny and make the point, but can you imagine what the same advertising budget on Linux would be doing to the adoption rate?
Spinning off into tangent land, how do we go about convincing Linux distributions to market more? More people using Linux means more money into it, which benefits the most important market segment, me. I'll start:
If you haven't tried Linux yet, plug in Ubuntu, its like Windows only free, and the software is free and it comes with everything and works on more hardware than Vista!
Thanks for a thoughtful reply. I am not new here and did not expect one.
I didn't look at your posting history, I rarely look at anyone's but I don't doubt you.
I think I do disagree with you on the statement:
Either our privacy matters, or it doesn't. Either someone taking a photograph of the inside of another's home is an invasion of their privacy or it isn't.
Clearly, for me, there is a difference between snapping a picture in which someone's window is incidental versus one in which the interior is deliberate.
I'm trying not to misquote, but selecting the portions I'm replying to for brevity.
If you don't draw the line there, in fairly black and white terms,... the data mining goes beyond simple invasion of privacy
Again, no, I don't think that statement is rational. Allowing people, citizens in particular but by extension companies, to take pictures that are not deliberately invasive, does not force people to allow real privacy invasion, and most certainly not something that "goes beyond" it.
The freedom of speech is an easy analogy, but let me rephrase since it caused a red herring: Having a right or expectation of privacy is by no means encroached by allowing the causal photograph of your dwelling to be published. It is not a loss of rights, it is a common sense allowance for normal acceptable behavior.
The government vs corporation stuff came from the British government reference. I took your inclusion of it to be a paralleling of the two situations, which is the only reason I could imagine you would mention it. Of course, if you were pointing out that privacy invasion was far more likely in British surveillance than from something as casual as a google snapshot, then I obviously missed your point. Somehow, still I doubt that was the intent.
Incidentally, I appreciate people who don't share my viewpoint but are able to express themselves clearly with reasoned arguments. I don't like to refer to them the same way as I do people I agree with, so I call them foes and set my preferences to give them a bonus point so I am more likely to read their opinion. I'm marking you foe because I seem to disagree with you, but you're lucid and thoughtful and I'd like to see more of that in general.
A lot of guys have too, but since they don't need to sit, then it happens a lot less often and of course the urgency thing is a part of it as well, most of the time when guys are in a hurry it isn't to sit. For women, every urgent call is a need to sit. Aside from those factors which make it less likely that a guy will forget to check the seat, there is also the mechanical factor. Plenty of women are mechanically inclined but far more guys are likely to be thinking of mechanics without having to actually work at it than the gals.
Then there is the biggest reason you haven't heard about it, male ego. Men are far, far (think parsecs here) less likely to ever mention it since that would be so unbelievably anti-macho.
And of course, men don't chat about things like that much do they? Women chat about things like that, men ignore them. Women go the bathroom in herds, men use euphemisms.
At a random guess I'd say the numbers break down something like this:
20% - Percentage of guys that have ever fallen in
90% - Percentage of women that have ever fallen in
98% - Percentage of women who admit they have fallen in to a non-spouse
0.00001% - Percentage of men that have ever mentioned they have fallen in to anyone at all
94% - Likelihood that you have ever met a woman who would mention it unabashedly in related conversation
0.000001% - Likelihood that you have ever met a man who would mention it in any conversation with another man
Novell showed the way with SCO. Use Novell and you don't have to worry about SCO IP infringement lawsuits. When Novell announced that they would effectively protect any company who used Novell and was sued for it by SCO, they became very attractive to companies that wanted to use Linux but were afraid of Lawsuits. The funny thing is that Microsoft may hold patent threats, but it could easily use that to push it's own Linux distribution.
Headline: Microsoft releases Linux version with software you cannot get from any other Linux distro. Why? Imagine the impact on the sales of RedHat if you could get the same thing (CentOS, Oracle) with Microsoft software and support on top of it. Certainly much of the FOSS community would freak out, but businesses wishing to support both MS and Linux systems would jump at the chance. For those businesses wishing to support Linux, it would give them a transition system that would never need to transition, keeping the lock-in that makes Office so popular. Businesses could hire developers who have experience programming for Apache and PHP to work along side people using.NET, VB and IIS. Instead of having to choose a candidate based on experience with the one system they have, they could hire whoever seems most qualified in any.
Instantly MS could say that it is "fostering" cross-platform development and at the same time edge out the players who release OSS. There is nothing that says you cannot run closed source software on Linux, or even distribute the same, as long as you don't mix the source. If anybody could pull it off, Microsoft could and if they do, it will be a major blow to the other Linux vendors which in turn decreases their revenue, and essentially squeezes down the amount of contribution that RedHat and SUSE are able to afford.
When? Well I'd expect the announcement shortly before the end of the current agreements with SUSE expire, so that MS can make a clean break, retain SUSE users and take a big bite out of RedHat revenue. RedHat would be in quite a pickle as any legal action they pursue against MS is already questionable and MS has the patents to make the lawsuit ugly.
If someone at MS were really smart they were talking over beers with SCO people with this in mind all along, make the lawsuits scary and you will make money -wink- -wink-... and thinking at the same time that if SCO gets hammered out of existence then take the assimilation approach.
I don't know if I'd be able to resist running exchange on a Linux system, the temptation of the dark side is very strong.
This is not true. It is like saying that we either have the freedom to say anything we want any time or we don't have freedom of speech. It is about reasonable restraint, a.k.a. common sense. You cannot start calling people and telling them that you are a representative of their congressman and you will kill them if he is not reelected. That prohibition doesn't mean that you don't have freedoms that matter.
Locally, we have the right to let twelve citizens decide our fate. Ask them if there is a difference between climbing trees, using telephoto lenses, using UV lenses and similar tatics to sell to gossip magazines, versus publishing one shot in thousands that happens to show what is inside of an unobscured clearly lit window.
Prefer the Big Brother argument? This is a company, the people you're concerned about are the government. If you want the government to limit itself, then pick a topic. Is it:
A.) The government shouldn't watch you
B.) Nobody should be allowed to record you
There is no:
C.) Nobody should be allowed to record you because the government might at some point want to watch you and it is only a matter of time before a company like google using pictures with accidental content causes other companies to start spying on you and the government to decide to monitor its citizens in invasive ways.
Actually, I guess there is a C, which seems to be the argument you make, but it sounds silly when stated directly doesn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, I'm not feeling motivated to sign my kids up, but can I set up a scholarship for the neighbor's kids?
Isn't that what solar cells are? 'Practical' perpetual energy? I know there are issues with the breakdown of materials, and eventual cooling of the sun, but if you invented the solar cell and called it a 'perpetual energy' machine, then where would you be? Much like where this guy is I suspect, being called a scam artist before you even get a chance to exhibit, being ignored because you weren't in negotiations with governments and pushing for NDAs.
I'm hoping that this will turn out to be something similar. I'm hoping that the demonstration will show way of harnessing energy we previously mostly ignored or didn't use the same way. We've got geothermal energy mostly untapped, wave energy mostly underfunded and immense, practically immeasurable energy flung by the sun into space, benefiting nobody. It isn't as if the energy sources don't exist, we just don't have the technology to tap most of the big ones yet.
The way I understand it, perpetual energy isn't even really impossible, sub-atomic particles pop into and out of existence all the time and sometimes get separated, thus Hawking radiation and for all practical purposes, perhaps all purposes, demonstrate perpetual motion. The trick would be in harnessing them, tricky bit that, what with the black holes and all. If you figure out how to do it you'd get a lot of cool points.
Failing any of the big payoff candidates like black holes or tapping the sun, maybe you could harness the magnetic properties of the earth? I think they're mostly a product of the earth's kinetic and maybe heat energy, they aren't truly perpetual, but it would be a neat trick to actually find a way to use them.
Yes, I know, this has the earmarks of a scam, but why not wait until we get a chance to find out more before we dismiss it entirely? You're not spending anything but your time, and to my way of thinking, anything that makes you think and reconsider your notions of what is possible is not a waste.
One would have to assume from TFA that the plaintif has copyright and trademarks that he feels are being infringed on. He certainly has been making real income from a real business, and feels that someone is unfairly making money off of his ideas and stealing his customers. He feels he has a right to the protection of his intellectual property, whether sold through a virtual world or not.
This might be the best case I've seen for drawing firmer lines around what is reasonably protected IP.
Can this case be extended to software patents? Certainly there are some parallels, but is there any chance that a courts ruling in this can be applied to the other issues that the industry faces?
I think he might mean that he would like to see if he can integrate a modified iPhone as a front end to this as the back end or develoment server (in relationship.)
I hope that is what he means. I am really curious to see somebody put BSD or Linux on an iPhone, heck I'd chuck $5 to that project if I could find someone with a good track record. Anybody planning to purchase $500 worth of "pretty" and then replace the OS?
I think it would be awesome to have a server/client system with a stick like this and a modded iPhone. Maybe you could put a demo webserver on the gumstick and use the iPhone as the client, try different servers when you're pitching a development contract... I dunno, I dont care why you do it, just as long as somebody does it.
iBeowulf anyone?
My boss is head of the IT department and pretty computer savy; Not uber-geek but he knows what Linux is and has tried Ubuntu for a desktop. His boss knows what machines cost since she approves budgets for various departments but I seriously doubt she has ever sat at a Linux console, she probably sees it as a server OS. Her boss, and the last in our chain, has probably heard of Linux and knows it has to do with computers, maybe even servers. The fact is that only my boss needs to basically understand why we need Linux in some places, Unix in others and Windows in the others. If he understands more, it isn't because he needs to in order to do his job well and the officers he answers to don't need to either. They need to understand people and listen to good advice. Our IT is run pretty well, not because people at the top understand the technology, but because they listen to good advice and hire good staff. I think the same is the most we can ask from our politicians. They're not going to be tech savy and the last thing I want is someone in office who thinks they are geek enough to decide the course. I want someone who knows how to hire and listen to good people, in particular people who understand detailed IT issues.
I suspect these results don't reflect politics of OS nearly as much as they reflect the type of people that the sides tend to employ. If you were to look at who is running most Republican sites, I suspect you'll find older people who have many years of experience in managing IT. They won't be experimenters, won't think of software as politically associated, and still think of Linux as a new thing that might get interesting some day. If you look in the Democratic camps, you'll probably find more students and people with strong ties between their software preferences and their belief systems. More than likely you can tell who is most influential with which age groups by what their IT people choose, but I doubt you'll find out anything about their personal views on software. Politicans are nearly always extroverts with a strong focus on relationships, the computer systems just tell you what kind of relationships they tend to achieve.
Most of us deal with the average Joe computer user at some point. Their perspective often surprises me. They don't care about licensing except that they don't want to break the law or just don't want to get caught, depending on the individual. I'm curious how common this troll's opinion is. Do most people see this as a DRM prevents theft, "only someone who wants to steal dislikes DRM?"
What is your average Joe experience? Mine is limited since I (very very) rarely buy music or videos and don't share that common interest with those who do.
I wonder occassionally why this seems so hard. I could easily set up a MythTV system (see http://www.mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html) and use it with any number of cards (http://www.wifi.com.ar/english/hw-pvr.html) as a way to turn output into input. Then I could use my DVD player or CD player or even my main computer as my player. It could be considered an audio hole, but it would be a pretty high quality system, not relying on something like a hand held camcorder or audio recorder. Sure someday it might be hard to buy that equipment, but I doubt it and of course the software could be made harder to get, but probably neither will be impossible in my lifetime and the hardware available now can handle it and I can't see it being unlikely to handle the same types of recording 20 years from now.
Back on topic with Vista and DRM, I personally think the best bet for virtualizing Vista is on a Xen based installation using the hardware based virtualization. I cannot see how Vista could even identify that it was running in virtualization. With that said, something like using LVM snapshotting would allow someone to set up a base installation, which could be reused anywhere the hardware was a close enough match to handle the Xen config. People wouldn't need to redistribute the base install but once, and the customizations would be the diff files (or partitions to mount and reg files to add.) For example, say that I have my Vista install set up the way I want, with the base install, and I want to create an install with a working IIS setup. I set up a snapshot, enable/install/configure then take another snapshot and then run a diff on the two, saving it as 'post IIS vX.x.x'. Now the VM application of IIS is a 'patch' that could be distributed to anybody who already has the base VM.
A shoplifted copy of Vista, a blockbuster card or a store that allows returns of CDs bought with cash would be sufficient for any of these to be done anonymously. That takes it from gray to black, but then if you're going to those lengths you're probably not worried about the morality. I believe the problem of piracy is insurmountable with technology, and the only hope of dealing with it is through instilling ethics. You can't legislate to force people to be ethical but you can legislate to make them afraid to act otherwise and you can legislate to change a society's norms. Why legislate? I suspect it is the only way to change the behavior of large numbers of people.
None of this addresses the question of whether it should be illegal. I'm not up to that debate.
That's right, because we all know that bullies only beat up other bullies. </sarcasm>>
I love that people assume that the US is a target because of it's actions. I wonder if these are the same people that assume that Microsoft gets hacked because it is an 'evil' company. Let me say it plainly: The US is a target because the US has a lot of money and influence. Microsoft is a target because they have a large number of users. There may be thousands of other reasons, but that is the real reason there is such a disparity in attacks against the two. I am not saying that MS shouldn't be a moral business or that the US shouldn't improve it's interactions in the world, I'm just saying that doing either one will not make a significant difference in the number of attacks.
Both have a need to do the same thing too, actually. They need to improve security and do it in such a way that it doesn't harm their base.
Back in the late '90s I was infected by my first virus. I had never connected to the internet, I had just used the library and school computers. Somehow, I still managed to get a virus on my floppy diskette.
I don't think it is unlikely that there are people who hook their laptops up to their work network, and I suspect it is even more likely that people plug in a floppy/thumbdrive/cdrom from home. I don't doubt that it would be safer to stay disconnected from the Internet, but a handcrafted virus would be far more likely to avoid detection by most antivirus and probably accomplish just as much in a hacker war. It would have to be a targeted program, but that is really the point isn't it, that hackers could be targeting networks that are supposed to be secured. Of course, it probably doesn't help security that they probably assume their network is safe.
Okay, there are 5 good excuses to release Safari, but I think that is what they are, just excuses.
I think the main reason, the real reason, is advertising. Everybody who reads "Why you don't need Safari" or "Safari vs IE" or anything like that at all is reading the equivilant to "Apple competes with Microsoft." Even people who never read anything more than a headline will think of Apple as a competitor next time they get ready to buy a computer. There are dozens, maybe hundreds of other good effects for Apple, but the core is that their main products, iPods, iPhones and Macs make more sales.
Go Apple.
Disclaimer: I do not own and have never owned a Mac (though I have used and supported them.) I secretly hope that Apple will release an i386 open source release some day.
I started to say something about the feeling that you need to wash your peripherals so often. I really don't feel it is that necessary, but I discussed an idea with my boss the other day and thought it might be proper to run it by somebody more cleanliness minded than myself, so I'll focus on that instead.
Imagine you have a desk with no monitor perched on it but instead it IS a touch sensitive monitor. Yeah, a monitor the size and shape of your desk, an actual desktop computer. Your keyboard would be a displayed on the desktop as would your mouse, if you needed a mouse. Your writing would behave like papers that you could drag around to where they were handy or you could drop into your calendar for follow-up or drop into your filing cabinent to file away or drop into your outbox for sending. If you wanted to do both, you could drag the paper with two fingers to make a link between the two or double-tap then double tap somewhere else on your desk to make a copy. The desktop display would have to be tough enough to take a hot cup of coffee dropped on it, tough enough to take a heavy lysol spraying and have a pretty high resolution.. but we're getting there.
It's just a thought, but I wonder how appealing it is to everybody else. For me it would mean no more papers cluttering up corners. It would mean an awful lot less power lines cluttering up the place and a tremendous improvement in being able to work as a group on a project (no more hauling the projector out, or mirror monitors and eye contact with everyone in the office rather than staring through a monitor at the one (un?)lucky enough to be behind one of them.)
I'm primarily asking WannaBeGeekGirl, but anyone is welcome to chime in.
Disclaimer: I'm not aware of anyone offering or who has patented anything like this concept, but I think it hardly qualifies as an original idea. As much as it does, presuming no previous patents, I hereby release anyone using this concept of any patent infringement onus, but retain all other rights of ownership, to be exercised by the Free Software Foundation in my absence. I have not at this time filed for any patent, nor do I intend to but do wish this post to be considered prior art as much as is possible.
Holy cow, I flipped out for a minute when I saw this. My dander went up and I felt the urge to fight for freedom everywhere and punish the blasphemer. Ignore the license? What the heck? How evil! How horrid! Breaking the license is a capital offense!
In my zeal to fight for the common good I had to consider for a moment who might be hurt and then my dander wilted. I have never personally known anyone who would be offended if their GPL2 code was used in a project by someone trying to use a slightly different license. Not one. I can't rule out the possibility but in the absolute worse case scenario you get a nasty letter that says "stop misusing my code" and you pull it and ask someone else to fill in the blank.
Back to the bat cave Robin, there is no evil here.
Personally, I like Sun and have for a long time. I think that their hardware is getting pretty good, their service rocks and their company is tending toward doing good things. Here is the rub though, I don't think that the company as a whole is committed to supporting OSS and I think they would dearly love to claim to be. For now I still think of them as a decent hardware company but I'm not ready to jump on any software they have. ZFS? No, not for me yet, probably never. Its a performance thing.
Durn Winder's boxes, sucking up the tubes. I say write a really nasty doomsday type virus that wipes out their internet connectivity. Get it propagated using the bot-net's own systems and any other venue that seems convenient and take em all down so that the virus writers can aim at Unix/Linux/BSD for a while and get us toughened up too. I'm tired of Windows getting all the exercise and leaving Nix fat and lazy.
</humor>I should clarify, he turns off the option to install SELinux during installations. He has done this after time and again he experienced trouble that was alleviated by doing temporary disables.
You can set it to temporarily permissive with setenforce 0.
Ironically enough when I install systems I leave it enabled, but our security administrator turns it off. He used to try to leave it on but after pulling out what little hair he had, he is opting for the easy solution these days. Fortunately he doesn't set many machines up. I think he'll go back to using it as we move to RHEL 5 since it seems to be more sanely configured.
You can find a nice note on it at: http://preview.tinyurl.com/yqjmfv which is on an EnGarde Linux page; they're one of the groups who spend some time studying and working with SELinux.
Yes you did read it, and no, sadly, I'm not kidding. With several Linux installs and also with FreeBSD I discovered that if I turned swap off, the system seemed to magically become more responsive. It shocked me to discover that the system seemed almost designed to be sluggish. Instead of using swap when it actually needed it, it used swap in case it might need it which equated to me trading performance for stability even when I really didn't need to make the trade.
It is indeed a sad state of affairs that putting the pagefile in RAM is a potential solution for a questionably designed system. Yes, I know why they do it, and you're taking horrible chances of running out of memory etc; I've ran out of memory and crashed enough systems that I know exactly what the pitfalls are. To be honest though, you have to either do something pretty stupid or work a machine pretty hard to cause that type of crash. Yes, you are trading valuable RAM for the increased performance, and limiting the amount of RAM available to other applications if you don't use disk based swap, but if you can't turn swap off (and I don't think you can in Windows) then it still might be the best alternative. It only becomes a viable alternative to using disk based swap if you have plenty of RAM to spare. If you've got 16G of RAM and most of the time never use more than half that, then you have the option. My machines do not have that much RAM and my RAM drive on Windows is 2MB. I can spare that to keep temp files that I don't want to be retained when my machine is powered off. For me, the loss of 2M is worth the added security. If you have enough then yes, the loss of 2G might be worth the increase in performance.
The real solution is to give users control of how SWAP is used, a slider bar to indicate how long something must be inactive before it is transferred to swap or perhaps just the option to turn it off. I don't have that problem in Linux because I control how much swap I'm using, how responsive it is, and if I want it used at all. With Windows I have far fewer options and if I run out of swap space, suddenly I'm "increasing the size of your pagefile" instead of getting a warning that I am low on memory. When I get the message I'd invariably rather just close some inactive applications than have Windows suck up some more space without any performance improvement.
The response I really hoped for was a link or a simple explanation showing how to actually disable the pagefile. Now that would be cool. (It would be nice to have things crash gracefully rather than BSOD, but I'd take my chances even without grace.)
Humm... nope. I realize they're not technically the same, but I'm not trying to be technical.
I'm saying that, knowing exactly what misunderstandings I might convey, but being willing to convey them by accident rather than make a situation more complex by trying to explain all the technical realities. Most people I've met using Linux have never read the entire GPL. It isn't that they don't understand the gist of it, they just don't need to know the technical points of it most of the time. Most people who read a sig or hear me say that, know that I'm not trying to pretend the two platforms are virtually the same, but they do understand that I'm saying that one will likely meet their needs as well as the other for less money. Money is a great motivator.
I think I will change my sig though to point to a new journal entry where I'll explain myself and point to your link as well. Perhaps it will make it more appealing to people who feel comfortable reading technical details.
When I put 500M RAM in my machine, I thought I was way ahead of the curve, but now I'm falling behind.
I usually run CentOS on my machine so I can play with the system at home, without worrying about toasting the real servers.
When I put CentOS4.4 on, it seemed slow, but the best I'd seen for serious speed was doing Gentoo starting with Stage 1 and static compiles. It flew, but I'm not patient enough these days to get it where I want it. So I use Annvix on my server systems and test with CentOS. When I installed CentOS 5 I knew I had really fallen behind. It drags. So yesterday I decided to get a system that would be snappy for normal day to day use. Something that wouldn't embarrass me to let someone use. And, I have a partial solution. Slax on the disk drive, copy2ram and 1G of swap. I've butchered it a bit, but I'm running the OS and apps from memory and it positively screams in responsiveness. There are other Live CD candidates I could do the same with I suppose, but Slax is so easy to modify and it supported my dual head system with absolutely minimal interaction.
I hate to have a system where I need to reboot to work with the stuff that I deal with professionally, but for now I'm happy to have a blazing fast system for most purposes and a (slow) full blown server install, virtually identical to what we have available at work.
I have machine envy now.
I know you don't have a large investment in making Windows behave better, but I wonder if you could create a RAM disk in Windows and put your pagefile there, thereby eliminating the actual slowdown due to paging.
Something like:1 or http://www.codeguru.com/cpp/w-p/system/devicedrive rdevelopment/article.php/c5789/
* RAMDISK: http://www.speedguide.net/read_articles.php?id=13
* Plus Moving Pagefile instructions: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307886/ and if you print often move the spool too: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308666/
If you weren't going to use the default desktop manager in Solaris (and I'm not) what would you use?
Maybe people just eventually learn their lessons. When the cell phone was first becoming popular, it weighed a ton and the return on sales was high. Now you sell astronomically more for far less with a much lower profit margin. The same people that bought the bricks now sit back and wait, in no hurry because they see the trend. Newcomers to the market still buy the upper end phones, but less as a percentage than did at first because all the conventional wisdom now says not to.
People flocked to buy '95, but it is twelve years later and all those people who then flocked, do not see a significant difference between XP and Vista. Newcomers to the market will hear people curse Vista if they discuss their plan to purchase it. (As our shop does, we have a couple hundred Windows licenses with two Vista installs and no intent to have any more in the foreseeable future.)
There is an upside to this, now is the time for Linux (or Mac for that matter) to pick up converts. More and more people know what I mean when I say that I use Linux and it takes only a nod and reassurance that it is easy to use now for them to try it. Mac commercials are funny and make the point, but can you imagine what the same advertising budget on Linux would be doing to the adoption rate?
Spinning off into tangent land, how do we go about convincing Linux distributions to market more? More people using Linux means more money into it, which benefits the most important market segment, me. I'll start:
If you haven't tried Linux yet, plug in Ubuntu, its like Windows only free, and the software is free and it comes with everything and works on more hardware than Vista!
Thanks for a thoughtful reply. I am not new here and did not expect one.
I didn't look at your posting history, I rarely look at anyone's but I don't doubt you.
I think I do disagree with you on the statement:
Clearly, for me, there is a difference between snapping a picture in which someone's window is incidental versus one in which the interior is deliberate.I'm trying not to misquote, but selecting the portions I'm replying to for brevity.
Again, no, I don't think that statement is rational. Allowing people, citizens in particular but by extension companies, to take pictures that are not deliberately invasive, does not force people to allow real privacy invasion, and most certainly not something that "goes beyond" it.The freedom of speech is an easy analogy, but let me rephrase since it caused a red herring: Having a right or expectation of privacy is by no means encroached by allowing the causal photograph of your dwelling to be published. It is not a loss of rights, it is a common sense allowance for normal acceptable behavior.
The government vs corporation stuff came from the British government reference. I took your inclusion of it to be a paralleling of the two situations, which is the only reason I could imagine you would mention it. Of course, if you were pointing out that privacy invasion was far more likely in British surveillance than from something as casual as a google snapshot, then I obviously missed your point. Somehow, still I doubt that was the intent.
Incidentally, I appreciate people who don't share my viewpoint but are able to express themselves clearly with reasoned arguments. I don't like to refer to them the same way as I do people I agree with, so I call them foes and set my preferences to give them a bonus point so I am more likely to read their opinion. I'm marking you foe because I seem to disagree with you, but you're lucid and thoughtful and I'd like to see more of that in general.
A lot of guys have too, but since they don't need to sit, then it happens a lot less often and of course the urgency thing is a part of it as well, most of the time when guys are in a hurry it isn't to sit. For women, every urgent call is a need to sit. Aside from those factors which make it less likely that a guy will forget to check the seat, there is also the mechanical factor. Plenty of women are mechanically inclined but far more guys are likely to be thinking of mechanics without having to actually work at it than the gals.
Then there is the biggest reason you haven't heard about it, male ego. Men are far, far (think parsecs here) less likely to ever mention it since that would be so unbelievably anti-macho.
And of course, men don't chat about things like that much do they? Women chat about things like that, men ignore them. Women go the bathroom in herds, men use euphemisms.
At a random guess I'd say the numbers break down something like this:
20% - Percentage of guys that have ever fallen in
90% - Percentage of women that have ever fallen in
98% - Percentage of women who admit they have fallen in to a non-spouse
0.00001% - Percentage of men that have ever mentioned they have fallen in to anyone at all
94% - Likelihood that you have ever met a woman who would mention it unabashedly in related conversation
0.000001% - Likelihood that you have ever met a man who would mention it in any conversation with another man
will be Microsoft Linux.
Novell showed the way with SCO. Use Novell and you don't have to worry about SCO IP infringement lawsuits. When Novell announced that they would effectively protect any company who used Novell and was sued for it by SCO, they became very attractive to companies that wanted to use Linux but were afraid of Lawsuits. The funny thing is that Microsoft may hold patent threats, but it could easily use that to push it's own Linux distribution.
Headline: Microsoft releases Linux version with software you cannot get from any other Linux distro. Why? Imagine the impact on the sales of RedHat if you could get the same thing (CentOS, Oracle) with Microsoft software and support on top of it. Certainly much of the FOSS community would freak out, but businesses wishing to support both MS and Linux systems would jump at the chance. For those businesses wishing to support Linux, it would give them a transition system that would never need to transition, keeping the lock-in that makes Office so popular. Businesses could hire developers who have experience programming for Apache and PHP to work along side people using .NET, VB and IIS. Instead of having to choose a candidate based on experience with the one system they have, they could hire whoever seems most qualified in any.
Instantly MS could say that it is "fostering" cross-platform development and at the same time edge out the players who release OSS. There is nothing that says you cannot run closed source software on Linux, or even distribute the same, as long as you don't mix the source. If anybody could pull it off, Microsoft could and if they do, it will be a major blow to the other Linux vendors which in turn decreases their revenue, and essentially squeezes down the amount of contribution that RedHat and SUSE are able to afford.
When? Well I'd expect the announcement shortly before the end of the current agreements with SUSE expire, so that MS can make a clean break, retain SUSE users and take a big bite out of RedHat revenue. RedHat would be in quite a pickle as any legal action they pursue against MS is already questionable and MS has the patents to make the lawsuit ugly.
If someone at MS were really smart they were talking over beers with SCO people with this in mind all along, make the lawsuits scary and you will make money -wink- -wink- ... and thinking at the same time that if SCO gets hammered out of existence then take the assimilation approach.
I don't know if I'd be able to resist running exchange on a Linux system, the temptation of the dark side is very strong.
This is not true. It is like saying that we either have the freedom to say anything we want any time or we don't have freedom of speech. It is about reasonable restraint, a.k.a. common sense. You cannot start calling people and telling them that you are a representative of their congressman and you will kill them if he is not reelected. That prohibition doesn't mean that you don't have freedoms that matter.
Locally, we have the right to let twelve citizens decide our fate. Ask them if there is a difference between climbing trees, using telephoto lenses, using UV lenses and similar tatics to sell to gossip magazines, versus publishing one shot in thousands that happens to show what is inside of an unobscured clearly lit window.
Prefer the Big Brother argument? This is a company, the people you're concerned about are the government. If you want the government to limit itself, then pick a topic. Is it:
A.) The government shouldn't watch you
B.) Nobody should be allowed to record you
There is no:
C.) Nobody should be allowed to record you because the government might at some point want to watch you and it is only a matter of time before a company like google using pictures with accidental content causes other companies to start spying on you and the government to decide to monitor its citizens in invasive ways.
Actually, I guess there is a C, which seems to be the argument you make, but it sounds silly when stated directly doesn't it?