There were plenty of harddisk-based MP3 players before iPod--so Apple's model is also a copy. What Apple added was a nice look, but at a premium price.
The Toshiba actually looks interesting, with its removable drive.
People have thought for a long time that radioactive decay contributes to warming of the earth's core. That was also considered to be the source of the He3 that still can be found in volcanic vents.
The question is just how much of a chain reaction there is. I guess traditionally, the assumption was "not much". But it seems quite plausible that uranium might concentrate and actually start a significant chain reaction.
It doesn't work for any software that isn't directly useful to the people writing it. The way our economy deals with situations like that is to pay people to write software,
Yes, of course: companies hire programmers and consultants to write or enhance open source software for them.
thereby making the writing of software directly useful to the people doing it. If the people aren't paid - for example, by selling shrinkwrapped, licenced CDs - then the software simply doesn't get written and the economy as a whole is worse off.
No, false. Just because you hire people to do your programming doesn't mean you have to put the results under onerous licenses. Most companies that have software created for them don't want to be in the software business, and many of them find it easier and less costly to just release the software freely. That's how open source software gets created in the real world and how programmers get paid for creating it. It really isn't that complicated.
QuickPad Pro runs MS-DOS (and use CF) and hence has a lot of software available for it, all of it keyboard- and large-screen aware. CalcuScribe is another device aimed at the educational market.
There are a bunch of manufacturers (e.g., quickpad.com) of similar devices that use an 80x86-compatible chip, run a DOS-compatible OS, and have a CF slot, for roughly the same price. There is a lot of really useful DOS-based software that knows how to deal with a keyboard and a larger screen. There is also a lot of productivity software for DOS, plenty of development environments, editors, Emacs clones, etc.
I think a DOS-based system like that makes a lot more sense than something based on PalmOS. PalmOS has trouble with dealing with larger screens, PalmOS applications don't assume a keyboard, software for PalmOS often assumes a 160x160 pixel screen, and the set of applications and tools for PalmOS pales in comparison with what is out there for DOS.
Both Microsoft and Netscape were trying to ensnare users and server vendors into some proprietary trap. Microsoft wanted to force all Internet content to depend on Windows, and Netscape wanted to turn their browser into an OS-independent, but otherwise proprietary, platform. Both failed, and in the end, we all won. IE may have most of the market share and some proprietary hooks, but the vast majority of web sites use open, documented, standardized HTML and JavaScript that works on many browsers.
Both Microsoft's and Netscape's strategies failed. The winner ultimately was the end user, who now has a choice among several good browsers that are either bundled or entirely free.
Not all Latin words ending in "-us" have a plural of "-i"; for some the nominative plural is "-us" (long "u"). And "thymus" comes from the Greek, not Latin anyway. For "virus" and "thymus", "viruses" and "thymuses" are the only acceptable plurals in English anyway.
If you start attaching Latin plurals to English words, you better be prepared to use the cases correctly, as in: "Less than a century ago, scientists discovered the viros. And per viris, they will be able to perform gene therapy. The genomes virorum are generally small and easily manipulated." Let's just stick with the English endings, OK?
Spolsky looks at the last three years of software and comes to the conclusion that free software is a consequence of this principle:
Smart companies try to commoditize their products' complements.
Sorry, but Spolsky reasons like he was born yesterday. There are a few companies whose actions could be interpreted that way and there have been a few fast-talking CEOs hungry for venture capital that have made such arguments, but this is not why or how most free software gets created.
The real driving force behind free software is end users and efficient sharing of development costs. People look at their annual budget for some piece of software, and they conclude that it is cheaper if they develop equivalent functionality themselves and in collaboration with others. Free software and its licensing methods are simply a low-overhead way of achieving that kind of collaborative development; the cost of setting up a commercial venture to carry out the collaborative development would be too high.
Occasionally, companies pursue the strategies that Spolsky points out. These companies are easy to spot: either they don't have true open source licenses at all (Sun Java), or they have some kind of dual licensing arrangement (Troll Tech) with some kind of agenda. In those cases, the smart end user holds on to his pocketbook and usually passes the "free" offer by. These kinds of arrangements are, however, uncharacteristic for open source software.
I won't even dignify a howler like the following with an analysis:
When computers become cheaper, more people buy them, and they all need operating systems, so demand for operating systems goes up, which means the price of operating systems can go up.
Even Spolsky can probably figure out why that kind of relationship between demand and price is completely bogus for software like Microsoft Windows. If he can't, he should have been paying more attention in his economics classes.
Free software is a way for end users to share development costs with other end users. That is, it's a way for an existing money-making business to reduce its costs. If you don't already have a money-making business, creating free software may not make much sense for you. I.e.:
Step 1: have a money making business
Step 2: develop software to support that busines
Step 3: reduce your software/development/support/marketing costs by sharing the software with others
Some people may be able to make a living providing free-software related services (consulting, support, documentation), and some people may even create free software as part of that. But ultimately, the way money gets into the free software economy is the same way it gets to Microsoft: from other money-making businesses.
Re:to the deniers of global warming...
on
Baked Alaska
·
· Score: 2
There appears to be a correlation, but correlation!=cause.
The assertion that CO2 causes increased global temperatures isn't based on correlations, it's based on first principles. If CO2 concentrations go up in the atmosphere and nothing else changes, the temperature must go up. That's elementary physics.
What if, you might say, something else does change and compensate? What if there is negative feedback, so that increased CO2 concentrations activate some mechanisms that somehow kept average global temperatures unchanged? That would be just as bad as global warming. The problem with global warming isn't that we don't like it warm, it is that it results in massive changes in weather and the environment. If there were negative feedback mechanisms that kept global average temperatures unchanged, those mechanisms would themselves represent massive changes in weather patterns and/or the environment.
The absolute best scenario that we can hope for is that there is neither negative nor positive feedback, and that the increase in CO2 just leads to an increase in global temperatures resulting from the CO2 greenhouse effect alone. That way, we could probably double atmospheric CO2 without too many problems or consequences. But even in that ideal scenario, we'd run into trouble once we triple or quadruple atmospheric CO2.
Of course, the most plausible climate models show some degree of positive feedback, meaning that increase in atmospheric CO2 leads to a larger increase in global temperatures than expected from the CO2-related greenhouse effect alone.
CO2 simply isn't like air. Emitting large quantities of it into the atmosphere must result in big changes beyond some point. From having studied lots of ecosystems, we know that those changes will mostly be undesirable and costly. And, if current trends continue, that point is not too far off even under the most optimistic scenarios.
I would like to be able to remove his columns from my Slashdot front page. In my opinion, he usually doesn't know what he is talking about, but because he is articulate, one still occasionally feels compelled to refute him when one comes across one of his columns.
In my experience, GUI applications for Linux are generally no harder to use than GUI applications for Windows. If anything, some important Windows GUI apps have gotten overly and unnecessary complex, and as a result are harder to use than equivalent, simpler Linux apps.
to the deniers of global warming...
on
Baked Alaska
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
People like to debate whether global warming exists based on temperature measurements. But that is missing the point. We don't need to interpret noisy temperature measurements in order to determine whether global warming exists. Instead, we just need to look at CO2 measurements.
We have excellent records of CO2 concentrations over thousands of years from inclusions of gas in ice cores, as well as other sources. CO2 concentrations have unquestionably increased significantly since the 1800's. And increased CO2 concentrations invariably will lead to higher temperatures. The only scientific debate is whether the temperature increase from our current levels of CO2 will be modest or dramatic.
But that question doesn't really get to the core of things. CO2 emissions aren't standing still, they are growing exponentially. If we don't curb CO2 emissions, atmospheric CO2 won't just double, it will double over and over again. At some point, even the most conservative climate models predict catastrophic consequences, whether that be 2x, 4x, 8x, or 16x current levels.
Sooner or later, we have to put a limit on the growth of CO2 emissions because, while we may debate how much CO2 is too much, there exists some level that is going to be too much. So, we might as well impose the limits now, since there is no economic reason to keep belching out CO2 at current rates. Besides, with a reduction in CO2 come a lot of other benefits, like reduction in particulate emissions, sulfur, and other pollutants.
My point was that notions of "we are better" and "they are inferior/guilty because of their nationality or race" are at the heart of right-wing ideologies. I'm sorry that I misunderstood you and I'm glad to see in your clarification that you don't.
I don't bring this up to defend the Germans; they can take care of themselves. But a lot of this kind of thinking and race/nation-based demonization infests today's political rhetoric here in the US and is being used for propaganda purposes, including in debates on Afghanistan, Palestine, Israel, and US race and class relations.
Re:Days of denial are over.
on
Baked Alaska
·
· Score: 2
You are wrong when you say that there is no evidence for global warming caused by human activity. There is absolutely no doubt that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have increased because human activity, and it is clear that that must lead to an increase in the temperature. The only question is how large that will be, whether its effects will be mild or devastating, and who will pay the price.
But more importantly, the judgement shouldn't be up to you or whoever benefits from a risky activity, it should be up to the people who bear the risk. When you masturbate, you yourself may or may not end up needing glasses. That's for you to work out. But when you belch out CO2, others potentially pay the cost. I don't benefit from your SUV, I only incur risks. The Netherlands or Bangladesh don't benefit from the US's idiotic energy policy, they just risk being drowned.
A lot of US and European wealth is based on externalizing their costs. This has got to stop in the long run.
The point of quantum teleportation is that it preserves the quantum entanglements of the object being teleported.
But for teleporting humans, what matters is first of all the classical physical structure: the DNA sequence, arrangement of membranes, intracellular locations of proteins, and all that. There is no indication that you need quantum mechanical information or even dynamical information in order to make teleportation work.
Maybe it will be quantum mechanical tricks that ultimately make teleportation feasible. But these results so far really have nothing to do with the teleportation of real-world objects, because they don't solve the hard problem. The hard part is not transmitting entanglements, the hard part is transmitting the instantaneous locations of molecules in 200 pounds of matter and recreate them at the other end nearly instantaneously.
It is just [the Germans'] way of atoning for those sins
Germany is a modern democratic nation of people mostly born after WWII. Most Germans living today had nothing to do with the Nazis, didn't benefit from the Nazis, and find the philosophy of the Nazis abhorrent; they have nothing to atone for because they have done nothing wrong.
By subscribing to the notion of collective, hereditary guilt, you are placing yourself pretty close to the philosophy of the Nazis. If you are concerned about right-wing extremism in the world, start worrying about yourself.
it's not a problem with RPM
on
Is RPM Doomed?
·
· Score: 2
RPM is really no worse than DEB or any of the alternatives. If anything, its file-based dependencies keep you out of trouble a little more. RedHat wouldn't magically work any better if they switched to DEB.
What makes DEB files work so well is that there is usually a single bottleneck that they all go through: the Debian organization. That's where they all get tested for whether they can be installed. You may notice that DEB files are almost never distributed separately. If they were, then users would have the same problems with them as they do with RPMs.
Systems like Gentoo really don't solve the problem either. Using source merely reduces the frequency of dependency problems, not their fundamental source. That, again, may be a practical tradeoff, but you also pay for it.
So, by all means, run Debian: it really does work better. But it doesn't work better because of the packaging format, it works better because of the organization behind it and because people generally just don't do third party package distribution.
The US tries hard to impose its draconian laws in areas like computer security, child pornography, and copyrights on other countries. The US assists police in foreign countries with raids on their citizens, detains visitors to the US (viz the Adobe case), and seizes assets. And the UK (libel) and Germany (Nazi hate speech) are trying to do the same thing.
Given what restrictions powerful nations like the US, the UK, and Germany are trying to impose on speech in other countries, they really don't have any reason to complain when other countries try to do this as well. What they can do and should do is criticize is Mugabe, his regime, and his policies, independent of how those policies spill over into the Interne.
Get laptops, extra batteries, and external chargers. To allow on-the-fly changes, you can either get dual-battery laptops (preferably with identical bays) or laptops with a small built-in battery.
A simple choice would be Mac iBooks: they are reasonably cheap, allow on-the-fly battery changes, and have decent battery life.
With the dual battery option, you could have a custom desktop accessory to warn you when one battery is empty, giving you still a few more hours of usage out of the other.
a lot of Unices use DES ecnryption to do passwords(which allows for only 8 chars)
The default password encryption algorithm on UNIX is "crypt", not DES. DES may eventually have made it into some commercial versions.
Furthermore, neither DES nor crypt impose intrinsic limitations on password length; it's easy to devise ways of using them with passwords of arbitrary length.
The people who should know about security will already know all this and the people who dont really don't need to worry this much about security.
Spoken like a true Apple zealot. Well, it's good if people with data to protect worry about how to protect their data. And a limited space of passwords is definitely something to worry about. Apple should go to MD5 and long passwords ASAP.
They don't want free, third-party emulators exactly because they want to sell their own. Makes perfect sense to me.
Of course, they shouldn't be able to prohibit emulators, which don't violate copyright, from being written. What they should be able to crack down on is the on-line distribution of copyrighted material.
It is now possible to envision a "macroscope" that present these invisible but ubiquitous patterns to human perceptual systems so that they would engage our innate ability to perceive millions of leaves as scores of trees...and a forest
Someone didn't do their homework. Data visualization, network visualization, and social network visualization have been hot topics for a while.
patents pending
The usual thing: someone who doesn't know the field patents what someone skilled in the art should know.
don't burden the system administrator with this
on
Ethical Obligations
·
· Score: 2
The system administrator is legally and ethically responsible to disclose the theft to his management. The company is ethically, and should be legally, responsible to disclose the theft to its customers. The company should also be subject to a penalty and pay a penalty.
Unfortunately, what happens in real life is that, if the theft comes to light at all, companies cry "hacker" and that their customers and the rest of society end up paying the cost for their negligence.
Slashdot Mirror
The Toshiba actually looks interesting, with its removable drive.
Yes, and you are the floppy disk.
The question is just how much of a chain reaction there is. I guess traditionally, the assumption was "not much". But it seems quite plausible that uranium might concentrate and actually start a significant chain reaction.
Yes, of course: companies hire programmers and consultants to write or enhance open source software for them.
thereby making the writing of software directly useful to the people doing it. If the people aren't paid - for example, by selling shrinkwrapped, licenced CDs - then the software simply doesn't get written and the economy as a whole is worse off.
No, false. Just because you hire people to do your programming doesn't mean you have to put the results under onerous licenses. Most companies that have software created for them don't want to be in the software business, and many of them find it easier and less costly to just release the software freely. That's how open source software gets created in the real world and how programmers get paid for creating it. It really isn't that complicated.
QuickPad Pro runs MS-DOS (and use CF) and hence has a lot of software available for it, all of it keyboard- and large-screen aware. CalcuScribe is another device aimed at the educational market.
I think a DOS-based system like that makes a lot more sense than something based on PalmOS. PalmOS has trouble with dealing with larger screens, PalmOS applications don't assume a keyboard, software for PalmOS often assumes a 160x160 pixel screen, and the set of applications and tools for PalmOS pales in comparison with what is out there for DOS.
Both Microsoft's and Netscape's strategies failed. The winner ultimately was the end user, who now has a choice among several good browsers that are either bundled or entirely free.
If you start attaching Latin plurals to English words, you better be prepared to use the cases correctly, as in: "Less than a century ago, scientists discovered the viros. And per viris, they will be able to perform gene therapy. The genomes virorum are generally small and easily manipulated." Let's just stick with the English endings, OK?
Sorry, but Spolsky reasons like he was born yesterday. There are a few companies whose actions could be interpreted that way and there have been a few fast-talking CEOs hungry for venture capital that have made such arguments, but this is not why or how most free software gets created.
The real driving force behind free software is end users and efficient sharing of development costs. People look at their annual budget for some piece of software, and they conclude that it is cheaper if they develop equivalent functionality themselves and in collaboration with others. Free software and its licensing methods are simply a low-overhead way of achieving that kind of collaborative development; the cost of setting up a commercial venture to carry out the collaborative development would be too high.
Occasionally, companies pursue the strategies that Spolsky points out. These companies are easy to spot: either they don't have true open source licenses at all (Sun Java), or they have some kind of dual licensing arrangement (Troll Tech) with some kind of agenda. In those cases, the smart end user holds on to his pocketbook and usually passes the "free" offer by. These kinds of arrangements are, however, uncharacteristic for open source software.
I won't even dignify a howler like the following with an analysis:
Even Spolsky can probably figure out why that kind of relationship between demand and price is completely bogus for software like Microsoft Windows. If he can't, he should have been paying more attention in his economics classes.Some people may be able to make a living providing free-software related services (consulting, support, documentation), and some people may even create free software as part of that. But ultimately, the way money gets into the free software economy is the same way it gets to Microsoft: from other money-making businesses.
The assertion that CO2 causes increased global temperatures isn't based on correlations, it's based on first principles. If CO2 concentrations go up in the atmosphere and nothing else changes, the temperature must go up. That's elementary physics.
What if, you might say, something else does change and compensate? What if there is negative feedback, so that increased CO2 concentrations activate some mechanisms that somehow kept average global temperatures unchanged? That would be just as bad as global warming. The problem with global warming isn't that we don't like it warm, it is that it results in massive changes in weather and the environment. If there were negative feedback mechanisms that kept global average temperatures unchanged, those mechanisms would themselves represent massive changes in weather patterns and/or the environment.
The absolute best scenario that we can hope for is that there is neither negative nor positive feedback, and that the increase in CO2 just leads to an increase in global temperatures resulting from the CO2 greenhouse effect alone. That way, we could probably double atmospheric CO2 without too many problems or consequences. But even in that ideal scenario, we'd run into trouble once we triple or quadruple atmospheric CO2.
Of course, the most plausible climate models show some degree of positive feedback, meaning that increase in atmospheric CO2 leads to a larger increase in global temperatures than expected from the CO2-related greenhouse effect alone.
CO2 simply isn't like air. Emitting large quantities of it into the atmosphere must result in big changes beyond some point. From having studied lots of ecosystems, we know that those changes will mostly be undesirable and costly. And, if current trends continue, that point is not too far off even under the most optimistic scenarios.
I would like to be able to remove his columns from my Slashdot front page. In my opinion, he usually doesn't know what he is talking about, but because he is articulate, one still occasionally feels compelled to refute him when one comes across one of his columns.
In my experience, GUI applications for Linux are generally no harder to use than GUI applications for Windows. If anything, some important Windows GUI apps have gotten overly and unnecessary complex, and as a result are harder to use than equivalent, simpler Linux apps.
We have excellent records of CO2 concentrations over thousands of years from inclusions of gas in ice cores, as well as other sources. CO2 concentrations have unquestionably increased significantly since the 1800's. And increased CO2 concentrations invariably will lead to higher temperatures. The only scientific debate is whether the temperature increase from our current levels of CO2 will be modest or dramatic.
But that question doesn't really get to the core of things. CO2 emissions aren't standing still, they are growing exponentially. If we don't curb CO2 emissions, atmospheric CO2 won't just double, it will double over and over again. At some point, even the most conservative climate models predict catastrophic consequences, whether that be 2x, 4x, 8x, or 16x current levels.
Sooner or later, we have to put a limit on the growth of CO2 emissions because, while we may debate how much CO2 is too much, there exists some level that is going to be too much. So, we might as well impose the limits now, since there is no economic reason to keep belching out CO2 at current rates. Besides, with a reduction in CO2 come a lot of other benefits, like reduction in particulate emissions, sulfur, and other pollutants.
I don't bring this up to defend the Germans; they can take care of themselves. But a lot of this kind of thinking and race/nation-based demonization infests today's political rhetoric here in the US and is being used for propaganda purposes, including in debates on Afghanistan, Palestine, Israel, and US race and class relations.
But more importantly, the judgement shouldn't be up to you or whoever benefits from a risky activity, it should be up to the people who bear the risk. When you masturbate, you yourself may or may not end up needing glasses. That's for you to work out. But when you belch out CO2, others potentially pay the cost. I don't benefit from your SUV, I only incur risks. The Netherlands or Bangladesh don't benefit from the US's idiotic energy policy, they just risk being drowned.
A lot of US and European wealth is based on externalizing their costs. This has got to stop in the long run.
But for teleporting humans, what matters is first of all the classical physical structure: the DNA sequence, arrangement of membranes, intracellular locations of proteins, and all that. There is no indication that you need quantum mechanical information or even dynamical information in order to make teleportation work.
Maybe it will be quantum mechanical tricks that ultimately make teleportation feasible. But these results so far really have nothing to do with the teleportation of real-world objects, because they don't solve the hard problem. The hard part is not transmitting entanglements, the hard part is transmitting the instantaneous locations of molecules in 200 pounds of matter and recreate them at the other end nearly instantaneously.
Germany is a modern democratic nation of people mostly born after WWII. Most Germans living today had nothing to do with the Nazis, didn't benefit from the Nazis, and find the philosophy of the Nazis abhorrent; they have nothing to atone for because they have done nothing wrong.
By subscribing to the notion of collective, hereditary guilt, you are placing yourself pretty close to the philosophy of the Nazis. If you are concerned about right-wing extremism in the world, start worrying about yourself.
What makes DEB files work so well is that there is usually a single bottleneck that they all go through: the Debian organization. That's where they all get tested for whether they can be installed. You may notice that DEB files are almost never distributed separately. If they were, then users would have the same problems with them as they do with RPMs.
Systems like Gentoo really don't solve the problem either. Using source merely reduces the frequency of dependency problems, not their fundamental source. That, again, may be a practical tradeoff, but you also pay for it.
So, by all means, run Debian: it really does work better. But it doesn't work better because of the packaging format, it works better because of the organization behind it and because people generally just don't do third party package distribution.
Given what restrictions powerful nations like the US, the UK, and Germany are trying to impose on speech in other countries, they really don't have any reason to complain when other countries try to do this as well. What they can do and should do is criticize is Mugabe, his regime, and his policies, independent of how those policies spill over into the Interne.
A simple choice would be Mac iBooks: they are reasonably cheap, allow on-the-fly battery changes, and have decent battery life.
With the dual battery option, you could have a custom desktop accessory to warn you when one battery is empty, giving you still a few more hours of usage out of the other.
The default password encryption algorithm on UNIX is "crypt", not DES. DES may eventually have made it into some commercial versions.
Furthermore, neither DES nor crypt impose intrinsic limitations on password length; it's easy to devise ways of using them with passwords of arbitrary length.
The people who should know about security will already know all this and the people who dont really don't need to worry this much about security.
Spoken like a true Apple zealot. Well, it's good if people with data to protect worry about how to protect their data. And a limited space of passwords is definitely something to worry about. Apple should go to MD5 and long passwords ASAP.
Of course, they shouldn't be able to prohibit emulators, which don't violate copyright, from being written. What they should be able to crack down on is the on-line distribution of copyrighted material.
Someone didn't do their homework. Data visualization, network visualization, and social network visualization have been hot topics for a while.
patents pending
The usual thing: someone who doesn't know the field patents what someone skilled in the art should know.
Unfortunately, what happens in real life is that, if the theft comes to light at all, companies cry "hacker" and that their customers and the rest of society end up paying the cost for their negligence.