FORTRAN provides a trinary logic switch where you can test a numeric result for equality to zero and branch on <0, equal to 0, or >0. That's a form of trnary logic. I remember that from when all we had to work with was woodburning computers... kids today have it so easy.
When I took my first computer courses, they waived the phys ed requirement for us 'cuz we all got our exercise hauling around boxes of Holleriths and emptying the bit buckets.
There's a link elsewhere on this thread to ternary logic that uses True, False, and Fail states. Sounds sort of like a built-in, very low level exception handler scheme...
The original context was that grandparent had made a tacit admission that a persons' behavior was bad by arguing that it was ballanced out by other good behaviors. Within that context, my statements about evil behavior stand. And please note that the "evil" tag is affixed to the behavior, not the person. People are human: neither evil nor good.
I might be willing to discuss the nature of good and evil with you over coffee, or in some other milieu where there would be the potential for a meaningful discussion. But not on slashdot where such a topic would fission within seconds into degenerate matters that have neither substance nor energy-- being instead nothing more than meaningless labels colliding loudly in a sterile void.
Which is not to put down slashdot. Slashdot is very good at being what it is.
Been getting mod points about once every two weeks for the last few months anyway. Whats up with that?
I'm kind of curious as to how the Cowboy and the Commander handle this stuff as well. I get requests to metamod at least daily, but I haven't had any mod points for weeks and weeks. I used to get them about weekly or more.
Strange. I halfway expect that if this post gets modded up a couple of points I'll start getting mod points again. Or maybe if it gets modded up, I'll never see metamod status again. Who knows what lurks in the minds of the Cowboy and Commander?
I thought the Willy Week article was pretty neat, and I really liked the cover picture. But, like you, I think "rebellion" is the wrong word for this.
It seems to me that calling this a "rebellion" is underrating what is going on. The increasing acceptance of Linux and OSS in general is the visible manifestation of a major revolution-- in thought and culture. The idea that a thousand eyes makes all bugs shallow-- cooperative development of new software wealth-- is as astounding and revolutionary as the idea of standardized parts that brought about the industrial revolution, or the idea of empiric, repeatable observation that brought about the scientific revolution, or perhaps even that idea our distant ancestors had that you could contain a small bit of fire, keep it fed, and actually benefit from it...
This revolution is not a thing of competition. You who choose OSS simply because those apps make your life better than the alternatives are actually right in the middle of the front lines and don't even know it. Which is the way it should be.
The revolution will not be televised. But if you know what to look for, you can see plenty evidence of it on slashdot.
Just because MS supports DRM doesn't mean that they are an evil company. Bear in mind that both MS and Bill Gates give millions of dollars to worthy causes round the world.
And what, I wonder, is your opinion about the pedophile who gives away all those lovely lollipops?
Count me among those who think it is inappropriate to use bookkeeping metaphors in place of ethical standards. There are no books where wrong actions can be balanced by right actions. Evil behavior is evil behavior and must always be opposed, even when done by someone who does Good Deeds too.
Check out the link. IIRC, it talks about the tonnage of material they recycle. That's a money maker, if you can get the boxen broken down into gold, copper, steel, and aluminum scrap heaps by volunteer labor.
My understanding is that they are not yet completely self-sufficient, but are getting close to that. They do get grant money for several programs, but I think most of that is seed money to get things like the "Computers for Kids" program started.
I'm thinking of starting a PC recycling business because most trashed PCs these days are still acceptable performers.
Free Geek in Portland Oregon does this as a non-profit. One of the keys to their success is lots of trainable volunteers, because they reward volunteer hours with a refurbished computer. Another key is that businesses and individuals who donate old computer systems get receipts for their charitable donation (but it is up to the donor to determine the value of the donation). When some area business upgrades, they rent a U-Haul truck to bring the old computers to Free Geek. It's an interesting thing to see.
It requires a lot of intensive people effort. I think the greatest challenges are finding the best ways to enable motivated but clueless volunteers to become effective at breaking down old equipment, then testing and assembling miscellaneous components into new working systems. It's fascinating. Free Geek is literally teaching people who didn't know a monitor had its own power cord how to build up a computer system.
Most of this is not yet really codified. It's at that stage where instructions to the n00b are "Just follow the flowchart that's on the workbench wall... oh yeah, come get me when you reach the third step because we've changed that..." The whole organization seems to run this way. Given the hacker culture there, I don't see any intrinsic reason why these people would try to codify what they've done beyond the bare minimum: the current methodology works, is constantly being adapted and improved, and is comfortable for all who are immediately involved with it. It may not seem very efficient, but the customary measures of efficiency don't apply in this situation (raw materials have zero cost; the value invested in a nearly complete work in progress can be less than the value of soothing someone's ego, etc).
Now an extrinsic reason for codifying their knowledge base, like grant funding to do so... hmmm... that's something to think about...
I think at present anyone wanting to start up a similar operation should either try real hard to headhunt one of the Free Geek staff, or send their own tame geek to Free Geek for three months or so, to absorb the culture and learn the techniques (but possibly lose their geek to the wilds of SE Portland).
Free Geek charges $10 / monitor to cover the cost of shipping them to a recycler that can break them apart safely. People (and businesses) bring in their old systems and leave with a receipt that's of use at tax time. It is up to the donator to estimate the value of his donation.
Free Geek runs three programs that are kind of interesting:
A, for Adoption program: do 24 hours of volunteer time and you earn a Freak Box (lot's of high schoolers in this program)
Freak Boxen are currently spec'ed as: 200 - 233 Mhz CPU, 96 Mb ram,
3 - 4 Gb HD, NIC, sound card, modem included, Debian as the OS. Volunteers get a four hour orientation to common home computering under Linux, a working system, and follow-up support.
B, for Build program: assemble five computers from salvaged parts for Free Geek's programs, then you can assemble a sixth one for yourself
C, for Collaborative Technologies programs: Debian systems, support, and training are provided to area non-profits like charities and churches to move them away from the costs of proprietary systems.
Here's the link again, in case you missed it in the parent: Free Geek
The Build program is a kick. Building systems from salvaged parts gives is giving me a whole different perspective.
Photography was a hobby of mine in my high school days, when my dreams of someday having a good darkroom were on a par with my dreams of someday owning a car. Life intervened of course, and for more than thirty years I've just done snapshots. The cars I've been able to justify, but the cost of a good enlarger, remodeling a bathroom, and dealing with the odors, expense, and risks of the chemistries of even a basic darkroom was too much.
But about a month ago that changed, when I bought a Minolta DiMAGE Z1, three sets of rechargeable NiMH batteries, and a 256 Mb SD memory chip.
In that month, I've shot over 500 photos. And saved about half of them-- the rest were crap disposed of immediately. As you said, many of these throw-aways were things of the learning curve. But a good portion of them are the usual overhead that I expect to always pay: the two out of three bracket shots that were not the best exposure; the four out of five progressives that did not catch the goose's wingbeat the way I wanted.
But the important thing is that the digital camera gets my images into Jasc's Paint Shop Pro much more efficiently and without the loss of quality involved in flatbed scanning the prints from my old 35 mm. (Also scanning images, even with a slide scanner, is a boring PITA.) Once I've got a good image from the Z1 into PSP, I've got all the capabilities, and more, of the best chemical darkroom equipment.
Of course I've used PSP since 1992 or so, for web graphics. So I already know a lot of the techniques. (But with the latest version, there are a lot more for me to learn-- happy happy joy joy!)
The Minolta DiMAGE Z1 is positioned as a high end amateur camera, or perhaps a professional's camera for high risk situations. Optic zoom is from mild wide angle to moderate telephoto; lens speed is middle of the road from about 2.8 (3.5 in full zoom) to 8. Not a fantastic lens, but satisfactory for most indoor/outdoor work. With 3.2 megapixels, it delivers photorealistic prints up to 8x10 inches when shooting in its best quality mode. (I can effectively double that with some creative work in PSP-- gotta love that "unsharp mask"). It only does.jpg images, but considering its other limitations a completely lossless format would be absurd. It is inexpensive enough that I'm comfortable with the idea of taking it on backpacking trips. (For another $130, I'd get 2 more 256 MB chips so I'd be carrying the equivalent of about 13 rolls of 35 mm film-- might want to buy $40 more batteries, too).
This combination of a 3.2 megapixel camera and an inexpensive digital darkroom makes available the kind of photo artwork capability that until now was just the stuff of wet dreams for many of us wannabee fotografers. We've had the digital darkroom software for several years: PSP v7 and Adobe's Photo Shop have been around for a long time. And now we're seeing the cameras that are the other half of the picture!
That's a lot of the reason for the digital push. There are a whole bunch of us guys who've wanted for the longest time to try some of the stuff that Ansel Adams did. And now there is a way we can play at doing that. And perhaps a few of us will find we have the talent or the luck to turn out some really good stuff from time to time.
An unexpected fringe benefit is that this camera is the lightest and most comfortable camera I've ever carried. So I'm taking it a lot more places than I ever would take a 35 mm. And the extra batteries are much less bulky than the extra rolls of film were.
I followed the OOo users support newsgroup for several months. To be sure, a large number of questions concerned installation details. But there was also a great deal of help asked for, and given, concerning ways to convert procedures from MS Office to OOo, and how to handle interchanges of some specialized data files between the two. And also ongoing discussions of several things that could be lumped together as "best practice" development.
I think the support news group is one of the more critical parts of making OOo a success. There is a lot of good energy there.
Funny. Microsoft is to blame for spyware issues, but Kazaa, et. al. aren't the problem when it comes to piracy.
Love the double standard. LOVE IT.
Sorry, but I don't see the connection that you are trying to make between these two situations. The closest I can get is that some Microsoft products have subsurface design flaws that create opportunities for lawbreakers, while Kazaa is openly designed to offer opportunities to circumvent some laws in addition to other lawful uses. But I can't tie these separate statements together the way you suggest.
Can you more clearly point out the connection between a flawed product that is dangerous to use in non-obvious ways and a product that is well designed but might be used for obviously illegal purposes?
I was wondering where I had heard the name "Claria" before. Then something jogged my memory.
Claria is the trademarked name of a line of headsets produced by HEADSETS 4UHEADSETS 4U - About us. I had been involved in a purchase decision for headsets for use Emergency Room, Intensive Care Unit, and switchboard and help desk settings in a mid-sized hospital; the Claria headsets were found to be suitable.
I've sent a note to their CEO about the possible trademark infraction. The name confusion between their product and ex-Gator is obviously not to their benefit.
Space itself streched, the matter did not move apart. Think of a ballon with dots on it, as you inflate the balloon, the dots move apart due to the stretching of the medium they are embedded in. There are no constraints that we know of on the speed that space can stretch at.
Ah! Now I understand warp drive technology. It is simply a method of partially relaxing a selected region of current space from its stretched state to a state that is more like its original condition. Hummm, it will require developing some warp field coils to contain the energy released in relaxation until it can be bled off into somebody's power grid, but that's just a SMOE (small matter of engineering).
(Now where did I put the US Patent Office address?)
I'm curious about what kind of person would buy 18% of a company with the stipulation that they would have *NO* say in how that company is run.
By definition, preferred stock does not give the buyer a voice in the way the company is run. It does, however, get preferential treatment if the corporation folds. AIR (and it has been a long time), owners of preferred stock are reimbursed at face value when the company disolves. My guess (see disclaimer above) is that in this deal, the buy-back value is fixed somewhere around $20/share. Preferred stock claims are met after creditors are satisfied but before common stockholders receive the final distribution.
It is because of this preferential treatment at the company's deathbed that preferred stock has no vote. If you think about it, that's a necessary protection for the company's health.
To the extent that SCO's fixed assets exceed $50 million and its debt structure is sound, there is not much risk to the holders of this stock.
To my mind, this confirms that SCO is using a "shoot the moon" strategy and expects to either win big or self-destruct in the near future. In other words, SCO is not behaving as a normal going concern, and the usual methods of assessing its long term values don't apply.
We've been saying that on slashdot for months, speaking from a technical viewpoint. But that message has not been getting through to accountants and market analysts. This preferred stock deal, at roughly 20% of the company's total current market value and contributing about 90% of its operating funds, is something that accountants and market analysts do understand. This is not the kind of move those guys expect from a healthy company. Today might be a particularly good day to short SCOX, before the analysts start publishing their articles.
Of course nobody would ever follow market advise given freely on slashdot, right?
BTW, for us who are too lazy to go find out ourselves, what makes firebird better than mozilla itself? I find mozilla to be quite satisfactory, why would I switch?
I just completed a personal eval of the *birds and Moz, so I can speak to this from a subjective POV.
Ways in which Firebird is better than Moz (imo)
It is smaller. It loads faster, takes up less memory. I didn't need to use a quick launch option (not sure if it even has one). It does better at running concurrently with bloatware than Moz does (running concurrently with a word processor with several open documents and an image editor). Small is good.
It seems to render faster. I'm frequently doing research on amateur pages such as a hang gliding club or a scuba diving club would have, which means I frequently see good content presented in truly crappy ways. It's surprising how far people can deviate from good HTML and still get a page to display. Firebird handles an abused web page with more panache than Moz.
The tabbed browsing is more capable. I could open a bookmark into a new tab with one click. Very nice.
It allows direct editing of bookmarks (without having to go to the Bookmark Manager window).
The extensions approach let me add just those features I want, and also change or upgrade each one individually.
Partly because of #5, toolbar management is a lot simpler.
There are a lot of other benefits that others are listing for you so I won't repeat them.
For me, Firebird of itself is a more suitable browser than Moz.
But Firebird does not do mail or newsgroups. Thunderbird is the mail/news reader. I found Thunderbird to be good enough to recommend to most people. It is stable and integrates well with Firebird, seems to have all the basic features, and has all the promises of extensibility. However it is not yet a mature product and shouldn't be used in any mission critical way (and as the archivist for a couple of private mailing lists who has to collect and preserve several megabytes of messages, my mail handler is "mission critical").
Built into Moz is a pretty good web page editor and very good support for javascript development. Also other web development tools that I haven't explored as yet. These are lacking in Firebird, though some of them can be added in extensions, and others will become available.
I'm staying with Moz for now, because of the mail handling. Otherwise I'd make the change.
I expect in two or three years I'll be running Firebird/Thunderbird.
One of the really big long term pluses for all three of these apps is that they are all cross-platform. I can't say whether I'll still be using Windows or have moved to a Mac or Linux system in the next three years. I can say that no matter what OS I'm running, I'll be using Moz or the birds.
IIRC, although this has yet to be observed directly, its affinity for bureaucracies has been amply demonstrated many times, since its presence causes vast amounts of inertia that otherwise cannot be explained.
If you put two or three bureaucrats together, then nothing gets done, no matter how much energy you flow into the system. All because of the trace amounts of administratium that are naturally occuring in each bureaucrat.
The US and Russia first got into space more than 30 years ago. But both essentially halted development of lift technologies more than 20 years ago. What this means is:
For the average slashdot reader, the core space technologies currently in use (as seen on the ISS, Shuttle, etc) are their father's technologies
China's flight next week will be the first attempt at manned space flight with technology that is actually younger than the average slashdot reader
It reminds me of what a nurse educator once told me: would rather hire a nurse with 20 years' experience, or a nurse with one year's experience repeated 20 times?
I, for one, welcome our new chinese taikonauts! And I look forward to seeing what human ingenuity has accomplished in the last 20+ years!
My mom assures me that the cookies will not burn.
I can ensure the cookies will not burn by checking them every couple minutes.
Those are good. Here's a better one for insure
My cookies are insured against burning: if they are burned, mom promises to give me $5.00 so I can buy some instead.
An important difference between insure and the other two is that when something is insured, there is no guarantee that it will work; there is instead a promise that if it fails some kind of compensation will be provided at some future date. It is significant that the compensation is not necessarily in kind and does not necessarily have the same value as the original.
In my own life, I find I often want to verify that the art supply expert is ensuring that the blue pigment will not turn green in sunlight and that he is not just insuring that I can get my money back if my painting ends up ruined.
...proves nothing except that @Stake is driven by their sponsors and not by the ideal of exposing the truth. This makes @Stake a security company that isn't secure in its convictions. Security you cannot trust.
You have said very succinctly what I have been trying to find a way to put into words. Thank you. Somebody mod parent up, please!
Of all the quiet ways in which @Stake could have handled this situation, they chose instead to do one of the loudest, messiest moves they had available, and they have thrown a lot of mud on themselves and on a major client. Think of how minimal the impact could have been if they quietly let it be known that Geer was a valued employee who was now on a short term administrative leave and would be returning to a less stressful position. That @Stake regrets that it had not recognized earlier the inhuman pressures of Greer's previous post (and the resulting mental abberations).
I'm not saying that this is the best way that @Stake could have handled damage control. I'm simply saying that @Stake doesn't seem to have any comprehension of what damage control is all about. Which I think is a serious flaw in a security firm.
So in addition to @Stake being "security you cannot trust", it's also evident that you cannot trust their business acumen either. When will they next shoot themselves in the foot? And spatter another of their clients with the resulting mess? Aren't there other companies that can provide the same service but do so in a quieter fashion? I expect that these are the kinds of questions that @Stake's potential customers are asking right now.
Has anyone worked out whether this is because women are more likely to conceive a healthy baby at 25, or because the woman is more likely to have the financial resources (husband, job, whatever) to support the baby properly?
The epidemiologists have found this to be a very murky area. (I am not one of them; I am an RN who has attempted to follow some of the research).
Within the teen mother population within the US, there is a greater number of babies born with addictions to crack, heroin, or with fetal alcohol syndrome than in the general population, so one factor is that pregnant teenage women in the US are, as a group, less likely to have good prenatal care. But that doesn't account for all the difference. Other things are going on.
Morbidity studies of accidental deaths of young children show a disproportionate number of children of teenage mothers die of drownings, falls, vehicle accidents, ingestions of household poisons, and other generally preventable causes. There is also a higher morbidity associated with diseases, but AFAIK it isn't clear whether this is because such children are more prone to serious illness or less likely to get early medical intervention. My guess is that in many of these cases, the young mother is less likely to assess the danger properly, and less likely to arrange early intervention. But you can't really tell that kind of thing from the numbers.
Still, there is a clear argument that teenage mothers lack the general experience in protective behaviors that older mothers have.
This statistical approach is too abstract to really be of much use in a forum like slashdot. So...
Say Amy and Betty were born on the same day to neighbors in a wealthy suburb. Both have unremarkable childhoods where they get everything they need and a lot of what they want (except of course for the ponies). On their 13th birthday, they open their hearts to each other and find that they each wants more than anything else to have kids. But Amy decides she wants to start her family while she's young, maybe with that good looking brown haired new boy at school who is such a dreamboat. While Betty decides that she'll wait until after college.
If Amy has her first baby at the age of 17, she will start off with four years of purposeful study of child-rearing behind her. If Betty waits until she is 22, she will have been studying in the same field for eight years and for the last four of them, she will have benefitted from the vicarious experiences that Amy, her best friend, has shared. So even disregarding the differences in critical thinking that occur over this time frame, which of these two young women is more likely to recognize potential threats to her baby and take effective risk reduction methods?
That question sort of brings the whole discussion to a very down-to-earth focus.
In the computer world, metric prefixes are base 10 when they refer to time or a rate and base 2 when they refer to data size.
Define your terms. What is it you mean when you say "computer world"? Who are the denizens of this world that are using the terms you are talking about?
Among geeks and nerds in their subcultures, I would agree with what you are saying, but a very long time ago (in chip years) these peoples became a minority group in the vastly expanding population of computer users. Today most people think a kilobyte is about 1,000 bytes, and a megabyte is about a million bytes, and that's good enough for their practical purposes. Today, those with training in computer science and similar studies know that when they are addressing a larger audience than their own kind, they need to use explicit definitions, such as "On this label, 1 Mb = 1,000,000 bytes."
The whole discussion is silly anyway; at the moment we don't have an effective measure for sizing hard drives since none of the units convert to the basic measures that today's average computer purchasers understand. We all have a good sense of how much information is in a 50 page report, compared to a 700 page report or a three paragraph abstract. But is that 50 page report bigger or smaller than a 125 kb text file? How many filing cabinets of old purchase orders can we put in a 20 gigabyte partition? Will it make a big difference whether we store those in Word format, or as plaintext?
Compared to these very sensible questions, the lawsuit appears to be frivolous.
Slashdot Mirror
FORTRAN provides a trinary logic switch where you can test a numeric result for equality to zero and branch on <0, equal to 0, or >0. That's a form of trnary logic. I remember that from when all we had to work with was woodburning computers... kids today have it so easy.
When I took my first computer courses, they waived the phys ed requirement for us 'cuz we all got our exercise hauling around boxes of Holleriths and emptying the bit buckets.
There's a link elsewhere on this thread to ternary logic that uses True, False, and Fail states. Sounds sort of like a built-in, very low level exception handler scheme...
The original context was that grandparent had made a tacit admission that a persons' behavior was bad by arguing that it was ballanced out by other good behaviors. Within that context, my statements about evil behavior stand. And please note that the "evil" tag is affixed to the behavior, not the person. People are human: neither evil nor good.
I might be willing to discuss the nature of good and evil with you over coffee, or in some other milieu where there would be the potential for a meaningful discussion. But not on slashdot where such a topic would fission within seconds into degenerate matters that have neither substance nor energy-- being instead nothing more than meaningless labels colliding loudly in a sterile void.
Which is not to put down slashdot. Slashdot is very good at being what it is.
Been getting mod points about once every two weeks for the last few months anyway. Whats up with that?
I'm kind of curious as to how the Cowboy and the Commander handle this stuff as well. I get requests to metamod at least daily, but I haven't had any mod points for weeks and weeks. I used to get them about weekly or more.
Strange. I halfway expect that if this post gets modded up a couple of points I'll start getting mod points again. Or maybe if it gets modded up, I'll never see metamod status again. Who knows what lurks in the minds of the Cowboy and Commander?
I thought the Willy Week article was pretty neat, and I really liked the cover picture. But, like you, I think "rebellion" is the wrong word for this.
It seems to me that calling this a "rebellion" is underrating what is going on. The increasing acceptance of Linux and OSS in general is the visible manifestation of a major revolution-- in thought and culture. The idea that a thousand eyes makes all bugs shallow-- cooperative development of new software wealth-- is as astounding and revolutionary as the idea of standardized parts that brought about the industrial revolution, or the idea of empiric, repeatable observation that brought about the scientific revolution, or perhaps even that idea our distant ancestors had that you could contain a small bit of fire, keep it fed, and actually benefit from it...
This revolution is not a thing of competition. You who choose OSS simply because those apps make your life better than the alternatives are actually right in the middle of the front lines and don't even know it. Which is the way it should be.
The revolution will not be televised. But if you know what to look for, you can see plenty evidence of it on slashdot.
Just because MS supports DRM doesn't mean that they are an evil company. Bear in mind that both MS and Bill Gates give millions of dollars to worthy causes round the world.
And what, I wonder, is your opinion about the pedophile who gives away all those lovely lollipops?
Count me among those who think it is inappropriate to use bookkeeping metaphors in place of ethical standards. There are no books where wrong actions can be balanced by right actions. Evil behavior is evil behavior and must always be opposed, even when done by someone who does Good Deeds too.
Check out the link. IIRC, it talks about the tonnage of material they recycle. That's a money maker, if you can get the boxen broken down into gold, copper, steel, and aluminum scrap heaps by volunteer labor.
My understanding is that they are not yet completely self-sufficient, but are getting close to that. They do get grant money for several programs, but I think most of that is seed money to get things like the "Computers for Kids" program started.
I'm thinking of starting a PC recycling business because most trashed PCs these days are still acceptable performers.
Free Geek in Portland Oregon does this as a non-profit. One of the keys to their success is lots of trainable volunteers, because they reward volunteer hours with a refurbished computer. Another key is that businesses and individuals who donate old computer systems get receipts for their charitable donation (but it is up to the donor to determine the value of the donation). When some area business upgrades, they rent a U-Haul truck to bring the old computers to Free Geek. It's an interesting thing to see.
It requires a lot of intensive people effort. I think the greatest challenges are finding the best ways to enable motivated but clueless volunteers to become effective at breaking down old equipment, then testing and assembling miscellaneous components into new working systems. It's fascinating. Free Geek is literally teaching people who didn't know a monitor had its own power cord how to build up a computer system.
Most of this is not yet really codified. It's at that stage where instructions to the n00b are "Just follow the flowchart that's on the workbench wall... oh yeah, come get me when you reach the third step because we've changed that..." The whole organization seems to run this way. Given the hacker culture there, I don't see any intrinsic reason why these people would try to codify what they've done beyond the bare minimum: the current methodology works, is constantly being adapted and improved, and is comfortable for all who are immediately involved with it. It may not seem very efficient, but the customary measures of efficiency don't apply in this situation (raw materials have zero cost; the value invested in a nearly complete work in progress can be less than the value of soothing someone's ego, etc).
Now an extrinsic reason for codifying their knowledge base, like grant funding to do so... hmmm... that's something to think about...
I think at present anyone wanting to start up a similar operation should either try real hard to headhunt one of the Free Geek staff, or send their own tame geek to Free Geek for three months or so, to absorb the culture and learn the techniques (but possibly lose their geek to the wilds of SE Portland).
Free Geek charges $10 / monitor to cover the cost of shipping them to a recycler that can break them apart safely. People (and businesses) bring in their old systems and leave with a receipt that's of use at tax time. It is up to the donator to estimate the value of his donation.
Free Geek runs three programs that are kind of interesting:
Freak Boxen are currently spec'ed as: 200 - 233 Mhz CPU, 96 Mb ram, 3 - 4 Gb HD, NIC, sound card, modem included, Debian as the OS. Volunteers get a four hour orientation to common home computering under Linux, a working system, and follow-up support.
Here's the link again, in case you missed it in the parent: Free Geek
The Build program is a kick. Building systems from salvaged parts gives is giving me a whole different perspective.
I really don't understand this digital push.
Let me enlighten you.
Photography was a hobby of mine in my high school days, when my dreams of someday having a good darkroom were on a par with my dreams of someday owning a car. Life intervened of course, and for more than thirty years I've just done snapshots. The cars I've been able to justify, but the cost of a good enlarger, remodeling a bathroom, and dealing with the odors, expense, and risks of the chemistries of even a basic darkroom was too much.
But about a month ago that changed, when I bought a Minolta DiMAGE Z1, three sets of rechargeable NiMH batteries, and a 256 Mb SD memory chip.
In that month, I've shot over 500 photos. And saved about half of them-- the rest were crap disposed of immediately. As you said, many of these throw-aways were things of the learning curve. But a good portion of them are the usual overhead that I expect to always pay: the two out of three bracket shots that were not the best exposure; the four out of five progressives that did not catch the goose's wingbeat the way I wanted.
But the important thing is that the digital camera gets my images into Jasc's Paint Shop Pro much more efficiently and without the loss of quality involved in flatbed scanning the prints from my old 35 mm. (Also scanning images, even with a slide scanner, is a boring PITA.) Once I've got a good image from the Z1 into PSP, I've got all the capabilities, and more, of the best chemical darkroom equipment.
Of course I've used PSP since 1992 or so, for web graphics. So I already know a lot of the techniques. (But with the latest version, there are a lot more for me to learn-- happy happy joy joy!)
The Minolta DiMAGE Z1 is positioned as a high end amateur camera, or perhaps a professional's camera for high risk situations. Optic zoom is from mild wide angle to moderate telephoto; lens speed is middle of the road from about 2.8 (3.5 in full zoom) to 8. Not a fantastic lens, but satisfactory for most indoor/outdoor work. With 3.2 megapixels, it delivers photorealistic prints up to 8x10 inches when shooting in its best quality mode. (I can effectively double that with some creative work in PSP-- gotta love that "unsharp mask"). It only does .jpg images, but considering its other limitations a completely lossless format would be absurd. It is inexpensive enough that I'm comfortable with the idea of taking it on backpacking trips. (For another $130, I'd get 2 more 256 MB chips so I'd be carrying the equivalent of about 13 rolls of 35 mm film-- might want to buy $40 more batteries, too).
This combination of a 3.2 megapixel camera and an inexpensive digital darkroom makes available the kind of photo artwork capability that until now was just the stuff of wet dreams for many of us wannabee fotografers. We've had the digital darkroom software for several years: PSP v7 and Adobe's Photo Shop have been around for a long time. And now we're seeing the cameras that are the other half of the picture!
That's a lot of the reason for the digital push. There are a whole bunch of us guys who've wanted for the longest time to try some of the stuff that Ansel Adams did. And now there is a way we can play at doing that. And perhaps a few of us will find we have the talent or the luck to turn out some really good stuff from time to time.
An unexpected fringe benefit is that this camera is the lightest and most comfortable camera I've ever carried. So I'm taking it a lot more places than I ever would take a 35 mm. And the extra batteries are much less bulky than the extra rolls of film were.
I followed the OOo users support newsgroup for several months. To be sure, a large number of questions concerned installation details. But there was also a great deal of help asked for, and given, concerning ways to convert procedures from MS Office to OOo, and how to handle interchanges of some specialized data files between the two. And also ongoing discussions of several things that could be lumped together as "best practice" development.
I think the support news group is one of the more critical parts of making OOo a success. There is a lot of good energy there.
Sorry, but I don't see the connection that you are trying to make between these two situations. The closest I can get is that some Microsoft products have subsurface design flaws that create opportunities for lawbreakers, while Kazaa is openly designed to offer opportunities to circumvent some laws in addition to other lawful uses. But I can't tie these separate statements together the way you suggest.
Can you more clearly point out the connection between a flawed product that is dangerous to use in non-obvious ways and a product that is well designed but might be used for obviously illegal purposes?
While two wrongs don't make a right (but three lefts do)...
With apologies to Abbot & Costello and a baseball routine I'd like to hear again some day.
I was wondering where I had heard the name "Claria" before. Then something jogged my memory.
Claria is the trademarked name of a line of headsets produced by HEADSETS 4U HEADSETS 4U - About us. I had been involved in a purchase decision for headsets for use Emergency Room, Intensive Care Unit, and switchboard and help desk settings in a mid-sized hospital; the Claria headsets were found to be suitable.
I've sent a note to their CEO about the possible trademark infraction. The name confusion between their product and ex-Gator is obviously not to their benefit.
Space itself streched, the matter did not move apart. Think of a ballon with dots on it, as you inflate the balloon, the dots move apart due to the stretching of the medium they are embedded in. There are no constraints that we know of on the speed that space can stretch at.
Ah! Now I understand warp drive technology. It is simply a method of partially relaxing a selected region of current space from its stretched state to a state that is more like its original condition. Hummm, it will require developing some warp field coils to contain the energy released in relaxation until it can be bled off into somebody's power grid, but that's just a SMOE (small matter of engineering).
(Now where did I put the US Patent Office address?)
I'm curious about what kind of person would buy 18% of a company with the stipulation that they would have *NO* say in how that company is run.
By definition, preferred stock does not give the buyer a voice in the way the company is run. It does, however, get preferential treatment if the corporation folds. AIR (and it has been a long time), owners of preferred stock are reimbursed at face value when the company disolves. My guess (see disclaimer above) is that in this deal, the buy-back value is fixed somewhere around $20/share. Preferred stock claims are met after creditors are satisfied but before common stockholders receive the final distribution.
It is because of this preferential treatment at the company's deathbed that preferred stock has no vote. If you think about it, that's a necessary protection for the company's health.
To the extent that SCO's fixed assets exceed $50 million and its debt structure is sound, there is not much risk to the holders of this stock.
To my mind, this confirms that SCO is using a "shoot the moon" strategy and expects to either win big or self-destruct in the near future. In other words, SCO is not behaving as a normal going concern, and the usual methods of assessing its long term values don't apply.
We've been saying that on slashdot for months, speaking from a technical viewpoint. But that message has not been getting through to accountants and market analysts. This preferred stock deal, at roughly 20% of the company's total current market value and contributing about 90% of its operating funds, is something that accountants and market analysts do understand. This is not the kind of move those guys expect from a healthy company. Today might be a particularly good day to short SCOX, before the analysts start publishing their articles.
Of course nobody would ever follow market advise given freely on slashdot, right?
BTW, for us who are too lazy to go find out ourselves, what makes firebird better than mozilla itself? I find mozilla to be quite satisfactory, why would I switch?
I just completed a personal eval of the *birds and Moz, so I can speak to this from a subjective POV.
Ways in which Firebird is better than Moz (imo)
For me, Firebird of itself is a more suitable browser than Moz.
But Firebird does not do mail or newsgroups. Thunderbird is the mail/news reader. I found Thunderbird to be good enough to recommend to most people. It is stable and integrates well with Firebird, seems to have all the basic features, and has all the promises of extensibility. However it is not yet a mature product and shouldn't be used in any mission critical way (and as the archivist for a couple of private mailing lists who has to collect and preserve several megabytes of messages, my mail handler is "mission critical").
Built into Moz is a pretty good web page editor and very good support for javascript development. Also other web development tools that I haven't explored as yet. These are lacking in Firebird, though some of them can be added in extensions, and others will become available.
I'm staying with Moz for now, because of the mail handling. Otherwise I'd make the change.
I expect in two or three years I'll be running Firebird/Thunderbird.
One of the really big long term pluses for all three of these apps is that they are all cross-platform. I can't say whether I'll still be using Windows or have moved to a Mac or Linux system in the next three years. I can say that no matter what OS I'm running, I'll be using Moz or the birds.
eleventyoneium
bilbonium.
You forgot Administratium.
IIRC, although this has yet to be observed directly, its affinity for bureaucracies has been amply demonstrated many times, since its presence causes vast amounts of inertia that otherwise cannot be explained.
If you put two or three bureaucrats together, then nothing gets done, no matter how much energy you flow into the system. All because of the trace amounts of administratium that are naturally occuring in each bureaucrat.
Significant things...
The US and Russia first got into space more than 30 years ago. But both essentially halted development of lift technologies more than 20 years ago. What this means is:
It reminds me of what a nurse educator once told me: would rather hire a nurse with 20 years' experience, or a nurse with one year's experience repeated 20 times?
I, for one, welcome our new chinese taikonauts! And I look forward to seeing what human ingenuity has accomplished in the last 20+ years!
2*b || !(2*b) is actually a tautology :P
According to Google, "2*b || !(2*b)" is most likely a generalized incomplete beta function
(As seen on Wolfram's functions
Oh, cookies! I am the Cookie Monster...
My mom assures me that the cookies will not burn.
I can ensure the cookies will not burn by checking them every couple minutes.
Those are good. Here's a better one for insure
My cookies are insured against burning: if they are burned, mom promises to give me $5.00 so I can buy some instead.
An important difference between insure and the other two is that when something is insured, there is no guarantee that it will work; there is instead a promise that if it fails some kind of compensation will be provided at some future date. It is significant that the compensation is not necessarily in kind and does not necessarily have the same value as the original.
In my own life, I find I often want to verify that the art supply expert is ensuring that the blue pigment will not turn green in sunlight and that he is not just insuring that I can get my money back if my painting ends up ruined.
You have said very succinctly what I have been trying to find a way to put into words. Thank you. Somebody mod parent up, please!
Of all the quiet ways in which @Stake could have handled this situation, they chose instead to do one of the loudest, messiest moves they had available, and they have thrown a lot of mud on themselves and on a major client. Think of how minimal the impact could have been if they quietly let it be known that Geer was a valued employee who was now on a short term administrative leave and would be returning to a less stressful position. That @Stake regrets that it had not recognized earlier the inhuman pressures of Greer's previous post (and the resulting mental abberations).
I'm not saying that this is the best way that @Stake could have handled damage control. I'm simply saying that @Stake doesn't seem to have any comprehension of what damage control is all about. Which I think is a serious flaw in a security firm.
So in addition to @Stake being "security you cannot trust", it's also evident that you cannot trust their business acumen either. When will they next shoot themselves in the foot? And spatter another of their clients with the resulting mess? Aren't there other companies that can provide the same service but do so in a quieter fashion? I expect that these are the kinds of questions that @Stake's potential customers are asking right now.
Has anyone worked out whether this is because women are more likely to conceive a healthy baby at 25, or because the woman is more likely to have the financial resources (husband, job, whatever) to support the baby properly?
The epidemiologists have found this to be a very murky area. (I am not one of them; I am an RN who has attempted to follow some of the research).
Within the teen mother population within the US, there is a greater number of babies born with addictions to crack, heroin, or with fetal alcohol syndrome than in the general population, so one factor is that pregnant teenage women in the US are, as a group, less likely to have good prenatal care. But that doesn't account for all the difference. Other things are going on.
Morbidity studies of accidental deaths of young children show a disproportionate number of children of teenage mothers die of drownings, falls, vehicle accidents, ingestions of household poisons, and other generally preventable causes. There is also a higher morbidity associated with diseases, but AFAIK it isn't clear whether this is because such children are more prone to serious illness or less likely to get early medical intervention. My guess is that in many of these cases, the young mother is less likely to assess the danger properly, and less likely to arrange early intervention. But you can't really tell that kind of thing from the numbers.
Still, there is a clear argument that teenage mothers lack the general experience in protective behaviors that older mothers have.
This statistical approach is too abstract to really be of much use in a forum like slashdot. So...
Say Amy and Betty were born on the same day to neighbors in a wealthy suburb. Both have unremarkable childhoods where they get everything they need and a lot of what they want (except of course for the ponies). On their 13th birthday, they open their hearts to each other and find that they each wants more than anything else to have kids. But Amy decides she wants to start her family while she's young, maybe with that good looking brown haired new boy at school who is such a dreamboat. While Betty decides that she'll wait until after college.
If Amy has her first baby at the age of 17, she will start off with four years of purposeful study of child-rearing behind her. If Betty waits until she is 22, she will have been studying in the same field for eight years and for the last four of them, she will have benefitted from the vicarious experiences that Amy, her best friend, has shared. So even disregarding the differences in critical thinking that occur over this time frame, which of these two young women is more likely to recognize potential threats to her baby and take effective risk reduction methods?
That question sort of brings the whole discussion to a very down-to-earth focus.
In the computer world, metric prefixes are base 10 when they refer to time or a rate and base 2 when they refer to data size.
Define your terms. What is it you mean when you say "computer world"? Who are the denizens of this world that are using the terms you are talking about?
Among geeks and nerds in their subcultures, I would agree with what you are saying, but a very long time ago (in chip years) these peoples became a minority group in the vastly expanding population of computer users. Today most people think a kilobyte is about 1,000 bytes, and a megabyte is about a million bytes, and that's good enough for their practical purposes. Today, those with training in computer science and similar studies know that when they are addressing a larger audience than their own kind, they need to use explicit definitions, such as "On this label, 1 Mb = 1,000,000 bytes."
The whole discussion is silly anyway; at the moment we don't have an effective measure for sizing hard drives since none of the units convert to the basic measures that today's average computer purchasers understand. We all have a good sense of how much information is in a 50 page report, compared to a 700 page report or a three paragraph abstract. But is that 50 page report bigger or smaller than a 125 kb text file? How many filing cabinets of old purchase orders can we put in a 20 gigabyte partition? Will it make a big difference whether we store those in Word format, or as plaintext?
Compared to these very sensible questions, the lawsuit appears to be frivolous.