Ricoh Aficio copier/printers use NetBSD. I had some Laniers that were rebranded Ricohs. I never tried to hack it, and there was no obvious way to drop into a unix shell, but somewhere in the documentation or in the interface it indicated it was NetBSD.
In a larger view, the difficulty in getting people to switch [to metric] is symptomatic of our long-BROKEN educational system.
I keep seeing things like this said. I don't see how not adopting the metric system is a failure of education. I was taught metric in school. Conceptually it's very simple math. All science classes used it. All the measuring cups in my cabinet have metric markings (secondary to old-style markings).
For me the problem with metric is it doesn't mean anything. There's no point in putting much effort into understanding, for example, if picking up an 40kg box is going to pull my back or strain my arms because I never see an 40kg box marked as such. From 5 lbs to 150 lbs...the way the items I interact with are clearly marked...I intrinsically know how careful to be when picking it up and about how far I can carry it before needing a break.
I have no problems with metric measures I commonly see, like 2-liter and 1-liter bottles or even how powerful a 2000cc engine is likely to feel compared to a 305 cubic inch engine.
The problem is not academic education but common familiarity. 25C outside? I have no idea how I need to dress. I know the conversion factor to F enough to figure it out slowly but not quickly enough to be of use daily. 200km to the next town? I've driven a lot, but all signs are in miles, and I know from experience how long it's going to take to get there and whether or not my bladder will hold.
Switch everything to metric and I'll grouse a bit for a while and pretty quickly I'll learn how to dress for 25C and 15C and know which town to stop at to avoid peeing in the roadside bushes.
However I think this is a bad time politically in the U.S. to try such a switch. Heck a buch of people keep wanting to build walls, kick out the Mexicans and outlaw the Spanish language being used in any sort of business transaction. Not to mention legally redefining marriage and pressuring employers who offer same-sex partner benefits to stop. Switching to metric to follow the rest of the world would probably ruffle a lot of feathers and be perceived as an attack on the "American way of life". I was born here and lived here all my life, but I dont get it, either.
Maybe they'll do the same thing they did in those DirecTV HD commercials...it appears as if they put a newly-acted face w/voiceover on old shots of kirk roaming the bridge much skinnier than he is today.
Oops. You're right. I should quit relying on my memory for posting any facts.
Wasn't there some Mars craft that is hurtling aimlessly in space now? Maybe I'm remembering MCO, but this article says it probably burned and broke up in the atmosphere.
Kind of silly since every villian I've seen in a Bond movie has a computer screen full of info on 007 complete with photo and personality quirks. Kind of hard to disavow him if they already know who he is.
This question is analagous to "if frogs had wings, would they still bump their butts on the ground?"
Intellectual property is an intangible construct. I don't see much point in discussing "if if if...." Ultimately there is no utopian DRM implementable. Heck, humans can't agree on value judgements...how can an algorithm do better?
From TA I gather they wanted to see what Sojourner did after losing contact...how did its programming to return to base play out?
I'm guessing it's also a sanity check of several factors.
Plus it's nifty cool!
Lastly, perhaps seeing how various known objects appear on the images will help them look for crash sites like Beagle's. MPL presumably is flying through space somewhere, but if they weren't confident of that they could look for its crash site, too.
Even more lastly it's probably interesting to see how the weather affects conditions around long-sitting known objects. Do dunes build up? Do they get dusty or does the wind clean them? Etc.
Wall Street still amazingly thinks the stock has some value. I am amazed that this stock is still selling for over a dollar a share, but far be it from me to suggest that the stock market makes any sense.
What you and all the responders have missed so far is that this stock is very thinly traded. Volume was 39,626 today, but from the graphs it appears to be maybe roughly 30 trades of varying blocks of stock. Look how today's price chart looks like a connect-the-dot diagram. Compare to Google's chart.
I'm pretty far from a stock expert, but I'd say that SCOX is too thinly traded to compare price swings to more liquid stocks. Few people are trading, and it looks several of the ones who are trade blocks of thousands at a time.
Sidebar gripe about stock charts: Charts should start at zero, and generally speaking they should be a logarithmic scale. That way you could make somewhat meaningful comparisons based on the shape of the plot. Chopping the Y axis and using a linear scale make a more dramatic plot, but you have to really think about it to extract any meaningful information from it. Anyone know a decent free place that lets you see charts with 0 as the base line and a logarithmic scale?
The HD-DVD player upconverts regular DVDs to look MUCH better than a regular DVD player, so all of the old disks work fine.
That's not a feature of the format. They can add that to DVD-format players. One of my players supposedly has upconversion, but in casual viewing I can't tell the difference between it and another progressive scan player, each connected via component cables to a 46" DLP TV.
I downloaded a recent version of the software image to run in VMWare. I clicked around on a few things. Sure it's Linux, but at first glance it doesn't seem to be designed to let you get to a command prompt or arbitrary Xwindows. When you say it's the first large scale computer with Linux preinstalled I think it's a bit misleading. Technically "Linux" is a kernel, but when people talk about a Linux OS I usually presume they mean an X desktop with one or more of the familiar environments (Gnome, KDE, various window managers) and a general unix-y feel. The interface for the OLPC--presuming the downloaded image represents that--is more along the lines of a PDA or cell phone than a general-purpose desktop or laptop system. That is to say I don't expect OLPC users to be dropping to shells or customizing their desktop layouts; the interface appears pretty strict, but that's a good thing for this product.
That's an observation, not a criticism. But I don't immediately see how this thing being distributed as widely as they hope would promote, say, Red Hat / Fedora, Suse / OpenSuse or Ubuntu.
Also, from what I understand of the goals of the project, compatible systems would be helpful to further distribute the paradigm and help kids everywhere.
As neat as these things sound and as good as the goals are, I don't think I'd be happy using one myself for my main PC. I'm too used to the "jack of all trades" paradigm in my personal PCs. I think they're a neat idea, though, and hope the project succeeds and is actually beneficial to the users.
On the other hand, maybe it's trivial to develop a Sugar icon that launches an xterm or xmms. I don't know.
I wouldn't be surprised if these servers shared one of those special rooms with the NSA routers.
In my limited experience, private high-dollar interests like banks, jewelry distributors and even corporate HQ's have tighter security than military and goverment locations. I haven't dealt with the NSA, but the security at military bases and GAO sites appeared much more lax than many private sites. The tightest places I've been (as a then field tech) have been jewelry distributors, CC/check processing centers and EDS HQ. Oh, and then of course the armored car barn...freaky place with all doors always locked and all doors having gun ports and bulletproof windows, but unlike the previous places I mentioned I was left alone (without an escort) although locked in a small room with two or three gunports.
Inversely, I set up Nessus to scan for vulnerabilities on my network. The scan crashed both nodes of my NetWare cluster as it turned out there was a TCP connection problem that needed patching...too many connections created by the Nessus scan crashed the boxes. I patched the servers but didn't try Nessus again.
Apparently you have never heard of Central Air Conditioning. The condenser sits outside the building, so water drainage isn't really an issue for the server room. Even if you use a wall-unit to add additional cooling, the condenser drainage should ALWAYS be outside the server room. Never ever ever have a water drain going into your server room. Oh, and as far as flooding is concerned, Your server room should always have a slightly elevated floor (about 3-6 inches) in case of a drainage backup from any nearby bathrooms. Any flooding more than that and a drain won't help you. Frankly, the risk of sewage backup from a direct-connected drain is far greater than a small-flood risk anyway. Again, no good reason to have a drain in the floor, and certainly no reason for a sink in the server room.
Apparently you haven't worked in many data centers or messed much with air conditioning. The condenser isn't the part that condenses water...it condenses the coolant, is warmer than ambient air and doesn't get water condensing on it. The evaporator gets water condensation on it, and the evaporator is always inside. In data center A/C's they are in the server room in those big boxes and need drainage for the condensate and the eventual failure and leakage of the humidifier.
And every elevated floor I've ever seen has lots of cabling under it. Both electrical and data. I wouldn't want any measure of standing water there for any period of time for many reasons...the obvious zap factor and the lingering smell of stagnant water under the floor in hard places to clean, for starters.
I'd hate to see a server room without dedicated cooling equipment. My last little server room had a small Liebert unit and central A/C vents. (Actually shouldn't be that way, but nevermind.) The SAN on my 2-node cluster was a virtual space heater, and the temp would rapidly shoot up to 90-105 deg F whenever the ancient Liebert unit failed. That unit was ancient, and I consider myself lucky not to have lost equipment to heat failure in the 5 years I was there. Other data centers I've had have redundant cooling units.
"It will have the ability to restrict your network access if you have a down-level machine."
Ehm... and who decides what is a down-level machine?
If you have to ask, you don't get to decide and you definintely have a down-level machine.;-)
My first thought on reading this article is that this could control some of the Windows network spamming I've seen too much of, but this really is the wrong way to go about fixing it.
Well, at least it is the first new video game interface since the joystick.
Hmmm, trackball/mouse, light gun, Nintendo glove, motion sensors for virtual boxing, bowling and golf games... (I'll grant that DDR pads and bike/jetski/whatever avatars are just scaled variations of previous controls)
Okay, I'm just nitpicking. The new controller has the potential for a revolution in game control and design. Actually I could see it being worked into TV and other remotes. Forget the jog wheel!
Just make sure they never use this to make backseat drivers have actual physical control over real cars!
I know that Wal-Mart is the "new world" and all but for every company to fall all over themselves to deal with them is a bit ridiculous. A company that prides itself in constraining all markets, destroying their populace and basically giving the middle finger to rest of the planet is put on a pedestal by the countries that should be invading them to free their people? As all the "free" countries fall all over themselves to sell and buy from a company that is as close to slave labour as we have presently. Maybe we should just forget about them for a while and they may go away, just like K-Mart. Before you mod me to hell, think about when you purchase your Chinese crap that is produced by children that don't make enough to feed themselves.
My BB will go 2 days max on a full charge, and I don't use it as a phone much. Also, the USB charger sucks compared to the wall charger. If I use the USB charger overnight the BB won't last more than a day.
I'm lukewarm on the BB. It was provided by work. My favorite features are the downloaded Texas Hold 'Em game and the web access from my toilet, airport gate or delayed aircraft parked on the taxiway for an hour or two.
I'm not a big email fan, so having every email buzz me is more of a (necessary for work given how they've taken our pagers away and replaced certain notifications with email) annoyance. And while the shape is usable for web surfing (and Hold 'Em) it's a pain as a phone...I drop it a lot.
On second thought, a somewhat earth-shattering feature is web access to my company's intranet from the BB. That saved my bacon once or twice and has been convenient a few times.
Yeah, my dependency hell issues were a while back. My recent foray into CentOS didn't get me much experience in modern RPM management. A few years ago with Red Hat I tried to add X after the install, and even the documentation said it was more or less impossible. IIRC removing X was similiarly daunting.
I like apt with Debian (and i386...haven't tried it with other arches), but I've always thought it was silly to try to apply a favored package manager to someone else's distro. The package management is one of the core features of a distro IMO (along with config tools e.g. YaST). If you're a user who's trying to change that it's time to change distros, or if that's not possible learn to live with the package manager. In my case I try out RH every now and then because if I ever want to make money doing Linux consulting I'm probably going to have to know how to administer Red Hat.
Okay, they aren't Linux, but Cygwin is fantastic for a unix geek stuck on Windows, and while I haven't had occasion to need or try eCos it sounds like a really nifty project.
I dislike *using* RedHat OS'es because I don't like their admin tools (don't get along with hand-editing; don't seem to do what I want quickly) or their package manager (too much dependency hell) I have no problem with the company and am glad it's giving so much code to the community.
As long as they follow the GPL rules (which they legaly must) I dont see the problem.
<cough> binary code with GPL wrapper <cough> a la Nvidia <cough>
If they can get people using their proprietary connectors they can embrace and extend at a whim and leave reimplementers in the dust.
I think all supported MS OS'es have Windows Update and Automatic Updates built in, and they're not supporting XP prior to SP1. They could require their binary connectors to use Windows Updates for updates and claim security patches are the reasons you have to update your binary connectors--which by the way don't work with Samba because [insert BS reason here].
Slashdot Mirror
Ricoh Aficio copier/printers use NetBSD. I had some Laniers that were rebranded Ricohs. I never tried to hack it, and there was no obvious way to drop into a unix shell, but somewhere in the documentation or in the interface it indicated it was NetBSD.
Yeah. uhuhuhuh. What a noob. Heh. uhuhuh.
I keep seeing things like this said. I don't see how not adopting the metric system is a failure of education. I was taught metric in school. Conceptually it's very simple math. All science classes used it. All the measuring cups in my cabinet have metric markings (secondary to old-style markings).
For me the problem with metric is it doesn't mean anything. There's no point in putting much effort into understanding, for example, if picking up an 40kg box is going to pull my back or strain my arms because I never see an 40kg box marked as such. From 5 lbs to 150 lbs...the way the items I interact with are clearly marked...I intrinsically know how careful to be when picking it up and about how far I can carry it before needing a break.
I have no problems with metric measures I commonly see, like 2-liter and 1-liter bottles or even how powerful a 2000cc engine is likely to feel compared to a 305 cubic inch engine.
The problem is not academic education but common familiarity. 25C outside? I have no idea how I need to dress. I know the conversion factor to F enough to figure it out slowly but not quickly enough to be of use daily. 200km to the next town? I've driven a lot, but all signs are in miles, and I know from experience how long it's going to take to get there and whether or not my bladder will hold.
Switch everything to metric and I'll grouse a bit for a while and pretty quickly I'll learn how to dress for 25C and 15C and know which town to stop at to avoid peeing in the roadside bushes.
However I think this is a bad time politically in the U.S. to try such a switch. Heck a buch of people keep wanting to build walls, kick out the Mexicans and outlaw the Spanish language being used in any sort of business transaction. Not to mention legally redefining marriage and pressuring employers who offer same-sex partner benefits to stop. Switching to metric to follow the rest of the world would probably ruffle a lot of feathers and be perceived as an attack on the "American way of life". I was born here and lived here all my life, but I dont get it, either.
Maybe they'll do the same thing they did in those DirecTV HD commercials...it appears as if they put a newly-acted face w/voiceover on old shots of kirk roaming the bridge much skinnier than he is today.
Oops. You're right. I should quit relying on my memory for posting any facts.
Wasn't there some Mars craft that is hurtling aimlessly in space now? Maybe I'm remembering MCO, but this article says it probably burned and broke up in the atmosphere.
Just think of the few dozen extra troops we could've sent to Baghdad instead of wasting money on this piece of space junk! Harumph!
Kind of silly since every villian I've seen in a Bond movie has a computer screen full of info on 007 complete with photo and personality quirks. Kind of hard to disavow him if they already know who he is.
This question is analagous to "if frogs had wings, would they still bump their butts on the ground?"
Intellectual property is an intangible construct. I don't see much point in discussing "if if if...." Ultimately there is no utopian DRM implementable. Heck, humans can't agree on value judgements...how can an algorithm do better?
From TA I gather they wanted to see what Sojourner did after losing contact...how did its programming to return to base play out?
I'm guessing it's also a sanity check of several factors.
Plus it's nifty cool!
Lastly, perhaps seeing how various known objects appear on the images will help them look for crash sites like Beagle's. MPL presumably is flying through space somewhere, but if they weren't confident of that they could look for its crash site, too.
Even more lastly it's probably interesting to see how the weather affects conditions around long-sitting known objects. Do dunes build up? Do they get dusty or does the wind clean them? Etc.
Slashdot headlines can already replicate themselves.
Capitalism will end when I can print a blow job.
What you and all the responders have missed so far is that this stock is very thinly traded. Volume was 39,626 today, but from the graphs it appears to be maybe roughly 30 trades of varying blocks of stock. Look how today's price chart looks like a connect-the-dot diagram. Compare to Google's chart.
I'm pretty far from a stock expert, but I'd say that SCOX is too thinly traded to compare price swings to more liquid stocks. Few people are trading, and it looks several of the ones who are trade blocks of thousands at a time.
23.8% of outstanding shares are sold short. Perhaps the short holders are covering after getting tired of waiting for the stock to go down?
Sidebar gripe about stock charts: Charts should start at zero, and generally speaking they should be a logarithmic scale. That way you could make somewhat meaningful comparisons based on the shape of the plot. Chopping the Y axis and using a linear scale make a more dramatic plot, but you have to really think about it to extract any meaningful information from it. Anyone know a decent free place that lets you see charts with 0 as the base line and a logarithmic scale?
That's not a feature of the format. They can add that to DVD-format players. One of my players supposedly has upconversion, but in casual viewing I can't tell the difference between it and another progressive scan player, each connected via component cables to a 46" DLP TV.
I downloaded a recent version of the software image to run in VMWare. I clicked around on a few things. Sure it's Linux, but at first glance it doesn't seem to be designed to let you get to a command prompt or arbitrary Xwindows. When you say it's the first large scale computer with Linux preinstalled I think it's a bit misleading. Technically "Linux" is a kernel, but when people talk about a Linux OS I usually presume they mean an X desktop with one or more of the familiar environments (Gnome, KDE, various window managers) and a general unix-y feel. The interface for the OLPC--presuming the downloaded image represents that--is more along the lines of a PDA or cell phone than a general-purpose desktop or laptop system. That is to say I don't expect OLPC users to be dropping to shells or customizing their desktop layouts; the interface appears pretty strict, but that's a good thing for this product.
That's an observation, not a criticism. But I don't immediately see how this thing being distributed as widely as they hope would promote, say, Red Hat / Fedora, Suse / OpenSuse or Ubuntu.
Also, from what I understand of the goals of the project, compatible systems would be helpful to further distribute the paradigm and help kids everywhere.
As neat as these things sound and as good as the goals are, I don't think I'd be happy using one myself for my main PC. I'm too used to the "jack of all trades" paradigm in my personal PCs. I think they're a neat idea, though, and hope the project succeeds and is actually beneficial to the users.
On the other hand, maybe it's trivial to develop a Sugar icon that launches an xterm or xmms. I don't know.
In my limited experience, private high-dollar interests like banks, jewelry distributors and even corporate HQ's have tighter security than military and goverment locations. I haven't dealt with the NSA, but the security at military bases and GAO sites appeared much more lax than many private sites. The tightest places I've been (as a then field tech) have been jewelry distributors, CC/check processing centers and EDS HQ. Oh, and then of course the armored car barn...freaky place with all doors always locked and all doors having gun ports and bulletproof windows, but unlike the previous places I mentioned I was left alone (without an escort) although locked in a small room with two or three gunports.
Inversely, I set up Nessus to scan for vulnerabilities on my network. The scan crashed both nodes of my NetWare cluster as it turned out there was a TCP connection problem that needed patching...too many connections created by the Nessus scan crashed the boxes. I patched the servers but didn't try Nessus again.
Apparently you haven't worked in many data centers or messed much with air conditioning. The condenser isn't the part that condenses water...it condenses the coolant, is warmer than ambient air and doesn't get water condensing on it. The evaporator gets water condensation on it, and the evaporator is always inside. In data center A/C's they are in the server room in those big boxes and need drainage for the condensate and the eventual failure and leakage of the humidifier.
And every elevated floor I've ever seen has lots of cabling under it. Both electrical and data. I wouldn't want any measure of standing water there for any period of time for many reasons...the obvious zap factor and the lingering smell of stagnant water under the floor in hard places to clean, for starters.
I'd hate to see a server room without dedicated cooling equipment. My last little server room had a small Liebert unit and central A/C vents. (Actually shouldn't be that way, but nevermind.) The SAN on my 2-node cluster was a virtual space heater, and the temp would rapidly shoot up to 90-105 deg F whenever the ancient Liebert unit failed. That unit was ancient, and I consider myself lucky not to have lost equipment to heat failure in the 5 years I was there. Other data centers I've had have redundant cooling units.
If you have to ask, you don't get to decide and you definintely have a down-level machine.
My first thought on reading this article is that this could control some of the Windows network spamming I've seen too much of, but this really is the wrong way to go about fixing it.
You forgot about the rotary girders.
Gotta have the rotary girders.
Well, at least it is the first new video game interface since the joystick.
Hmmm, trackball/mouse, light gun, Nintendo glove, motion sensors for virtual boxing, bowling and golf games... (I'll grant that DDR pads and bike/jetski/whatever avatars are just scaled variations of previous controls)
Okay, I'm just nitpicking. The new controller has the potential for a revolution in game control and design. Actually I could see it being worked into TV and other remotes. Forget the jog wheel!
Just make sure they never use this to make backseat drivers have actual physical control over real cars!
I know that Wal-Mart is the "new world" and all but for every company to fall all over themselves to deal with them is a bit ridiculous. A company that prides itself in constraining all markets, destroying their populace and basically giving the middle finger to rest of the planet is put on a pedestal by the countries that should be invading them to free their people? As all the "free" countries fall all over themselves to sell and buy from a company that is as close to slave labour as we have presently. Maybe we should just forget about them for a while and they may go away, just like K-Mart. Before you mod me to hell, think about when you purchase your Chinese crap that is produced by children that don't make enough to feed themselves.
My BB will go 2 days max on a full charge, and I don't use it as a phone much. Also, the USB charger sucks compared to the wall charger. If I use the USB charger overnight the BB won't last more than a day.
I'm lukewarm on the BB. It was provided by work. My favorite features are the downloaded Texas Hold 'Em game and the web access from my toilet, airport gate or delayed aircraft parked on the taxiway for an hour or two.
I'm not a big email fan, so having every email buzz me is more of a (necessary for work given how they've taken our pagers away and replaced certain notifications with email) annoyance. And while the shape is usable for web surfing (and Hold 'Em) it's a pain as a phone...I drop it a lot.
On second thought, a somewhat earth-shattering feature is web access to my company's intranet from the BB. That saved my bacon once or twice and has been convenient a few times.
Yeah, my dependency hell issues were a while back. My recent foray into CentOS didn't get me much experience in modern RPM management. A few years ago with Red Hat I tried to add X after the install, and even the documentation said it was more or less impossible. IIRC removing X was similiarly daunting.
I like apt with Debian (and i386...haven't tried it with other arches), but I've always thought it was silly to try to apply a favored package manager to someone else's distro. The package management is one of the core features of a distro IMO (along with config tools e.g. YaST). If you're a user who's trying to change that it's time to change distros, or if that's not possible learn to live with the package manager. In my case I try out RH every now and then because if I ever want to make money doing Linux consulting I'm probably going to have to know how to administer Red Hat.
Don't forget Cygwin and eCos!
Okay, they aren't Linux, but Cygwin is fantastic for a unix geek stuck on Windows, and while I haven't had occasion to need or try eCos it sounds like a really nifty project.
I dislike *using* RedHat OS'es because I don't like their admin tools (don't get along with hand-editing; don't seem to do what I want quickly) or their package manager (too much dependency hell) I have no problem with the company and am glad it's giving so much code to the community.
As long as they follow the GPL rules (which they legaly must) I dont see the problem.
<cough> binary code with GPL wrapper <cough> a la Nvidia <cough>
If they can get people using their proprietary connectors they can embrace and extend at a whim and leave reimplementers in the dust.
I think all supported MS OS'es have Windows Update and Automatic Updates built in, and they're not supporting XP prior to SP1. They could require their binary connectors to use Windows Updates for updates and claim security patches are the reasons you have to update your binary connectors--which by the way don't work with Samba because [insert BS reason here].