No. Reportedly a program to do exactly that using regular toll passes for the NY State Thruway was canned because there was no way to distinguish between normal drivers and state legislators zooming up to Albany. Legislators don't get tickets you see.
The Intel Centrino which is used in notebook computers uses less power. But by the time somebody get around to making a desktop mobo for them, Intel will have boosted the power on those as well.
If we're really bound and determined to burn up the worlds oil and energy supply running these things, the thing to do is to have freon connects for hooking up to your home AC lines and eliminate the middle man, your AC cooling air which then cools the PC. Plus your fan is now outside where it won't annoy you because geeks never go outside anyway. Might even save power since I won't have to set the AC so low because the room the PC is in is 10 degrees hotter then the rest of the house.
SCSI tape drives, most of them, even the low end ones, always had a way of reading the error statistics for tape reads and writes. So in theory, because no tape software actually uses this info, you could get advance warning that a particular tape was deteriorating before you got to the point of non-recoverable errors.
I suspect that CD drives also have this capability, just that software doesn't bother to use that info. Actually, most software doesn't even appear to check for non-recoverable errors so I suppose it's being consistent.
SCO seems to be referring to the RCU, NUMA and other SMP code. They claim that they own it as being a derivative work. The compare must of been those files to themselves which is kind of silly and probably why they are blurring stuff so as to not look more stupid than they really are.
Since they can't actually sue anybody until they identify the specific code they claim is in infringement, and since it will take about the same amount of time to remove said code no matter when you start to do it, then ignoring SCO until they do identify the code would be a good idea.
When part of the internet goes out, the other parts take up the slack, ie. share the load, but things can slow down considerably. The equivalent effect for the grid would be a major drop in voltage, enough to damage every piece of electrical equipment attached to the grid. Not an option.
The real problem was how the cutouts work. Normally, problems like lightning strikes and tree limbs falling on power lines happen all the time and the cutouts work. But the cutouts only work for a certain amount of load. If we have the sucessive failure of two or more nodes, then the amount of overload becomes too much for the successive cutout to be able to contain. and takes out the entire grid.
That's already been discussed, and while redundancy wouldn't be a bad thing, it's not clear how that would have helped all that much. The blackout happened because the automatic cutouts didn't happen fast enough to prevent a cascade effect taking out the entire grid. The whole grid went down in 9 seconds.
The big problem is that the power being generated has to match demand almost exactly (which is why turning the power back on takes so long). If some part of the enery generation or distribution cuts out, the other parts of the system can't instantly take up the slack and can become overloaded. The solution is cut out part of the energy demand (local or rolling blackouts). And it has to be done quickly.
There is a problem if you use polarized sunglasses and your car's lcd display is polarized in the wrong direction. When that happens is that they all appear black and cannot be read. You can use cellophane or some other suitable plastic to "correct" the lcd's angle of polarization and allow the use of polarized sunglasses while driving.
I'd have posted this info yesterday if I had actually been able to RTFA.
I believe SCO's real strategy is to appear more stupid than they really are in order to provoke an irrational reaction from the Linux community. After all, if they behaved in a reasonable manner and identified the code in breach of their copyright, Linux developers would just rewrite the offending code and that would be the end of it as far as Linux is concerned. And all SCO would be left with would be to sue a corporation much larger then they are. There must be a method to their madness.
It's a bunch of patent counter claims that have nothing to do with the orginal suit, and a reiteration of their claim that SCO is also distributing linux thereby doing what SCO claims everyone else is doing.
But IBM is in a position to clairify the facts in this case, something SCO is unwilling to do. But why should IBM be unwilling to do so either. IBM as a unix licensee is in posession of SysV source code. IBM could do a source code compare between the SysV code and Linux and point out any illicitly copied code, or if none found, declare that fact.
The other thing that SCO is complaining about involves a contractual dispute with IBM. There's no reason IBM can't publish the contracts in question so that the public can make decision on the validitiy of SCO's complaints. Waiting for the courts to decide will take years. If IBM is not willing to do this, then we should immediately start replacing IBM's contributions to Linux on general principle. It won't be too hard in some cases. Replacing RCU, which is actually in the public domain, will likely just involve a few comment changes, ie. saying the RCU technique came from a public domain mainframe method rather than from a unix method.
IANAL, but I beleive the damages don't start until specific notification of infringment is made, and that hasn't been done. SCO can't start the meter running on damages until it explicitly identifies what code it believes is infringing on its IP. Since there is no benefit to SCO to not identify the code in question right away, it calls into serious question the validity of their claims.
Has anyone actually seen one of these beasties? Do the licenses make specific claims to IP or they the usual vague claims of extortion attempts, pay us and we won't hurt you.
Ha! I can just see Darl "Pirana" McBride's next bright idea, SCOO, the Santa Cruz Other Operation.
What can they be used for? Well, your external drives for instance, unless of course you like filling up your power tap with that crap they use to power your external devices with these days. And how do you think that cheap crap performs in comparison to a real PSU?
Of course you can route one of your internal power connectors out through an unused pci slot opening so you could do this even if you didn't buy the Antec PSU.
On the next system that I build, I going to buy extra molex connectors and redo the PSU wiring harness. There's a lot of spagetti on those PSU and it just gets in the way of a clean wiring solution. Plus I'll have external molex connectors for my external drives.
IBM had its own discussion groups equivalent to usenet discussion groups that were called forums. Prior to that, there was the VM Newsletter, a mailing list, edited by Peter Capek, that served to announce the availability of many programs and software tools to the internal IBM community. These tools became a sort of open source since distribution of source was encouraged due to the support provided, "as is", though much of the support was excellant. In some cases, people made improvements to the source, sent it back to the orginal author who incorporated them into the program.
I'm a toolie from way back with a few contributions of my own, SEARCH, a flat file database query tool (used Boyer-Moore string search to make it real fast), and REACC/QUACC, a command that let you determine whether a R/O CMS disk had changed and needed to be reaccessed.
Also some that never got off the ground. I had this idea to emulating temporary files without doing actual i/o to disks. Couldn't call it virtual i/o since there was already a mainframe i/o method called that. I described it to a friend who said oh yeah, unix has those, they're called file pipes. !!? This is the late 70's or very early 80's when unix was basically unknown at IBM. So a first for unix in that case. File pipes were cool and I was probably the only one who had them on mainframes at that time.
So yeah, other than that, we mainframe guys invented everything first. But we never believed the stories told by those ex Future Systems guys. They claimed they invented everything first.
I think the argument is that by distributing the code themselves, SCO failed to maintain secrecy themselves and therefore can't claim trade secrecy. It has nothing to do the the GPL. It's right there in the article.
In other news "SCO has amended its complaint so that it no longer compares Linux to a bicycle and Unix to a luxury car" so I'm happy.
Sustainable growth. If everyone in China got a refrigerator, the entire world oil supply would last for about 6 months. So they're not going to get a USA standard of living (which isn't sustainable either).
So China will have continued supply of cheap labor as long as they can maintain domestic tranquility somehow. They might have to acquire the odd country (Tibet) or continent (Australia watch out) to do this though.
Don't confuse economic quantity for economic quality. Someone rich once said, "I'd rather earn 1% of the efforts of 100 men then 100% of my own efforts"*. China will have a lot of rich people but not all of them will be rich. Kind of the way the US is going but from the other direction.
* this quote seems to be a favorite of MLM schemes if you google it.
ABIT got rid of the legacy parallel and db25 serial connectors (Who uses those things any more) and added extra usb connectors. Finally! That bodes well for their new mini form factor net week. The parallel/serial connectors took up most of the external i/o real estate.
OEMs are finally getting clues. I just noticed that lian-li just came out with a new case, the 6077, that the entire front of the case is 5.5" bays, 9 of them. The on/off switch, led face place and 3 3.5" internal bay takes 2 of those but you can put it in any 2 of the 9 bays. Sweet. I've been looking for this for a long time. You could really load up this sucker with disk drives.
Now if they would just get rid of some of that spagetti on the power supplies, the new SATA drives don't need it anymore.
or diabolical conspiracy if you must. I was trying to figure what was going on with all this outsourcing and stuff. If you can move companies around and staff them with commodity workers and infrastructure, what exactly is a company? What prevents anyone else with sufficient capital from doing exactly the same thing and becoming an instant competitor and displacing the first company in the marketplace? The answer is IP and increasingly, business model IP.
It used to be a company's business model was largely embodied in its personnel. Knowledge in that form had a lot of inertia in setting up and tranferring, so it prevented anyone else from becoming instant competitors. But that way of doing business is largely incompatible with commodity workers, hence the new model.
An added benefit from the company's point of view is that it solves the problem that figured in Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash, workers taking home the knowledge of their jobs. Now it doesn't matter what you know since it's illegal for you to use that knowledge. Of course it sucks if you are a displaced worker and that is the only knowledge that you have.
This need to be designed using stealth technology. Stores can and do restrict behavior on their premises (it's private property). They won't allow behavior that they believe is not in their best interests. So if you are going to design products for today's brave new world, you are going to have to avoid unwarranted assumptions like free speech, individual rights, etc...
Linus was saying he was extra careful because he knew the RCU patents were owned by IBM and wanted a clear license to use the patents from IBM. What he doesn't know is there is a prior patent, 4,809,168, that is in the public domain so Linux, or anybody for that matter, doesn't really need a license for RCU. Even SCO could implement RCU without a license from IBM.
Actually, deflation is a little iffy. The Fed is threatening to print money to fend off deflation. How would the Fed print money? Easy, they will buy back Treasury bonds. Since the T bills are "assets", the Fed can exchange "money" for them thus increasing the money supply. The problem is they're Enron style assets. Luckily the goverment is excempt from accounting regulations.
So the coping strategy is to drive cabs like the Russian programmers did for a living until deflation hits the US big time and then we'll be able to undercut the offshore competition and get our jobs back.
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No. Reportedly a program to do exactly that using regular toll passes for the NY State Thruway was canned because there was no way to distinguish between normal drivers and state legislators zooming up to Albany. Legislators don't get tickets you see.
If we're really bound and determined to burn up the worlds oil and energy supply running these things, the thing to do is to have freon connects for hooking up to your home AC lines and eliminate the middle man, your AC cooling air which then cools the PC. Plus your fan is now outside where it won't annoy you because geeks never go outside anyway. Might even save power since I won't have to set the AC so low because the room the PC is in is 10 degrees hotter then the rest of the house.
I suspect that CD drives also have this capability, just that software doesn't bother to use that info. Actually, most software doesn't even appear to check for non-recoverable errors so I suppose it's being consistent.
Since they can't actually sue anybody until they identify the specific code they claim is in infringement, and since it will take about the same amount of time to remove said code no matter when you start to do it, then ignoring SCO until they do identify the code would be a good idea.
Furby Stress Testing. Read and learn.
The real problem was how the cutouts work. Normally, problems like lightning strikes and tree limbs falling on power lines happen all the time and the cutouts work. But the cutouts only work for a certain amount of load. If we have the sucessive failure of two or more nodes, then the amount of overload becomes too much for the successive cutout to be able to contain. and takes out the entire grid.
The big problem is that the power being generated has to match demand almost exactly (which is why turning the power back on takes so long). If some part of the enery generation or distribution cuts out, the other parts of the system can't instantly take up the slack and can become overloaded. The solution is cut out part of the energy demand (local or rolling blackouts). And it has to be done quickly.
I'd have posted this info yesterday if I had actually been able to RTFA.
I believe SCO's real strategy is to appear more stupid than they really are in order to provoke an irrational reaction from the Linux community. After all, if they behaved in a reasonable manner and identified the code in breach of their copyright, Linux developers would just rewrite the offending code and that would be the end of it as far as Linux is concerned. And all SCO would be left with would be to sue a corporation much larger then they are. There must be a method to their madness.
I can see it now. "Sir, you bought those box cutters in Maine. This is Massachusetts and you haven't paid Massachusetts Use Tax on those." Busted!
But IBM is in a position to clairify the facts in this case, something SCO is unwilling to do. But why should IBM be unwilling to do so either. IBM as a unix licensee is in posession of SysV source code. IBM could do a source code compare between the SysV code and Linux and point out any illicitly copied code, or if none found, declare that fact.
The other thing that SCO is complaining about involves a contractual dispute with IBM. There's no reason IBM can't publish the contracts in question so that the public can make decision on the validitiy of SCO's complaints. Waiting for the courts to decide will take years. If IBM is not willing to do this, then we should immediately start replacing IBM's contributions to Linux on general principle. It won't be too hard in some cases. Replacing RCU, which is actually in the public domain, will likely just involve a few comment changes, ie. saying the RCU technique came from a public domain mainframe method rather than from a unix method.
IANAL, but I beleive the damages don't start until specific notification of infringment is made, and that hasn't been done. SCO can't start the meter running on damages until it explicitly identifies what code it believes is infringing on its IP. Since there is no benefit to SCO to not identify the code in question right away, it calls into serious question the validity of their claims.
Ha! I can just see Darl "Pirana" McBride's next bright idea, SCOO, the Santa Cruz Other Operation.
Check out the pics here. Pricey but really cool looking.
Of course you can route one of your internal power connectors out through an unused pci slot opening so you could do this even if you didn't buy the Antec PSU.
On the next system that I build, I going to buy extra molex connectors and redo the PSU wiring harness. There's a lot of spagetti on those PSU and it just gets in the way of a clean wiring solution. Plus I'll have external molex connectors for my external drives.
I'm a toolie from way back with a few contributions of my own, SEARCH, a flat file database query tool (used Boyer-Moore string search to make it real fast), and REACC/QUACC, a command that let you determine whether a R/O CMS disk had changed and needed to be reaccessed.
Also some that never got off the ground. I had this idea to emulating temporary files without doing actual i/o to disks. Couldn't call it virtual i/o since there was already a mainframe i/o method called that. I described it to a friend who said oh yeah, unix has those, they're called file pipes. !!? This is the late 70's or very early 80's when unix was basically unknown at IBM. So a first for unix in that case. File pipes were cool and I was probably the only one who had them on mainframes at that time.
So yeah, other than that, we mainframe guys invented everything first. But we never believed the stories told by those ex Future Systems guys. They claimed they invented everything first.
In other news "SCO has amended its complaint so that it no longer compares Linux to a bicycle and Unix to a luxury car" so I'm happy.
So China will have continued supply of cheap labor as long as they can maintain domestic tranquility somehow. They might have to acquire the odd country (Tibet) or continent (Australia watch out) to do this though.
Don't confuse economic quantity for economic quality. Someone rich once said, "I'd rather earn 1% of the efforts of 100 men then 100% of my own efforts"*. China will have a lot of rich people but not all of them will be rich. Kind of the way the US is going but from the other direction.
* this quote seems to be a favorite of MLM schemes if you google it.
OEMs are finally getting clues. I just noticed that lian-li just came out with a new case, the 6077, that the entire front of the case is 5.5" bays, 9 of them. The on/off switch, led face place and 3 3.5" internal bay takes 2 of those but you can put it in any 2 of the 9 bays. Sweet. I've been looking for this for a long time. You could really load up this sucker with disk drives.
Now if they would just get rid of some of that spagetti on the power supplies, the new SATA drives don't need it anymore.
It used to be a company's business model was largely embodied in its personnel. Knowledge in that form had a lot of inertia in setting up and tranferring, so it prevented anyone else from becoming instant competitors. But that way of doing business is largely incompatible with commodity workers, hence the new model.
An added benefit from the company's point of view is that it solves the problem that figured in Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash, workers taking home the knowledge of their jobs. Now it doesn't matter what you know since it's illegal for you to use that knowledge. Of course it sucks if you are a displaced worker and that is the only knowledge that you have.
This need to be designed using stealth technology. Stores can and do restrict behavior on their premises (it's private property). They won't allow behavior that they believe is not in their best interests. So if you are going to design products for today's brave new world, you are going to have to avoid unwarranted assumptions like free speech, individual rights, etc...
Well, BSD can have RCU too if they base it on the expired patent I mentioned in my other post.
Linus was saying he was extra careful because he knew the RCU patents were owned by IBM and wanted a clear license to use the patents from IBM. What he doesn't know is there is a prior patent, 4,809,168, that is in the public domain so Linux, or anybody for that matter, doesn't really need a license for RCU. Even SCO could implement RCU without a license from IBM.
Actually, deflation is a little iffy. The Fed is threatening to print money to fend off deflation. How would the Fed print money? Easy, they will buy back Treasury bonds. Since the T bills are "assets", the Fed can exchange "money" for them thus increasing the money supply. The problem is they're Enron style assets. Luckily the goverment is excempt from accounting regulations.
So the coping strategy is to drive cabs like the Russian programmers did for a living until deflation hits the US big time and then we'll be able to undercut the offshore competition and get our jobs back.