As someone who has spent several 30+hour sessions editing home video clips into kayaking/skiing films for my friends and I to enjoy, I definately care about quality of the the encoded video. I have several DVDs of stuff that I'd love to be able to share and archive with some decent compression.
I just looked closely at the Firefox icon for the first time and based on the geography of the planet in the icon, it doesn't appear to be Earth.
Granted there could have been political battles on who's smidgin of Earth would get to be by the Red Panda's nose; so the non-earth on the icon could be a good thing.
I and my collegues currently pay the bills writing OSS, though the business-model is a bit different.
We develope content management/online testing/digital repository software from within a university for said university and release it open-source.
How does this work as a business model? Since our stuff is OSS, other universities have taken it up and send us bug reports/patches making the software better for our home institution. As well, because of the open nature of our software, it is easier to get grants from national foundations to ease the financial burden on our home institution.
Gains via OSS:
- I get paid.
- My employer gets good software that is well tested at many institutions.
- The my employer saves on over-all costs due to collaboration with other universities and grants to our developement group.
- My employer gains cred (which is big in academics).
The counter-argument to all of this is that "well, that's academia". That's true, but the function of our software is not all that different from the things needed with the commercial sector where you need software tools to achieve your primary revenue stream. Those tools are where OSS developement can pay programmers. The biggest hurdle is getting that sort of thing started as you generally need to do it from the inside of a company in order to get paid for it.
What really gets money into the economy? Give money to poor people who are going to spend it within a few months (or days) on basic necessities. Giving tax breaks to the rich just gives them more money to hoard.
If you get something that normally comes in a cheap plastic, but they make a nice shiny metal one. Most people might not care, but a lot of geeks will like the nice shiny metal one.
I found heaven in a stainless steel/translucent-blue Petzl coffee mug. None other compares with the durability and style (or the wide base to keep it upright even when sliding the car sideways around a turn). I got this in an outdoors store (Petzl makes climbing equipment), but every geek who has seen it is quite impressed.
I especially like the Linux-based PCI Firewall. Now even if you have to have the main processor running Micro$oft products, your other hardware can run its own os. Too bad its so pricey, though I guess $300-$400 is not bad for a computer on a PCI card.
AdBlock for MozillaFirebird will block Flash ads as well as images from urls that match one of your search strings. This works REALLY well, I haven't seen an advertizement in over a month now that I have my filters all set up.
This is what I've been looking for for a long time. The only problem is the 20GB limit -- since I ripped my CD collection into 50GB of MP3s. What size drive is in the unit, e.g. can it be pulled out and replaced with a 80GB drive?
I use Firebird/Thunderbird exlusively as well, but I have seen a few problems:
- Clicking on links in Thunderbird doesn't send them to a broswer on *nix systems (OS X included).
- For some reason Firebird sometimes "captures" my mouse-click in OS X and forces me to log out to use the mouse again. Kinda strange. I'm trying to figure out a pattern, but its something with right-clicking, then hitting the keyboard or somethign.
Anyway, I love these two, but they still need a little work. The plugin system that they use seem like it should be pretty good for preventing feature-creep from killing them. Default: nice and stripped down, 1-click install of any additional features. Pretty nice if you ask me.
The point works better for companies (at least at first). Look for a small town with a nice college or university in it to provide some new graduates to pick from for entry-level positions, move your company there and offer lower pay, but also advertise the lower cost of living. This is good for the town (more decent jobs), good for the company (cheaper labor), and good for the employees (nice safe environment for kids, cheaper bigger houses). Granted some urbanophiles (that really should be a word) would hate to live in the sticks, but many (myself included) find this sort of thing ideal. Just a thought.
Well, if you look at SourceForge, they set up a donation system for the site as a whole as well as individual projects. I'm not sure how much its being used so far, but this is definately a step in the right direction. Its opt-in for projects too, so no one is forcing you to take money.
I haven't tried yet, but if you could attach a comment to your donation like "Here's $50, could you hurry up with a fix for XXX." that might be helpful. Or there could be something along the lines of TransGaming's WineX game voting. As you donate more, you could get more votes to use in the feature request tracker. Various things like this could easily allow developers to easily get a handle on what features people want and are willing to pay for. Things like "Nice User Interface".;-)
I think that it is probably the power difference that is the crux of the matter. This is probably why statutory rape laws (generally) say the the person must be of a certain age OR that both persons are within X (i've seen 2) years of age. Two 13 year olds messing around is much less likely to result in one of them getting warped interpretations of authority than sex with an adult. Likewise, on the harm side, the a child doesn't know what will hurt, and those two teenagers (assuming both are of similar experience) are much less likely to rush into something hurtful than a pedophile who will rush to get his kicks off at the expense of the child.
Pregnacy would be quite harmful to a child, caused forcably or otherwise, but that is not the whole of of the sexuality that is taboo and the threat of which can be reduced greatly through education.
And just when, in the last 2 millenia or so, has it ever been "acceptable" to be, say, a Christian? It's pretty much been an uphill battle for us since day one.
Well, in Europe and the Americas (since the arrival of Europeans) there was this little 1500 period in the past 2 millenia where "Christian" was the correct answer when asked about anything religious. Maybe in intellectual circles agnostic is prefered (for decades at most), but I for one was ostracized as a child for not being Christian. Yes, I was born and raised in central Pennsylvania, but Christian was most definately the ONLY acceptable answer.
Likewise, there have been several happy periods refered to by the institution of various Inquisitions. These varied in "strictness" by time and location, however answering anything other than "Christian" to a Spanish Inquisitor was punishable by torture -- until you changed your mind or died. Many Muslems, Jews, and others perished in this way.
Yes, Christians had it hard for that first few hundred years, but after they got rolling it really wasn't an uphill battle.
Re:The first 15 posts on this are things you cant
on
What You Can't Say
·
· Score: 1
Webster's dictionary isn't all that helpful on "meta", but in the library world at least, the meta in meta-data refers to data that is descriptive.
i.e. Data: An image Meta-data: Cataloguing number, title, author, etc.
Meta-data is data. What's special is that it describes other data.
In this scenario, meta-meta-data might be a definition of the cataloguing schema used.
I realize that this isn't the point of your post, but I've just spent several months working with librarians and figured I'd throw this out there.:-)
Well, my car (an old Integra) only has the vanity mirror on the passenger side. Maybe there isn't a law to cause this, but it is a nice safety feature for when I let my girlfriend borrow the car.:-)
You could reasonably call me a green (I hope to be doing my graduate study next year developing neural-network style electrical micro-grids to integrate renewable wind, solar, and biomass power with large-scale power plants) and yes, I do believe in global warming. At least, I'd rather spend more and end up with "overly clean" air/water than guess wrong and be fsked and be unable to go outside (a la Jetsons). That all said, nuclear is pretty decent. Small, safe, reactors can work great, and the key thing is the localization of waste as the parent mentioned. Even though nuclear waste is really nasty, it is (compared to smoke) really easy to keep track of.
The parent was a bit off on the viability of wind and solar however. The chemical waste associated with photovoltaics is in the form of solvants used in manufacturing and isn't all that bad. Not perfect, but we're not dumping tons of waste into rivers to make PV cells. If you live in an area with decent sun, a household solar array can repay its cost by reduced electric bills in about 7 years. After that, electricity IS free.
In one widely-publicized study reported in 1989, for example, a neutral committee of three biologists found that a single nuclear power plant, the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in California, killed some 21 tons of fish each year, including "several billion" fish larvae [9].
And a study at a single Florida coal-fired power plant with four smokestacks recorded an estimated 3,000 deaths in a single evening during a fall migration [7].
[7] "Bird Casualties at a Central Florida Power Plant," Maehr, D. S., et al., Florida Field Naturalist, 11:45-49, 1983. Florida Ornithological Society. [9] "Committee Finds Massive Sea Life Kills from San Onofre," Groundswell, Vol. 11, No. 2&3, Autumn, 1989. Nuclear Information and Resource Service, Washington, D.C.
In the Altamont Pass Wind Resource Area (which has some 7,000 wind turbines), a two-year study found 182 dead birds, of which 119 were raptors. The study attributed 55 percent of raptor deaths to collisions with turbines, eight percent to electrocutions from power lines, 11 percent to collisions with wires, and 26 percent to unknown causes [4].
The inital posted article says:
an estimated 22,000 birds have died......after flying into the spinning blades of the wind turbines.
Where was the posted article getting its data? 52 deaths per year by collision is A LOT less than the 1100 per year mentioned in the article. Kinda shifts things a bit...
I don't have any numbers, but I grew up around a lot of Menonite farms and I've seen a number of close calls between Menonite walkers, bikers, and buggies and cars wizzing down the road. I'm sure that a few of thier people are hit each year at least nation-wide.
Don't forget, just about the whole of the world of OSS is now availible on a Mac. I just opened up Fink Commander and it shows 1136 apps ready for install. All Free, all just a (double) click away.
I'm currently running Gaim, Umbrello (a UML modeling tool), wget, mysql, cvs, xmms, tetex, and a host of other CLI and X based apps. So far it seems as if it runs in Linux, it'll run on a Mac. Plus, with the Mac you can use various specialized AV apps if that is your deal.
I've never looked for engineering apps, but if a *nix version was made, it would work on a mac, as well as various x86, sparc, etc workstations. This is a pretty huge advantage as the underlying architecture becomes less important if you have a unix-like environment and X. Heck, most of this stuff will run on Windows under Cygwin. For any app it could be One Source to rule them all, One Source to Free them, from the shadows of architecture dependence.
I was just given a PowerBook with an iSight, any leads on OSS for connecting to/using the iSight? All I could find are iChat AV and a few $50 "shareware" programs. Something that is scriptable/pluggable would be great. Or drivers for any video capture software... This thing has got to be useful for more than just video conferencing.
<rant> Wow. I've been using Linux for the past 3 years and I completely forgot about the whole concept of shareware. Its sort of like the bastard child of OSS, trying to capitalize on the free as in beer, but then sticking you in the back 30 days later on that and never giving you the free as in speech bit. Does anyone know if shareware actually generates much revenue, or are they all just people hoping for a break? </rant>
Slashdot Mirror
"even large companies are not above a little fraud now and then."
Enron anyone?
As someone who has spent several 30+hour sessions editing home video clips into kayaking/skiing films for my friends and I to enjoy, I definately care about quality of the the encoded video. I have several DVDs of stuff that I'd love to be able to share and archive with some decent compression.
I just looked closely at the Firefox icon for the first time and based on the geography of the planet in the icon, it doesn't appear to be Earth.
Granted there could have been political battles on who's smidgin of Earth would get to be by the Red Panda's nose; so the non-earth on the icon could be a good thing.
Anyway, as far as I can tell, its not the Earth.
I and my collegues currently pay the bills writing OSS, though the business-model is a bit different.
We develope content management/online testing/digital repository software from within a university for said university and release it open-source.
How does this work as a business model? Since our stuff is OSS, other universities have taken it up and send us bug reports/patches making the software better for our home institution. As well, because of the open nature of our software, it is easier to get grants from national foundations to ease the financial burden on our home institution.
Gains via OSS:
- I get paid.
- My employer gets good software that is well tested at many institutions.
- The my employer saves on over-all costs due to collaboration with other universities and grants to our developement group.
- My employer gains cred (which is big in academics).
The counter-argument to all of this is that "well, that's academia". That's true, but the function of our software is not all that different from the things needed with the commercial sector where you need software tools to achieve your primary revenue stream. Those tools are where OSS developement can pay programmers. The biggest hurdle is getting that sort of thing started as you generally need to do it from the inside of a company in order to get paid for it.
What really gets money into the economy? Give money to poor people who are going to spend it within a few months (or days) on basic necessities. Giving tax breaks to the rich just gives them more money to hoard.
If you get something that normally comes in a cheap plastic, but they make a nice shiny metal one. Most people might not care, but a lot of geeks will like the nice shiny metal one.
I found heaven in a stainless steel/translucent-blue Petzl coffee mug. None other compares with the durability and style (or the wide base to keep it upright even when sliding the car sideways around a turn). I got this in an outdoors store (Petzl makes climbing equipment), but every geek who has seen it is quite impressed.
I especially like the Linux-based PCI Firewall. Now even if you have to have the main processor running Micro$oft products, your other hardware can run its own os. Too bad its so pricey, though I guess $300-$400 is not bad for a computer on a PCI card.
AdBlock for MozillaFirebird will block Flash ads as well as images from urls that match one of your search strings. This works REALLY well, I haven't seen an advertizement in over a month now that I have my filters all set up.
This is what I've been looking for for a long time. The only problem is the 20GB limit -- since I ripped my CD collection into 50GB of MP3s. What size drive is in the unit, e.g. can it be pulled out and replaced with a 80GB drive?
Maybe it could put the article text at the bottom of the page.
;-)
Unfortunatly it wouldn't really change the number of people who read the articles.
Face it though, it happens. :-) Might as well put the sig there too instead of accumulating them in a heap at the bottom.
I use Firebird/Thunderbird exlusively as well, but I have seen a few problems:
- Clicking on links in Thunderbird doesn't send them to a broswer on *nix systems (OS X included).
- For some reason Firebird sometimes "captures" my mouse-click in OS X and forces me to log out to use the mouse again. Kinda strange. I'm trying to figure out a pattern, but its something with right-clicking, then hitting the keyboard or somethign.
Anyway, I love these two, but they still need a little work. The plugin system that they use seem like it should be pretty good for preventing feature-creep from killing them. Default: nice and stripped down, 1-click install of any additional features. Pretty nice if you ask me.
The point works better for companies (at least at first). Look for a small town with a nice college or university in it to provide some new graduates to pick from for entry-level positions, move your company there and offer lower pay, but also advertise the lower cost of living. This is good for the town (more decent jobs), good for the company (cheaper labor), and good for the employees (nice safe environment for kids, cheaper bigger houses). Granted some urbanophiles (that really should be a word) would hate to live in the sticks, but many (myself included) find this sort of thing ideal. Just a thought.
Well, if you look at SourceForge, they set up a donation system for the site as a whole as well as individual projects. I'm not sure how much its being used so far, but this is definately a step in the right direction. Its opt-in for projects too, so no one is forcing you to take money.
;-)
I haven't tried yet, but if you could attach a comment to your donation like "Here's $50, could you hurry up with a fix for XXX." that might be helpful. Or there could be something along the lines of TransGaming's WineX game voting. As you donate more, you could get more votes to use in the feature request tracker. Various things like this could easily allow developers to easily get a handle on what features people want and are willing to pay for. Things like "Nice User Interface".
I think that it is probably the power difference that is the crux of the matter. This is probably why statutory rape laws (generally) say the the person must be of a certain age OR that both persons are within X (i've seen 2) years of age. Two 13 year olds messing around is much less likely to result in one of them getting warped interpretations of authority than sex with an adult. Likewise, on the harm side, the a child doesn't know what will hurt, and those two teenagers (assuming both are of similar experience) are much less likely to rush into something hurtful than a pedophile who will rush to get his kicks off at the expense of the child.
Pregnacy would be quite harmful to a child, caused forcably or otherwise, but that is not the whole of of the sexuality that is taboo and the threat of which can be reduced greatly through education.
And just when, in the last 2 millenia or so, has it ever been "acceptable" to be, say, a Christian? It's pretty much been an uphill battle for us since day one.
Well, in Europe and the Americas (since the arrival of Europeans) there was this little 1500 period in the past 2 millenia where "Christian" was the correct answer when asked about anything religious. Maybe in intellectual circles agnostic is prefered (for decades at most), but I for one was ostracized as a child for not being Christian. Yes, I was born and raised in central Pennsylvania, but Christian was most definately the ONLY acceptable answer.
Likewise, there have been several happy periods refered to by the institution of various Inquisitions. These varied in "strictness" by time and location, however answering anything other than "Christian" to a Spanish Inquisitor was punishable by torture -- until you changed your mind or died. Many Muslems, Jews, and others perished in this way.
Yes, Christians had it hard for that first few hundred years, but after they got rolling it really wasn't an uphill battle.
Webster's dictionary isn't all that helpful on "meta", but in the library world at least, the meta in meta-data refers to data that is descriptive.
:-)
i.e.
Data: An image
Meta-data: Cataloguing number, title, author, etc.
Meta-data is data. What's special is that it describes other data.
In this scenario, meta-meta-data might be a definition of the cataloguing schema used.
I realize that this isn't the point of your post, but I've just spent several months working with librarians and figured I'd throw this out there.
Adam
Well, my car (an old Integra) only has the vanity mirror on the passenger side. Maybe there isn't a law to cause this, but it is a nice safety feature for when I let my girlfriend borrow the car. :-)
The shareware constitutes very significant income...
Sounds good then. If it didn't, it would be a pity that it is closed source as well as not putting food on the table.
You could reasonably call me a green (I hope to be doing my graduate study next year developing neural-network style electrical micro-grids to integrate renewable wind, solar, and biomass power with large-scale power plants) and yes, I do believe in global warming. At least, I'd rather spend more and end up with "overly clean" air/water than guess wrong and be fsked and be unable to go outside (a la Jetsons). That all said, nuclear is pretty decent. Small, safe, reactors can work great, and the key thing is the localization of waste as the parent mentioned. Even though nuclear waste is really nasty, it is (compared to smoke) really easy to keep track of.
The parent was a bit off on the viability of wind and solar however. The chemical waste associated with photovoltaics is in the form of solvants used in manufacturing and isn't all that bad. Not perfect, but we're not dumping tons of waste into rivers to make PV cells. If you live in an area with decent sun, a household solar array can repay its cost by reduced electric bills in about 7 years. After that, electricity IS free.
All from this article.
In one widely-publicized study reported in
1989, for example, a neutral committee of three biologists found that a
single nuclear power plant, the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in
California, killed some 21 tons of fish each year, including "several
billion" fish larvae [9].
And a study at a single Florida coal-fired power
plant with four smokestacks recorded an estimated 3,000 deaths in a
single evening during a fall migration [7].
[7] "Bird Casualties at a Central Florida Power Plant," Maehr, D. S., et
al., Florida Field Naturalist, 11:45-49, 1983. Florida Ornithological
Society.
[9] "Committee Finds Massive Sea Life Kills from San Onofre,"
Groundswell, Vol. 11, No. 2&3, Autumn, 1989. Nuclear Information and
Resource Service, Washington, D.C.
Wind seems pretty safe.
Another bit from that article:
...after flying into the spinning blades of the wind turbines.
In the Altamont Pass Wind Resource Area (which has some 7,000 wind
turbines), a two-year study found 182 dead birds, of which 119 were
raptors. The study attributed 55 percent of raptor deaths to collisions
with turbines, eight percent to electrocutions from power lines, 11
percent to collisions with wires, and 26 percent to unknown causes [4].
The inital posted article says:
an estimated 22,000 birds have died...
Where was the posted article getting its data? 52 deaths per year by collision is A LOT less than the 1100 per year mentioned in the article. Kinda shifts things a bit...
I don't have any numbers, but I grew up around a lot of Menonite farms and I've seen a number of close calls between Menonite walkers, bikers, and buggies and cars wizzing down the road. I'm sure that a few of thier people are hit each year at least nation-wide.
Don't forget, just about the whole of the world of OSS is now availible on a Mac. I just opened up Fink Commander and it shows 1136 apps ready for install. All Free, all just a (double) click away.
I'm currently running Gaim, Umbrello (a UML modeling tool), wget, mysql, cvs, xmms, tetex, and a host of other CLI and X based apps. So far it seems as if it runs in Linux, it'll run on a Mac. Plus, with the Mac you can use various specialized AV apps if that is your deal.
I've never looked for engineering apps, but if a *nix version was made, it would work on a mac, as well as various x86, sparc, etc workstations. This is a pretty huge advantage as the underlying architecture becomes less important if you have a unix-like environment and X. Heck, most of this stuff will run on Windows under Cygwin. For any app it could be One Source to rule them all, One Source to Free them, from the shadows of architecture dependence.
I was just given a PowerBook with an iSight, any leads on OSS for connecting to/using the iSight? All I could find are iChat AV and a few $50 "shareware" programs. Something that is scriptable/pluggable would be great. Or drivers for any video capture software... This thing has got to be useful for more than just video conferencing.
<rant>
Wow. I've been using Linux for the past 3 years and I completely forgot about the whole concept of shareware. Its sort of like the bastard child of OSS, trying to capitalize on the free as in beer, but then sticking you in the back 30 days later on that and never giving you the free as in speech bit. Does anyone know if shareware actually generates much revenue, or are they all just people hoping for a break?
</rant>