How much of our tax money is being used for this nonsense? Is the loser going to be made to reimburse the court system? If so, will it really cover all the costs?
Or is Red Hat saving the people money by getting this into the court system, so the FTC and SEC don't have to?
Good point. Why shouldn't commercial companies come out with their own ad-driven free software! Take a BSD-licensed app and stick a Ford logo on it, and Joe Sixpack could finally relate! GM and Toyota could come out with competing products for Joe 30-pack and Joe Sapporo.
You could go on and on with this -- but giving away ad-plastered software could put these big names squarely in front of the public. I reinstall Windows (or install Linux) on every office computer I get in primarily to get rid of the advertising!
On the About page of the Gentoo site, Larry the Cow reveals his frustrations with other Linux distros. Hmm, this reminds me of the Gateway commercials running a little while ago where Ted Wiatt talks to a Holstein heifer with a male voice.
I dunno, but I gotta wonder if these are examples indicative of a common psycho-sexual trend among computer-using bovines...
On the About page of the Gentoo site, Larry the Cow reveals his frustrations with other Linux distros. Hmm, this reminds me of the Gateway commercials running a little while ago where Ted Wiatt talks to a Holstein heifer with a male voice.
I dunno, but I gotta wonder if these are examples indicative of a common psycho-sexual trend among computer-using bovines...
And how many support folks among us have had to take time to educate our people (no, I didn't do anything to your computer, it's just an ad, relax already!). Multiply your hours by number of support techs in the world. Multiply by average wage plus 15% taxes and overhead.
I don't believe individuals should be the plaintiffs in this suit, as at least they learned something valuable -- to research before you click. Businesses were the real victim here.
btw, I wasted 15 minutes of my time posting this. good thing I'm on salary -- JC
When we (a small Medical headquarters unit) deployed we left our Windows boxes home. Personnel and Supply used Burroughs machines (some type of UNIX) to manage our stuff. These 386's were pretty tough and stood a lot more abuse than the crappy clones we left behind, except for going through a lot of floppy drives 'cause people wouldn't put the report disks in baggies like we told them. And had to keep blowing the sand out of everything.
Anyway, point is that we did just fine with these boxes -- managing people and supplies and mail, doing word processing and spreadsheets -- and when we got back to Texas I used it to get a Compuserve account.
The Japanese "donated" a bunch of new Windows machines during Desert Shield in lieu "real" military support (I don't blame 'em). The Colonel allocated himself the one for our unit and spent every evening mastering Solitaire and Minesweeper. This was a valuable asset in that it kept his mind occupied with something other than conjuring up new busy-work for us.
There's no denying that the web has plenty of bad abuses of HTML. (Many of which would be erased if Geocities and other sites would just clean out their inactive accounts).
Yeah, I've got a website that I lost the password to edit it several junky hard drives ago. I know, that did teach me that backing up my personal stuff was important too! Anyway, it was on Geocities and the management there is unresponsive to my requests to supply me a password or take it down.
Wouldn't be so bad if it didn't contain my badly outdated resume! The info on the resume is the only proof that the website was mine. I told them they were holding my information hostage, but you know they're just too busy to bother with an old Access 2.0 data manager. Wish I had put something a little scarier in my Curriculum Vitae!
"Computers do exactly what they're told, not necessarily what you want them to do."
That's sorta true, but luser input is rarely in assembly code. So programmer has to make assumptions on howe that input is interpreted. When learning BASIC on my VIC 20 (many moons ago) I never understood the logic that when I'd tell it to PRINT it would display the string on the screen, and not output to the printer. The programmer's definition of the word "print" wasn't the same as mine.
I've been hoping this technology would reach the consumer market (who 'da thunk Coleman would be the one?). Been reading about this in Mother Earth News for years.
Yes, you could produce your own hydrogen quite easily from electricity and water. The problem here is to produce pure hydrogen without any residual oxygen left in the line or holding tank *very dangerous*. So don't try this at home without researching it! A proper setup would burn off the residual oxygen in the hydrogen line using (guess what) another fuel cell. Purified hydrogen can be stored at moderate pressure in inspected propane tanks -- though you go through a lot of tanks as the energy per pound is quite low.
Purify the oxygen output using another fuel cell, and you have medically pure oxygen! Wouldn't those medical supply companies hate to see people producing their own!
So what I'm really waiting for to hit the mass market is a safe inexpensive hydrogen producing machine. It would make storing electrical energy cheap for windmill generators or pv cells.
Some of the less informed here think you could produce electricity from water itself. Water doesn't contain the potential for producing power (caveat follows) -- you have to put in power before you can take it back! My apologies to those already using the trace amounts of H3 (heavy water) to power the Mr. Fusion on their DeLoreans.
And yes, you could run a fuel cell on methane. It takes an extra step and another precious metal (iridium, palladium? I forgot) in addition to the platinum layer. On the output, it generates CO2 in addition to water vapor. Not quite as clean as pure hydrogen, but who wouldn't want to run their computer on chickens**t gas!
A pig farmer in Africa produced methane from all the manure and (using conventional generators) supplied all the electricity for his farm and home. Biggest advantage though was the cleanliness of his farm -- no stink, almost no flies! I'd love to see (and smell) a lot more farms use this technology.
Methane's also very abundant in the form of hydrides underneath the ocean. Between that and the farms methane could supplant most of the oil in our economy. Potential for world change abounds.
I think the courts ought to charge the loser of these patent suits triple the cost of the judge, bailiff, overhead, etc. and have the residual profit go back to the taxpayers. The people involved in these disputes are tying up our courts' resources that could be used for real problems.
Of course, if the patent process actually worked for us I probably would have a different opinion.
I took a job teaching an intro to computers class to adults. I'm not a professional teacher, but have been programming, hacking, and learning computers since the mid-80's.
The school district couldn't find any teachers that would teach this class as up here in Maine there just weren't that many around that knew more about computers than Yahoo! chat. And the IT guys used blockware on the computers (which was in an elementary school), that I would have to hack and disable on each machine so my students would be able to use Wordpad and Paint instead of Reader Rabbit and Oregon Trail.
Like in another article I read here, I received no books, no course outline, nothing from the administration on how I should conduct my class. Like I said, I'm not a professional teacher so this was very difficult to come up with my own course from scratch, and it showed in the (lack of) quality in my teaching.
Some of my students received some value for their money, but for the most part, I don't feel as if I succeeded. I could'a been great! but without any support, it was predestined that I ended up just shy of mediocre.
I can just imagine what its like to be teaching to kids without this support. Not a job for me! Unless you just want me to guide your kid through the intricacies of Mario Teaches Typing.
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How much of our tax money is being used for this nonsense? Is the loser going to be made to reimburse the court system? If so, will it really cover all the costs? Or is Red Hat saving the people money by getting this into the court system, so the FTC and SEC don't have to?
What we need to do hear folks is educate ourselves.
Couldn't agree more.
Good point. Why shouldn't commercial companies come out with their own ad-driven free software! Take a BSD-licensed app and stick a Ford logo on it, and Joe Sixpack could finally relate! GM and Toyota could come out with competing products for Joe 30-pack and Joe Sapporo. You could go on and on with this -- but giving away ad-plastered software could put these big names squarely in front of the public. I reinstall Windows (or install Linux) on every office computer I get in primarily to get rid of the advertising!
darned tabbed browsing! guess I gotta pay attention to which story I'm posting to. Sorry!
On the About page of the Gentoo site, Larry the Cow reveals his frustrations with other Linux distros. Hmm, this reminds me of the Gateway commercials running a little while ago where Ted Wiatt talks to a Holstein heifer with a male voice.
...
I dunno, but I gotta wonder if these are examples indicative of a common psycho-sexual trend among computer-using bovines
On the About page of the Gentoo site, Larry the Cow reveals his frustrations with other Linux distros. Hmm, this reminds me of the Gateway commercials running a little while ago where Ted Wiatt talks to a Holstein heifer with a male voice.
I dunno, but I gotta wonder if these are examples indicative of a common psycho-sexual trend among computer-using bovines ...
And how many support folks among us have had to take time to educate our people (no, I didn't do anything to your computer, it's just an ad, relax already!). Multiply your hours by number of support techs in the world. Multiply by average wage plus 15% taxes and overhead.
I don't believe individuals should be the plaintiffs in this suit, as at least they learned something valuable -- to research before you click. Businesses were the real victim here.
btw, I wasted 15 minutes of my time posting this. good thing I'm on salary -- JC
When we (a small Medical headquarters unit) deployed we left our Windows boxes home. Personnel and Supply used Burroughs machines (some type of UNIX) to manage our stuff. These 386's were pretty tough and stood a lot more abuse than the crappy clones we left behind, except for going through a lot of floppy drives 'cause people wouldn't put the report disks in baggies like we told them. And had to keep blowing the sand out of everything. Anyway, point is that we did just fine with these boxes -- managing people and supplies and mail, doing word processing and spreadsheets -- and when we got back to Texas I used it to get a Compuserve account. The Japanese "donated" a bunch of new Windows machines during Desert Shield in lieu "real" military support (I don't blame 'em). The Colonel allocated himself the one for our unit and spent every evening mastering Solitaire and Minesweeper. This was a valuable asset in that it kept his mind occupied with something other than conjuring up new busy-work for us.
There's no denying that the web has plenty of bad abuses of HTML. (Many of which would be erased if Geocities and other sites would just clean out their inactive accounts).
Yeah, I've got a website that I lost the password to edit it several junky hard drives ago. I know, that did teach me that backing up my personal stuff was important too! Anyway, it was on Geocities and the management there is unresponsive to my requests to supply me a password or take it down.
Wouldn't be so bad if it didn't contain my badly outdated resume! The info on the resume is the only proof that the website was mine. I told them they were holding my information hostage, but you know they're just too busy to bother with an old Access 2.0 data manager. Wish I had put something a little scarier in my Curriculum Vitae!
Anyone else have a story like this?
That's sorta true, but luser input is rarely in assembly code. So programmer has to make assumptions on howe that input is interpreted. When learning BASIC on my VIC 20 (many moons ago) I never understood the logic that when I'd tell it to PRINT it would display the string on the screen, and not output to the printer. The programmer's definition of the word "print" wasn't the same as mine.
I've been hoping this technology would reach the consumer market (who 'da thunk Coleman would be the one?). Been reading about this in Mother Earth News for years.
Yes, you could produce your own hydrogen quite easily from electricity and water. The problem here is to produce pure hydrogen without any residual oxygen left in the line or holding tank *very dangerous*. So don't try this at home without researching it! A proper setup would burn off the residual oxygen in the hydrogen line using (guess what) another fuel cell. Purified hydrogen can be stored at moderate pressure in inspected propane tanks -- though you go through a lot of tanks as the energy per pound is quite low.
Purify the oxygen output using another fuel cell, and you have medically pure oxygen! Wouldn't those medical supply companies hate to see people producing their own!
So what I'm really waiting for to hit the mass market is a safe inexpensive hydrogen producing machine. It would make storing electrical energy cheap for windmill generators or pv cells.
Some of the less informed here think you could produce electricity from water itself. Water doesn't contain the potential for producing power (caveat follows) -- you have to put in power before you can take it back! My apologies to those already using the trace amounts of H3 (heavy water) to power the Mr. Fusion on their DeLoreans.
And yes, you could run a fuel cell on methane. It takes an extra step and another precious metal (iridium, palladium? I forgot) in addition to the platinum layer. On the output, it generates CO2 in addition to water vapor. Not quite as clean as pure hydrogen, but who wouldn't want to run their computer on chickens**t gas!
A pig farmer in Africa produced methane from all the manure and (using conventional generators) supplied all the electricity for his farm and home. Biggest advantage though was the cleanliness of his farm -- no stink, almost no flies! I'd love to see (and smell) a lot more farms use this technology.
Methane's also very abundant in the form of hydrides underneath the ocean. Between that and the farms methane could supplant most of the oil in our economy. Potential for world change abounds.
I think the courts ought to charge the loser of these patent suits triple the cost of the judge, bailiff, overhead, etc. and have the residual profit go back to the taxpayers. The people involved in these disputes are tying up our courts' resources that could be used for real problems.
Of course, if the patent process actually worked for us I probably would have a different opinion.
I took a job teaching an intro to computers class to adults. I'm not a professional teacher, but have been programming, hacking, and learning computers since the mid-80's.
The school district couldn't find any teachers that would teach this class as up here in Maine there just weren't that many around that knew more about computers than Yahoo! chat. And the IT guys used blockware on the computers (which was in an elementary school), that I would have to hack and disable on each machine so my students would be able to use Wordpad and Paint instead of Reader Rabbit and Oregon Trail.
Like in another article I read here, I received no books, no course outline, nothing from the administration on how I should conduct my class. Like I said, I'm not a professional teacher so this was very difficult to come up with my own course from scratch, and it showed in the (lack of) quality in my teaching.
Some of my students received some value for their money, but for the most part, I don't feel as if I succeeded. I could'a been great! but without any support, it was predestined that I ended up just shy of mediocre.
I can just imagine what its like to be teaching to kids without this support. Not a job for me! Unless you just want me to guide your kid through the intricacies of Mario Teaches Typing.