I think it's a great idea, and you should go forward full steam ahead.
Seems like the key is the database. Keep that open and if there are real security issues, a darn good competing project will spring up (with more security) from the same folk who pooh-poohed your initial project. And that is EXACTLY what you and the community need.
Remember what happend with CD signature databases (CDDB) -- it was well populated, but the owner of the data was... well... the OWNER.
Keep it open, and this project won't fail -- it'll morph into three others.
Sure, Engineers could use liberal-arts educations, aquire social skills, and move up because of them. But would that HELP us innovate? This guy doesn't know. I don't know. Nobody does. Huge innovations made by American engineers may have been made BECAUSE they had no lives, had no outlets, couldn't see the much bigger picture, had no joy in their lives through interactions. If Dilbert drinks from the cup of management, he LOSES the knack. Is that true? This guy doesn't know.
Meanwhile, saying we can send out our lower work, while keeping the innovation part strikes me as like saying, "who cares if our dairies move all milk production to Canada. We are the world's best at producing CREAM. We'll keep the cream and forget about all the lost milk work." If the cows are gone, Mister, how are we gonna make cream?
We'd be forced to buy milk from Canada, that's how.
And if we send our small engineering jobs to foreign parts, we loose our ability to make engineers, because it's in the milk work where we find the engineers to make the cream.
I haven't used gnome 2.6, but I've used previous Gnomes and Nautilus. I know this makes me a Ludite, but what I realy want is TWM.
So while I know what we need to land Gnome on the usual corporate and home desktops is integrated file browsers and clickable devices and such, I'd really like to be able to very, very quickly turn all that off, but have it so my brother-in-law can log into my box and have all that stuff.
Maybe a "behavior" browser (one with plugable pages for any app, one with a hand-holding look that does NOT remind people of registry editing, one with a really obvious, friendly, lasting icon) should be a prime-focus part of the next release? Maybe a browser with templates at the front, then deeper in, individual behavior changes.
Windows (the versions I've used) doesn't make changing the way the desktop works all that easy. There are a couple of different places you have to click, you can't change a huge amount, and the places to make changes move from version to version.
What if a major design aspect of gnome was "All behavior, where there IS an alternative, must be configurable. The one thing you cannot turn off, is the _Configure_ icon."
That would make me MUCH more comfortable with whistles and bells and would encourage me to try stuff. Would it be a good aspect for conversion users from Windows, Mac or KDE?
Can the Gnome guys do a nice job on such a thing fairly easily? Could we all (even those who, like me, want a truely minimal desktop) stand one constant part of the interface, the behavior-browser, which would always be there?
My electric usage this month was 564 kWh. 564 kWh means that, on average, I use 18 kWh per day.
If I can store power efficiently, then my solar cells need to generate 18 kWh per day, in about 10 hours of nice, bright sunlight. That's 1800 watts at any given time. At $2/watt, that's $3600 for the array (ignore the storage costs for now).
My electric bill for that month was $55.74, so I get payback in a little more than 5 years.
The problem is, I've seen different numbers for panels. Modules for consumers cost $5.85 per watt, these days.
And at that rate, my scenerio costs $10,500, and the payoff time is now 15 years. If I invest that money, and get a 7% rate of return on it, I make more money by PAYING my electric bill ($61.25 per month income, $55.74 payout). It's more profitable for me NOT to install the cells.
The numbers quoted in the previous post for cost drop by growth indicate that (I'd love to see how the math for this is done, properly, but my aproximation follows) those $2 cells will cost $.75 in 2010. Excellent!
But the cost of panels is not all CELLS, and has stayed pretty darn stable. In the past three years, panel cost has only come down a few percent. It went UP some months, too. So we can expect the panels to be cheaper, but not by NEARLY that much.
And in the above I've ignored storage inefficiencies, and support hardware and battery costs.
In other words, I don't think the picture is so rosey.
Huh? Looks very mixed to me. looking at just a few examples, while it seems consistently better than perl (except in regexp, where perl is very fast), it's not up to java par.
Looks like a minor speed increase to me.
But then, I'm looking at a shootout from 2001. Have things changed?
Yeah, the other reply to this already answers your query -- it's gotta be aid to an enemy.
However, you might make a case that since we're at war, any "attack" on our institutions is aid to our enemy.
Pity we're not even really at war. We've got no declaration. What a messed up time we live in (since WWI) militarilegally speaking.
But it really cries out for a "treason"-ish crme, doesn't it? Is it a high-crime, even? Shouldn't knowingly disenfranchizing voters en-mass be a hanging offence?
It's the nature of digital to resist decay because the difference between a one and a zero is BIG. That makes it hard for an individual bit to change state from a one to a zero or vice-versa.
Analog tapes, on the other hand, are in flux -- they change while you stare at them, only it's hard for you to perceive the change. For instance, even if there was no signal degredation, we can bet your tapes have stretched, as you played them, and in the boxes they were stored in, and that therefore the pitch of your grandfather's voice has changed.
They've probably drooped on the reels a little, and therefore his voice goes up and down, but so little that you wouldn't notice.
If you're recording in a non-lossy digital format, you're safe from that. Everything will be pitch perfect, but in the unlikely (at any given time) and yet innevitable (over a long time) event that bits change in your digital form, you'll gets some pops, as bits change in random positions.
In an eight-bit sample-size example: 10101010 might change to a 10101011 or a 11101010 -- the former would be inperceptable, but the other would be a big smack on the sound.
The real problem here is not the degradation of the non-lossy copy of your grandfather's voice, it's the sector boundaries, the directory of the disk -- It's the stuff that lets your computer FIND the data and interpret the data. If you get a bad sector on the disk, the data as sound is essentially still perfectly good. But most systems would give up on a disk with an important bad sector.
What we need is a way to write bit-streams to CD or some other medium where we know the medium will be readable AS BITS in 20 years. Sectors aren't important if the system is simple and the player is smart -- allowing you access to the data even though the stuff describing where it is is damaged.
Most software for reading (ie. OS software) just give up. Most lossy systems don't gracefully handle bad data in their files. Most storage systems don't store the data redundantly (you'd need three copies of a given bit, or a mathematical checksum which allows you to compute bits based on three factors to recover data as it drops out). Most media formats have short life-spans.
It would be great if someone, say the library of Congress, would work with a good, smart technician and the technical community to come up with a simple format which is robust, and then agree to use it as an archive system for some number of years.
A CD or DVD-based system seems like a good starting place.
This is actually a big deal. Linguists die, and ten years later someone goes through their drawers, finding tapes of languages dead longer than the linguist, and those tapes are turning to muck. We can get back some of the lost history, but not most. Likewise, as we take a lot of digital pictures, now, those will be lost to history in 20 years.
Academics need this like crazy, and so do grandchildren.
I can hardly wait until the US decides to sell one of these Linux-based systems. The US is one of the biggest arms exporters in the world. We make a killing, so to speak, on that industry.
Let's say Lockheed Martin decides that sell something they've developed using Linux. To Kurdistan, say.
The State Department and the Office of the Joint Chiefs will approve the sale, after some lunches are bought for some functionaries, and the product will move.
Then after buying the product, Kurdistan will say, OK, where's the source code? And LMT will say "Huh, we're not giving you source code." And Kurdistan will say "But it's GPL. And you just sold it to us. So, A. we're not giving it back, and B. you owe us source."
At which point, we as a community will be between a rock and a hard place. We can say "Hey you bums, you owe them the source code." and have congress make a specific Anti-GPL line item to let the military off the hook, which will undermine the GPL in the States.
Or we can ignore it, and have it be a minor precident that GPL is ignored where security is concerned.
Linux developers can simply ignore this whole issue. When the productivity suites and desktops work in a way which allows big companies to retire 95% of their Windows boxes in favor of Linux machines, the sound card industry will fall all over themselves to get us drivers.
Meanwhile, the companies who will do this first, as they hunt for productivity, will either not give a hoot whether all sound cards work (just the one they have 10,000 of) or will be actively happy that sound DOESN'T work.
As Linux makes the climb to corporate desktop prominance, the first step comes first. Forget about the second step, as you won't have to do the work for it. Unless, of course, it amuses you to do that work. If so, HURRY, because the big adopters are coming, and six months after they do, our conversations on this topic will be our anger at the lack of source code, not our embarassment at the lack of drivers.
The substance of this article seems to be:
Catchy way of describing my idea (albeit misdirective)
Why we need my idea
My idea.
As you can tell from how Slashdotters are reacting, they never finished the article, or didn't read the whole of the last paragraph, where the idea of encrypting patches and distributing a key days or weeks later is actually stated.
It's a good idea. It solves badwidth issues for people with huge patches (Microsoft, in particular).
But he has so much in the first and second section and so little in the last section that his idea gets buried. I think he needs to make his ideas less mysterious. Give us some terms of the actually idea ("Slow down patches WITH CRYPTOGRAPHY") or something so that we actually READ the last paragraph.
Furthermore, there would need to be a darn easy way to do this for it to work. Microsoft's update feature could do it, as (we can pretend) every windows box has it.
If SSH has a vulnerability, you can release a patch this way, unless every OS it runs on has a automatic system -- one which gets patches and keys and installs patches when a key arrives. Red Carpet could be modified to do that, but what do the Plan Nine users use, the MacOS users, the FreeBSD people?
However, over time, such a system could get wide acceptance for configuration/vendor specific patches and then become useful for applications, as well.
It would have to be a well-defined OPEN system, and MicroSoft (it seems) need not be included -- they'd do their own thing and make the system non-portable.
This seems a lot like when SGI committed suicide a few years back, dropping their emphasis on IRIX and embracing NT. The NT boxes barely exist, the IRIX machines stopped selling overnight, as their customer-base felt (not entirely wrongly) that they'd get no bug fixes, advances, or support anymore.
Sun hasn't said "We're dropping Solaris" but embracing Linux without becoming a player in the Linux kernel team is a HUGE mistake.
Solaris does some things much better than Linux -- less and less, certainly, but, for example, Solaris does partitioning of machines, the IP stack is great, and Solaris boxes can be configured to run complicated apps with higher uptimes even than Linux -- it's close but Solaris still has a small edge in reliability.
So Sun embraces Linux, further marginalizes Solaris, and soon Solaris will only run on Sun's Big Iron -- E10K's and the like.
IBM will make Linux scream on their Big Iron, and some of us (more and more of us) will pick IBM's Iron over Sun's because it's the same across the board.
Sun really has two options. 1. Embrace Linux and be part of the process, cannibalizing Solaris for Linux's sake and becoming a major Linux player -- with the E10K running just a feature-rich on Linux as Solaris. 2. Push Solaris hard. Give it away for the small boxes, get it on the desktop, run Linux apps on it (they've already got a project to allow this), and keep a culture that's 100% Sun, stressing in their sales pitch the few, but legitimate ways where Linux is a liability on Big Iron.
Option 3, undermine Solaris, and remain apart from the Linux community, seems to be the chosen path, however. It's the same path SGI went down. You remember SGI, don't you? You know, the guys with the pretty colored plastic? Think back...
I use code which is written by others and distributed for use ALL THE TIME. Things on news groups "here's how you..." things on web-pages and in books which are done as tutorials. Furthermore you have the issue of fair use -- if you use three lines of a 200 lines program, and even those you adapt to your environment, do you answer on this survey "I never copy code" even though you do, or "I do copy code without the author's permission" when you'r not copying from a legal standpoint?
Virtually all questions in this survey have a resemblance to a "Have you stopped beating your wife?"-style trap.
If it's unintentional, they're pretty crappy survey writers, and should withdraw this and rewrite it. If it's not unintentional, then they're weasles.
But I'd like to see the number of stories on slashdot increase on April 1, with the usual number of real news/info still present. This year, the real stuff seems to be crowded out.
Here's what I'd REALLY like to see. I'd like to see me suckered. I'd like to see something that looks absolutely real -- Close to the edge, not over. And I'd like to make a serious post on it, and then fifteen minutes later, feel like an ass, 'cause I realize I've been duped.
"...if scaled up, this system would produce 51 kilowatts on the waste from 100,000 people, Logan says." Hello. That's half a watt per person. I could produce half a watt by looking at something hard.
I must be missing something. I'm not an engineer. Please tell me why something that gets back this little energy is valuable at ALL?
An oral contract is enforcable, but this isn't a contract, since a contract must have payment or goods/services on both sides, and must have a term -- a start and end date. You can have a contract for eternity.
If you argue that the police were essentially selling advertising space, perhaps there was reciprocation.
But you can't find a term here. Hence, not a contract -- oral, written or otherwise.
One way or another, this is an interesting situation. Not because of what he was charging or the details of the setup to the action, but of the action itself.
Essentially, we have a non-contract situation, and the provider decides to terminate the arrangement, and the ownership of the content and name are in dispute (who would win such a dispute, no matter how obvious the answer, not the point).
For any private citizen, the only recourse would be litigation in civil courts.
Since the customer was a police department, the matter is taken up as a criminal case. His property is seized (the customer took posession of the files in question), and he's jailed, finger-printed, and now has a criminal record of arrest.
Does a senator get to fix his daughter's traffic tickets?
Does a judge get to let his friends off?
Does the dog catcher get to kill his enemy's uncollared dog as a stray, when he knows full well whose dog it is?
The police engaged in kidnapping, battery (by placing cuffs on him), theft and libel.
Not because it was the normal action, but because they COULD. He may be a scumbag, but he's not put in a position of trust by those he's elected (or hired) to protect. He doesn't take an oath of office as certainly the judge who authorized the warrant did, and I suspect the officers did, too.
A. Microsoft costs the patent office time on this, and that's our money.
B. They cost us, as a community, time.
C. They're gambling on getting it through under radar, and if that happens it'll cost lots of folks money to fight it.
So there's a monetary component to this.
Meanwhile, Microsoft KNOWS they don't have actual title to this, and are submitting it in effort to take title to this idea FRAUDULENTLY, as they KNOW they don't have title.
That sounds to me like slander of title, and is ACTIONABLE, correct?
And while it's hard to figure out who needs to do the actual suing, damages to the community could be set as a fraction of legal fees expected as an average of Microsoft's expenditures on patent actions.
And it would put the fear of God into some of these slanderers of title we've been talking about for the past year(s).
The problem with Verisign is that they're a monopoly.
They can hold us over a barrell and all we can do is sue them. We've seen how long lawsuits take. A week of we're-screwed-time is too long.
While it would take forever to get every incompetant sysadmin to change root DNS servers, the bulk of us could be changed over in days.
We just need
A. someone to do it (set up new root servers and maintain them)
B. a massive insult and pain in the ass like the reinstitution of site-finder to prod sysadmins into changing over to them.
Versign would still own creating domains, but a clone could be actually serving the info. Talk about embarassing for Verisign. They'd sue immediately and the civilians would learn about this quickly.
When it all comes down to it, such a new root server provider could say, "I'm takin' my ball and..." creating new top levels? censoring sites via domain expiration? splitting the list off entirely, creating an Internet-prime? Telling ICANN to shove it? "We are, after all, just an edge service which people use by choice. PETA.com stays People Eating Tastey Animals on our servers. Screw you."
And if the community didn't like it, someone else could do it all AGAIN. When you set up an Internet connection, you'd say, which one do I want to be on? (Logically, not physically, of course.)
It would be both horrifying and interesting. And after some chaos, order would be restored in the form of a ROOT server authority with the oversite of a smarter overseer (one hopes).
I would hope that a public entity would do it, someone who is interested in the Internet being open, but a private entity would do, too. Hey, GoDaddy, do you hear oportunity knocking?
Ok, that they can stall us for as long as SCO remains seems clear. But what about Canopy group. It seems like they have VERY deep pockets and would not be able to outlast a lawsuit. Can we sue Canopy group for thousands of instances of copyright infringement ($30,000 per infringement) since their spawn (SCO) repudiated the GPL and still sells the software?
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's a great idea, and you should go forward full steam ahead.
Seems like the key is the database. Keep that open and if there are real security issues, a darn good competing project will spring up (with more security) from the same folk who pooh-poohed your initial project. And that is EXACTLY what you and the community need.
Remember what happend with CD signature databases (CDDB) -- it was well populated, but the owner of the data was... well... the OWNER.
Keep it open, and this project won't fail -- it'll morph into three others.
Sure, Engineers could use liberal-arts educations, aquire social skills, and move up because of them. But would that HELP us innovate? This guy doesn't know. I don't know. Nobody does. Huge innovations made by American engineers may have been made BECAUSE they had no lives, had no outlets, couldn't see the much bigger picture, had no joy in their lives through interactions. If Dilbert drinks from the cup of management, he LOSES the knack. Is that true? This guy doesn't know.
Meanwhile, saying we can send out our lower work, while keeping the innovation part strikes me as like saying, "who cares if our dairies move all milk production to Canada. We are the world's best at producing CREAM. We'll keep the cream and forget about all the lost milk work." If the cows are gone, Mister, how are we gonna make cream?
We'd be forced to buy milk from Canada, that's how.
And if we send our small engineering jobs to foreign parts, we loose our ability to make engineers, because it's in the milk work where we find the engineers to make the cream.
I haven't used gnome 2.6, but I've used previous Gnomes and Nautilus. I know this makes me a Ludite, but what I realy want is TWM.
So while I know what we need to land Gnome on the usual corporate and home desktops is integrated file browsers and clickable devices and such, I'd really like to be able to very, very quickly turn all that off, but have it so my brother-in-law can log into my box and have all that stuff.
Maybe a "behavior" browser (one with plugable pages for any app, one with a hand-holding look that does NOT remind people of registry editing, one with a really obvious, friendly, lasting icon) should be a prime-focus part of the next release? Maybe a browser with templates at the front, then deeper in, individual behavior changes.
Windows (the versions I've used) doesn't make changing the way the desktop works all that easy. There are a couple of different places you have to click, you can't change a huge amount, and the places to make changes move from version to version.
What if a major design aspect of gnome was "All behavior, where there IS an alternative, must be configurable. The one thing you cannot turn off, is the _Configure_ icon."
That would make me MUCH more comfortable with whistles and bells and would encourage me to try stuff. Would it be a good aspect for conversion users from Windows, Mac or KDE?
Can the Gnome guys do a nice job on such a thing fairly easily? Could we all (even those who, like me, want a truely minimal desktop) stand one constant part of the interface, the behavior-browser, which would always be there?
Right, you have $12 in hand, in the first scenerio and $55 in hand in the other... That makes sense.
So in 15 years (just banking, not investing) you have the solar cells (still returning $55) AND the $10.5K, which is worth $67/month.
Right on! Thanks for setting me straight!
Should we care whether it's hype (lies) or not? They've proven themselves to be bullying, evasive (read "lying") jerks.
We won't be buying their stuff, unless it's to pull apart the machines, anyhow and we won't even do that, unless they sell them below cost.
We don't trust them. We don't like them.
Weren't they clever? They've sowed salt in their on fields.
If I can store power efficiently, then my solar cells need to generate 18 kWh per day, in about 10 hours of nice, bright sunlight. That's 1800 watts at any given time. At $2/watt, that's $3600 for the array (ignore the storage costs for now).
My electric bill for that month was $55.74, so I get payback in a little more than 5 years.
The problem is, I've seen different numbers for panels. Modules for consumers cost $5.85 per watt, these days. And at that rate, my scenerio costs $10,500, and the payoff time is now 15 years. If I invest that money, and get a 7% rate of return on it, I make more money by PAYING my electric bill ($61.25 per month income, $55.74 payout). It's more profitable for me NOT to install the cells.
The numbers quoted in the previous post for cost drop by growth indicate that (I'd love to see how the math for this is done, properly, but my aproximation follows) those $2 cells will cost $.75 in 2010. Excellent!
But the cost of panels is not all CELLS, and has stayed pretty darn stable. In the past three years, panel cost has only come down a few percent. It went UP some months, too. So we can expect the panels to be cheaper, but not by NEARLY that much.
And in the above I've ignored storage inefficiencies, and support hardware and battery costs.
In other words, I don't think the picture is so rosey.
A class on CS (as opposed to programming in java) ought to define the laguage in two pages at the front of the test.
Anyone familiar with the concepts of programming out to be able to learn a simple language for the test from that.
I suppose that the language could vary, every few pages. The first one could be like basic, the last like smalltalk.
But I suppose teaching concepts to high-schoolers is a lot harder than teaching very concrete stuff.
Huh? Looks very mixed to me. looking at just a few examples, while it seems consistently better than perl (except in regexp, where perl is very fast), it's not up to java par.
Looks like a minor speed increase to me.
But then, I'm looking at a shootout from 2001. Have things changed?
As gamer laptops get more popular, shouldn't we see new lower power GPUs with comparable muscle to the previous rev?
What's the power consumption like on a GPU that isn't doing much? Do they sleep like some CPUs can, or are they always going at full bore?
Lets say the lawsuit is dismissed with prejudice and SCO is required to pay Daimler-Chrysler's courst costs.
Does that make it easier from IBM to get the same result, or is it too late in the game for that?
And if IBM files the same motion, and the court orders SCO to pay IBM's legal fees, will that finally break the SCO bank?
Yeah, the other reply to this already answers your query -- it's gotta be aid to an enemy.
However, you might make a case that since we're at war, any "attack" on our institutions is aid to our enemy.
Pity we're not even really at war. We've got no declaration. What a messed up time we live in (since WWI) militarilegally speaking.
But it really cries out for a "treason"-ish crme, doesn't it? Is it a high-crime, even? Shouldn't knowingly disenfranchizing voters en-mass be a hanging offence?
It's the nature of digital to resist decay because the difference between a one and a zero is BIG. That makes it hard for an individual bit to change state from a one to a zero or vice-versa.
Analog tapes, on the other hand, are in flux -- they change while you stare at them, only it's hard for you to perceive the change. For instance, even if there was no signal degredation, we can bet your tapes have stretched, as you played them, and in the boxes they were stored in, and that therefore the pitch of your grandfather's voice has changed.
They've probably drooped on the reels a little, and therefore his voice goes up and down, but so little that you wouldn't notice.
If you're recording in a non-lossy digital format, you're safe from that. Everything will be pitch perfect, but in the unlikely (at any given time) and yet innevitable (over a long time) event that bits change in your digital form, you'll gets some pops, as bits change in random positions.
In an eight-bit sample-size example: 10101010 might change to a 10101011 or a 11101010 -- the former would be inperceptable, but the other would be a big smack on the sound.
The real problem here is not the degradation of the non-lossy copy of your grandfather's voice, it's the sector boundaries, the directory of the disk -- It's the stuff that lets your computer FIND the data and interpret the data. If you get a bad sector on the disk, the data as sound is essentially still perfectly good. But most systems would give up on a disk with an important bad sector.
What we need is a way to write bit-streams to CD or some other medium where we know the medium will be readable AS BITS in 20 years. Sectors aren't important if the system is simple and the player is smart -- allowing you access to the data even though the stuff describing where it is is damaged.
Most software for reading (ie. OS software) just give up. Most lossy systems don't gracefully handle bad data in their files. Most storage systems don't store the data redundantly (you'd need three copies of a given bit, or a mathematical checksum which allows you to compute bits based on three factors to recover data as it drops out). Most media formats have short life-spans.
It would be great if someone, say the library of Congress, would work with a good, smart technician and the technical community to come up with a simple format which is robust, and then agree to use it as an archive system for some number of years.
A CD or DVD-based system seems like a good starting place.
This is actually a big deal. Linguists die, and ten years later someone goes through their drawers, finding tapes of languages dead longer than the linguist, and those tapes are turning to muck. We can get back some of the lost history, but not most. Likewise, as we take a lot of digital pictures, now, those will be lost to history in 20 years.
Academics need this like crazy, and so do grandchildren.
I can hardly wait until the US decides to sell one of these Linux-based systems. The US is one of the biggest arms exporters in the world. We make a killing, so to speak, on that industry.
Let's say Lockheed Martin decides that sell something they've developed using Linux. To Kurdistan, say.
The State Department and the Office of the Joint Chiefs will approve the sale, after some lunches are bought for some functionaries, and the product will move.
Then after buying the product, Kurdistan will say, OK, where's the source code? And LMT will say "Huh, we're not giving you source code." And Kurdistan will say "But it's GPL. And you just sold it to us. So, A. we're not giving it back, and B. you owe us source."
At which point, we as a community will be between a rock and a hard place. We can say "Hey you bums, you owe them the source code." and have congress make a specific Anti-GPL line item to let the military off the hook, which will undermine the GPL in the States.
Or we can ignore it, and have it be a minor precident that GPL is ignored where security is concerned.
And security will generalize to DMCA stuff.
I guess it makes sense that Verisign would wind up in the Ninth Circle. Oh, wait. That was Ninth Circuit.
Linux developers can simply ignore this whole issue. When the productivity suites and desktops work in a way which allows big companies to retire 95% of their Windows boxes in favor of Linux machines, the sound card industry will fall all over themselves to get us drivers.
Meanwhile, the companies who will do this first, as they hunt for productivity, will either not give a hoot whether all sound cards work (just the one they have 10,000 of) or will be actively happy that sound DOESN'T work.
As Linux makes the climb to corporate desktop prominance, the first step comes first. Forget about the second step, as you won't have to do the work for it. Unless, of course, it amuses you to do that work. If so, HURRY, because the big adopters are coming, and six months after they do, our conversations on this topic will be our anger at the lack of source code, not our embarassment at the lack of drivers.
The substance of this article seems to be:
Catchy way of describing my idea (albeit misdirective)
Why we need my idea
My idea.
As you can tell from how Slashdotters are reacting, they never finished the article, or didn't read the whole of the last paragraph, where the idea of encrypting patches and distributing a key days or weeks later is actually stated.
It's a good idea. It solves badwidth issues for people with huge patches (Microsoft, in particular).
But he has so much in the first and second section and so little in the last section that his idea gets buried. I think he needs to make his ideas less mysterious. Give us some terms of the actually idea ("Slow down patches WITH CRYPTOGRAPHY") or something so that we actually READ the last paragraph.
Furthermore, there would need to be a darn easy way to do this for it to work. Microsoft's update feature could do it, as (we can pretend) every windows box has it.
If SSH has a vulnerability, you can release a patch this way, unless every OS it runs on has a automatic system -- one which gets patches and keys and installs patches when a key arrives. Red Carpet could be modified to do that, but what do the Plan Nine users use, the MacOS users, the FreeBSD people?
However, over time, such a system could get wide acceptance for configuration/vendor specific patches and then become useful for applications, as well.
It would have to be a well-defined OPEN system, and MicroSoft (it seems) need not be included -- they'd do their own thing and make the system non-portable.
Sun hasn't said "We're dropping Solaris" but embracing Linux without becoming a player in the Linux kernel team is a HUGE mistake.
Solaris does some things much better than Linux -- less and less, certainly, but, for example, Solaris does partitioning of machines, the IP stack is great, and Solaris boxes can be configured to run complicated apps with higher uptimes even than Linux -- it's close but Solaris still has a small edge in reliability.
So Sun embraces Linux, further marginalizes Solaris, and soon Solaris will only run on Sun's Big Iron -- E10K's and the like.
IBM will make Linux scream on their Big Iron, and some of us (more and more of us) will pick IBM's Iron over Sun's because it's the same across the board.
Sun really has two options. 1. Embrace Linux and be part of the process, cannibalizing Solaris for Linux's sake and becoming a major Linux player -- with the E10K running just a feature-rich on Linux as Solaris. 2. Push Solaris hard. Give it away for the small boxes, get it on the desktop, run Linux apps on it (they've already got a project to allow this), and keep a culture that's 100% Sun, stressing in their sales pitch the few, but legitimate ways where Linux is a liability on Big Iron.
Option 3, undermine Solaris, and remain apart from the Linux community, seems to be the chosen path, however. It's the same path SGI went down. You remember SGI, don't you? You know, the guys with the pretty colored plastic? Think back...
I use code which is written by others and distributed for use ALL THE TIME. Things on news groups "here's how you ..." things on web-pages and in books which are done as tutorials. Furthermore you have the issue of fair use -- if you use three lines of a 200 lines program, and even those you adapt to your environment, do you answer on this survey "I never copy code" even though you do, or "I do copy code without the author's permission" when you'r not copying from a legal standpoint?
Virtually all questions in this survey have a resemblance to a "Have you stopped beating your wife?"-style trap.
If it's unintentional, they're pretty crappy survey writers, and should withdraw this and rewrite it. If it's not unintentional, then they're weasles.
These are fine. They're entertaining.
But I'd like to see the number of stories on slashdot increase on April 1, with the usual number of real news/info still present. This year, the real stuff seems to be crowded out.
Here's what I'd REALLY like to see. I'd like to see me suckered. I'd like to see something that looks absolutely real -- Close to the edge, not over. And I'd like to make a serious post on it, and then fifteen minutes later, feel like an ass, 'cause I realize I've been duped.
"...if scaled up, this system would produce 51 kilowatts on the waste from 100,000 people, Logan says." Hello. That's half a watt per person. I could produce half a watt by looking at something hard.
I must be missing something. I'm not an engineer. Please tell me why something that gets back this little energy is valuable at ALL?
An oral contract is enforcable, but this isn't a contract, since a contract must have payment or goods/services on both sides, and must have a term -- a start and end date. You can have a contract for eternity.
If you argue that the police were essentially selling advertising space, perhaps there was reciprocation.
But you can't find a term here. Hence, not a contract -- oral, written or otherwise.
One way or another, this is an interesting situation. Not because of what he was charging or the details of the setup to the action, but of the action itself.
Essentially, we have a non-contract situation, and the provider decides to terminate the arrangement, and the ownership of the content and name are in dispute (who would win such a dispute, no matter how obvious the answer, not the point).
For any private citizen, the only recourse would be litigation in civil courts.
Since the customer was a police department, the matter is taken up as a criminal case. His property is seized (the customer took posession of the files in question), and he's jailed, finger-printed, and now has a criminal record of arrest.
Does a senator get to fix his daughter's traffic tickets?
Does a judge get to let his friends off?
Does the dog catcher get to kill his enemy's uncollared dog as a stray, when he knows full well whose dog it is?
The police engaged in kidnapping, battery (by placing cuffs on him), theft and libel.
Not because it was the normal action, but because they COULD. He may be a scumbag, but he's not put in a position of trust by those he's elected (or hired) to protect. He doesn't take an oath of office as certainly the judge who authorized the warrant did, and I suspect the officers did, too.
The wrong fellow's out on bail, here.
A. Microsoft costs the patent office time on this, and that's our money.
B. They cost us, as a community, time.
C. They're gambling on getting it through under radar, and if that happens it'll cost lots of folks money to fight it.
So there's a monetary component to this.
Meanwhile, Microsoft KNOWS they don't have actual title to this, and are submitting it in effort to take title to this idea FRAUDULENTLY, as they KNOW they don't have title.
That sounds to me like slander of title, and is ACTIONABLE, correct?
And while it's hard to figure out who needs to do the actual suing, damages to the community could be set as a fraction of legal fees expected as an average of Microsoft's expenditures on patent actions.
And it would put the fear of God into some of these slanderers of title we've been talking about for the past year(s).
They can hold us over a barrell and all we can do is sue them. We've seen how long lawsuits take. A week of we're-screwed-time is too long.
While it would take forever to get every incompetant sysadmin to change root DNS servers, the bulk of us could be changed over in days.
We just need
A. someone to do it (set up new root servers and maintain them)
B. a massive insult and pain in the ass like the reinstitution of site-finder to prod sysadmins into changing over to them.
Versign would still own creating domains, but a clone could be actually serving the info. Talk about embarassing for Verisign. They'd sue immediately and the civilians would learn about this quickly.
When it all comes down to it, such a new root server provider could say, "I'm takin' my ball and..." creating new top levels? censoring sites via domain expiration? splitting the list off entirely, creating an Internet-prime? Telling ICANN to shove it? "We are, after all, just an edge service which people use by choice. PETA.com stays People Eating Tastey Animals on our servers. Screw you."
And if the community didn't like it, someone else could do it all AGAIN. When you set up an Internet connection, you'd say, which one do I want to be on? (Logically, not physically, of course.)
It would be both horrifying and interesting. And after some chaos, order would be restored in the form of a ROOT server authority with the oversite of a smarter overseer (one hopes).
I would hope that a public entity would do it, someone who is interested in the Internet being open, but a private entity would do, too. Hey, GoDaddy, do you hear oportunity knocking?
Ok, that they can stall us for as long as SCO remains seems clear. But what about Canopy group. It seems like they have VERY deep pockets and would not be able to outlast a lawsuit. Can we sue Canopy group for thousands of instances of copyright infringement ($30,000 per infringement) since their spawn (SCO) repudiated the GPL and still sells the software?