Contact my health insurance company if I do *NOT* buy cheetos, etc. -- I might be eligible for a discount.
This example seems to follow the same principal as the savings card to begin with -- opt in to get a discount, but some fear of using the privacy-invasion to raise the prices for others.
Candyland and Clue are both "popular" Hasbro games. Clue and Candyland were both small companies (not hard to guess the industries). Can anyone explain the differences in these cases to me, besides the obvious (and hopefully irrelevant legally)?
I know it was modded funny, but I agree. Indemnification is for proprietary commercial software, and I'd much rather see IBM & Intel defend the open-source nature than add yet another middleman imposing yet another cost.
Indemnification has a cost, and by a vendor indemnifying a customer (like HP) they're really saying "yes, you may have to pay licensing, and in addition you should apy me too". Adding an additional layer of costs to Linux is the last thing I'd want from my vendor.
By putting the money into defending the Open Source nature (defending against lawsuits, and helping program-around any infringing parts), it's really asserting that IBM and Intel do consider Linux as free (FSF definition) software.
Not to pick on you, but - Another reason why 'charge-per-GB' plans would be nice. It moves the burden of paying for bandwidth to the person who should be in control of how much bandwidth is used.
Perhaps people would be more aware of their bandwidth (download freeware to measure bits/day and watch them regularly) and stop these kinds of things earlier.
I'd be really curious if some false-advertising claim could be made against the companies.
If they advertise "X-Mbps" and I don't get it 95%, 99%, (what's an appropriate SLA for the computer industry) of the time, it's broken!
With the web site the company I'm at is hosting hosting, between WorldCom and Akamai, we're buying 50Mbps (95th percentile). If they tell us "oops you used 50Mbps for too many seconds", that's just wrong.
If a ISP wants to charge per Gigabyte, I'm all for it. But if their advertising Mbps, they should deliver.
Personally, I'd be all for some companies offering charge-per-Gigabyte plans, because I think there's a lot of time that I don't use that many gigabytes.
Parent wrote: "This means they can say at anytime you are downloading too much, without even telling you how much is too much. They don't need to give you any download cap.
I haven't received a letter yet but I have friends who did... people might want to start thinking about limiting their download"
Interesting conclusion... another possible conclusion would be to look for a plan that doesn't have such limits (either from them or from other carriers).
Seems too similar to an apartment charging for spending too much time in their building.
Nice. Yes, many/most of the features are in there (in KDE and Gnome) - but it's the little things that still get me. If I'm not sure which subdirectory had the images, something like
Interestingly, you're kinda right for flash drives (those USB keychain drives)
For flash drives you're much better off (faster and the drive will last longer) using 'dd' with a block size (bs=32k) that matches the device than 'cp'. The reason is that internally some of those have very large (32k) block sizes, so 'cp' (with a small block size of a few k) is actually doing read-modify-write's instead of just writes.
One thing I'm curious about, though, is what was that bug that caused people to use dd instead of cp for hard drives? I don't know how it failed before. Dim memories made me suspect it was on the writing side, but that beowulf.org article suggested it was on the reading side.
What would you expect to happen?
(assuming you have large file support)
Other people on beowulf.org
also report successes.
"Note that 'dd' is pretty much the same as
cp/dev/hda1/dev/hdb1
The reason old timers recommend 'dd' is a long-forgotten semantic bug in
old UNIX systems that could be worked around by reading only whole
blocks from raw devices. This has now turned into superstition."
Huh? How is it better because the animal was tortured and imprisoned before it was killed.
Personally I find it much more humane to eat a freshly hunted duck or deer that at least had a chance to live a happy life, than a wing-clipped-caged-chicken or a immobalized-and-starved-veal-calf.
(And no, I'm not PETA herbivore - Sure Chicken tastes yummy, but free-range chickens that got to exercize taste even better and I feel less cruel eating them.)
In this article Pamela Anderson takes on KFC (really - not a troll) it says KFC kills 750 million birds per year. Add that to McDonalds and you have over a billion/year. Puts some perspective on the turbines...
I think next they'll get closer and closer to copying the "free as in can't charge for it" as more and more countries switch.
It'll take them a while before they copy the "free as in Free Software" part.
It amazes me that a company can still charge a premium on what's basically a commodity component (scheduler, memory manager, etc) that's been around for decades. Same for that other company that's charging for relational databases. IMHO they should recognize that after 30 years these parts become commodities and that they need to find somethign else to sell if they want high margin products.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that would be cool. I've seen it play, and it's pretty much just like the Windows WinDVD.
Another article on their LinDVD based Instant On product in NewScientist
- Contact my health insurance company if I do *NOT* buy cheetos, etc. -- I might be eligible for a discount.
This example seems to follow the same principal as the savings card to begin with -- opt in to get a discount, but some fear of using the privacy-invasion to raise the prices for others.Or is that going too far? It might save lives, though...
"He was paid in AOL stock, not dollars. What are 400 million pieces of toilet paper worth? Enough.
400 sheets of toilet paper (Kleenex Cottonelle) on amazon.com go for $3.65
400 million pieces of toilet paper = $3,650,000.
(At least I didn't say 3...profit)
Hasbro sued Clue Computing and apparently lost, and in a pretty similar case (IMHO)
Hasbro sued Candyland.com and apparently won.
Candyland and Clue are both "popular" Hasbro games. Clue and Candyland were both small companies (not hard to guess the industries). Can anyone explain the differences in these cases to me, besides the obvious (and hopefully irrelevant legally)?
Indemnification has a cost, and by a vendor indemnifying a customer (like HP) they're really saying "yes, you may have to pay licensing, and in addition you should apy me too". Adding an additional layer of costs to Linux is the last thing I'd want from my vendor.
By putting the money into defending the Open Source nature (defending against lawsuits, and helping program-around any infringing parts), it's really asserting that IBM and Intel do consider Linux as free (FSF definition) software.
Perhaps people would be more aware of their bandwidth (download freeware to measure bits/day and watch them regularly) and stop these kinds of things earlier.
If they advertise "X-Mbps" and I don't get it 95%, 99%, (what's an appropriate SLA for the computer industry) of the time, it's broken!
With the web site the company I'm at is hosting hosting, between WorldCom and Akamai, we're buying 50Mbps (95th percentile). If they tell us "oops you used 50Mbps for too many seconds", that's just wrong.
If a ISP wants to charge per Gigabyte, I'm all for it. But if their advertising Mbps, they should deliver.
Personally, I'd be all for some companies offering charge-per-Gigabyte plans, because I think there's a lot of time that I don't use that many gigabytes.
Interesting conclusion... another possible conclusion would be to look for a plan that doesn't have such limits (either from them or from other carriers).
Seems too similar to an apartment charging for spending too much time in their building.
" That search engine at http://xxx.lanl.gov/find is hard to use isn't it?"
That host's called "xxx"? What's that, pr0n for 31337 Phy5ici5t5?
would sure be nice sometimes.
Then can I suggest even cooler tricks?
How about the equivalent of backticks...
- `grep -l foo *` - to find all files with 'foo' in them
- `find . -name '*.c' -print` - to find all
.c files under this directory.
- `slocate
.gif` - to find all .gif files on the system
Once my file-widget can do those, I'll be much happier wth themThat would make it really useful to me.
Well, that and
`find /home/ron/src -name `*.c` -print`
to open all the c files.
I'd like:
- to be able to type "../../whatever.txt" in the "filename" textarea and have it work reasonable,
- the complete path to be a gui-widget that I can copy&paste from
- to be able to type D*31.GIF and have it work reasonably (glob like a shell)
- by extention, have "/u*/l*/b*/mozilla" typed into the text area find
/usr/local/bin/mozilla if that's the only match.
Typing is so much easier than mousing sometimes, I'd really really like to have those wildcards work.For flash drives you're much better off (faster and the drive will last longer) using 'dd' with a block size (bs=32k) that matches the device than 'cp'. The reason is that internally some of those have very large (32k) block sizes, so 'cp' (with a small block size of a few k) is actually doing read-modify-write's instead of just writes.
One thing I'm curious about, though, is what was that bug that caused people to use dd instead of cp for hard drives? I don't know how it failed before. Dim memories made me suspect it was on the writing side, but that beowulf.org article suggested it was on the reading side.
Have you tried it?
What would you expect to happen? (assuming you have large file support)
Other people on beowulf.org also report successes.
"Note that 'dd' is pretty much the same as /dev/hda1 /dev/hdb1
The reason old timers recommend 'dd' is a long-forgotten semantic bug in
old UNIX systems that could be worked around by reading only whole
blocks from raw devices. This has now turned into superstition."
cp
(Yes, copying the raw device, not a mounted filesystem).
Oh, and the mental image you painted about the tiny stacked cages was much more vividly disturbing. :-)
(ps... parent probably deserves to be modded up because he seems like the one in the thread with the most relevant (bird raising) experience)
Personally I find it much more humane to eat a freshly hunted duck or deer that at least had a chance to live a happy life, than a wing-clipped-caged-chicken or a immobalized-and-starved-veal-calf.
(And no, I'm not PETA herbivore - Sure Chicken tastes yummy, but free-range chickens that got to exercize taste even better and I feel less cruel eating them.)
(and it has a nice picture)
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=566654.566 640l n line.siggraph.org/2002/Papers/13_GraphicsHardware/ purcell.ppt
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/25312.htm
http://online.cs.nps.navy.mil/DistanceEducation/o
Oracle scales well technologically, but it doesn't scale well financially.
It'll take them a while before they copy the "free as in Free Software" part.
It amazes me that a company can still charge a premium on what's basically a commodity component (scheduler, memory manager, etc) that's been around for decades. Same for that other company that's charging for relational databases. IMHO they should recognize that after 30 years these parts become commodities and that they need to find somethign else to sell if they want high margin products.
This could be a great distribution channel for indie bands distributing legal free music as well.