Yes, it's a bit more complicated than just the number of bits in the address-range when calculating disk-mapping capacity.
"A disk has sectors numbered 0, 1, 2,... This is called LBA addressing.
In ancient times, before the advent of IDE disks, disks had a geometry described by three constants C, H, S: the number of cylinders, the number of heads, the number of sectors per track. The address of a sector was given by three numbers: c, h, s:
No disk manufactured less than ten years ago has a geometry, but this ancient 3D sector addressing is still used by the INT13 BIOS interface (with fantasy numbers C, H, S unrelated to any physical reality).
The old INT13 BIOS interface to disk I/O uses 24 bits to address a sector: 10 bits for the cylinder, 8 bits for the head, and 6 bits for the sector number within the track (counting from 1). This means that this interface cannot address more than 1024*256*63 sectors, which is 8.5 GB (with 512-byte sectors). And if the (fantasy) geometry specified for the disk has fewer than 1024 cylinders, or 256 heads, or 63 sectors per track, then this limit will be less.
The old ATA standard describes how to address a sector on an IDE disk using 28 bits (8 bits for the sector, 4 for the head, 16 for the cylinder). This means that an IDE disk can have at most 2^28 addressable sectors - With 512-byte sectors this is 2^37 bytes, that is, 137.4 GB.
The ATA-6 standard includes a specification how to address past this 2^28 sector boundary. The new standard allows addressing of 2^48 sectors. "
Basically bit-size of the address range, because of this legacy BIOS fantasy translation to CHS, is not linearly related to the addressable capacity of the disk. Note, linux isn't affected by this problem post-boot, as it addresses the disk directly. It does however cause lots of problem if the boot partition is on a drive with two different geometries depending on when you look at it from the BIOS, and when you look at it in the OS.
Hmm, thinking about it, if it's a true hardware RAID array, it might hit the 2TB limit if it addresses the entire array as a single drive. Using 4 of these in a hardware RAID5 array, or 3 in a RAID0, you may well need LBA64 support in both the controller and the OS (which goes up to 512TB). AFAIK, only windows 2003 SP1 and linux 2.6.x (and presumably windows x64) support LBA64 at the moment, so you wouldn't run into problems with Vista or linux with a 2TB+ hardware raid array, assuming you had one of the SATA controllers that does LBA64 atm. There's also hacks for 2TB+ using 4k sector sizes, which goes up to 16TB.
I'm running 3x 400GB SATA's in a software RAID5 on a linux server no problem. The key problem you may be thinking of was the LBA48 support. Older IDE drive controllers only supported LBA32, so they would only see 137GB of larger drives. Often a BIOS upgrade fixes that, and ups support to LBA48. Newer SATA spec doesn't require LBA48, but I'm not aware of one that doesn't, though there's probably the odd one. There'd very likely be a BIOS or flash upgrade for the controller to add 48-bit addressing. LBA48 tops out at about 2000GB per drive on 32-bit processors IIRC.
Doh. for (webDAV is done over plain html) read (webDAV is done over plain http) i.e. unencrypted. For webDAVs on apache, you need to setup the published folders with ssl, as usual for https traffic.
Anything based on webDAVs is what you're after. It's a web-standard for transferring data backwards and forwards as https traffic to a webserver. (webDAV is done over plain html) I've implemented it on our network for remote access to user areas.
They can get read access just by using an https address in their browser (and authenticate, obviously).
For read/write treat-it-like-a-normal-folder access, there's support built into mac, windows network folders, and kde. for example, just typing webdavs://www.example.com/username into konqueror allows you to treat it exactly like a local folder - drag-n-drop, save, delete, create etc. Mount it as a network folder in windows, and again you treat it just like a network drive.
Very cool, and all the tweaks are only server side, and you setup authentication just like you would for any other config in apache (I use a mod to auth directly against our domain server, but there's ALL sorts of auth mods for apache). Can't recommend it enough.
It's no more a licence than when I go into a bookstore, put down some cash, and get a book. Copyright law prevents me photocopying that book and giving away the copies, or replacing the cover and pretending I'm the author, or put it up for rent (along with a couple of other things) - but importantly, under first sale doctrine it's mine to do as I wish afterwards, including defacing or reselling it.
If it's a business contract, such as software assurance, where I pay a continuing fee to the software holder for periodic new versions of the software, and we both sign such a contract, that's different.
If it's sold in a shop (in a box or on a computer) for a one-time fee, with no contract signed prior to the purchase, it's a sale, just like any other sale of a copy of a copyrighted work, and subject to first sale doctrine. That has been upheld in many different court cases.
All retail (and a number of OEM) CD and DVD drives come with free software locked to that drive model. Nero, PowerDVD and musicmatch are all very common apps with such drives, so they're fully legal to put on the machine. The mp3s could have been free ones that came with the music player, or possibly the geek squad put some on there to test it and forgot to take them off.
When I first saw this article title, I thought it was about leads you could use to extend your wireless connection.
Thinking about it, wouldn't that be a great idea? If your wireless network doesn't reach quite far enough - say you want to get wireless in the garden - you just run a really long extension lead from your laptop to the wireless router, and bingo, a network connection. We just need a name for them, maybe wifi network leads or something.
Nooooooooo. I WARNED everyone that cats were trying to take over the world via their parasites and cute fluffyness, and now even slashdot has succumbed to teh cuteness!
The end of the world is nigh, we're all doomed by the cute fuffy kittens in sinks... *clicks link* OMG!!! That's like the best thing EVAR. Stuff the kernel recompile, I need to go buy a KITTEN!!!!
Well, I consider 28 days better than 90, especially given the amount of pressure the government bought to bear on parliament, including the attempt to try and guilt his own party rebels into it.
Overall though, I DO find it a worrying piece of legislation for a liberal democracy, as I said at the end of the sentence you half-quoted.
Oh, I nearly forgot - there's also supervision of the holding orders by a High Court Judge, so at least there's some oversight of the process outside the police.
Close. Scarily, the "glorification of terror" is indeed an offence now, though the suspicion is that they wanted to be able to nail people like Abu Hamza, who stood up in the centre of london and praised al-Qaeda.
However, the 90 day extension of the holding powers was stopped by parliament in Blair's first Commons defeat; instead the previous 14-day holding period (without charge) was extended to 28 days, which is still a dangerous piece of legislation for a liberal democracy IMHO.
There's a difference between security by obscurity, which is just hiding the problems and hoping no-one ever finds them, and delaying the release of precise details of a vulnerability for a short period until a fix is made.
To draw a parallel with software, I think it is irresponsible to release exact details of an exploit without telling the supplier first. It's better to tell them of the details, then release the details publically after say, 30 days if they haven't fixed it to force their hand. If it's a truly critical vulnerability, you could release a general warning about that package after a day or two, if the supplier hasn't lept on the problem immediately. You have to strike a balance between alerting the public that there is a problem, and giving exploiters exact details of a problem they probably don't know about before the supplier had a chance to fix it. It's a little different in the open source world, as users have the option of fixing the bug themselves, rather than having to wait on the supplier, but even so, most users still have to wait for the supplier to fix it.
Admittedly, the current US administration has very little trust left in it that it won't exploit secrecy to its own ends, but being able to close an emergency meeting of a security agency to the public is not automatically a bad idea, in the abstract.
Wrong way round; that's using an ALSA driver to emulate OSS for OSS-only apps. Here, we need a way for an OSS-only driver to support ALSA calls. Nice thought though.
Yes, but all free speech is constrained by law to a certain extent. Take shouting "fire" in a crowded theatre, or discussing how to assassinate the US president - or hell, just look at libel laws. Another example that springs to mind is incitement to violence. Freedom of speech has limits (mainly where they infringe on someone elses rights), just as property laws don't entitle you to strangle someone in your car just because you own it.
You're nearly right. The European Union has the Charter of Fundamental Rights, which the UK has recently adopted into national law. There's the European wide Court of Human Rights which is a higher authority than national courts when it comes to cases that come into its jurisdiction.
Article 10 of the Charter provides the right to freedom of expression, subject to certain restrictions that are "in accordance with law" and "necessary in a democratic society". This right includes the freedom to hold opinions, and to receive and impart information and ideas.
In effect, by adopting the Charter, the UK now has a constitution for the first time in its history, though as you say, Magna Carta and the English Bill of Rights laid out many of the fundamental rights we take for granted today.
If you need a single-slot cooler (i.e. doesn't overlap the adjacent pci slot) then about your only choice with the grunt for HDTV is the nvidia 6600 passive (i.e. fanless); it comes as both AGP and PCI-E versions from club, xfx or gigabyte. With a reasonable specc'd CPU and a scythe ninja cooler, and of course a quiet or passively cooled PSU and a mechanically decoupled hard-drive, you should be able to build a PC that is only cooled by a single low-speed 120mm fan - effectively silent (I can't hear mine from more than a couple of feet away, and most of the noise is the hard-drives). If you want to cut the noise even further, use a 2.5" laptop hard-drive.
If your HTPC case is big enough to allow a dual-slot cooler for the GPU, you can buy pre-fitted or post-fit a zalman vf700-cu or arctic cooler to pretty much any high-spec GPU, that will keep it cool and run really quiet - the zalman on my 7800gt in my gaming rig is on a fan-controller, at 50%, and is quieter than either the CPU fan or the PSU fan - and both of them are ultra-quiet.
For air-cooling kit, I'd recommend silentpcreview.com for starters, they have some great reviews on what 'quiet' kit is actually quiet.
Your final option, if you have the money, is water cooling. You can cool the entire system with one or two low-speed 120mm fans and a big radiator, and still have ninja specs for the PC, if you wanted a dual-purpose gaming and DVR rig.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by HDVD's - blueray and HD-DVD aren't out yet, and either way, the copy-restrictions will stop you ripping them for now. The real advantage of HTPC's with say, mythtv, is fitting multiple TV tuners, whatever drive-sizes you like, and being able to play music and DVD rips off the hard-drive. With the flexibility comes the problems of retro-fitting PC hardware to run passively. If you want small passive kit that 'just works', I strongly recommend a Tivo (or similar prebuilt kit) and decent DVD player, as mythtv or windows MCE definitely needs a little sweat to get working fully.
BTW - I just invested in a 5.1 speaker setup, and WOW is it better than 2 speakers. I know you didn't ask, but I had to tell someone:)
If the atlantic conveyer slows or stops, then northern and western europe will get colder. All sorts of changes will happen.
The global temperature will still go up overall though. Changes will include an increase in temperature near the equator, and reduced rainfall in the existing temperature zones, causing big effects for farming. Storms will get more powerful, and sea levels will rise.
As with any big complex system, you introduce more energy (temp=energy), the system gets more chaotic. We can't say with certainty what will happen, or when exactly it'll happen, but it won't be fun or cheap to deal with. You won't see a decades cycle for glaciers though, as the system doesn't change that fast. We're starting to see the effects of 100 years of huge amounts of CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere. The effects will carry on getting worse for decades, even if we drastically cut emissions now. If we don't, we just make things even worse for our children and grandchildren. I think they're really gonna hate us for not doing anything about our ongoing mess, even though we knew what we're causing.
Gentoo started out as a personal project, and still remains a very independant project with no corporate sugar-daddy like novell or redhat. These days it's run as a foundation.
I know there was a big drive when DRobbins left the project to reinburse him the $20,000 (not $40k) he was in debt after gentoo, though I don't think he got the full amount; I think he got several thousand in donations though.
Commercial software certainly has its place, as do 'hobbyist' projects like gentoo. It's all good.
FWIW, focus follows mouse, focus under mouse are available under KDE, in Control Panel, Window Behavour, Focus. Sorry if you already know that, but your post was a little unclear as to whether you just did't use it KDE, or didn't think KDE had it....
I'm with you on KDE. Personally, konqueror is the 'killer app' for me; being able to have an sftp tab, samba share, local file and several browser tabs open in one window really rocks, and something I really miss in my day job on Windows. Should be interesting to see what happens with KDE 4, i believe tidying up the control panel and making it a bit more sane (without removing functionality) is a primary goal.
Re:That's all well and good...
on
KDE 4 Screenshots
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· Score: 2, Informative
I believe it's actually an old unix standard, rather a KDE specific thing. As I understand it, the implementation is as follows:
focus follows mouse - window focus is whichever window the mouse touched last, but can be 'stolen' by explicit actions such as opening new windows, popups etc (if you launch a shortcut etc) focus under mouse - window focus is whichever window the mouse touched last, and cannot be stolen. focus strictly under mouse - window focus is whichever window the mouse is hovering over, and if the mouse is not touching a window, no window has focus.
Since toxoplasma makes rats unafraid of or even like cat urine, I think it's all a diabolical scheme by the cats. I used to think cats only tolerated us until they could figure out how to operate a can-opener, but now I've realised its a much more cunning scheme - to make humans the slaves of cats!
Old ladies are obviously the most affected after a lifetime of exposure, but its only a matter of time before we all become food suppliers and grooming slaves to our cat overlords. Just look what happens to people when you show them pictures of fluffy kittens, they go all gooey and unable to think straight - my girlfriend is a typical example, she defends her cats against any criticism, because they're so 'cute'.
We must act now, while some of us can still see what the cats are up to. We must destroy the cat menace!
Couldn't agree more. I work as a techie in a school, and we run a spyware check as a matter of course on all the student laptops that come in for something (usually just for a hand with setting up the wireless access so the can 'get on the internet') and virtually all of them have some form of spyware on them. Quite a few of the staff laptops do too, even though we tell them about the hazards and even provide AV and AS software, so it doesn't surprise me that the UK has the highest rate of infection in europe.
Because he's not suggesting this as a 'fix' to the albedo, but a way to provide a big stream of cold salty water at the north end of the global conveyer. Why go to all that trouble?
The global conveyer transports hot water from the equator to and western coast of europe, including the UK, keeping that part of europe warmer and more temperate than it's latitude would otherwise make it. The warm water cools, drops down, and returns in a reverse current going south. Too much fresh water at the northern end of the conveyer, from melting fresh water ice at the pole, and russian rivers, dilutes that heavy salty water, and weakens (and could eventually stop) the return trip of the conveyer. The conveyer weakens or even dies, and the UK gets a lot colder, causing all sorts of problems. This 'fix' would strengthen or even restart the conveyer. The 50 billion gives you an idea of how much it might cost us in the medium term if we ignore global warming, just to 'fix' one part of the problem.
Hopefully, politicians will look at this idea, not as something to do now, but something to convince themselves to do something about global warming (i.e. CO2 and methane emissions) before we have to start planning on projects like this. There's a good chance that the global conveyer shutting down will happen in my or my children's lifetime if we do nothing, and I'd rather not have to seriously face a plan like this.
No links I'm afraid, but the studies I've seen work more along the napster model (but cheaper), i.e. around $5 flat fee a month for as much music as you like. The price is low, but it scales - and there's a lot of people who only buy a couple of albums a year, so they actually end up paying a bit more, but for a lot more music. Tack it into the ISP bill as standard, with an opt-out, and the music business would probably make a vast amount of money. Flat fees have worked very well for broadcast TV companies, so there's no reason why it wouldn't work well for music on the internet, if it's priced low enough with no DRM. If Napster wasn't windows-DRM only, I'd probably sign up for it.
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Yes, it's a bit more complicated than just the number of bits in the address-range when calculating disk-mapping capacity.
... This is called LBA addressing.
"A disk has sectors numbered 0, 1, 2,
In ancient times, before the advent of IDE disks, disks had a geometry described by three constants C, H, S: the number of cylinders, the number of heads, the number of sectors per track. The address of a sector was given by three numbers: c, h, s:
No disk manufactured less than ten years ago has a geometry, but this ancient 3D sector addressing is still used by the INT13 BIOS interface (with fantasy numbers C, H, S unrelated to any physical reality).
The old INT13 BIOS interface to disk I/O uses 24 bits to address a sector: 10 bits for the cylinder, 8 bits for the head, and 6 bits for the sector number within the track (counting from 1). This means that this interface cannot address more than 1024*256*63 sectors, which is 8.5 GB (with 512-byte sectors). And if the (fantasy) geometry specified for the disk has fewer than 1024 cylinders, or 256 heads, or 63 sectors per track, then this limit will be less.
The old ATA standard describes how to address a sector on an IDE disk using 28 bits (8 bits for the sector, 4 for the head, 16 for the cylinder). This means that an IDE disk can have at most 2^28 addressable sectors - With 512-byte sectors this is 2^37 bytes, that is, 137.4 GB.
The ATA-6 standard includes a specification how to address past this 2^28 sector boundary. The new standard allows addressing of 2^48 sectors. "
Basically bit-size of the address range, because of this legacy BIOS fantasy translation to CHS, is not linearly related to the addressable capacity of the disk. Note, linux isn't affected by this problem post-boot, as it addresses the disk directly. It does however cause lots of problem if the boot partition is on a drive with two different geometries depending on when you look at it from the BIOS, and when you look at it in the OS.
Hmm, thinking about it, if it's a true hardware RAID array, it might hit the 2TB limit if it addresses the entire array as a single drive. Using 4 of these in a hardware RAID5 array, or 3 in a RAID0, you may well need LBA64 support in both the controller and the OS (which goes up to 512TB). AFAIK, only windows 2003 SP1 and linux 2.6.x (and presumably windows x64) support LBA64 at the moment, so you wouldn't run into problems with Vista or linux with a 2TB+ hardware raid array, assuming you had one of the SATA controllers that does LBA64 atm. There's also hacks for 2TB+ using 4k sector sizes, which goes up to 16TB.
I'm running 3x 400GB SATA's in a software RAID5 on a linux server no problem. The key problem you may be thinking of was the LBA48 support. Older IDE drive controllers only supported LBA32, so they would only see 137GB of larger drives. Often a BIOS upgrade fixes that, and ups support to LBA48. Newer SATA spec doesn't require LBA48, but I'm not aware of one that doesn't, though there's probably the odd one. There'd very likely be a BIOS or flash upgrade for the controller to add 48-bit addressing. LBA48 tops out at about 2000GB per drive on 32-bit processors IIRC.
Doh. for (webDAV is done over plain html) read (webDAV is done over plain http) i.e. unencrypted. For webDAVs on apache, you need to setup the published folders with ssl, as usual for https traffic.
Anything based on webDAVs is what you're after. It's a web-standard for transferring data backwards and forwards as https traffic to a webserver. (webDAV is done over plain html) I've implemented it on our network for remote access to user areas.
They can get read access just by using an https address in their browser (and authenticate, obviously).
For read/write treat-it-like-a-normal-folder access, there's support built into mac, windows network folders, and kde.
for example, just typing webdavs://www.example.com/username into konqueror allows you to treat it exactly like a local folder - drag-n-drop, save, delete, create etc. Mount it as a network folder in windows, and again you treat it just like a network drive.
Very cool, and all the tweaks are only server side, and you setup authentication just like you would for any other config in apache (I use a mod to auth directly against our domain server, but there's ALL sorts of auth mods for apache). Can't recommend it enough.
http://www.webdav.org/
It's no more a licence than when I go into a bookstore, put down some cash, and get a book. Copyright law prevents me photocopying that book and giving away the copies, or replacing the cover and pretending I'm the author, or put it up for rent (along with a couple of other things) - but importantly, under first sale doctrine it's mine to do as I wish afterwards, including defacing or reselling it.
If it's a business contract, such as software assurance, where I pay a continuing fee to the software holder for periodic new versions of the software, and we both sign such a contract, that's different.
If it's sold in a shop (in a box or on a computer) for a one-time fee, with no contract signed prior to the purchase, it's a sale, just like any other sale of a copy of a copyrighted work, and subject to first sale doctrine. That has been upheld in many different court cases.
All retail (and a number of OEM) CD and DVD drives come with free software locked to that drive model. Nero, PowerDVD and musicmatch are all very common apps with such drives, so they're fully legal to put on the machine. The mp3s could have been free ones that came with the music player, or possibly the geek squad put some on there to test it and forgot to take them off.
When I first saw this article title, I thought it was about leads you could use to extend your wireless connection.
Thinking about it, wouldn't that be a great idea? If your wireless network doesn't reach quite far enough - say you want to get wireless in the garden - you just run a really long extension lead from your laptop to the wireless router, and bingo, a network connection. We just need a name for them, maybe wifi network leads or something.
Nooooooooo. I WARNED everyone that cats were trying to take over the world via their parasites and cute fluffyness, and now even slashdot has succumbed to teh cuteness!
The end of the world is nigh, we're all doomed by the cute fuffy kittens in sinks... *clicks link* OMG!!! That's like the best thing EVAR. Stuff the kernel recompile, I need to go buy a KITTEN!!!!
Well, I consider 28 days better than 90, especially given the amount of pressure the government bought to bear on parliament, including the attempt to try and guilt his own party rebels into it.
Overall though, I DO find it a worrying piece of legislation for a liberal democracy, as I said at the end of the sentence you half-quoted.
Oh, I nearly forgot - there's also supervision of the holding orders by a High Court Judge, so at least there's some oversight of the process outside the police.
Close. Scarily, the "glorification of terror" is indeed an offence now, though the suspicion is that they wanted to be able to nail people like Abu Hamza, who stood up in the centre of london and praised al-Qaeda.
However, the 90 day extension of the holding powers was stopped by parliament in Blair's first Commons defeat; instead the previous 14-day holding period (without charge) was extended to 28 days, which is still a dangerous piece of legislation for a liberal democracy IMHO.
There's a difference between security by obscurity, which is just hiding the problems and hoping no-one ever finds them, and delaying the release of precise details of a vulnerability for a short period until a fix is made.
To draw a parallel with software, I think it is irresponsible to release exact details of an exploit without telling the supplier first. It's better to tell them of the details, then release the details publically after say, 30 days if they haven't fixed it to force their hand. If it's a truly critical vulnerability, you could release a general warning about that package after a day or two, if the supplier hasn't lept on the problem immediately. You have to strike a balance between alerting the public that there is a problem, and giving exploiters exact details of a problem they probably don't know about before the supplier had a chance to fix it. It's a little different in the open source world, as users have the option of fixing the bug themselves, rather than having to wait on the supplier, but even so, most users still have to wait for the supplier to fix it.
Admittedly, the current US administration has very little trust left in it that it won't exploit secrecy to its own ends, but being able to close an emergency meeting of a security agency to the public is not automatically a bad idea, in the abstract.
Wrong way round; that's using an ALSA driver to emulate OSS for OSS-only apps. Here, we need a way for an OSS-only driver to support ALSA calls. Nice thought though.
Yes, but all free speech is constrained by law to a certain extent. Take shouting "fire" in a crowded theatre, or discussing how to assassinate the US president - or hell, just look at libel laws. Another example that springs to mind is incitement to violence. Freedom of speech has limits (mainly where they infringe on someone elses rights), just as property laws don't entitle you to strangle someone in your car just because you own it.
You're nearly right. The European Union has the Charter of Fundamental Rights, which the UK has recently adopted into national law. There's the European wide Court of Human Rights which is a higher authority than national courts when it comes to cases that come into its jurisdiction.
Article 10 of the Charter provides the right to freedom of expression, subject to certain restrictions that are "in accordance with law" and "necessary in a democratic society". This right includes the freedom to hold opinions, and to receive and impart information and ideas.
In effect, by adopting the Charter, the UK now has a constitution for the first time in its history, though as you say, Magna Carta and the English Bill of Rights laid out many of the fundamental rights we take for granted today.
If you need a single-slot cooler (i.e. doesn't overlap the adjacent pci slot) then about your only choice with the grunt for HDTV is the nvidia 6600 passive (i.e. fanless); it comes as both AGP and PCI-E versions from club, xfx or gigabyte. With a reasonable specc'd CPU and a scythe ninja cooler, and of course a quiet or passively cooled PSU and a mechanically decoupled hard-drive, you should be able to build a PC that is only cooled by a single low-speed 120mm fan - effectively silent (I can't hear mine from more than a couple of feet away, and most of the noise is the hard-drives). If you want to cut the noise even further, use a 2.5" laptop hard-drive.
:)
If your HTPC case is big enough to allow a dual-slot cooler for the GPU, you can buy pre-fitted or post-fit a zalman vf700-cu or arctic cooler to pretty much any high-spec GPU, that will keep it cool and run really quiet - the zalman on my 7800gt in my gaming rig is on a fan-controller, at 50%, and is quieter than either the CPU fan or the PSU fan - and both of them are ultra-quiet.
For air-cooling kit, I'd recommend silentpcreview.com for starters, they have some great reviews on what 'quiet' kit is actually quiet.
Your final option, if you have the money, is water cooling. You can cool the entire system with one or two low-speed 120mm fans and a big radiator, and still have ninja specs for the PC, if you wanted a dual-purpose gaming and DVR rig.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by HDVD's - blueray and HD-DVD aren't out yet, and either way, the copy-restrictions will stop you ripping them for now. The real advantage of HTPC's with say, mythtv, is fitting multiple TV tuners, whatever drive-sizes you like, and being able to play music and DVD rips off the hard-drive. With the flexibility comes the problems of retro-fitting PC hardware to run passively. If you want small passive kit that 'just works', I strongly recommend a Tivo (or similar prebuilt kit) and decent DVD player, as mythtv or windows MCE definitely needs a little sweat to get working fully.
BTW - I just invested in a 5.1 speaker setup, and WOW is it better than 2 speakers. I know you didn't ask, but I had to tell someone
If the atlantic conveyer slows or stops, then northern and western europe will get colder. All sorts of changes will happen.
The global temperature will still go up overall though. Changes will include an increase in temperature near the equator, and reduced rainfall in the existing temperature zones, causing big effects for farming. Storms will get more powerful, and sea levels will rise.
As with any big complex system, you introduce more energy (temp=energy), the system gets more chaotic. We can't say with certainty what will happen, or when exactly it'll happen, but it won't be fun or cheap to deal with. You won't see a decades cycle for glaciers though, as the system doesn't change that fast. We're starting to see the effects of 100 years of huge amounts of CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere. The effects will carry on getting worse for decades, even if we drastically cut emissions now. If we don't, we just make things even worse for our children and grandchildren. I think they're really gonna hate us for not doing anything about our ongoing mess, even though we knew what we're causing.
Gentoo started out as a personal project, and still remains a very independant project with no corporate sugar-daddy like novell or redhat. These days it's run as a foundation.
I know there was a big drive when DRobbins left the project to reinburse him the $20,000 (not $40k) he was in debt after gentoo, though I don't think he got the full amount; I think he got several thousand in donations though.
Commercial software certainly has its place, as do 'hobbyist' projects like gentoo. It's all good.
FWIW, focus follows mouse, focus under mouse are available under KDE, in Control Panel, Window Behavour, Focus. Sorry if you already know that, but your post was a little unclear as to whether you just did't use it KDE, or didn't think KDE had it....
I'm with you on KDE. Personally, konqueror is the 'killer app' for me; being able to have an sftp tab, samba share, local file and several browser tabs open in one window really rocks, and something I really miss in my day job on Windows.
Should be interesting to see what happens with KDE 4, i believe tidying up the control panel and making it a bit more sane (without removing functionality) is a primary goal.
I believe it's actually an old unix standard, rather a KDE specific thing. As I understand it, the implementation is as follows:
focus follows mouse - window focus is whichever window the mouse touched last, but can be 'stolen' by explicit actions such as opening new windows, popups etc (if you launch a shortcut etc)
focus under mouse - window focus is whichever window the mouse touched last, and cannot be stolen.
focus strictly under mouse - window focus is whichever window the mouse is hovering over, and if the mouse is not touching a window, no window has focus.
Since toxoplasma makes rats unafraid of or even like cat urine, I think it's all a diabolical scheme by the cats. I used to think cats only tolerated us until they could figure out how to operate a can-opener, but now I've realised its a much more cunning scheme - to make humans the slaves of cats!
Old ladies are obviously the most affected after a lifetime of exposure, but its only a matter of time before we all become food suppliers and grooming slaves to our cat overlords. Just look what happens to people when you show them pictures of fluffy kittens, they go all gooey and unable to think straight - my girlfriend is a typical example, she defends her cats against any criticism, because they're so 'cute'.
We must act now, while some of us can still see what the cats are up to. We must destroy the cat menace!
Couldn't agree more. I work as a techie in a school, and we run a spyware check as a matter of course on all the student laptops that come in for something (usually just for a hand with setting up the wireless access so the can 'get on the internet') and virtually all of them have some form of spyware on them. Quite a few of the staff laptops do too, even though we tell them about the hazards and even provide AV and AS software, so it doesn't surprise me that the UK has the highest rate of infection in europe.
Because he's not suggesting this as a 'fix' to the albedo, but a way to provide a big stream of cold salty water at the north end of the global conveyer. Why go to all that trouble?
The global conveyer transports hot water from the equator to and western coast of europe, including the UK, keeping that part of europe warmer and more temperate than it's latitude would otherwise make it. The warm water cools, drops down, and returns in a reverse current going south. Too much fresh water at the northern end of the conveyer, from melting fresh water ice at the pole, and russian rivers, dilutes that heavy salty water, and weakens (and could eventually stop) the return trip of the conveyer. The conveyer weakens or even dies, and the UK gets a lot colder, causing all sorts of problems. This 'fix' would strengthen or even restart the conveyer. The 50 billion gives you an idea of how much it might cost us in the medium term if we ignore global warming, just to 'fix' one part of the problem.
Hopefully, politicians will look at this idea, not as something to do now, but something to convince themselves to do something about global warming (i.e. CO2 and methane emissions) before we have to start planning on projects like this. There's a good chance that the global conveyer shutting down will happen in my or my children's lifetime if we do nothing, and I'd rather not have to seriously face a plan like this.
No links I'm afraid, but the studies I've seen work more along the napster model (but cheaper), i.e. around $5 flat fee a month for as much music as you like. The price is low, but it scales - and there's a lot of people who only buy a couple of albums a year, so they actually end up paying a bit more, but for a lot more music. Tack it into the ISP bill as standard, with an opt-out, and the music business would probably make a vast amount of money. Flat fees have worked very well for broadcast TV companies, so there's no reason why it wouldn't work well for music on the internet, if it's priced low enough with no DRM. If Napster wasn't windows-DRM only, I'd probably sign up for it.