There might not be a connection - KT isn't always updated every week ? And AFAIK, linuxcare only provides the Web Hosting, they don't write Kernel Traffic and the Kernel Cousins.
If they were to (stupidly, since I'm sure many people know of linuxcare mostly for kt.linuxcare.com) stop web hosting that page, I'm sure somebody else would step up and do it quite fast.
> Mozilla exists, and can't be destroyed.
No, but it can't be used either. It's not quite stable in its current state.. But soon, it will be. And I bet that lack of a good web browser is holding a lot of windows users back. I, for example.. As soon as I have a good browser under linux, bye-bye windows.
> Office. Office clones exists.
I use StarOffice - it works well and it's free. The place I work for uses it for computers that can't justify a 600$ office 2000 license but need a word processing app. It's not as good as Office 2000, but it does the job.
> Backoffice.
Open Source has almost all of this, and more, without the annoying licensing restrictions.
> SQL Server
Look at PostgreSQL lately ? Or mySQL, for web applications ?
> Analysis Services
You got me here..
> Visual Basic
VB is an interesting, yet sucky piece of software. Kylix anyone ?
This program is dependent on a program called tempfile. I've tried running it.. But it complained of not finding that program.
Well. My guess is that tempfile just gives a temporary filename ready for use. So, the (not politically correct) fix would be a perl script called tempfile.
This message is 127*127*23 (pix*pix*pages*). With "our" symbols, we would either have to lenghten the message significantly or raise the resolution of each of the pages.
By using specially made, compact symbols, we can send a message that's easily readable by people, no matter what their language is or what symbols they use. A message that contains theory on number systems and complex number representations, equations, particles and waves. Measurement of pressure, power, energy, speed, temperature, time. The size of the planets, astronomical and geographical information about earth. Sensory capabilities, DNA, general appearance and other details about humans.
And all of that takes what ? 46 kilobytes ! 46 !
Creating that message is quite a feat if you ask me. It would have been impossible to do it that well with "our symbols".
Phase 1 - Design standard that makes installed software impossible to copy on other machines.
Phase 2 - For each software you release, separately bundle two "editions". One only works on copy-protection-enabled machines, and costs half as much as the other. Meanwhile, pressure HD companies to make copy-protection-enabled drives. Tell people how easy it is to upgrade to the new standard.. And how much money it'll save them.
Phase 3 - Stop making software that works on normal HDs.
Phase 4 - Implement new functionality in the copy-protection standard which disallows installation of unapproved software. Such as non-microsoft OSes..
Given they've only applied for the patent and haven't got it yet, wouldn't there be a way to intervene in the approval process somehow ? Collect prior art and send it to the PTO, showing them that ebay is trying to patent something that's been invented eons ago ?
Just convince Linus Torvalds to include it in the kernel, and include kernel hooks for CSS decoding. Let it go unnoticed for a while and watch the RIAA try to have 5 revisions of the kernel suppressed from 500 mirrors and 2 million production machines.
"We all know that if you put an "illegal" domain on one of your nameservers and allow it to propogate, you'll get busted heavily. Why? Because of the regulation, and you have to wonder wheter it's all really neccessary."
I'm not sure if I understand perfectly what you're saying, but I believe that you don't understand the basic principles of DNS so well.
First of all, DNS entries do "propagate", but not as you imply.
The way it works:
You set up a "master" server which contains all "zone information", which contains records for a particular domain. You may set up "slave" server which will regularly poll the "master" and transfer the "zone information" and make a local copy.
Therefore, zones only propagate between servers you control. There is no way you can propagate a new TLD.
All lookups (assuming no record caching) must go through the "root servers", which contain information for domains under the TLDs. New TLDs would have to be added there. You have to control those root servers to add a TLD.
It's an option to purchase 1 million Rambus shares at 10$ each.
Tom's numbers come from the fact the right now, Rambus shares are priced 168$. That means that Intel can exercice those options and purchase 168 millons' worth of shares for only 10 millions.
Now, back in march, Rambus shares were worth 471 at one point. That's 461 million of free money for Intel if they had exercised their options back then.
Intel is probably hoping that they can drive Rambus to such high prices again, and therefore make huge amounts of money.
Okay, I do not think that you are understanding the situation perfectly.
Pentium optimised distros will provide performance boost on any intel or non-intel pentium-class or higher CPU, including the AMD K5, K6, K6-2, K6-3, K7, as well the the Cyrix 6x86, M-II and M-III.
Now, the only CPUs that won't benefit from pentium optimisation are lower than pentium CPUs. Those are 486es and 386es. How many people want to run a graphic-intense distro on such CPUs ? Not many. The thing is, mandrake is aimed at users with powerful machines, not at users with old junk they're looking to reuse for free.
Same with the floppy friendly nature of distros. I think that floppy friendlyness should be an afterthought. I mean, who wants to install a linux distro from floppies, and why ? It doesn't make sense, as most machines out there have got a CD-Rom drive. Those without a CD-Rom drive can either go with copying the files over the network, or taking out the HD for installation on another box.. but a floppy install should never be required, nor should it be something developers waste time on when doing a distro. It's waste of time, it's boring work..
Linux isn't just for the old machines you don't want of anymore. It's for the brand-new K7 or P-III you've got as well.
What I've noticed is that most of the data we're accumulating is quickly becoming useless. 10 year old schoolwork isn't something so worthy of archiving. The data you really want to keep shouldn't be very large anyway...
Modern word processing still opens really old file formats like Windows.WRI and Word 1.0, and I don't see that likely to change in the near future. The filters will probably stay, but be optional. If you want to future-proof your documents, run a mass conversion utility on them and convert them to a more "standard" format than Word or Wordperfect. Say, pure ASCII, HTML or RTF. Sure, you're going to lose formatting, but if those are documents you're not likely to use ever again, yet there may be a slight chance you will, then losing formatting isn't important. If you need the content again, you shouldn't mind too much having to redo the formatting correctly again...
Floppy disks are degrading rapidly, but most people's floppy collection can fit on a single CD-R. Then again, most people just don't care about their floppy collection, and will just let it die. The data contained on it isn't useful anymore.
Let's see about Audio CDs. They degrade over time (scratches) and possibly rot. I believe that what will happen is that we're going to convert them to some format like MP3. I'm fairly certain that MP3 capability will continue to be implemented in computer for a very long time.. And if it shows signs of getting phased out, then you might simply batch-convert everything to the new format. Or just rerip your Audio CDs that are sitting in storage, if you really care about the quality (since batch conversion will result in degradation, unless we find a way to actually enhance the audio quality... which might or might not happen...)
Movies. VHS tapes degrade... Probably, we'll be converting what we really want onto some kind of optical disk in the future. And the rest willl decay, and we won't care about it decaying. When the format (DVD-R perhaps ?) is being phased out, since it's in digital format, it should be possible quite easily to simply transfer our DVD-Rs to the higher capacity medium... Perhaps 10 discs on a single one... Saving a lot of space, and having the format live another 20 years. After all, how hard will it be to include MPEG-2 decompression in next generation video players ? The cost of an MPEG-2 decoding circuit probably won't be very high anymore.
The other possibility I see is that bandwith gets cheap enough so that we may consider remote storage vaults. That has a couple of privacy issues I'm certain you can see... But it's incredibly convenient and will probably be adopted by everyone if we just find a way to have a high speed switched pipe to everybody's home at a reasonable cost..
If we do indeed have high bandwith in every house, I see that the media companies might also get their acts together and start putting up their own gigantic media-archive. They could offer a monthly media-license that'd give you access to any music or movie you want. Or perhaps just make you pay for every access to the archive. Of course, such a thing.. I can think of so many ways it could go wrong. What if they decide to have only censored material on the archive ? What about independant artists ? Perhaps we'll just see a protocol to access and pay for access to media archives, and have a dozen appear. Let's say, DisnABCTimeAOL could have theirs, AndoTransmeVAMicrosoChryslerDaimler could have theirs...
This could be so horrible if not properly done - a lot of "non approved" content could suddenly become unavailaible if you killed the distribution channels except those media-archives... So. Is this just an incoherent rant ? Would you care to add any constructive comment to it ? Answers ? Questions ? Anything at all.
The real problem with this lawsuit is that they are companies and associations from the United States suing a canadian company. The article doesn't give out a lot of information about what kind of law they used, but it seems pretty strange that american companies would be able to get an injuction so easily against a canadian company... After all, the canadian law does permit rebroadcasting, and that's what they're doing. The US law doesn't, and they're invoking a US law to ban a canadian company from doing business ?
How can a judge in Plattsburgh, Pa, order a canadian company to provide logs and shut down its service ? That's the thing I can't understand.. Would anybody care to explain me a little international law ? I'm canadian. Could I sue an american company, and have a canadian judge decide the outcome ? What if I win, and I get a court order saying that I can seize property from the american company. Then what happens ? Who makes sure that the court order is respected ?
Actually, there is a problem with ads. We pay for bandwith.
The stats for the proxies, when merged together, give exactly this:
62.46% Global Hit-Rate 29.63% Doubleclick.net Hit-Rate 03.72% Doubleclick.net KB Transferred
By making a simple calculation doubleclick alone is using 7.84% of my bandwith, therefore increasing my monthly costs by more or less that amount. The connections we use have a base cost that's pretty low plus 12$ a gigabyte. So doubleclick (and other ad sites, but mostly doubleclick) is costing us a non-insignificant amount of money !
Now, I'm sure the stats are different than they would in another environement - this is an educational establishement so the sites visited tend to be more often the same, and a normal proxy would probably devote less bandwith to doubleclick.net, and a normal site would probably not pay for bandwith by the gig like we do.
The problem is, they're making money without us getting anything in return. I don't feel it's immoral to deprive them of their revenue as long as they won't compensate us at all. I think that if more proxy administrators start doing the same, or perhaps even replacing the doubleclick banners (that's pretty easy to do, and I am considering doing it), doubleclick will have to react and do something.
What I'd consider fair is for them to offer us a share of the revenue. It wouldn't have to be big.. And perhaps offer a solution to cache their ads more efficiently rather to get such a low hit-rate.
Please reply with any constructive input, I appreciate it:)
This is the opt-out link. It will place a cookie on your computer that'll let you opt out of doubleclick's tracking.
I am the administrator of a few web caches (I use squid) and I've started blocking web ads a while ago, replacing them by one-pixel blank gifs. It probably fixes the problem...
I would like to know Bruce's opinion on linux standards, with regaurds in particular to a standard desktop, and package manager. because as a software developer i feel it is tough to support so many distributions with many different directory layouts and different package formats.
That's a pretty big question, and I think we should talk about GUI's since there's more than one of them. And I should talk about distros, with regard to standards. The Linux standard base, is working on issues like filesystem layouts, names of libraries, what's in the libraries, and in general the nuts and bolts of how things works. However, they're not standardizing on a GUI. So, it looks like for the forseeable future, we're going to have KDE and Gnome both. I think they address different markets.
As AT&T awaits for the aproval of the merger with the 3rd largest cable company in the US, MediaOne, and as AOL may change it's tune of open acess cable for the internet if it's merger with TimeWarner, the 2nd largest cable operator, goes through, what do you envision the Future holds for the freedom to acess the Internet, for the freedom _of_ the Internet, and for grassroots sites such as yours, Technocrat?
Well, several users ago, I commented to the FCC on the creation of a personal digital radio service. And my intent at that time was that the service be used to establish a fidonet or usenet sort of relay system, that would allow people to do internet like things. Without the wired internet. So far, we don't have good radios to do this, except for maybe for some radios that AT&T is manufacturing. I've worked on this problem for as L0pht, and I'd like to see more radio and software develeopment, for a disconnected internet. A totally old-fashioned thing, which takes a lot of money. I actually tried to fund this, about a year ago, and did not succeed. It's possible I'll have better success now, once Linux Capital Group has funded some linux projects.
What is your opinion of the Wine project? Do you think a functional/reliable Windows emulator is important for Linux's success on the desktop, and do you believe it is possible for Wine to achieve a high level of compatibility with Windows?
Wine is one of the most difficult products in Linux. They're chasing a moving target, and a poorly documented one at that. Look at the commercial ones, like Wabi, which suddenly disappeared one day. I would like to see Wine succeed, I'd certainly help them any way I could. But, I think in the end, we need Linux applications for linux systems.
I'm wondering what your thoughts on the recent DVD DeCSS brouhaha are?
I was in the courtroom, for the first hearing. Unfortunately I missed the second one, where the prelim injunction was granted. I think that Linux folks just want to play DVD discs, and you should be able to play them with open source software. I think that US law is going too far, as far as intellectual propertly protection, when that kind of protection puts constraints in our hardware. And I think that the DVD folks, who are the movie studios, have nothing to lose, because DeCSS is not enabling the wholesale bootleggers. They have professional equipment. So, I'd hope that they could eventually be persuaded to drop the issue, but they've shown a history of being shortsighted. When the first Video Tape Recorders (betamax) came into homes, the movie studios did the same sort of lawsuit. They lost, and boy are they glad they did. They now make more from videotape sales, then they do from theatrical presentation. And the videotapes have only the lamest copy protection.
With the recent success of Loki distributing and porting games to linux, and the recent anouncement of more ports do you think application developers will start to hop on and port the killer apps over?
Well, I don't think of games as the killer aps for Linux, but maybe I'm prejudiced:-) I am actually trying to run a porting operation in Linux Capital Group. However, there are ethical problems. By porting commercial windows apps to Linux, and keeping them proprietary, do I make it more difficult for an open source solution to happen? And is the open source solution where I should be putting my company's efforts ? I figure I have to decide this on a item-by-item basis. If TurboTax wants a port, they will get it. If some FTP program wants a port, I'd just explain what the competition is like.
Being a Java developer, I'm interested in how you see the future of the language considering Sun's current licencing position. Also, what advice would you have for Sun, keeping in mind the fact that they are trying hard to stop third parties (like MS) from polluting the language?
Sun is in big trouble. They are painting themselves into smaller and smaller corners. This is because nobody has to listen to Sun unless they are using Sun's own software. Surely Transvirtual can sell Microsoft any version of Kaffe they wish. And now sun is going to release Solaris under SCSL. That will be a big boost to Linux. Linux programmers will copy what they like, but not close enough to violate copyright. Solaris will still have a dumb license and will gain market share more slowly than Linux, if it gains it at all. So, I am of mixed minds. I would prefer that sun use a good Open Source license. But at the same time I don't think this will hurt linux, it will help it if sun uses a bad license.
Do you think the recent relaxation of the restrictions on crypto by the US DoC is really a step forward, or just a straw-move to placate crypto-activists?
Regarding the crypto question, I have not had time to read the new law. So, I can only make a general answer. Open Source needs good crypto to work. If we can not tell where our programs come from, we will not know if they have trojan horses. So, we need digital signature very badly. So I'd like to see crypto laws support free import and export of open source crypto.
Agreed ! Send 2 million dollars worth of unmarked gold bars to the following address, and I'll take care of everything for you. I swear !
One of the problems with this idea is to find a trustable manager. Nevermind we'll have to convince a newspaper to run the ad. They do have some control over the content of the ads... And we have to find the money, too. And arrange for everybody to pay in an untraceable way. It gets quite hard to do...
I wonder how important the CGI is in that movie. It's easy to see how the producers could deem necessary to have half the movie made out of cheesy CGI of huge dragons and magic... But I do not think that it is necessary at all for the movie to look good. Unfortunately, from what that article says, they have sold their souls to cheesy, low budget CGI (anybody saw B5: Crusade ? Doesn't cheap CGI just want to make you puke ?).
Probably some of you have seen the anime Record of Lodoss War, which is the closest thing to a D&D movie (even though it's animated). Making a live action version of that would require some CGI, but by carefully selecting the scenes, you don't need that much of it to make it look great. And then there is the anime Heroic Legend of Arslan. You would need so little CGI to make a live action version of that one.
I think that a D&D type movie could be done with only a few minutes of CGI. After all, D&D is all about the story, not the special effects. The roleplaying has never needed any special effects, and never will. Then, why must a movie be full of them ? Have we come to a point where a movie needs to be full of cheesy effect in order to be successful ?
Why do movie producers seem to sell their soul to the effects firms more and more often these days. I hate that. When you have a perfectly good movie with a lot of effects shot that add absolutely nothing to the story.
If they only have 30 million of funding, wouldn't they have been better off spending that on magnificent battle scenes. Ah well. I guess my stupid rant isn't even making sense anymore. Most unfortunate.
I wonder how that movie will turn out. And I also wonder how the Final Fantasy movie will turn out. Has a full length feature movie featuring human lead characters entirely in CGI ever been attempted ? From what we saw in toy story 2, they still don't master the animation of humans. And that was Pixar, who had a ton of budget. The FF movie might very well look like shit... Still, I'd like to see that one... 100% CGI might be a style of movie that takes off. Perhaps it'll replace traditional animation... hopefully it won't inherit the "animation is for kiddies" stigma that Disney has unfortunately propagated. Will it win over people over 25... Or they'll just shun it as being cheesy animation, for kiddies... eh. Time will tell.
My method to detect e-mail spam is to use give companies companyname@mydomain.com as my email address. Of course, that only works if you have your own domain and a catchall account. But it allows you to know who put you on a spam list, and to ignore them easily by forwarding their spam to/dev/null.
Your middle name method is pretty clever...
One of the things that one can do to limit the value of the credit card he uses, and therefore defend against most fraud, is to use a card without anymore money than you wish to spend.
Three possibilities I can think of.
First, an Incentive Card if you can find any. Those come with fixed values, they're not credit cards, but you can spend up to their fixed value anywhere that takes credit cards. www.aies.com sells them, I believe. That way, you keep changing CC# very often.
www.webcertificate.com offers a similar product, and you can add money with your real credit card (processing fee of 1.50$ by 50$ you add). You don't get a physical card, but only a mastercard number you can use to make purchases. It works great for me.
The third method is to use a Visa Debit Card and deposit the amount you wish to use before every transaction... That's a bit of trouble, but combined with online banking it can be made easy. I use www.x.com to do that. You open an account with them, and they send you a visa debit card you can use like a credit card. But the balance availaible is only what you deposit in it. You can deposit up to 500$/6 months with another credit card, and as much as you want by check.
Any of those ways, you have a "credit card" without credit. It only has as much money as you want. I'm sure you can understand the implication of that.. Even if somebody steals it from you, you don't lose anything more than the value that you put on it, which is probably only the value of the item that was there in the first place. And as they're issued by banks, they will let you contest charges as well as with a real credit card.
Hope this has been helpful.
--- P.S. If you sign up for x.com, you have the option of referring somebody. If you feel generous, refer francois@bradet.com . You don't lose anything if you don't refer me. If you feel this whole thing sounds like a commercial endorsement and you don't like such things, please let me know by moderating me down. If you really what I just wrote is bad, let me know at francois@bradet.com and I'll apologize. I'm just trying to share my knowledge.
When slashdot constantly accuses Microsoft of generating FUD, what is this ? Can anybody debate the fact that the topic is strongly anti-MS biased ? I hope that the posters will know better than to say "that's what happens when you don't go with linux". Sure, MS has a lot of security flaws.
In this very situation, you are combining two things.
First, the database administrators (who might not be MCSEs... Without praising the MCSE program, one thing it does put emphasis on is long, hard to guess passwords with short expiration times) made the stupid mistake of using the default username for their database and putting no password, or a stupid password. That's like leaving the root password blank, and allowing root to log in via telnet ! It's a stupid mistake made by people who probably didn't get any kind of training. Probably not the kind of people you'd normally hire to run your server... Such a person running your linux server would give you a very vulnerable server, as vulnerable as those.
Second thing is, they were using a version of IIS that had not been patched for the last two years. Okay, it shouldn't have been defective in the first place. But look at 2 year old linux distributions ! Anybody with a good root package is able to crack a linux box that's been left alone for the past 2 years ! Use one of the buffer overflows in one of the various flawed daemons, if it's 2 years old, it's probably vulnerable... If you don't patch your system, no matter what OS it runs, it will be vulnerable.
Who should be blamed here, the OS or the administrators ? I think the answer is obvious. A bad administrator will cause similar problems in any old OS.
HDTV what you're talking about. HDTV televisions are very expensive, and the high bandwith requirement is a major problem.
DTV is another thing completely. DTV will work with any television you throw at it, using a receiver provided by your cable company. It gives you superior image quality when compared to analog TV, makes channel pirating almost impossible, lets you have a lot of value added services (like digital music channels, pay per view, nice on screen TV guides...)
DTV isn't more expensive than analog is. Here, in Quebec City, somebody who had base analog service (about 35 CDN) will be able to go with DTV for 2$ extra. That includes a DTV receiver box and a choice of channels. With analog, you can only have preselected channels. With DTV, you get 16 base channels and you can choose 15 channels (with the base plan, it costs extra for extra channels) out of about 40. DTV is good for everybody, the consumer and the broadcasters, as it lets the customer choose the channels they want to get. No more Food network if you don't want it.
Any company making DVD products must license the patented technology from a Philips/Pioneer/Sony pool, a Hitachi/Matsushita/Mitsubishi/Time Warner/Toshiba/Victor pool, and from Thomson. Total royalties are about 6% (minimum $6) for a DVD-Video player, 6% (minimum $6) for a DVD-ROM drive, 5% (minimum $2) for a DVD decoder, and 10 cents for a DVD disc.
An MPEG-2 patent license may also be required, from MPEG LA (Licensing Adminstrator). Cost is about $4 for a DVD player or decoder card and 4 cents for each DVD disc, although there seems to be disagreement on whether content producers owe royalties for discs. Contact MPEG LA for more info: .
DotComGuy writes "ABCNNMSNBC is reporting that an loony is actually throwing out all computers from his rented house for a year, to prove that it is possible to live without e-commerce. He's even changed his legal name to Mich Maddox. He says, 'I'm going to come out being a loon,' but I think you have to be crazy already to even think of doing this in the first place... " Actually, it does appear that he can use devices with embedded microcontrollers - and can use the phone. But still, I think I'd lose it after about two weeks or so.
Even if you could communicate over some kind of wireless LAN that spanned over your city, what userful network would you be connected to ? The internet, you say ? There aren't enough addresses to share so that you would end up with one. If you connect to a public wireless LAN, the best you'll have is an address behind a NAT. An unreachable address. That's not so good.
There is a need for a network to connect to, that wouldn't have those address limitations. Something based on IPV6 would fit the bill. From that IPV6 network, you could open tunnels that'd lead to the IPV4 internet. Perhaps even request a real, tunnelled IPV4 address from an IPV4 provider somewhere.
There is the 6bone ( www.6bone.net ) that has been starting to create an IPV6 network. But it's not progressing. There is no content or services on the IPV6 network, so nobody will go there. A chicken-and-egg problem. If the 6bone or some other IPV6 network grew, it would solve one of the major impediments to a wireless internet.
That and micropayments. Micropayments remain something that would enable a lot of services to be offered. There are a couple of interesting systems.. www.e-gold.com is one. It allows one to purchase gold, kept in trust by the e-gold corporation. You can give any amount, no matter how small, with only a 1% transfer fee (0.50$ max). The problem is that getting money into an e-gold account is going to cost you at least 4%, probably more. And there is a 1% per year maintenance fee. So the system still is pretty costly.
www.standardreserve.com does things a bit differently. Perhaps in a more useful way. And then there is www.mojonation.net which promises to also create another virtual currency, but which is aimed at file sharing. However, the possibilities of such a virtual currency do not end there.
If you had an easy-to-buy, easy-to-trade virtual currency, that allowed micropayments among other things, and that had some popularity, that would enable many things. A wireless network ran by people in their homes would be one of them. Reflectors, tunnels, lease of addresses, and other network services further enabling a new network, they could all prove interesting to run, as you'd charge for their use. A minor fee, yes, but still a fee. Mojonation aims to do that. Combine the goal of mojonation with working software (instead of pre-pre-alpha quality mojonation software) and valuable e-currency such as e-gold (100% backed by metal).. And you'd have something truly interesting.
I imagine a parallel network developping along the internet. Any geek in his home, with a 30$ transmitter, could setup an access point. He would charge small sums for each KB transfered and sent through a tunnel, via the internet, onto that new network.
This could be bad. Only three weeks left before y2k and they aren't ready yet ? I wonder why the watchdog groups didn't make sure the plants were compliant a little earlier. This would be a major disaster if the plants did fail.
Still, to what level can the plants fail without an operator noticing ? It's not like there is a "dump toxic sewage into drinkable water" valve connected to the main computer. And I'm sure the process isn't so automated the operators will simply miss a gross error like that. Surely they can revert to mostly manual operation. Or just throw the power lever for five minutes, set the clocks back, and set the power back on.
Is there any other essential service that has the potential to fail on y2k which can't simply be paused for a moment while the clock is set back ? I'm not talking about things like telephone and electricity, as it is safe to assume that those companies have already taken measures to make sure nothing unexpected will happen on y2k. I don't think we have to fear y2k so much. Of course, it's not pleasant to hear 3 weeks before y2k that some utilities might not yet be ready...
I wonder how could hardware and software makers decide to ignore the problem for so long, even some systems built a few years ago aren't compliant. I mean, in 1993, some Honeywell central air conditioning systems weren't yet compliant. It's probably a conspiracy to be able to increase sales and support revenue.. They charged an outrageous upgrade fee. And so did a lot of other companies. I wonder how much does the y2k problem really cost us... We must take in account that it probably help the technology business take off, which created a lot of jobs. But did anybody ever lose a job due to the y2k problem, except for their own oversight in designing a system ?
The y2k problem might actually have been a blessing that forced us to raise our level of technology, and helped the industry blossom. I wonder if the industry will slow down as some people predict.
Some people here seem to think that we should explore Jupiter's Moons rather than Mars. I agree that the prospects of finding something interesting (life ?) on the moons seem to be, right now, much higher. But keep in mind that this is only a single discovery, which highlights the possibility of life in strange environements which Europa might or might not have.
However, I believe that there are several advantages to the exploration of Mars first. Remember that Europa is 100 times smaller than the Earth. Europa could not possibly support human life. Mars could. Therefore, it would be much more interesting to have a base on Mars than to have a base on Europa.
Mars is also much nearer to us - it takes what, 3 or 4 years at full speed to get to Jupiter. Our technology is much closer to allowing us to do productive exploration of Mars. I'm not against exploring Europa and the other moons of Jupiter in the future, but right now we should focus on what we already begun: the Exploration of Mars.
What do you think ? Or should we just scrap the Mars project and go to Jupiter right away:) I don't think that the budget of NASA can sustain focused exploration of both planets..
Slashdot Mirror
There might not be a connection - KT isn't always updated every week ? And AFAIK, linuxcare only provides the Web Hosting, they don't write Kernel Traffic and the Kernel Cousins.
If they were to (stupidly, since I'm sure many people know of linuxcare mostly for kt.linuxcare.com) stop web hosting that page, I'm sure somebody else would step up and do it quite fast.
> Mozilla exists, and can't be destroyed.
:)
No, but it can't be used either. It's not quite stable in its current state.. But soon, it will be. And I bet that lack of a good web browser is holding a lot of windows users back. I, for example.. As soon as I have a good browser under linux, bye-bye windows.
> Office. Office clones exists.
I use StarOffice - it works well and it's free. The place I work for uses it for computers that can't justify a 600$ office 2000 license but need a word processing app. It's not as good as Office 2000, but it does the job.
> Backoffice.
Open Source has almost all of this, and more, without the annoying licensing restrictions.
> SQL Server
Look at PostgreSQL lately ? Or mySQL, for web applications ?
> Analysis Services
You got me here..
> Visual Basic
VB is an interesting, yet sucky piece of software. Kylix anyone ?
> Third partey apps
Wine is getting better
This program is dependent on a program called tempfile. I've tried running it.. But it complained of not finding that program.
Well. My guess is that tempfile just gives a temporary filename ready for use. So, the (not politically correct) fix would be a perl script called tempfile.
#!/usr/local/bin/perl
print "/tmp/",rand(100000);
Worked for me ! My poster is on the way.
Why indeed ?
This message is 127*127*23 (pix*pix*pages*). With "our" symbols, we would either have to lenghten the message significantly or raise the resolution of each of the pages.
By using specially made, compact symbols, we can send a message that's easily readable by people, no matter what their language is or what symbols they use. A message that contains theory on number systems and complex number representations, equations, particles and waves. Measurement of pressure, power, energy, speed, temperature, time. The size of the planets, astronomical and geographical information about earth. Sensory capabilities, DNA, general appearance and other details about humans.
And all of that takes what ? 46 kilobytes ! 46 !
Creating that message is quite a feat if you ask me. It would have been impossible to do it that well with "our symbols".
Phase 1 - Design standard that makes installed software impossible to copy on other machines.
Phase 2 - For each software you release, separately bundle two "editions". One only works on copy-protection-enabled machines, and costs half as much as the other. Meanwhile, pressure HD companies to make copy-protection-enabled drives. Tell people how easy it is to upgrade to the new standard.. And how much money it'll save them.
Phase 3 - Stop making software that works on normal HDs.
Phase 4 - Implement new functionality in the copy-protection standard which disallows installation of unapproved software. Such as non-microsoft OSes..
Given they've only applied for the patent and haven't got it yet, wouldn't there be a way to intervene in the approval process somehow ? Collect prior art and send it to the PTO, showing them that ebay is trying to patent something that's been invented eons ago ?
Just convince Linus Torvalds to include it in the kernel, and include kernel hooks for CSS decoding. Let it go unnoticed for a while and watch the RIAA try to have 5 revisions of the kernel suppressed from 500 mirrors and 2 million production machines.
"We all know that if you put an "illegal" domain on one of your nameservers and allow it to propogate, you'll get busted heavily. Why? Because of the regulation, and you have to wonder wheter it's all really neccessary."
I'm not sure if I understand perfectly what you're saying, but I believe that you don't understand the basic principles of DNS so well.
First of all, DNS entries do "propagate", but not as you imply.
The way it works:
You set up a "master" server which contains all "zone information", which contains records for a particular domain. You may set up "slave" server which will regularly poll the "master" and transfer the "zone information" and make a local copy.
Therefore, zones only propagate between servers you control. There is no way you can propagate a new TLD.
All lookups (assuming no record caching) must go through the "root servers", which contain information for domains under the TLDs. New TLDs would have to be added there. You have to control those root servers to add a TLD.
It's not just a matter a regulation.
It's an option to purchase 1 million Rambus shares at 10$ each.
Tom's numbers come from the fact the right now, Rambus shares are priced 168$. That means that Intel can exercice those options and purchase 168 millons' worth of shares for only 10 millions.
Now, back in march, Rambus shares were worth 471 at one point. That's 461 million of free money for Intel if they had exercised their options back then.
Intel is probably hoping that they can drive Rambus to such high prices again, and therefore make huge amounts of money.
Okay, I do not think that you are understanding the situation perfectly.
Pentium optimised distros will provide performance boost on any intel or non-intel pentium-class or higher CPU, including the AMD K5, K6, K6-2, K6-3, K7, as well the the Cyrix 6x86, M-II and M-III.
Now, the only CPUs that won't benefit from pentium optimisation are lower than pentium CPUs. Those are 486es and 386es. How many people want to run a graphic-intense distro on such CPUs ? Not many. The thing is, mandrake is aimed at users with powerful machines, not at users with old junk they're looking to reuse for free.
Same with the floppy friendly nature of distros. I think that floppy friendlyness should be an afterthought. I mean, who wants to install a linux distro from floppies, and why ? It doesn't make sense, as most machines out there have got a CD-Rom drive. Those without a CD-Rom drive can either go with copying the files over the network, or taking out the HD for installation on another box.. but a floppy install should never be required, nor should it be something developers waste time on when doing a distro. It's waste of time, it's boring work..
Linux isn't just for the old machines you don't want of anymore. It's for the brand-new K7 or P-III you've got as well.
What I've noticed is that most of the data we're accumulating is quickly becoming useless. 10 year old schoolwork isn't something so worthy of archiving. The data you really want to keep shouldn't be very large anyway...
.WRI and Word 1.0, and I don't see that likely to change in the near future. The filters will probably stay, but be optional. If you want to future-proof your documents, run a mass conversion utility on them and convert them to a more "standard" format than Word or Wordperfect. Say, pure ASCII, HTML or RTF. Sure, you're going to lose formatting, but if those are documents you're not likely to use ever again, yet there may be a slight chance you will, then losing formatting isn't important. If you need the content again, you shouldn't mind too much having to redo the formatting correctly again...
Modern word processing still opens really old file formats like Windows
Floppy disks are degrading rapidly, but most people's floppy collection can fit on a single CD-R. Then again, most people just don't care about their floppy collection, and will just let it die. The data contained on it isn't useful anymore.
Let's see about Audio CDs. They degrade over time (scratches) and possibly rot. I believe that what will happen is that we're going to convert them to some format like MP3. I'm fairly certain that MP3 capability will continue to be implemented in computer for a very long time.. And if it shows signs of getting phased out, then you might simply batch-convert everything to the new format. Or just rerip your Audio CDs that are sitting in storage, if you really care about the quality (since batch conversion will result in degradation, unless we find a way to actually enhance the audio quality... which might or might not happen...)
Movies. VHS tapes degrade... Probably, we'll be converting what we really want onto some kind of optical disk in the future. And the rest willl decay, and we won't care about it decaying. When the format (DVD-R perhaps ?) is being phased out, since it's in digital format, it should be possible quite easily to simply transfer our DVD-Rs to the higher capacity medium... Perhaps 10 discs on a single one... Saving a lot of space, and having the format live another 20 years. After all, how hard will it be to include MPEG-2 decompression in next generation video players ? The cost of an MPEG-2 decoding circuit probably won't be very high anymore.
The other possibility I see is that bandwith gets cheap enough so that we may consider remote storage vaults. That has a couple of privacy issues I'm certain you can see... But it's incredibly convenient and will probably be adopted by everyone if we just find a way to have a high speed switched pipe to everybody's home at a reasonable cost..
If we do indeed have high bandwith in every house, I see that the media companies might also get their acts together and start putting up their own gigantic media-archive. They could offer a monthly media-license that'd give you access to any music or movie you want. Or perhaps just make you pay for every access to the archive. Of course, such a thing.. I can think of so many ways it could go wrong. What if they decide to have only censored material on the archive ? What about independant artists ? Perhaps we'll just see a protocol to access and pay for access to media archives, and have a dozen appear. Let's say, DisnABCTimeAOL could have theirs, AndoTransmeVAMicrosoChryslerDaimler could have theirs...
This could be so horrible if not properly done - a lot of "non approved" content could suddenly become unavailaible if you killed the distribution channels except those media-archives... So. Is this just an incoherent rant ? Would you care to add any constructive comment to it ? Answers ? Questions ? Anything at all.
The real problem with this lawsuit is that they are companies and associations from the United States suing a canadian company. The article doesn't give out a lot of information about what kind of law they used, but it seems pretty strange that american companies would be able to get an injuction so easily against a canadian company... After all, the canadian law does permit rebroadcasting, and that's what they're doing. The US law doesn't, and they're invoking a US law to ban a canadian company from doing business ?
How can a judge in Plattsburgh, Pa, order a canadian company to provide logs and shut down its service ? That's the thing I can't understand.. Would anybody care to explain me a little international law ? I'm canadian. Could I sue an american company, and have a canadian judge decide the outcome ? What if I win, and I get a court order saying that I can seize property from the american company. Then what happens ? Who makes sure that the court order is respected ?
Thanks.
Actually, there is a problem with ads. We pay for bandwith.
:)
The stats for the proxies, when merged together, give exactly this:
62.46% Global Hit-Rate
29.63% Doubleclick.net Hit-Rate
03.72% Doubleclick.net KB Transferred
By making a simple calculation doubleclick alone is using 7.84% of my bandwith, therefore increasing my monthly costs by more or less that amount. The connections we use have a base cost that's pretty low plus 12$ a gigabyte. So doubleclick (and other ad sites, but mostly doubleclick) is costing us a non-insignificant amount of money !
Now, I'm sure the stats are different than they would in another environement - this is an educational establishement so the sites visited tend to be more often the same, and a normal proxy would probably devote less bandwith to doubleclick.net, and a normal site would probably not pay for bandwith by the gig like we do.
The problem is, they're making money without us getting anything in return. I don't feel it's immoral to deprive them of their revenue as long as they won't compensate us at all. I think that if more proxy administrators start doing the same, or perhaps even replacing the doubleclick banners (that's pretty easy to do, and I am considering doing it), doubleclick will have to react and do something.
What I'd consider fair is for them to offer us a share of the revenue. It wouldn't have to be big.. And perhaps offer a solution to cache their ads more efficiently rather to get such a low hit-rate.
Please reply with any constructive input, I appreciate it
This is the opt-out link. It will place a cookie on your computer that'll let you opt out of doubleclick's tracking.
I am the administrator of a few web caches (I use squid) and I've started blocking web ads a while ago, replacing them by one-pixel blank gifs. It probably fixes the problem...
I would like to know Bruce's opinion on linux standards, with regaurds in particular to a standard desktop, and package manager. because as a software developer i feel it is tough to support so many distributions with many different directory layouts and different package formats.
:-) I am actually trying to run a porting operation in Linux Capital Group. However, there are ethical problems. By porting commercial windows apps to Linux, and keeping them proprietary, do I make it more difficult for an open source solution to happen? And is the open source solution where I should be putting my company's efforts ? I figure I have to decide this on a item-by-item basis. If TurboTax wants a port, they will get it. If some FTP program wants a port, I'd just explain what the competition is like.
That's a pretty big question, and I think we should talk about GUI's since there's more than one of them. And I should talk about distros, with regard to standards. The Linux standard base, is working on issues like filesystem layouts, names of libraries, what's in the libraries, and in general the nuts and bolts of how things works. However, they're not standardizing on a GUI. So, it looks like for the forseeable future, we're going to have KDE and Gnome both. I think they address different markets.
As AT&T awaits for the aproval of the merger with the 3rd largest cable company in the US, MediaOne, and as AOL may change it's tune of open acess cable for the internet if it's merger with TimeWarner, the 2nd largest cable operator, goes through, what do you envision the Future holds for the freedom to acess the Internet, for the freedom _of_ the Internet, and for grassroots sites such as yours, Technocrat?
Well, several users ago, I commented to the FCC on the creation of a personal digital radio service. And my intent at that time was that the service be used to establish a fidonet or usenet sort of relay system, that would allow people to do internet like things. Without the wired internet. So far, we don't have good radios to do this, except for maybe for some radios that AT&T is manufacturing. I've worked on this problem for as L0pht, and I'd like to see more radio and software develeopment, for a disconnected internet. A totally old-fashioned thing, which takes a lot of money. I actually tried to fund this, about a year ago, and did not succeed. It's possible I'll have better success now, once Linux Capital Group has funded some linux projects.
What is your opinion of the Wine project? Do you think a functional/reliable Windows emulator is important for Linux's success on the desktop, and do you believe it is possible for Wine to achieve a high level of compatibility with Windows?
Wine is one of the most difficult products in Linux. They're chasing a moving target, and a poorly documented one at that. Look at the commercial ones, like Wabi, which suddenly disappeared one day. I would like to see Wine succeed, I'd certainly help them any way I could. But, I think in the end, we need Linux applications for linux systems.
I'm wondering what your thoughts on the recent DVD DeCSS brouhaha are?
I was in the courtroom, for the first hearing. Unfortunately I missed the second one, where the prelim injunction was granted. I think that Linux folks just want to play DVD discs, and you should be able to play them with open source software. I think that US law is going too far, as far as intellectual propertly protection, when that kind of protection puts constraints in our hardware. And I think that the DVD folks, who are the movie studios, have nothing to lose, because DeCSS is not enabling the wholesale bootleggers. They have professional equipment. So, I'd hope that they could eventually be persuaded to drop the issue, but they've shown a history of being shortsighted. When the first Video Tape Recorders (betamax) came into homes, the movie studios did the same sort of lawsuit. They lost, and boy are they glad they did. They now make more from videotape sales, then they do from theatrical presentation. And the videotapes have only the lamest copy protection.
With the recent success of Loki distributing and porting games to linux, and the recent anouncement of more ports do you think application developers will start to hop on and port the killer apps over?
Well, I don't think of games as the killer aps for Linux, but maybe I'm prejudiced
Being a Java developer, I'm interested in how you see the future of the language considering Sun's current licencing position. Also, what advice would you have for Sun, keeping in mind the fact that they are trying hard to stop third parties (like MS) from polluting the language?
Sun is in big trouble. They are painting themselves into smaller and smaller corners. This is because nobody has to listen to Sun unless they are using Sun's own software. Surely Transvirtual can sell Microsoft any version of Kaffe they wish. And now sun is going to release Solaris under SCSL. That will be a big boost to Linux. Linux programmers will copy what they like, but not close enough to violate copyright. Solaris will still have a dumb license and will gain market share more slowly than Linux, if it gains it at all. So, I am of mixed minds. I would prefer that sun use a good Open Source license. But at the same time I don't think this will hurt linux, it will help it if sun uses a bad license.
Do you think the recent relaxation of the restrictions on crypto by the US DoC is really a step forward, or just a straw-move to placate crypto-activists?
Regarding the crypto question, I have not had time to read the new law. So, I can only make a general answer. Open Source needs good crypto to work. If we can not tell where our programs come from, we will not know if they have trojan horses. So, we need digital signature very badly. So I'd like to see crypto laws support free import and export of open source crypto.
Agreed ! Send 2 million dollars worth of unmarked gold bars to the following address, and I'll take care of everything for you. I swear !
One of the problems with this idea is to find a trustable manager. Nevermind we'll have to convince a newspaper to run the ad. They do have some control over the content of the ads... And we have to find the money, too. And arrange for everybody to pay in an untraceable way. It gets quite hard to do...
I wonder how important the CGI is in that movie. It's easy to see how the producers could deem necessary to have half the movie made out of cheesy CGI of huge dragons and magic... But I do not think that it is necessary at all for the movie to look good. Unfortunately, from what that article says, they have sold their souls to cheesy, low budget CGI (anybody saw B5: Crusade ? Doesn't cheap CGI just want to make you puke ?).
Probably some of you have seen the anime Record of Lodoss War, which is the closest thing to a D&D movie (even though it's animated). Making a live action version of that would require some CGI, but by carefully selecting the scenes, you don't need that much of it to make it look great. And then there is the anime Heroic Legend of Arslan. You would need so little CGI to make a live action version of that one.
I think that a D&D type movie could be done with only a few minutes of CGI. After all, D&D is all about the story, not the special effects. The roleplaying has never needed any special effects, and never will. Then, why must a movie be full of them ? Have we come to a point where a movie needs to be full of cheesy effect in order to be successful ?
Why do movie producers seem to sell their soul to the effects firms more and more often these days. I hate that. When you have a perfectly good movie with a lot of effects shot that add absolutely nothing to the story.
If they only have 30 million of funding, wouldn't they have been better off spending that on magnificent battle scenes. Ah well. I guess my stupid rant isn't even making sense anymore. Most unfortunate.
I wonder how that movie will turn out. And I also wonder how the Final Fantasy movie will turn out. Has a full length feature movie featuring human lead characters entirely in CGI ever been attempted ? From what we saw in toy story 2, they still don't master the animation of humans. And that was Pixar, who had a ton of budget. The FF movie might very well look like shit... Still, I'd like to see that one... 100% CGI might be a style of movie that takes off. Perhaps it'll replace traditional animation... hopefully it won't inherit the "animation is for kiddies" stigma that Disney has unfortunately propagated. Will it win over people over 25... Or they'll just shun it as being cheesy animation, for kiddies... eh. Time will tell.
My method to detect e-mail spam is to use give companies companyname@mydomain.com as my email address. Of course, that only works if you have your own domain and a catchall account. But it allows you to know who put you on a spam list, and to ignore them easily by forwarding their spam to /dev/null.
Your middle name method is pretty clever...
One of the things that one can do to limit the value of the credit card he uses, and therefore defend against most fraud, is to use a card without anymore money than you wish to spend.
Three possibilities I can think of.
First, an Incentive Card if you can find any. Those come with fixed values, they're not credit cards, but you can spend up to their fixed value anywhere that takes credit cards. www.aies.com sells them, I believe. That way, you keep changing CC# very often.
www.webcertificate.com offers a similar product, and you can add money with your real credit card (processing fee of 1.50$ by 50$ you add). You don't get a physical card, but only a mastercard number you can use to make purchases. It works great for me.
The third method is to use a Visa Debit Card and deposit the amount you wish to use before every transaction... That's a bit of trouble, but combined with online banking it can be made easy. I use www.x.com to do that. You open an account with them, and they send you a visa debit card you can use like a credit card. But the balance availaible is only what you deposit in it. You can deposit up to 500$/6 months with another credit card, and as much as you want by check.
Any of those ways, you have a "credit card" without credit. It only has as much money as you want. I'm sure you can understand the implication of that.. Even if somebody steals it from you, you don't lose anything more than the value that you put on it, which is probably only the value of the item that was there in the first place. And as they're issued by banks, they will let you contest charges as well as with a real credit card.
Hope this has been helpful.
---
P.S. If you sign up for x.com, you have the option of referring somebody. If you feel generous, refer francois@bradet.com . You don't lose anything if you don't refer me. If you feel this whole thing sounds like a commercial endorsement and you don't like such things, please let me know by moderating me down. If you really what I just wrote is bad, let me know at francois@bradet.com and I'll apologize. I'm just trying to share my knowledge.
When slashdot constantly accuses Microsoft of generating FUD, what is this ? Can anybody debate the fact that the topic is strongly anti-MS biased ? I hope that the posters will know better than to say "that's what happens when you don't go with linux". Sure, MS has a lot of security flaws.
In this very situation, you are combining two things.
First, the database administrators (who might not be MCSEs... Without praising the MCSE program, one thing it does put emphasis on is long, hard to guess passwords with short expiration times) made the stupid mistake of using the default username for their database and putting no password, or a stupid password. That's like leaving the root password blank, and allowing root to log in via telnet ! It's a stupid mistake made by people who probably didn't get any kind of training. Probably not the kind of people you'd normally hire to run your server... Such a person running your linux server would give you a very vulnerable server, as vulnerable as those.
Second thing is, they were using a version of IIS that had not been patched for the last two years. Okay, it shouldn't have been defective in the first place. But look at 2 year old linux distributions ! Anybody with a good root package is able to crack a linux box that's been left alone for the past 2 years ! Use one of the buffer overflows in one of the various flawed daemons, if it's 2 years old, it's probably vulnerable... If you don't patch your system, no matter what OS it runs, it will be vulnerable.
Who should be blamed here, the OS or the administrators ? I think the answer is obvious. A bad administrator will cause similar problems in any old OS.
You're confusing HDTV and DTV.
HDTV what you're talking about. HDTV televisions are very expensive, and the high bandwith requirement is a major problem.
DTV is another thing completely. DTV will work with any television you throw at it, using a receiver provided by your cable company. It gives you superior image quality when compared to analog TV, makes channel pirating almost impossible, lets you have a lot of value added services (like digital music channels, pay per view, nice on screen TV guides...)
DTV isn't more expensive than analog is. Here, in Quebec City, somebody who had base analog service (about 35 CDN) will be able to go with DTV for 2$ extra. That includes a DTV receiver box and a choice of channels. With analog, you can only have preselected channels. With DTV, you get 16 base channels and you can choose 15 channels (with the base plan, it costs extra for extra channels) out of about 40. DTV is good for everybody, the consumer and the broadcasters, as it lets the customer choose the channels they want to get. No more Food network if you don't want it.
HDTV is another beast entirely.
It is quite significant. To quote the DVD FAQ.
Any company making DVD products must license the patented technology from a Philips/Pioneer/Sony pool, a Hitachi/Matsushita/Mitsubishi/Time Warner/Toshiba/Victor pool, and from Thomson. Total royalties are about 6% (minimum $6) for a DVD-Video player, 6% (minimum $6) for a DVD-ROM drive, 5% (minimum $2) for a DVD decoder, and 10 cents for a DVD disc.
An MPEG-2 patent license may also be required, from MPEG LA (Licensing Adminstrator). Cost is about $4 for a DVD player or decoder card and 4 cents for each DVD disc, although there seems to be disagreement on whether content producers owe royalties for discs. Contact MPEG LA for more info: .
DotComGuy writes "ABCNNMSNBC is reporting that an loony is actually throwing out all computers from his rented house for a year, to prove that it is possible to live without e-commerce. He's even changed his legal name to Mich Maddox. He says, 'I'm going to come out being a loon,' but I think you have to be crazy already to even think of doing this in the first place... " Actually, it does appear that he can use devices with embedded microcontrollers - and can use the phone. But still, I think I'd lose it after about two weeks or so.
Even if you could communicate over some kind of wireless LAN that spanned over your city, what userful network would you be connected to ? The internet, you say ? There aren't enough addresses to share so that you would end up with one. If you connect to a public wireless LAN, the best you'll have is an address behind a NAT. An unreachable address. That's not so good.
There is a need for a network to connect to, that wouldn't have those address limitations. Something based on IPV6 would fit the bill. From that IPV6 network, you could open tunnels that'd lead to the IPV4 internet. Perhaps even request a real, tunnelled IPV4 address from an IPV4 provider somewhere.
There is the 6bone ( www.6bone.net ) that has been starting to create an IPV6 network. But it's not progressing. There is no content or services on the IPV6 network, so nobody will go there. A chicken-and-egg problem. If the 6bone or some other IPV6 network grew, it would solve one of the major impediments to a wireless internet.
That and micropayments. Micropayments remain something that would enable a lot of services to be offered. There are a couple of interesting systems.. www.e-gold.com is one. It allows one to purchase gold, kept in trust by the e-gold corporation. You can give any amount, no matter how small, with only a 1% transfer fee (0.50$ max). The problem is that getting money into an e-gold account is going to cost you at least 4%, probably more. And there is a 1% per year maintenance fee. So the system still is pretty costly.
www.standardreserve.com does things a bit differently. Perhaps in a more useful way. And then there is www.mojonation.net which promises to also create another virtual currency, but which is aimed at file sharing. However, the possibilities of such a virtual currency do not end there.
If you had an easy-to-buy, easy-to-trade virtual currency, that allowed micropayments among other things, and that had some popularity, that would enable many things. A wireless network ran by people in their homes would be one of them. Reflectors, tunnels, lease of addresses, and other network services further enabling a new network, they could all prove interesting to run, as you'd charge for their use. A minor fee, yes, but still a fee. Mojonation aims to do that. Combine the goal of mojonation with working software (instead of pre-pre-alpha quality mojonation software) and valuable e-currency such as e-gold (100% backed by metal).. And you'd have something truly interesting.
I imagine a parallel network developping along the internet. Any geek in his home, with a 30$ transmitter, could setup an access point. He would charge small sums for each KB transfered and sent through a tunnel, via the internet, onto that new network.
Dreams...
This could be bad. Only three weeks left before y2k and they aren't ready yet ? I wonder why the watchdog groups didn't make sure the plants were compliant a little earlier. This would be a major disaster if the plants did fail.
Still, to what level can the plants fail without an operator noticing ? It's not like there is a "dump toxic sewage into drinkable water" valve connected to the main computer. And I'm sure the process isn't so automated the operators will simply miss a gross error like that. Surely they can revert to mostly manual operation. Or just throw the power lever for five minutes, set the clocks back, and set the power back on.
Is there any other essential service that has the potential to fail on y2k which can't simply be paused for a moment while the clock is set back ? I'm not talking about things like telephone and electricity, as it is safe to assume that those companies have already taken measures to make sure nothing unexpected will happen on y2k. I don't think we have to fear y2k so much. Of course, it's not pleasant to hear 3 weeks before y2k that some utilities might not yet be ready...
I wonder how could hardware and software makers decide to ignore the problem for so long, even some systems built a few years ago aren't compliant. I mean, in 1993, some Honeywell central air conditioning systems weren't yet compliant. It's probably a conspiracy to be able to increase sales and support revenue.. They charged an outrageous upgrade fee. And so did a lot of other companies. I wonder how much does the y2k problem really cost us... We must take in account that it probably help the technology business take off, which created a lot of jobs. But did anybody ever lose a job due to the y2k problem, except for their own oversight in designing a system ?
The y2k problem might actually have been a blessing that forced us to raise our level of technology, and helped the industry blossom. I wonder if the industry will slow down as some people predict.
Anyway, it will be interesting to watch..
Some people here seem to think that we should explore Jupiter's Moons rather than Mars. I agree that the prospects of finding something interesting (life ?) on the moons seem to be, right now, much higher. But keep in mind that this is only a single discovery, which highlights the possibility of life in strange environements which Europa might or might not have.
:) I don't think that the budget of NASA can sustain focused exploration of both planets..
However, I believe that there are several advantages to the exploration of Mars first. Remember that Europa is 100 times smaller than the Earth. Europa could not possibly support human life. Mars could. Therefore, it would be much more interesting to have a base on Mars than to have a base on Europa.
Mars is also much nearer to us - it takes what, 3 or 4 years at full speed to get to Jupiter. Our technology is much closer to allowing us to do productive exploration of Mars. I'm not against exploring Europa and the other moons of Jupiter in the future, but right now we should focus on what we already begun: the Exploration of Mars.
What do you think ? Or should we just scrap the Mars project and go to Jupiter right away