Update: it's been opened. It contains material. The report is due six months or so, so set a tickle.
Mars is easier than an asteroid. At Mars you have a planet to cancel your Delta-V with its gravity and atmosphere (limited though Mars' atmosphere is, it does help). Hitting an asteroid and returning is roughly twice as hard as hitting Mars and returning because you have to halt your motion at the asteroid using propulsion. It's a miracle Hyabusa returned at all - and it was three years late - because it missed its return window and had to wait for Earth to come back into position. The efforts of the ground team could be considered heroic - if some blood had been spilled.
Don't you think we should ask the guy?
on
Knuth Got It Wrong
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· Score: 1
I know he's a legend and all (and most deservedly so!), but it's not like he's dead or anything. He's only 72. We could ask him.
Before you ask your questions though, thank him - even if you don't know why. You owe him more than you know.
The shortage of fossil fuels is a myth. Even if BP didn't plan to just burn off upwards of 20,000 bpd in the gulf because they can't get ships to haul the stuff away in time, it's just not true. Apparently all the world's oceans are coated dozens of meters deep with something called "clathrates", which is fossil methane that can be converted to clean-burning propane. There's not enough oxygen in the atmosphere to burn all that stuff. We haven't even begun to tap the arctic and antarctic reserves - and the antarctic is likely to be a bigger source of oil than Saudi Arabia. Fossil fuel shortages are the least of our problems.
Nuclear fuel shortages? Also a myth. The problem with nuclear fuels is that if you use nuclear enough you wind up with too much nuclear fuel. The more you use it the more you get. It's like the trouble with tribbles. Just like mining technologies turn the discarded tailings of silver mines into the greatest repositories of gold ore, reprocessing technolgies will one day turn the wasteland that is the Hanford superfund cleanup site into a critical national resource - and a source of beautiful nuclear age glass in colors never seen before.
You want a real problem? There are more of us than we need there to be. We can sustain our culture and promote scientific progress we need to take humanity to the next level - interstellar exploration - with certainly 300 million of us, likely 30 million, possibly 3 million. 95% to 99.95% of us are "extra". Do you want to be the one to explain to 19 of 20 humans (or 1999 of 2000) that they're redundant? I don't think they'll take the news very well. We may have passed the point where we can solve this problem. The next ice age will straighten this out by pruning us back to a few hundred thousand. We will of course go feral and lose our history and culture again just like we did the last ten times. After 100,000 years of ice maybe we'll get the next evolution of men, who may discover our long forgotten rovers on the moon and take it for the warning that it is: that men came here before and died out and were forgotten. Maybe they will learn. It's probably too late for us, but evolution will try and try again until it achieves galactic domination or eventually our sun will cleanse all traces of it from the rocks in its orbit as it expands into red giant phase. Fortunately this experiment is redundant - it's being tried throughout the universe around billions of suns with varying levels of success.
We've achieved what must be a universally rare level: the choice. We can choose to live. It's within our power to make our genome persistent beyond the loss of the ecology that supports our science and culture. We can choose to make an offsite backup of mankind. We can go out amongst the stars and claim the universe as our own. The prize is simply "all there is". It's a rare choice because if that choice were common we could see them from here - they might have settled this rock before we did, but for certain we could see them from here. We probably won't choose life. One might suppose that millions of cultures had risen up within the range of our telescopes and not chosen life and so been lost - but we can choose life. Will we be the rare one to surmount this bar? It seems unlikely. All those asteroids will probably be still waiting for men to mine starships out of them 90,000 years from now. It's cold out there, and dark. Lots of creepy things might be out there. The road is long and hard - fraught with peril, and the first step is the hardest step of all. To take the first step you have to steel yourself to venturing from the fire, abandoning all you've ever known, to letting go of returning. It's best we stay home here by the fire and let others go if they dare. It's warm here, and here we have Cable.
In IT we're starting to do something about this. If you take 100 P4 desktops that burn 150 watts for eight hours a day and replace them with a virtual server that burns 150 watts and 100 15-watt thin clients you save 89% of the electricity, or about 13,000 watts - likely double that once air conditioning and other factors are considered - call it 25,000 watts - and the keyboard jockeys get a better experience overall. At that rate I only need to convert 100K users to replace a smallish (25MW) coal-fired plant like Healy Unit 1 [pdf]. That's a stretch goal, but I think I might have a chance of selling that with some help.
With iPad type devices and private clouds and telepresence we might lure a lot of folks away from their desks or hopefully talk them out of commuting every day entirely, which will save a lot more. If they don't go to work at all you don't need to light and climate control that space, they don't have to burn energy to get their 200lbs of meat to and from work each day when their boss only needs the 10lbs between their ears and it doesn't matter to him where the work happens. That's an even better deal because getting the people to work costs more energy than building them a place to work, lighting and heating it, and and providing them technology to work on. The manufacturing plants that make the drywall, the cubicles, the furniture can be shut down - and the plants that build the parts that go into those plants can be scaled back. The trucks that take the Bic pens, paperclips and file folders to those offices don't have to be built, nor do a lot of the trucks that delivered gas to the stations that served those commuters and trucks and trains. All of that manufacturing is energy too.
If, with the help of y'all, I can help convince 100 million PC users that thin ARM-based iPad equivalents and thin clients and Apple TV type devices (with Android by personal preference) backed by cloud compute is preferable to a kilowatt gaming rig, we'll do even better. The advantage here is not to us actually, but to the next billion users to join us here. They just don't have the watts so they'll have to ante up with shared computing, thin clients and ARM just to get in the game. In the US I think it'll go another way - the PC will go cloud and most suburbanites will just have some sort of LCD ARM terminal in every room. In order to pull this off we need to promote domestic networking to fiber gigabit, and fiber to the premises. Gigabit fiber gives the bandwidth for the content-hungry American consumer and has a low enough latency to provide a satisfactory gaming experience even with thin clients accessing a neighborhood datacenter that, by providing centralized time-shared servers saves energy, costs and space.
If you need a resume then you're doing it wrong. Make a name for yourself and sell your name - the whole time you're employed. If your status changes from "unavailable" to "?" on your website, FB and Linkedin and you don't have a dozen offers of employment in 24 hours, then you've failed. If your friends in the industry keep touch many of them are checking to see if you're available now because really you're not that interesting but they get a spiff for bringing you in. If you're selling yourself properly then you're happy where you are and you still get 4-8 unconditional offers a year, and dozens of inquiries that might be. You can call around to your friends if you get desperate, but then you're in a weak position. All else is fluff.
You don't own the vanity web domain that is your name? You don't use it to advertise your self? So sad for you. What were you thinking? Maybe you don't belong in tech. That's a grand placement for a blog that shows off your achievements, your knowledge, your puissance, your value. I bought my name (though it's now a flat page and not a blog). Everybody I know did that. If you enter my proper name in Google, the first hit is the page I want you to see, and most of the entire rest of it is links to public sites where I aired my carefully considered forward thinking opinion - and a few hits are to a scary guy who shares my name but most obviously isn't me even though he lives near me (damn you FencePost!) I googled me just now, and that's how it is. Most of us did it several different ways. A domain is like ten bucks a year. Come on: if you can't invest that much in yourself, what's somebody going to think?
Hint: people are going to "Google" you before they offer you a job. The output associated with your name should be interesting, forward looking, and non-toxic. The Internet being what it is, you don't get to revoke output associated tightly with your name so if you're prone to stupid, racist, sexist or obscure arguments while posting sober or impaired, it's best if you use a pseudonym while doing that so you don't make yourself unemployable. It's probably best to have a general alt to use for your common activity, and post under your real name only in your most careful, sober and considered capacity. Unfortunately this guidance is far too late for me, but hopefully my strengths overcome my Internet shortcomings and my learning will educate others.
An AC can claim anything he wants including not being the AC that provided prior comments, or being a longstanding member of the/. community. Unless you're willing to stand up as your uid and say "that was me" you're just another AC. And even if you do, trolling phenomena have existed long since three digit IDs, so you'll also have to bring some worthy content. Low UID usually gets you some respect but you can throw it away if you want to.
You see this onion on my belt? It was the fashion in the day. I wear it to remind me that fashions stink, and the older they are the more they do. My onion is very old.
Please? You don't have to re-announce it one more time. I want to buy the thing. I'm sold. I'm oversold. I've wanted to buy the thing for a year. What I need is a website that will take my credit card info in return for giving me the darned thing. I get it. Tegra II with Android. I'm all in. Now sell me the darned thing! You have it, I want it. You have product and I have money. We should be able to work out a deal. What the heck is your problem?
It took time to add links to the footnotes of the text of the decision. Over time, in the way Groklaw works, the footnote text will become links to text versions of the associated documents, which link to the official court PDFs, and a link to the blog post will appear in the summary page here, or a child page. That's how Groklaw does things. The members contribute to fund the purchase of the documents from the court. Groklaw was a tiny bit slower than Ars Technica this time but in the fullness of time GrokLaw makes a better record that the Library of Congress has deemed worthy to record. This is certainly the best recorded copyright infringement case ever, and that's solely because of GrokLaw. Not only that, but the thorough documentation makes it a case study in all forms of intellectual property litigation and even all forms of extended litigation practice. Pamela isn't the fastest always, though she usually is because this case is a specialty - but her site is the definitive record of this series of court cases. Groklaw doesn't have the attention deficit disorder that/. suffers from, nor does it tolerate certain types of troll, nor obscenity. Pamela might have chosen the slashdot moderation system instead of the one she did given an adequate education and foresight in blogging and technology - but she didn't. She's not a geek like us, she's a paralegal and the decision point was more than seven years ago. It's a paralegal's blog and given the persistence and popularity of her site she chose well. Groklaw might have obsessive compulsive disorder in that it follows religiously minutia on a court case most people don't care about, but that's a different issue. Groklaw is thorough. It's a worthy reference for this specific topic, and the only one worth mentioning.
The site is also producing text-based documentation of the Comes V. Microsoft collection of documents. In Comes, the plaintiff forced production of a vast collection of documents that offer an interesting view into the internal operation of the Microsoft monopoly, and published them on their website which closed when Microsoft settled. Most of these documents were captured, and are being indexed by the Groklaw team. This is a worthy endeavor that could use help if you're interested.
Groklaw has no advertising - it's fully funded by its interested members (in this group I am proud to stand) and supported with servers and bandwidth by ibiblio because it's a noteworthy and popular endeavor that promotes openness. Ars Technica reports on major events in the case, and references their other articles on the case. Ars does this to attract page hits that drive their advertising funding. It's in no way similar to the way Groklaw works.
Groklaw is notable not just for this case but in providing an exemplary example to follow for documenting a notable legal case. This has never been done before in this way and Pamela Jones deserves considerable respect for inventing this method of preventing a miscarriage of justice. What these cases need more than anything else to secure justice is the full light of public knowledge of what's happening. Had that public awareness and thorough documentation provided by GrokLaw not been the case, an unpleasantly different outcome was almost certain.
For me GrokLaw is not just about this case though that is a prime focus now. It's about how we, the common geeks through our collective memory and obsessive attention to detail can derail the attempts to halt progress by seasoned lawyers who are ignorant of how things actually work, and inattentive to when they were inven
Come on guys. Groklaw has been covering this thing since the very beginning. The least you could do is link to the article there. Give a little respect to Pam Jones for following this long slog like a trouper.
It's plenty legal as long as you buy the licenses - which are $16.50 to $57.24 per system imaged. $16.50 is for qty 500-1000 with no support. This is why we switched to clonezilla years ago.
Well, that and the fact that Clonezilla works better, faster, easier, more reliably, and does more things.
A $5k jackpot is a win that a player will brag about long after they've lost $50K more. It keeps them coming back. An $11M jackpot is a prize where the winner moves to a new home and changes their name, giving up gambling forever - it provides little advertising benefit.
When it hits the jackpot, the machine reboots over and over to void play. The player gets some trivial payout and usually is none the wiser. BTW: Most Vegas digital slots run Redhat. Were you expecting Windows CE?
I guess it depends on your point of view. For me for the last decade reading the mainstream tech press has been all about Microsoft spin detection. Of course now that we have the Comes collection we know why: Microsoft is all over the influencing mindshare thing, influencing "analysts" like Rob Enderle and Maureen O'Gara by funding their "research" or feeding them pre-release gems to make them seem prescient, paying for "studies" by IDC, Gartner and the rest to buy their results, advertising in publications that print favorable articles and so on. These things are all now a part of the official public record. Even here on slashdot it's pretty easy to tell the astroturfers from the people who are giving their real opinion and whether they're ignorant fools influenced by mindshare or cynical IT pros with long experience. The most beautiful illustration of this was the Vista threads where the number of paid slashdot bloggers must have numbered in the hundreds and their reality denial was absolute.
Anybody can scan this very thread for AC comments and make a list of Microsoft talking points. Then they can index those against the registered members and find out who's spouting the company's line and who isn't. If you can come up with a pro-Microsoft point of view that isn't echoed by three AC's, you might have something interesting - otherwise you're just repeating what you heard. Every Microsoft thread for the last five years is the same. "When Linux and OS-X are as popular as Windows they will have viruses too" is one of my favorite indicators of turfness. If you've posted this gem you deserve to be dismissed as an idiot until you've recanted. I'm pretty sure a scientific analysis of this phenomenon is publication-worthy if anybody's looking for a paper to write.
That crap might play on PC World (though you don't see it as much any more in the articles). Even on PCWorld and CNET and other mainstream press the comments are now mostly insightful, interesting and dismissive of Microsoft's efforts as they could possibly be. Even with paid bloggers and funded analysts Microsoft can't defeat the basic truths that their ability to provide innovation ended more than a decade ago. The world has changed. The value of classical reportage has diminished considerably. The vast majority of Internet content that people read isn't the reportage, it's the comments where individuals give their own experience, insight and opinion - not for pay but for the self satisfaction of being right the vast majority of the time. It's a self-reward, self-actualization game and even Microsoft's blogger budget can't overcome an entire world of bloggers disgusted with Microsoft products who want a future where they get new stuff that works.
Actually, to pretend to use their search engine to buy things. The Bing advertisers would tell you - no matter how you arrived at the product - at checkout time that you could get Bing cashback if you put in the Bing code. So you had to go find the thing on Bing to get the code.
The basic dishonesty of this evolution didn't lend credibility to Bing with anybody involved.
The correct size is "all sizes". That way if you need one in a particular size, there is one for it. Your question is like asking the right number of blades for a razor, the ideal horsepower for a truck. This is wrong thinking entirely.
D00d - Android is Linux. The only purpose for antivirus in Linux is as a mail filter for Windows mail clients. The solution to this root kit is: don't lend people your phone. The begged question is, "why would I lend someone my phone?"
Bill is still Chairman of the Board and reportedly an advisor on key development projects. If you draw a salary you can't be said to "not work there any more".
Basically, Microsoft and Apple are code cathedrals. Using the Cathedral system they can organize the labor of a great many people. In a Cathedral you can do anything that is permitted to be done in that Cathedral - which can be almost anything that brings the controlling powers profit really. But if you want to do something they don't want you to do, then you can't and there's nothing you can do about it but leave the cathedral or accept that you can't do that thing.
Android and the Linuxes are the Bazaar. It's noisy and chaotic. It can be harder to find things. Some of the things you find in a Bazaar are quite crude. But in the Bazaar you can do anything you want any way you want. The Bazaar is run by everybody in it, for each to his own benefit. Almost anything that can be found in the Cathedral can also be purchased in the Bazaar by a man with ready cash. Almost anything.
One thing that can be bought in the Cathedral but not in the Bazaar is the preventing of things you don't want others to do. If somebody wants to prevent the use of VP8 or Flash in the Cathedral, or the development of hardware platforms that don't run Windows, well, anything can be proscribed if the price is right. The Cathedral is run by the head priest, and not specifically for your benefit but primarily for the benefit of the Cathedral - because it's this self serving nature that makes Cathedrals persistent and powerful.
One is not necessarily better than the other. Each has merits, each has uses.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not like there aren't thousands of security flaws being exploited in the wild. What's one more, against the convenience of orderly patching?
I saw an interview with the guy. There are no words. If he won fair and square, then I weep for my children.
Let us claim our place among the fossils with pride, that we did not stoop to such foolishness before the inevitable asteroid took us.
Over there we're laughing at a reporter who thinks Donald Knuth got something wrong, ever in his life. The poor fool.
For living icons who had an impact on mankind Donald Knuth beats Bill Gates by four orders of magnitude, and I'm talking Big O notation here.
Update: it's been opened. It contains material. The report is due six months or so, so set a tickle.
Mars is easier than an asteroid. At Mars you have a planet to cancel your Delta-V with its gravity and atmosphere (limited though Mars' atmosphere is, it does help). Hitting an asteroid and returning is roughly twice as hard as hitting Mars and returning because you have to halt your motion at the asteroid using propulsion. It's a miracle Hyabusa returned at all - and it was three years late - because it missed its return window and had to wait for Earth to come back into position. The efforts of the ground team could be considered heroic - if some blood had been spilled.
I know he's a legend and all (and most deservedly so!), but it's not like he's dead or anything. He's only 72. We could ask him.
Before you ask your questions though, thank him - even if you don't know why. You owe him more than you know.
The shortage of fossil fuels is a myth. Even if BP didn't plan to just burn off upwards of 20,000 bpd in the gulf because they can't get ships to haul the stuff away in time, it's just not true. Apparently all the world's oceans are coated dozens of meters deep with something called "clathrates", which is fossil methane that can be converted to clean-burning propane. There's not enough oxygen in the atmosphere to burn all that stuff. We haven't even begun to tap the arctic and antarctic reserves - and the antarctic is likely to be a bigger source of oil than Saudi Arabia. Fossil fuel shortages are the least of our problems.
Nuclear fuel shortages? Also a myth. The problem with nuclear fuels is that if you use nuclear enough you wind up with too much nuclear fuel. The more you use it the more you get. It's like the trouble with tribbles. Just like mining technologies turn the discarded tailings of silver mines into the greatest repositories of gold ore, reprocessing technolgies will one day turn the wasteland that is the Hanford superfund cleanup site into a critical national resource - and a source of beautiful nuclear age glass in colors never seen before.
You want a real problem? There are more of us than we need there to be. We can sustain our culture and promote scientific progress we need to take humanity to the next level - interstellar exploration - with certainly 300 million of us, likely 30 million, possibly 3 million. 95% to 99.95% of us are "extra". Do you want to be the one to explain to 19 of 20 humans (or 1999 of 2000) that they're redundant? I don't think they'll take the news very well. We may have passed the point where we can solve this problem. The next ice age will straighten this out by pruning us back to a few hundred thousand. We will of course go feral and lose our history and culture again just like we did the last ten times. After 100,000 years of ice maybe we'll get the next evolution of men, who may discover our long forgotten rovers on the moon and take it for the warning that it is: that men came here before and died out and were forgotten. Maybe they will learn. It's probably too late for us, but evolution will try and try again until it achieves galactic domination or eventually our sun will cleanse all traces of it from the rocks in its orbit as it expands into red giant phase. Fortunately this experiment is redundant - it's being tried throughout the universe around billions of suns with varying levels of success.
We've achieved what must be a universally rare level: the choice. We can choose to live. It's within our power to make our genome persistent beyond the loss of the ecology that supports our science and culture. We can choose to make an offsite backup of mankind. We can go out amongst the stars and claim the universe as our own. The prize is simply "all there is". It's a rare choice because if that choice were common we could see them from here - they might have settled this rock before we did, but for certain we could see them from here. We probably won't choose life. One might suppose that millions of cultures had risen up within the range of our telescopes and not chosen life and so been lost - but we can choose life. Will we be the rare one to surmount this bar? It seems unlikely. All those asteroids will probably be still waiting for men to mine starships out of them 90,000 years from now. It's cold out there, and dark. Lots of creepy things might be out there. The road is long and hard - fraught with peril, and the first step is the hardest step of all. To take the first step you have to steel yourself to venturing from the fire, abandoning all you've ever known, to letting go of returning. It's best we stay home here by the fire and let others go if they dare. It's warm here, and here we have Cable.
Screw it. What's on Fox?
In IT we're starting to do something about this. If you take 100 P4 desktops that burn 150 watts for eight hours a day and replace them with a virtual server that burns 150 watts and 100 15-watt thin clients you save 89% of the electricity, or about 13,000 watts - likely double that once air conditioning and other factors are considered - call it 25,000 watts - and the keyboard jockeys get a better experience overall. At that rate I only need to convert 100K users to replace a smallish (25MW) coal-fired plant like Healy Unit 1 [pdf]. That's a stretch goal, but I think I might have a chance of selling that with some help.
With iPad type devices and private clouds and telepresence we might lure a lot of folks away from their desks or hopefully talk them out of commuting every day entirely, which will save a lot more. If they don't go to work at all you don't need to light and climate control that space, they don't have to burn energy to get their 200lbs of meat to and from work each day when their boss only needs the 10lbs between their ears and it doesn't matter to him where the work happens. That's an even better deal because getting the people to work costs more energy than building them a place to work, lighting and heating it, and and providing them technology to work on. The manufacturing plants that make the drywall, the cubicles, the furniture can be shut down - and the plants that build the parts that go into those plants can be scaled back. The trucks that take the Bic pens, paperclips and file folders to those offices don't have to be built, nor do a lot of the trucks that delivered gas to the stations that served those commuters and trucks and trains. All of that manufacturing is energy too.
If, with the help of y'all, I can help convince 100 million PC users that thin ARM-based iPad equivalents and thin clients and Apple TV type devices (with Android by personal preference) backed by cloud compute is preferable to a kilowatt gaming rig, we'll do even better. The advantage here is not to us actually, but to the next billion users to join us here. They just don't have the watts so they'll have to ante up with shared computing, thin clients and ARM just to get in the game. In the US I think it'll go another way - the PC will go cloud and most suburbanites will just have some sort of LCD ARM terminal in every room. In order to pull this off we need to promote domestic networking to fiber gigabit, and fiber to the premises. Gigabit fiber gives the bandwidth for the content-hungry American consumer and has a low enough latency to provide a satisfactory gaming experience even with thin clients accessing a neighborhood datacenter that, by providing centralized time-shared servers saves energy, costs and space.
If you need a resume then you're doing it wrong. Make a name for yourself and sell your name - the whole time you're employed. If your status changes from "unavailable" to "?" on your website, FB and Linkedin and you don't have a dozen offers of employment in 24 hours, then you've failed. If your friends in the industry keep touch many of them are checking to see if you're available now because really you're not that interesting but they get a spiff for bringing you in. If you're selling yourself properly then you're happy where you are and you still get 4-8 unconditional offers a year, and dozens of inquiries that might be. You can call around to your friends if you get desperate, but then you're in a weak position. All else is fluff.
You don't own the vanity web domain that is your name? You don't use it to advertise your self? So sad for you. What were you thinking? Maybe you don't belong in tech. That's a grand placement for a blog that shows off your achievements, your knowledge, your puissance, your value. I bought my name (though it's now a flat page and not a blog). Everybody I know did that. If you enter my proper name in Google, the first hit is the page I want you to see, and most of the entire rest of it is links to public sites where I aired my carefully considered forward thinking opinion - and a few hits are to a scary guy who shares my name but most obviously isn't me even though he lives near me (damn you FencePost!) I googled me just now, and that's how it is. Most of us did it several different ways. A domain is like ten bucks a year. Come on: if you can't invest that much in yourself, what's somebody going to think?
Hint: people are going to "Google" you before they offer you a job. The output associated with your name should be interesting, forward looking, and non-toxic. The Internet being what it is, you don't get to revoke output associated tightly with your name so if you're prone to stupid, racist, sexist or obscure arguments while posting sober or impaired, it's best if you use a pseudonym while doing that so you don't make yourself unemployable. It's probably best to have a general alt to use for your common activity, and post under your real name only in your most careful, sober and considered capacity. Unfortunately this guidance is far too late for me, but hopefully my strengths overcome my Internet shortcomings and my learning will educate others.
An AC can claim anything he wants including not being the AC that provided prior comments, or being a longstanding member of the /. community. Unless you're willing to stand up as your uid and say "that was me" you're just another AC. And even if you do, trolling phenomena have existed long since three digit IDs, so you'll also have to bring some worthy content. Low UID usually gets you some respect but you can throw it away if you want to.
You see this onion on my belt? It was the fashion in the day. I wear it to remind me that fashions stink, and the older they are the more they do. My onion is very old.
Please? You don't have to re-announce it one more time. I want to buy the thing. I'm sold. I'm oversold. I've wanted to buy the thing for a year. What I need is a website that will take my credit card info in return for giving me the darned thing. I get it. Tegra II with Android. I'm all in. Now sell me the darned thing! You have it, I want it. You have product and I have money. We should be able to work out a deal. What the heck is your problem?
It took time to add links to the footnotes of the text of the decision. Over time, in the way Groklaw works, the footnote text will become links to text versions of the associated documents, which link to the official court PDFs, and a link to the blog post will appear in the summary page here, or a child page. That's how Groklaw does things. The members contribute to fund the purchase of the documents from the court. Groklaw was a tiny bit slower than Ars Technica this time but in the fullness of time GrokLaw makes a better record that the Library of Congress has deemed worthy to record. This is certainly the best recorded copyright infringement case ever, and that's solely because of GrokLaw. Not only that, but the thorough documentation makes it a case study in all forms of intellectual property litigation and even all forms of extended litigation practice. Pamela isn't the fastest always, though she usually is because this case is a specialty - but her site is the definitive record of this series of court cases. Groklaw doesn't have the attention deficit disorder that /. suffers from, nor does it tolerate certain types of troll, nor obscenity. Pamela might have chosen the slashdot moderation system instead of the one she did given an adequate education and foresight in blogging and technology - but she didn't. She's not a geek like us, she's a paralegal and the decision point was more than seven years ago. It's a paralegal's blog and given the persistence and popularity of her site she chose well. Groklaw might have obsessive compulsive disorder in that it follows religiously minutia on a court case most people don't care about, but that's a different issue. Groklaw is thorough. It's a worthy reference for this specific topic, and the only one worth mentioning.
The site is also producing text-based documentation of the Comes V. Microsoft collection of documents. In Comes, the plaintiff forced production of a vast collection of documents that offer an interesting view into the internal operation of the Microsoft monopoly, and published them on their website which closed when Microsoft settled. Most of these documents were captured, and are being indexed by the Groklaw team. This is a worthy endeavor that could use help if you're interested.
Groklaw has no advertising - it's fully funded by its interested members (in this group I am proud to stand) and supported with servers and bandwidth by ibiblio because it's a noteworthy and popular endeavor that promotes openness. Ars Technica reports on major events in the case, and references their other articles on the case. Ars does this to attract page hits that drive their advertising funding. It's in no way similar to the way Groklaw works.
Groklaw is notable not just for this case but in providing an exemplary example to follow for documenting a notable legal case. This has never been done before in this way and Pamela Jones deserves considerable respect for inventing this method of preventing a miscarriage of justice. What these cases need more than anything else to secure justice is the full light of public knowledge of what's happening. Had that public awareness and thorough documentation provided by GrokLaw not been the case, an unpleasantly different outcome was almost certain.
For me GrokLaw is not just about this case though that is a prime focus now. It's about how we, the common geeks through our collective memory and obsessive attention to detail can derail the attempts to halt progress by seasoned lawyers who are ignorant of how things actually work, and inattentive to when they were inven
Come on guys. Groklaw has been covering this thing since the very beginning. The least you could do is link to the article there. Give a little respect to Pam Jones for following this long slog like a trouper.
It's plenty legal as long as you buy the licenses - which are $16.50 to $57.24 per system imaged. $16.50 is for qty 500-1000 with no support. This is why we switched to clonezilla years ago.
Well, that and the fact that Clonezilla works better, faster, easier, more reliably, and does more things.
User IDs are up to 1.7M now? How did that happen?
A $5k jackpot is a win that a player will brag about long after they've lost $50K more. It keeps them coming back. An $11M jackpot is a prize where the winner moves to a new home and changes their name, giving up gambling forever - it provides little advertising benefit.
When it hits the jackpot, the machine reboots over and over to void play. The player gets some trivial payout and usually is none the wiser. BTW: Most Vegas digital slots run Redhat. Were you expecting Windows CE?
I guess it depends on your point of view. For me for the last decade reading the mainstream tech press has been all about Microsoft spin detection. Of course now that we have the Comes collection we know why: Microsoft is all over the influencing mindshare thing, influencing "analysts" like Rob Enderle and Maureen O'Gara by funding their "research" or feeding them pre-release gems to make them seem prescient, paying for "studies" by IDC, Gartner and the rest to buy their results, advertising in publications that print favorable articles and so on. These things are all now a part of the official public record. Even here on slashdot it's pretty easy to tell the astroturfers from the people who are giving their real opinion and whether they're ignorant fools influenced by mindshare or cynical IT pros with long experience. The most beautiful illustration of this was the Vista threads where the number of paid slashdot bloggers must have numbered in the hundreds and their reality denial was absolute.
Anybody can scan this very thread for AC comments and make a list of Microsoft talking points. Then they can index those against the registered members and find out who's spouting the company's line and who isn't. If you can come up with a pro-Microsoft point of view that isn't echoed by three AC's, you might have something interesting - otherwise you're just repeating what you heard. Every Microsoft thread for the last five years is the same. "When Linux and OS-X are as popular as Windows they will have viruses too" is one of my favorite indicators of turfness. If you've posted this gem you deserve to be dismissed as an idiot until you've recanted. I'm pretty sure a scientific analysis of this phenomenon is publication-worthy if anybody's looking for a paper to write.
That crap might play on PC World (though you don't see it as much any more in the articles). Even on PCWorld and CNET and other mainstream press the comments are now mostly insightful, interesting and dismissive of Microsoft's efforts as they could possibly be. Even with paid bloggers and funded analysts Microsoft can't defeat the basic truths that their ability to provide innovation ended more than a decade ago. The world has changed. The value of classical reportage has diminished considerably. The vast majority of Internet content that people read isn't the reportage, it's the comments where individuals give their own experience, insight and opinion - not for pay but for the self satisfaction of being right the vast majority of the time. It's a self-reward, self-actualization game and even Microsoft's blogger budget can't overcome an entire world of bloggers disgusted with Microsoft products who want a future where they get new stuff that works.
Actually, to pretend to use their search engine to buy things. The Bing advertisers would tell you - no matter how you arrived at the product - at checkout time that you could get Bing cashback if you put in the Bing code. So you had to go find the thing on Bing to get the code.
The basic dishonesty of this evolution didn't lend credibility to Bing with anybody involved.
The correct size is "all sizes". That way if you need one in a particular size, there is one for it. Your question is like asking the right number of blades for a razor, the ideal horsepower for a truck. This is wrong thinking entirely.
D00d - Android is Linux. The only purpose for antivirus in Linux is as a mail filter for Windows mail clients. The solution to this root kit is: don't lend people your phone. The begged question is, "why would I lend someone my phone?"
So what you're saying is that for the last two years Pwn2Own has been some sort of security Special Olympics? That's actually very interesting.
Did they ever have a BSD?
Bill is still Chairman of the Board and reportedly an advisor on key development projects. If you draw a salary you can't be said to "not work there any more".
You will find the answer to this mystery in "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by Eric S. Raymond [1992].
Basically, Microsoft and Apple are code cathedrals. Using the Cathedral system they can organize the labor of a great many people. In a Cathedral you can do anything that is permitted to be done in that Cathedral - which can be almost anything that brings the controlling powers profit really. But if you want to do something they don't want you to do, then you can't and there's nothing you can do about it but leave the cathedral or accept that you can't do that thing.
Android and the Linuxes are the Bazaar. It's noisy and chaotic. It can be harder to find things. Some of the things you find in a Bazaar are quite crude. But in the Bazaar you can do anything you want any way you want. The Bazaar is run by everybody in it, for each to his own benefit. Almost anything that can be found in the Cathedral can also be purchased in the Bazaar by a man with ready cash. Almost anything.
One thing that can be bought in the Cathedral but not in the Bazaar is the preventing of things you don't want others to do. If somebody wants to prevent the use of VP8 or Flash in the Cathedral, or the development of hardware platforms that don't run Windows, well, anything can be proscribed if the price is right. The Cathedral is run by the head priest, and not specifically for your benefit but primarily for the benefit of the Cathedral - because it's this self serving nature that makes Cathedrals persistent and powerful.
One is not necessarily better than the other. Each has merits, each has uses.
They always catch you unprepared. You'll get over it - or you won't. Damn the torpedos, full speed ahead!