Except slashdot is not a proper news service - it's just a bunch of people exchanging views and jokes. Nor is slashdot funded with a tax on the public. If I'm paying my licence fee, I don't expect the beeb to be making libelous remarks about me (being a linux developer) being a criminal.
I certainly don't pay my licence fee for the beeb to label me as a criminal (hey, I use linux so I must be a criminal!)... I've sent a strongly worded complaint to them, I urge others to do the same:
----
This story is completely inaccurate, and I would go so far as to say that it is libelous against almost the entire opensource community.
"It is also a new front in a war waged by those who want to preserve the open-source Linux operating system."
This is a completely unfounded accusation - practically the whole open-source community has condemned the actions of the MyDoom author. This attack is either:
1. A single extremist with a screw loose. Every group of people has these - religious extremists often walk into busy shopping centres and blow themselves up. If the media held their whole religion responsible for the actions of a few extremists there would be hell to pay.
2. A publicity stunt by SCO - there is documented evidence that shows that SCO have faked attacks on their own website in recent months for the publicity value and to give the open source community a bad name.
3. A publicity stunt by spammers - there are proven links between spammers and viruses - many of the recent viruses have been used by spammers to both perform denial of service attacks on leading anti-spam services and to perform spamming services for these people. The opensource antispam software is at the forefront of antispam technology and it is in the spammers' interest to discredit the opensource community.
By publishing this article that makes wild accusations, you are only helping the people responsible. Almost noone wants security problems on the internet - it's almost as much of a problem for linux users as it is for windows users. Yes, these viruses won't infect a system that's not running Windows, but that doesn't stop them flooding out email inboxes and using precious bandwidth across the internet.
In future, please put some thought into your articles before publishing such defamatory material.
Terminal velocity is the maximum velocity you will reach if you start from stationary and are accellerated by gravity through the atmosphere. Obviously it's a function of mass, aerodynamics, atmospheric pressure and strength of gravity.
On earth we can assume gravity is fairly constant and pressure is dependent on your altitude. If the pressure is zero (because you're in space) then mass and aerodynamics don't count because everything accellerates at the same rate, but in the atmosphere, something with a lot of mass and good aerodynamics (i.e. low drag) will have a higher terminal velocity than something with very little mass and poor aerodynamics (i.e. high drag). Think of the difference between dropping a feather and a rock.
What people don't understand is that the Internet isn't free. I make my money by signing you up at my Web site, getting your information, and using that information to figure out what you like.
He's right - the internet isn't free, I pay my ISP for my account... Now perhaps I wouldn't complain so much about receiving spam if the money made from the spam paid for some of my bandwidth, but it doesn't... infact, the exact opposide - the spammers are effectively stealing the bandwidth that I'm paying for.
I think that it's the "uncontrollable group of people" thing which scares everyone. When a company does something illegal then they can be held accountable, whereas when an uncontrollable mass of people does something illegal it's slightly harder.
On roads we use miles/yards, in the pub we use pints (and for milk we use pints). I honestly can't think of anything else I regularly use imperial units for - small distances are done in mm, cm and metres (that includes height), weights are done in grams and kg (when cooking I use grams, when I'm measuring my weight I use kg).
Using kg to measure weight certainly makes more sense to me - I do windsurfing so measuring my weight in kg means I can work out what size board to use since kg == litres of water displaced.
Damned if I know how many pounds in a stone, etc.
And certainly in engineering, using anything other than metric would be unheard of in the UK.
Errm... so 10000 metres is the distance between the equator and the North pole? (i.e. 10km). You live on a very small planet with a circumference of 40km then.
Conversion from English units to metric units? That would be multiply by 1 then since we use metric almost exclusively in England? (Except for miles, which are still used on the roads)
Fedora is essentially RedHat 10, just with a different release premise (they are releasing new versions of packages rather than backporting fixes to old packages). This should both make it harder and easier to support:
Harder because new versions of stuff might need config changes and might break things.
Easier because there shouldn't be that single huge upgrade every couple of years where you have to take the system down and break everything all at once. Plus constantly getting new versions == more toys:)
Sky+ doesn't actually encode any data so probably doesn't apply. Tivo takes a normal analogue video stream and MPEG2 encodes it, Sky+ takes an MPEG2 stream directly off the satellite feed and sticks it on the hard drive. Suing over Sky+ would be like suing anyone who provides a technology that allows an MPEG2 file to be downloaded from wherever and stored on a hard drive (i.e. anyone that has ever written any network file transfer software).
Does that mean that if you only upload music you don't own then you aren't breaking the law? i.e. download from someone (legal) upload the track to someone else (also legal since you didn't own it originally).
Remember that the people sharing music they own are just a small proportion of people sharing.
Personally, I download the odd track, but if I want more than about 1 track on an album then I buy the album instead (I often download the whole album first to see what it's like, but if I like it I _will_ buy it).
Recently I downloaded the whole of Evanescence's Origin album and several of their demo tracks - I am very thankful for P2P because these tracks are not available elsewhere (Origin is a deleted album that wasn't widely distributed to start with).
I am very dubious about the reliability of USB flash keys - we use 256MB ones where I work and have had a very large number of failures after very short times (i.e. I would say over 50% of the keys we have bought have failed within 5 - 10 writes). I could understand if it was a single manufacturer, but we have bought a variety of different makes and have had the same problem with all of them.
I never suggested that it was suitable for the mainstream. The message I was replying to said "[MythTV and Freevo] don't seem to have any concept of CABLE BOXES! Many people out there have digital cable and need to be able to control a cable box." which is completely incorrect - the ability to control external decoders is a very basic necessity that is well supported and in use by most Myth users. It is by no means a hack - it was designed to do it.
Myth is certainly not ready the the mainstream yet, but I had 3 choices when getting a PVR:
Tivo: AFAIK nolonger available as new in the UK, and requires subscription.
Sky Plus: Serious problems with the scheduler which means you often have to reprogram the scheduler frequently because the "Series Link" option that lets you select a whole series for recording has been broken for years, completely defeating the whole point of it. Also requires subscription.
Myth: Ok, so it's got some bugs, but if they annoy me enough I can actually fix them myself instead of waiting for the manufacturer to fix them. Fast development - there are new features being added very frequently. Infinitely hackable, and I don't have to pay a monthly subscription. Also very expandable - if I want to record several programs at once I can just put in more TV cards. If I want to watch TV in the other room on my PC, well that's fine too - it's networked, I can watch it in there with all the PVR services.
.
In any case, LIRC is compatable with a number of USB IR devices, and programming LIRC with your remote control codes is really no harder than programming a learning remote - you point your remote at it and press the buttons (anyone who can't do that has no business using a video recorder in the first place).
MythTV works perfectly with a decoder box - you set the input to S-Video (or composite if you can put up with composite quality), tell it to use an external channel changer script and write a short script to send the right commands to the decoder using LIRC and a IR diode.
I use Myth with my Sky Digital box very happilly - my LIRC configuration and channel changer script is on my website. The hardware required is just an IR LED across the serial port (as described on the LIRC website). I also have an IR receiver plugged into the same serial port so I can control Myth with my original Sky remote control.
I think the next step for Google is to wipe out the pagerank for all those sites that insist on using antisocial behavior like log spamming other websites.
300mm is the diameter of the silicon wafer. A large number of dies are constructed on the circular wafer, tested and the wafer is then cut up with a diamond saw. At this point the dies that failed the tests are binned (there certainly used to be a very high failure rate - not sure how high it is these days though). AMD makes their CPUs as "flip-chips" these days, thich means that the die is bonded directly onto a PCB, instead of embedding it in ceramic or plastic.
I suspect Linus won't sue, but I'm hoping some of the big projects that have some muscle who are affected (samba, mysql, etc) might throw some legal weight around.
I for one hope that AOL starts distributing the Microsoft patches on their CDs and via their service as well as part of their AOL software updates to encourage people to get the most recent software patches.
This won't happen - Microsoft have already banned the distribution of their patches on CD (they seem to be under the impression that everyone is on DSL and can afford to download several hundred meg of patches).
Another use for beaming power by laser which the article doesn't mention would possibly be for power generation - imagine placing a satellite in orbit with large solar panels and have it beam the energy down to a ground station by laser.
Infact, if you are confident about aiming the beam, it would probably be very efficient to just put a huge parabolic mirror in space that focusses the sun's energy onto photovaltaic cells on the ground (which would have the disadvantage that you can't just shut it down when you accidentally aim the beam at a city:) - huge parabolic mirrors are already flying in space - they are being used on military listening satellites to pick up weak radio signals.
Slashdot Mirror
Except slashdot is not a proper news service - it's just a bunch of people exchanging views and jokes. Nor is slashdot funded with a tax on the public. If I'm paying my licence fee, I don't expect the beeb to be making libelous remarks about me (being a linux developer) being a criminal.
I certainly don't pay my licence fee for the beeb to label me as a criminal (hey, I use linux so I must be a criminal!)... I've sent a strongly worded complaint to them, I urge others to do the same:
----
This story is completely inaccurate, and I would go so far as to say that it
is libelous against almost the entire opensource community.
"It is also a new front in a war waged by those who want to preserve the
open-source Linux operating system."
This is a completely unfounded accusation - practically the whole open-source
community has condemned the actions of the MyDoom author. This attack is
either:
1. A single extremist with a screw loose. Every group of people has these -
religious extremists often walk into busy shopping centres and blow themselves
up. If the media held their whole religion responsible for the actions of a
few extremists there would be hell to pay.
2. A publicity stunt by SCO - there is documented evidence that shows that SCO
have faked attacks on their own website in recent months for the publicity
value and to give the open source community a bad name.
3. A publicity stunt by spammers - there are proven links between spammers and
viruses - many of the recent viruses have been used by spammers to both
perform denial of service attacks on leading anti-spam services and to perform
spamming services for these people. The opensource antispam software is at
the forefront of antispam technology and it is in the spammers' interest to
discredit the opensource community.
By publishing this article that makes wild accusations, you are only helping
the people responsible. Almost noone wants security problems on the internet
- it's almost as much of a problem for linux users as it is for windows users.
Yes, these viruses won't infect a system that's not running Windows, but
that doesn't stop them flooding out email inboxes and using precious
bandwidth across the internet.
In future, please put some thought into your articles before publishing such
defamatory material.
Terminal velocity is the maximum velocity you will reach if you start from stationary and are accellerated by gravity through the atmosphere. Obviously it's a function of mass, aerodynamics, atmospheric pressure and strength of gravity.
On earth we can assume gravity is fairly constant and pressure is dependent on your altitude. If the pressure is zero (because you're in space) then mass and aerodynamics don't count because everything accellerates at the same rate, but in the atmosphere, something with a lot of mass and good aerodynamics (i.e. low drag) will have a higher terminal velocity than something with very little mass and poor aerodynamics (i.e. high drag). Think of the difference between dropping a feather and a rock.
Forgive me for sounding thick, but in space so long as you keep the fuel and oxidizer separate, where's the explosion risk?
What people don't understand is that the Internet isn't free. I make my money by signing you up at my Web site, getting your information, and using that information to figure out what you like.
He's right - the internet isn't free, I pay my ISP for my account... Now perhaps I wouldn't complain so much about receiving spam if the money made from the spam paid for some of my bandwidth, but it doesn't... infact, the exact opposide - the spammers are effectively stealing the bandwidth that I'm paying for.
If the worm hasn't been released opensource then it's obviously not the opensource community behind it. :)
:)
Look for mydoom.sourceforge.net
I think that it's the "uncontrollable group of people" thing which scares everyone. When a company does something illegal then they can be held accountable, whereas when an uncontrollable mass of people does something illegal it's slightly harder.
On roads we use miles/yards, in the pub we use pints (and for milk we use pints). I honestly can't think of anything else I regularly use imperial units for - small distances are done in mm, cm and metres (that includes height), weights are done in grams and kg (when cooking I use grams, when I'm measuring my weight I use kg).
Using kg to measure weight certainly makes more sense to me - I do windsurfing so measuring my weight in kg means I can work out what size board to use since kg == litres of water displaced.
Damned if I know how many pounds in a stone, etc.
And certainly in engineering, using anything other than metric would be unheard of in the UK.
Someone probably paced the distance :)
180cm and 75kg
Errm... so 10000 metres is the distance between the equator and the North pole? (i.e. 10km). You live on a very small planet with a circumference of 40km then.
Conversion from English units to metric units? That would be multiply by 1 then since we use metric almost exclusively in England? (Except for miles, which are still used on the roads)
Fedora is essentially RedHat 10, just with a different release premise (they are releasing new versions of packages rather than backporting fixes to old packages). This should both make it harder and easier to support:
:)
Harder because new versions of stuff might need config changes and might break things.
Easier because there shouldn't be that single huge upgrade every couple of years where you have to take the system down and break everything all at once. Plus constantly getting new versions == more toys
Sky+ doesn't actually encode any data so probably doesn't apply. Tivo takes a normal analogue video stream and MPEG2 encodes it, Sky+ takes an MPEG2 stream directly off the satellite feed and sticks it on the hard drive. Suing over Sky+ would be like suing anyone who provides a technology that allows an MPEG2 file to be downloaded from wherever and stored on a hard drive (i.e. anyone that has ever written any network file transfer software).
Does that mean that if you only upload music you don't own then you aren't breaking the law? i.e. download from someone (legal) upload the track to someone else (also legal since you didn't own it originally).
Remember that the people sharing music they own are just a small proportion of people sharing.
Personally, I download the odd track, but if I want more than about 1 track on an album then I buy the album instead (I often download the whole album first to see what it's like, but if I like it I _will_ buy it).
Recently I downloaded the whole of Evanescence's Origin album and several of their demo tracks - I am very thankful for P2P because these tracks are not available elsewhere (Origin is a deleted album that wasn't widely distributed to start with).
I am very dubious about the reliability of USB flash keys - we use 256MB ones where I work and have had a very large number of failures after very short times (i.e. I would say over 50% of the keys we have bought have failed within 5 - 10 writes). I could understand if it was a single manufacturer, but we have bought a variety of different makes and have had the same problem with all of them.
Myth is certainly not ready the the mainstream yet, but I had 3 choices when getting a PVR:
- Tivo: AFAIK nolonger available as new in the UK, and requires subscription.
- Sky Plus: Serious problems with the scheduler which means you often have to reprogram the scheduler frequently because the "Series Link" option that lets you select a whole series for recording has been broken for years, completely defeating the whole point of it. Also requires subscription.
- Myth: Ok, so it's got some bugs, but if they annoy me enough I can actually fix them myself instead of waiting for the manufacturer to fix them. Fast development - there are new features being added very frequently. Infinitely hackable, and I don't have to pay a monthly subscription. Also very expandable - if I want to record several programs at once I can just put in more TV cards. If I want to watch TV in the other room on my PC, well that's fine too - it's networked, I can watch it in there with all the PVR services.
.In any case, LIRC is compatable with a number of USB IR devices, and programming LIRC with your remote control codes is really no harder than programming a learning remote - you point your remote at it and press the buttons (anyone who can't do that has no business using a video recorder in the first place).
-
MythTV works perfectly with a decoder box - you set the input to S-Video (or composite if you can put up with composite quality), tell it to use an external channel changer script and write a short script to send the right commands to the decoder using LIRC and a IR diode.
I use Myth with my Sky Digital box very happilly - my LIRC configuration and channel changer script is on my website. The hardware required is just an IR LED across the serial port (as described on the LIRC website). I also have an IR receiver plugged into the same serial port so I can control Myth with my original Sky remote control.
I think the next step for Google is to wipe out the pagerank for all those sites that insist on using antisocial behavior like log spamming other websites.
300mm is the diameter of the silicon wafer.
A large number of dies are constructed on the circular wafer, tested and the wafer is then cut up with a diamond saw. At this point the dies that failed the tests are binned (there certainly used to be a very high failure rate - not sure how high it is these days though).
AMD makes their CPUs as "flip-chips" these days, thich means that the die is bonded directly onto a PCB, instead of embedding it in ceramic or plastic.
I suspect Linus won't sue, but I'm hoping some of the big projects that have some muscle who are affected (samba, mysql, etc) might throw some legal weight around.
The patent in question is on the US Patent Office website.
I for one hope that AOL starts distributing the Microsoft patches on their CDs and via their service as well as part of their AOL software updates to encourage people to get the most recent software patches.
This won't happen - Microsoft have already banned the distribution of their patches on CD (they seem to be under the impression that everyone is on DSL and can afford to download several hundred meg of patches).
When will they withdraw the top level domains from Verisign's control?
They have already been shown to be untrustworthy on several occasions.
Another use for beaming power by laser which the article doesn't mention would possibly be for power generation - imagine placing a satellite in orbit with large solar panels and have it beam the energy down to a ground station by laser.
:) - huge parabolic mirrors are already flying in space - they are being used on military listening satellites to pick up weak radio signals.
Infact, if you are confident about aiming the beam, it would probably be very efficient to just put a huge parabolic mirror in space that focusses the sun's energy onto photovaltaic cells on the ground (which would have the disadvantage that you can't just shut it down when you accidentally aim the beam at a city