Must agree Markus. The cow leg counter is a great example.
The absurdity in the article makes one wonder where we've been getting all that hydrogen from for all these years. We've been cracking H2O with electrolysis and been getting both H's pretty consistently for decades. The experiments that show the PH are pretty solid as well, so it seems a little early to start theorizing that black holes are giving off the extra half a mole of Hydrogen we've been getting out of a mole of water.
The cool part (that they seemed to entirely miss) is that these techniques could be used to confirm/reject models for wave-theory covalent bonding. Maybe that tough little benzene ring is resonant at more than just the electron shell level....
"Mr. Itguy, Looks like you're running 1500 copies of RH 9.0." "Yes, your honor." "And you're being sued by SCO for 1.5 million dollars?" "Yes, your honor." "Did that software come with an EULA?" "Yes, the GNU GPL." "Does that agreement bind you pay money to SCO?" "No, sir." "Have you seen the news reports of SCO claiming they have code in Linux?" "Yes, sir." "Did you know that seeing something on the news creates a binding agreement between you and the plaintiff to pay them whatever amount of money that they ask?" "No, sir." "Neither did I. Clerk, are there any cases on our agenda today with some merit?"
Then yes, it's unlimited everything. At 20 cents a minute. (From their web page)
- Instant access to your e-mail
- Ability to browse the Web from any location
- Flexibility in where you work, when you work
- 20 per minute calling
- 300 inbound/outbound text messages; 5 each additional message
At 4k bytes per second average rate it will take 4.26 minutes to transfer a megabyte. Or cost about 85 cents a meg. This is made especially painful as they're charging you at the full data rate while your logging in and doing other low bandwidth stuff. I'd be suprised if an efficient user actually got a megabyte of data for every $1.50 that s/he spent.
They're probably out to launch some kind of "We're so much better than AOL campaign and wanted to make sure that this bullet point on their list of features could be unique to them.
The fact that they did it poorly is unsurprising.
Given the way babel fish treats documents with whole paragraphs worth of context, It's hard to imagine that IM language translation is going to be remotely useful.
Claude: Hi, Ivan, that vaccuum cleaner you left is on the fritz again, it doesn't suck.
Brrrring! You have a new translated message from: buddy_claude
"Hello, I use recreational vehicles. The space you left was cleansed by Fritz repeatedly. It is great.
But this confirms my suspicion that this is a digital dataport. Other links from google indicate that the drive could play/read either of two tracks on the cassette.
There isn't going to be any "simple" wiring to turn a six hundred baud digital data stream into the inputs to a standard tape recorder.
Prosys [whoever s/he is] has a great little site on how to interface that same port to a standard computer. Nick Kennedy has some pretty snazzy software for dealing with that interface.
Not only would this gain you the ability to save, but to exchange Atari stuff with other people on the Internet without the "joy" of mailing cassettes to each other.
Viacom should just pay up, or better still promise to invest the 20 mil. in the next ST movie.
Let's see a show of hands for everyone who thought Nemesis was the best Star Trek yet? [crowd remains motionless]
The likely problem I see is that damned corporate pride. There are all kinds of fun things to do in the StarTrek universe still. The Viacom execs. must have convinced themselves that "StarTrek is dead and we have the ratings from Nemesis to prove it."
I certainly hope someone at that company has the balls to say Nemesis sucked because we made it suck, and shop for a decent script for a new movie.
While I agree that the poster is looking for a word that exemplifies the Thomas Jefferson quote. I disagree with CdotZinger's objection to the request.
I think it's very relevant because usage makes the language. I don't like this either, but it's a fact. I've observed the following instances of people fighting against this.
ESR's attempts to reclaim the word "hacker" when (to the non computing public) it clearly includes "crackers." This is probably mostly do to the fact that they are the only ones doing anything that would appear interesting on a silver screen. Can you imagine a movie about kernel module development? I'll take Battlefiled Earth thank you. But I digress.
Liberals true to the ideals set forth early in US history are quite different from Socialists, and in conversation they will point this out and attempt to reclaim the term, unsuccessfully for the most part.
Bugs, to most people, seems to include any non-aquatic invertebrates that crawl. If you use the term around entomologists, you'll get a speech to the effect that "True bugs belong to the order Hemiptera" and they go on about leathery based hemelytra in much the same helpful and nourishing fashion as CdotZinger above.
The ugly fact these three observations have in common is that common usage adds meanings to words. In some cases these connotations are objectionable, and it doesn't seem at all unreasonable to look for new terms that lack the objectionable connotations.
I consider patents, trademarks, copyrights and trade secrets to be what I'm referring to when I say "IP." As such it's a very convenient term to use in conversation.
SCO and other large companies before them have attempted to add an additional, non-legal, but purportedly moral connotation to this term. They have been selling the public on the idea that they do in fact own "ideas." That this ownership is called "IP" and that it is their legal right. They are specifically selling the concept that if they do something first in their software, that every future piece of software that serves the same function is in part their "intellectual property." A term they use very much in the sense of "owned ideas" and not at all in the sense of "products primarily of the labor of the mind."
Even though he elsewhere acknowledges that the parts of Linux that were allegedly copied can be replaced, (thus eliminating the application of Copyright's derived works section), Blake Stowell (SCO spokesman) still maintains:
"Linux could still be used; it just wouldn't be free," Stowell said. "These people are upset because they've been enjoying a free ride for some time. They're upset their free ride will potentially be gone."
So exactly what gives him the right to tax our cup of tea?
He doesn't have a patent on SMP. He won't have even have the desperately weak copyright claim 24 hours after the "offending code" gets published. He doesn't own the Trademark, and it's clearly not a Trade Secret.
He is convinced that we who use Linux owe him money based on this nebulous 5th category based on the principal of "idea ownership."
I think femto is very right to want his/her conversations to lack endorsement of this stupidity, and I wish him/her good luck in coming up with a good replacement. Till then when people refer to IP, I will gently and without a hint of corrective authority ask them to clarify which aspect of IP they are referring to, and we'll talk about it "long hand" until such time as someone answers femto's question with a catchy, Jefferson compatible, substitute.
All over the U.S. aspiring young "film people" make all kinds of cute little shorts. They would love the exposure; most would be glad to release under the GPL, or GDL, or whatever public license you want.
If you need some good cartoon footage I saw a link to a short with a little rodent scurrying about the house in a translucent ball around here somewhere....
The greedy bastards just don't get it...
on
Working Hard?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
The greedy bastards just don't get it...
I have been ineligible for overtime for my entire career and I'm ok with that. When I get off work after a full day typing and my wrists ache and I can't seem to focus on anything outside the beamwidth of 19" at 2.5 feet, I just have to sit down for some Belgian Waffles at the local restaurant and watch someone really hussle for < 1/3rd of my wage and I just can't bring myself to snivel.
So it's not with any personal sense of unfair treatment, that I state the following:
A minimum wage, while coincidently fair to an employee, serves it's greatest purpose in motivating employers to make good business decisions.
As an average employee works more than 40 hours a week his/her work quality steadily declines and his/her chance of having some kind of accident goes up hyperbolicly.
The accidents cost everyone. That cost is spread around in insurance premiums and workman's comp., but we all pay for it. The cost of mediocre work in a global economy is that it makes slave labor from struggling countries more appealing to use because the quality differential has decreased.
Very few business owners are so farsighted as to spend extra cash to help with these problems. The primary benefit of the overtime pay that it forces them to.
When you have four employees working 50 hour weeks, it is cheaper for the business to hire the extra employee the need than it is to pay 40 hours a week in overtime. This system makes the bean-counters make better decisions for their own workplace and for the country as well.
If I find a place for public comment I will propose a counter amendment.
In order to ignore the welfare of the worker to the same extent as the currently proposed bill, continue to withhold overtime pay from people who have earned it, but force the employer to pay it directly to a non-profit hospital, food bank, or homeless shelter, so that the business is still motivated to keep employee hours sane, and the charitable systems that will bear the brunt of the cost for this extreme lack of foresight will be better funded.
...done to Tru64, Irix, HP/UX, AIX and Solaris and emerge as the only viable competitor to Windows on the desktop?
Of course not. Two reasons:
1) Apple's followers are nothing less than fanatical; you will pry their Macs from their cold dead fingers.
2) Apple has seen the light. The costs of embracing Unix underpinnings and âoeMostlyOpenSource,â are going to seriously pay off. Soon, there will be nothing cool that comes out for the Linux Desktop that doesn't soon run on the Mac.
I must agree that the list of features for the new version sounded like a hugh leap wherein the yeild would have to be unusually significant to justify the effort. I personally need another scripting language like I need another nose.
As for the particularly necessary part. I would have to argue that LRP was extremely useful in helping Linux penetrate the embedded systems market. The original idea was to get all the cool features of the kernel and just enough OS to be useful on a floppy. Once someone got it working, and working well, it was suddenly very easy to offer your [insert generic internet object] with routing/firewalling/web-based configuration stuff. All you really had to do was add one of the many excellent tiny webservers, and a pile of cgi-scripts to generate the config files from the forms and call/etc/init.d/network restart, and Voila!
Getting a barebones-but-configurable linux out there spawned piles of projects for embedding it, like remote data collection, PDA O/Ss, net-boot computers, and piles of 'reuse' projects for PCs that couldn't/wouldn't have a hard drive in them.
In summary, I don't know what his latest rev. would have contributed, but LRP was the start of something cool that we now seem to take for granted. Me more than most people. As I hit submit my old 200Mhz/hard-driveless/cdromless LRP router (up for 4560h now) will pass the packets to/.
I know with private correspondence, say a letter from me to you, it is certainly the case that republishing without permission is legally-uncool, and there are some reasons for that I can agree with.
I would also wager that there are lawyers who for fear of bad P.R. for their sponsors would love the concept that they can bully people and automatically gag them at the same time. I also understand that they may have included this clause with that hope in mind.
What I can't see as likely is to go before a judge and attempt to convince them that a notice of copyright infringement posted to the webmaster of a publicly accessible website has a reasonable expectation of privacy. If they aren't being bullies and they genuinely believe they are doing the "right thing" in good faith then what damages can they claim are occurring as a result of having their notice publicly posted?
The simple version of the logic is: If shrink wrap lic. agreements don't stand up in court. I don't see that a "Note:" at the bottom of an e-mail is going to do any better. Especially if they can't prove it was untruthful.
If there is a sound legal backing for such silliness, every spammer in the world should use this technique, and complain if any of their mail gets handed over to abuse@yahoo.com that it is a violation of their âoenote:â clause and therefore illegal.
If you read closely the prohibitions apply to persons or entities other than the intended recipient. I believe the idea here is that the intended recipient is obligated to be truthful (at lawyer-point), but if his ISP sees the letter going by in the "suspicious mail" folder and does a routine SPAM reveiw on it, the ISP cannot then publish what he found.
In fact to state that the intended recipient is not allowed to have the letter "reviewed" by a lawyer would be contrary to their purpose of using expensive lawyers to handle what should be done by decent thinking people.
As a previous poster noted though, the letter does not include specific references to the manuals for those games, and it wasn't and endless list of games.
If I had to take a wild stab at it I'd wager the site-owner is just frustrated by running a non-profit site that isn't doing any actual damage to anyones business and getting kicked in the teeth for it by lawyers anxious to justify their billable hours.
"Look! We stopped another person from freely sharing information that will never be of use to anyone! That'll be $1200 dollars please."
Then it looks like it's definitely misbehaving. If the voltage just before shutdown is 26-27 volts then you definitely need to adjust the shutdown threshold. The voltage just after shutdown should actually pop up to this range if the batteries aren't discharged (which they don't seem to be), but the voltage output of an unloaded battery is a poor indicator of it's state of charge.
On a typical 12V battery under medium load (say one that would take an hour to drain it of it's rated amp hours), 10.8 volts seems to be the rule of thumb for where to drain it to. So in your system 21.6 would be a good cutoff voltage. I don't know what you have to do to adjust that on your system. Mine has only indicator lamps of charge. And they are done with very primitive circuitry. The voltage systems in mine as I vaguely recall were simple and analog. If I were going to attempt to hack the a new cut off voltage into such a thing, I'd find an electronics enthusiast friend with a good variable bench supply that will go up to the 28V range and supply at least 5 amps of power. Then I'd feed the 28 volts from the supply to the UPS, with it unplugged, add a 100 watt incandescent load, and turn it on and see at what voltage I had to turn the supply down to, to make it cut off. Then I could test with the "screw with output components" method until I had adjusted the cut off down to 10.8.
I was suprised to find that many of the manufacturers like yuasa have full charge characteristic sheets on their web sites. I don't know what kind mine were, but I found'em and seeing that the system was treating me right gave me quite the warm fuzzy feeling.
Compwizards point is a good one. These things do not size like they're supposed to.
It think part of it is the fact that the batteries are rated to a much lower drain than the UPS can use them (like rated for a drain down to 9 volts when the UPS kicks off at 11) and that the UPS step-up powersupply has significant inefficiencies.
When I first got it. With that weaselly little battery that comes in side it, I got ~35% load (which is only 350w) for about 9 minutes. So, you're not far off the mark here. With the extra pack, it actually scaled more in my favor (again, probably the voltage/remaining charge curve) as my next test got an hour and ten mintues.
If you want generate an off the hip number I'd take the amp hours your batteries are rated for, multply them by your voltage to get watt hours and divide by two. In my case it's 68Ah x 12V for 816 watt hours. Divide by two for 408 watt hours. Divide by 350 watts for 1.2 hours of operation.
It begs the question though: Why do you want this?
Granted you're not getting what you paid for, and you have the right to complain. Beyond that though, if your servers are on stand-by power for more than 120 seconds you can have them 'shutdown -h now' Assuming they can power off in another 60 seconds, you're home free at 70% of your rated load. The only time having twice as much capacity will make a difference is on blackouts that are > 2 minutes, but less than 5. If you regularly hit that zone it might make the difference, if they're usually longer, your servers will still have to shut down, if they're usually under 2 minutes the other batteries don't buy you much.
That said. I would feel quite justified, if I paid cash for a smartups 1400, and could verify the current coming out of it was at 50% load, and the run time was only half of what it should be, in telling APC to fix it or refund my money.
As I bought mine broken on ebay, I had no room to complain:).
I have been asked to fix a number of UPS's and set up hugh battery banks for telcom. carriers with very large UPS's, and I've observed a couple things.
FuturePower (above) was right, every UPS I've seen has current limited charge circuitry. Not because they are anticipating larger battery packs, but because that is the easiest way to do it.
The cheap systems just had a current limiter on the float charger. They tried to bring the battery to some float voltage (let's assume a 12V system) like 13.6 and limited the current to an amp, and that was it. This of course is a lousy way to charge the battery, that will take forever to get it to a full charge, but it's cheap and easy.
The better systems were dual mode. They would set a higher target charge voltage like 14.5 until and limit the current to something like 6 amps until the current dropped down to a couple amps, and then kicked over to their float mode for the last bit of charge. These systems recover properly and well.
If the voltages match, I would try it out, with the actual equipment (you are using the ext3 file system right:) ) and see how it performs.
The only two things that you might want to tweak are float voltage and cooling.
You'll be very lucky if there is a POT (varible resistor with a screwdriver or thumbwheel adjustment) that lets you adjust the float voltage. If there is, please post the make and model to/. so we can buy them up off of ebay.
If not, you'll probably have to have someone who knows his electronics look at the charger stage and tell you where the adjustment resistor is. It may be the only 1% (always five striped, often blue) resistor in the charging circuity. If you can spot it, my favorite trick would be to use two of the pin-cups from a machine pinned socket and solder them in where the resistor was, then you can try several resistors just by forming their leads and jamming them in.
The whole "float voltage varies by temperature" issue is important for a remote mountaintop installation, but if this is going on your home, do the calcs for 70 degrees and leave it. The variance between 60 degree nights and 80 degree days isn't going to have any measurable effect on your battery life.
The other issue is cooling. As others have pointed out, the engineers that were selling a UPS to operate for five minutes at a particular load can safely choose (cheaper) components that will overheat in 10 minutes. The quick and dirty fix for these is a fan. Easiest way to hook it up would be to use a double pole relay with a 120V coil and contacts rated for at least 12V (they will probably be rated for much more, but that's ok). You choose the connections such that when the relay is energized it opens the circuit. If you use a 12V battery, then the circuit is a 12V fan connected to the 12V battery with the relay in between. When power is on, the circuit is open, the fan is off, when power is off the relay closes the fan comes on. The problem with this, is that if the power goes off while you're away for a couple days, the fan will drain the batteries flat (bad for the batteries, but not dangerous).
The slightly more complicated solution uses the relay plus a 5V 100ma. fan (found everywhere) and a 6.2V 1Watt zener diode (found lots of places but worst case Digikey 1N4735AMSCT-ND 25cents (min. order required; good excuse to buy cables and connectors)). You hook it up as before, but with the diode reverse biased so it drops ~6.2V in the circuit with the fan running. This won't move as much air, so you'll have to figure out what gets hot and get the fan positioned to blow on it and get some good ventilation holes in the case. The good part is, it will stop conducting at 6.2V (probably 7V in a practical circuit), and won't drain your batteries dry.
Your article reminded me to test the 68Ah worth of batteries I added to my SmartUPS 1400 five years ago.
This article typed to you on battery power. Good luck.
I'm not picking. REALLY. It's just too funny that someone complaining about bad mathmatics in the thread, and the C compiler, in the same post, would live on a planet with a 10 month year.
float y = (float) 1/2 * x;// should yeild better results.
Someone needs to invent two over the counter drugs to counter these effects.
1) A morning beverage with a central nervous system stimulant. Preferably served hot for those in cold climates.
2) A mellow tasty central nervous system depressant that goes well with pizza and will help you get a good nights sleep.
Wait a minute...
Re:If MS were to use such strategies, would anyone
on
Platform Evangelism
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· Score: 1
If?
I can't see any "If" in this.
Flash is (for most people) a browser plug in. It is totally at the mercy of the browser.
Somewhere on the Microsoft campus near sub-level 27 the "Steering Committee for Things We Need to Crush under our Boots" is meeting.
Hundreds of megabytes of PowerPoint presentations will be displayed, doughnuts and espresso will disappear like wild leaves that before the wild hurricane fly. And in the end, the fate of MacroMedia will be decided by one Excel spreadsheet, displayed with the new MakeEmotionallyComfortingHolographicImage Wizard.
That graph will show the convergence of three metrics:
1) The value of owning Macromedia flash.
2) The perceived cost of implementing an inferior equivalent as IE's new default âoeplayer.â
3) The damage to Bill's feelings of omniscience by not owning Flash [measured in billions].
First off any company who employs deceptive practices to gather information (no matter how useless) should have to pay for it 100k sounds like a good start.
That said I would like to address one of your other points:
How's every single detail of my life going to help
them make a better game? Does my street, house number and phone number really help their design process?
Actually it does. One of the most important aspects of design is knowing who your designing for, and geographic influences are often significant. The company in question might want your data for some kind of ugly database but that's beside my point as well.
One of the scariest moments in business is after you have a successful product and some surplus cash, and want to know what to do with it. Two things come to mind, advertise and improve your product. For both of them it is critical to know your target audience. If you're selling new hip looking mp3 players and your registration cards come back and you find that their being bought up by 9-13 year old girls living in hawaii, then advertise on Sabrina, offer neon-colors, consider a water-resistant unit. If they're being purchased by 25-35 year old men living in Seattle, Chicago and Philly, then advertise on Frasier, offer leather and wood-like finishes, and consider a Palm-Direct transfer feature. Making these decisions properly will often make or break your company, and any information that can help has value.
In the OpenSource community the need to have something drives us to create it. We are therefore very often part of our target audience, and if not, we receive bug mail from them that makes it very clear exactly what they are doing with it.
Consumer Product development and marketing models are very different from ours, but they exist because they work. So have a Coke(r) and a smile.
The coolest form of this data gathering I found was on some little electronic tool (power screwdriver I think). They offered a one year warranty by default and an extra year if you filled out their silly little card, with the added bonus that doing so meant you could misplace the receipt and still get it repaired free of charge for two years.
5 seconds of recorded data seems fair and reasonable.
I have a problem with where they draw the line though. Since it's currently somewhere reasonable, I guess this makes me a privacy-freak.
It doesn't seem like it would be hard to pass a "Car Consumer Saftey Protection Act" (with riders for new child restraints or something equally popular) to mandate that it also store the top speed in the last 15 minutes. If that act also mandated a standard interface, little greedy municipalitities all over the country would be issuing their officers the readers and making it legal for them to be able to interface with any car they pull over.
Odds are no Congress person will spend any "juice" putting a law on the books that keeps this to a reasonable 5 seconds.
So I agree it's not a problem today, but is it not just a matter of time?
Slashdot Mirror
Must agree Markus. The cow leg counter is a great example.
The absurdity in the article makes one wonder where we've been getting all that hydrogen from for all these years. We've been cracking H2O with electrolysis and been getting both H's pretty consistently for decades. The experiments that show the PH are pretty solid as well, so it seems a little early to start theorizing that black holes are giving off the extra half a mole of Hydrogen we've been getting out of a mole of water.
The cool part (that they seemed to entirely miss) is that these techniques could be used to confirm/reject models for wave-theory covalent bonding. Maybe that tough little benzene ring is resonant at more than just the electron shell level....
....your Microsoft O/S is completely secure.
"Mr. Itguy, Looks like you're running 1500 copies of RH 9.0."
"Yes, your honor."
"And you're being sued by SCO for 1.5 million dollars?"
"Yes, your honor."
"Did that software come with an EULA?"
"Yes, the GNU GPL."
"Does that agreement bind you pay money to SCO?"
"No, sir."
"Have you seen the news reports of SCO claiming they have code in Linux?"
"Yes, sir."
"Did you know that seeing something on the news creates a binding agreement between you and the plaintiff to pay them whatever amount of money that they ask?"
"No, sir."
"Neither did I. Clerk, are there any cases on our agenda today with some merit?"
At 4k bytes per second average rate it will take 4.26 minutes to transfer a megabyte. Or cost about 85 cents a meg. This is made especially painful as they're charging you at the full data rate while your logging in and doing other low bandwidth stuff. I'd be suprised if an efficient user actually got a megabyte of data for every $1.50 that s/he spent.
This was probably a marketing department patent.
They're probably out to launch some kind of "We're so much better than AOL campaign and wanted to make sure that this bullet point on their list of features could be unique to them.
The fact that they did it poorly is unsurprising.
Given the way babel fish treats documents with whole paragraphs worth of context, It's hard to imagine that IM language translation is going to be remotely useful.
Claude: Hi, Ivan, that vaccuum cleaner you left is on the fritz again, it doesn't suck.
Brrrring! You have a new translated message from: buddy_claude "Hello, I use recreational vehicles. The space you left was cleansed by Fritz repeatedly. It is great.
It's great that you found him the link.
But this confirms my suspicion that this is a digital dataport. Other links from google indicate that the drive could play/read either of two tracks on the cassette.
There isn't going to be any "simple" wiring to turn a six hundred baud digital data stream into the inputs to a standard tape recorder.
Prosys [whoever s/he is] has a great little site on how to interface that same port to a standard computer. Nick Kennedy has some pretty snazzy software for dealing with that interface.
Not only would this gain you the ability to save, but to exchange Atari stuff with other people on the Internet without the "joy" of mailing cassettes to each other.
One hundred thousand lines of code will take 100 programmers two weeks.
And we have them.
Unless SCO produces a contract signed by Linus in 1990 granting them rights to all future derivatives, they won't even put a dent in Linux.
Viacom should just pay up, or better still promise to invest the 20 mil. in the next ST movie.
Let's see a show of hands for everyone who thought Nemesis was the best Star Trek yet?
[crowd remains motionless]
The likely problem I see is that damned corporate pride. There are all kinds of fun things to do in the StarTrek universe still. The Viacom execs. must have convinced themselves that "StarTrek is dead and we have the ratings from Nemesis to prove it."
I certainly hope someone at that company has the balls to say Nemesis sucked because we made it suck, and shop for a decent script for a new movie.
I think it's very relevant because usage makes the language. I don't like this either, but it's a fact. I've observed the following instances of people fighting against this.
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ESR's attempts to reclaim the word "hacker" when (to the non computing public) it clearly includes "crackers." This is probably mostly do to the fact that they are the only ones doing anything that would appear interesting on a silver screen. Can you imagine a movie about kernel module development? I'll take Battlefiled Earth thank you. But I digress.
-
Liberals true to the ideals set forth early in US history are quite different from Socialists, and in conversation they will point this out and attempt to reclaim the term, unsuccessfully for the most part.
-
Bugs, to most people, seems to include any non-aquatic invertebrates that crawl. If you use the term around entomologists, you'll get a speech to the effect that "True bugs belong to the order Hemiptera" and they go on about leathery based hemelytra in much the same helpful and nourishing fashion as CdotZinger above.
The ugly fact these three observations have in common is that common usage adds meanings to words. In some cases these connotations are objectionable, and it doesn't seem at all unreasonable to look for new terms that lack the objectionable connotations.I consider patents, trademarks, copyrights and trade secrets to be what I'm referring to when I say "IP." As such it's a very convenient term to use in conversation.
SCO and other large companies before them have attempted to add an additional, non-legal, but purportedly moral connotation to this term. They have been selling the public on the idea that they do in fact own "ideas." That this ownership is called "IP" and that it is their legal right. They are specifically selling the concept that if they do something first in their software, that every future piece of software that serves the same function is in part their "intellectual property." A term they use very much in the sense of "owned ideas" and not at all in the sense of "products primarily of the labor of the mind."
Even though he elsewhere acknowledges that the parts of Linux that were allegedly copied can be replaced, (thus eliminating the application of Copyright's derived works section), Blake Stowell (SCO spokesman) still maintains: "Linux could still be used; it just wouldn't be free," Stowell said. "These people are upset because they've been enjoying a free ride for some time. They're upset their free ride will potentially be gone."
So exactly what gives him the right to tax our cup of tea?
He doesn't have a patent on SMP. He won't have even have the desperately weak copyright claim 24 hours after the "offending code" gets published. He doesn't own the Trademark, and it's clearly not a Trade Secret.
He is convinced that we who use Linux owe him money based on this nebulous 5th category based on the principal of "idea ownership."
I think femto is very right to want his/her conversations to lack endorsement of this stupidity, and I wish him/her good luck in coming up with a good replacement. Till then when people refer to IP, I will gently and without a hint of corrective authority ask them to clarify which aspect of IP they are referring to, and we'll talk about it "long hand" until such time as someone answers femto's question with a catchy, Jefferson compatible, substitute.
All over the U.S. aspiring young "film people" make all kinds of cute little shorts. They would love the exposure; most would be glad to release under the GPL, or GDL, or whatever public license you want.
If you need some good cartoon footage I saw a link to a short with a little rodent scurrying about the house in a translucent ball around here somewhere....
The greedy bastards just don't get it... I have been ineligible for overtime for my entire career and I'm ok with that. When I get off work after a full day typing and my wrists ache and I can't seem to focus on anything outside the beamwidth of 19" at 2.5 feet, I just have to sit down for some Belgian Waffles at the local restaurant and watch someone really hussle for < 1/3rd of my wage and I just can't bring myself to snivel.
So it's not with any personal sense of unfair treatment, that I state the following:
A minimum wage, while coincidently fair to an employee, serves it's greatest purpose in motivating employers to make good business decisions.
As an average employee works more than 40 hours a week his/her work quality steadily declines and his/her chance of having some kind of accident goes up hyperbolicly.
The accidents cost everyone. That cost is spread around in insurance premiums and workman's comp., but we all pay for it. The cost of mediocre work in a global economy is that it makes slave labor from struggling countries more appealing to use because the quality differential has decreased.
Very few business owners are so farsighted as to spend extra cash to help with these problems. The primary benefit of the overtime pay that it forces them to.
When you have four employees working 50 hour weeks, it is cheaper for the business to hire the extra employee the need than it is to pay 40 hours a week in overtime. This system makes the bean-counters make better decisions for their own workplace and for the country as well.
If I find a place for public comment I will propose a counter amendment.
In order to ignore the welfare of the worker to the same extent as the currently proposed bill, continue to withhold overtime pay from people who have earned it, but force the employer to pay it directly to a non-profit hospital, food bank, or homeless shelter, so that the business is still motivated to keep employee hours sane, and the charitable systems that will bear the brunt of the cost for this extreme lack of foresight will be better funded.
But that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
...done to Tru64, Irix, HP/UX, AIX and Solaris and emerge as the only viable competitor to Windows on the desktop?
Of course not. Two reasons:
1) Apple's followers are nothing less than fanatical; you will pry their Macs from their cold dead fingers.
2) Apple has seen the light. The costs of embracing Unix underpinnings and âoeMostlyOpenSource,â are going to seriously pay off. Soon, there will be nothing cool that comes out for the Linux Desktop that doesn't soon run on the Mac.
No worries.
I must agree that the list of features for the new version sounded like a hugh leap wherein the yeild would have to be unusually significant to justify the effort. I personally need another scripting language like I need another nose.
/etc/init.d/network restart, and Voila!
/.
As for the particularly necessary part. I would have to argue that LRP was extremely useful in helping Linux penetrate the embedded systems market. The original idea was to get all the cool features of the kernel and just enough OS to be useful on a floppy. Once someone got it working, and working well, it was suddenly very easy to offer your [insert generic internet object] with routing/firewalling/web-based configuration stuff. All you really had to do was add one of the many excellent tiny webservers, and a pile of cgi-scripts to generate the config files from the forms and call
Getting a barebones-but-configurable linux out there spawned piles of projects for embedding it, like remote data collection, PDA O/Ss, net-boot computers, and piles of 'reuse' projects for PCs that couldn't/wouldn't have a hard drive in them.
In summary, I don't know what his latest rev. would have contributed, but LRP was the start of something cool that we now seem to take for granted. Me more than most people. As I hit submit my old 200Mhz/hard-driveless/cdromless LRP router (up for 4560h now) will pass the packets to
I know with private correspondence, say a letter from me to you, it is certainly the case that republishing without permission is legally-uncool, and there are some reasons for that I can agree with.
I would also wager that there are lawyers who for fear of bad P.R. for their sponsors would love the concept that they can bully people and automatically gag them at the same time. I also understand that they may have included this clause with that hope in mind.
What I can't see as likely is to go before a judge and attempt to convince them that a notice of copyright infringement posted to the webmaster of a publicly accessible website has a reasonable expectation of privacy. If they aren't being bullies and they genuinely believe they are doing the "right thing" in good faith then what damages can they claim are occurring as a result of having their notice publicly posted?
The simple version of the logic is: If shrink wrap lic. agreements don't stand up in court. I don't see that a "Note:" at the bottom of an e-mail is going to do any better. Especially if they can't prove it was untruthful.
If there is a sound legal backing for such silliness, every spammer in the world should use this technique, and complain if any of their mail gets handed over to abuse@yahoo.com that it is a violation of their âoenote:â clause and therefore illegal.
If you read closely the prohibitions apply to persons or entities other than the intended recipient. I believe the idea here is that the intended recipient is obligated to be truthful (at lawyer-point), but if his ISP sees the letter going by in the "suspicious mail" folder and does a routine SPAM reveiw on it, the ISP cannot then publish what he found.
In fact to state that the intended recipient is not allowed to have the letter "reviewed" by a lawyer would be contrary to their purpose of using expensive lawyers to handle what should be done by decent thinking people.
As a previous poster noted though, the letter does not include specific references to the manuals for those games, and it wasn't and endless list of games.
If I had to take a wild stab at it I'd wager the site-owner is just frustrated by running a non-profit site that isn't doing any actual damage to anyones business and getting kicked in the teeth for it by lawyers anxious to justify their billable hours.
"Look! We stopped another person from freely sharing information that will never be of use to anyone! That'll be $1200 dollars please."
Then it looks like it's definitely misbehaving. If the voltage just before shutdown is 26-27 volts then you definitely need to adjust the shutdown threshold. The voltage just after shutdown should actually pop up to this range if the batteries aren't discharged (which they don't seem to be), but the voltage output of an unloaded battery is a poor indicator of it's state of charge.
On a typical 12V battery under medium load (say one that would take an hour to drain it of it's rated amp hours), 10.8 volts seems to be the rule of thumb for where to drain it to. So in your system 21.6 would be a good cutoff voltage. I don't know what you have to do to adjust that on your system. Mine has only indicator lamps of charge. And they are done with very primitive circuitry. The voltage systems in mine as I vaguely recall were simple and analog. If I were going to attempt to hack the a new cut off voltage into such a thing, I'd find an electronics enthusiast friend with a good variable bench supply that will go up to the 28V range and supply at least 5 amps of power. Then I'd feed the 28 volts from the supply to the UPS, with it unplugged, add a 100 watt incandescent load, and turn it on and see at what voltage I had to turn the supply down to, to make it cut off. Then I could test with the "screw with output components" method until I had adjusted the cut off down to 10.8.
I was suprised to find that many of the manufacturers like yuasa have full charge characteristic sheets on their web sites. I don't know what kind mine were, but I found'em and seeing that the system was treating me right gave me quite the warm fuzzy feeling.
Best of luck with the hacking.
Compwizards point is a good one. These things do not size like they're supposed to.
:).
It think part of it is the fact that the batteries are rated to a much lower drain than the UPS can use them (like rated for a drain down to 9 volts when the UPS kicks off at 11) and that the UPS step-up powersupply has significant inefficiencies.
When I first got it. With that weaselly little battery that comes in side it, I got ~35% load (which is only 350w) for about 9 minutes. So, you're not far off the mark here. With the extra pack, it actually scaled more in my favor (again, probably the voltage/remaining charge curve) as my next test got an hour and ten mintues.
If you want generate an off the hip number I'd take the amp hours your batteries are rated for, multply them by your voltage to get watt hours and divide by two. In my case it's 68Ah x 12V for 816 watt hours. Divide by two for 408 watt hours. Divide by 350 watts for 1.2 hours of operation.
It begs the question though: Why do you want this? Granted you're not getting what you paid for, and you have the right to complain. Beyond that though, if your servers are on stand-by power for more than 120 seconds you can have them 'shutdown -h now' Assuming they can power off in another 60 seconds, you're home free at 70% of your rated load. The only time having twice as much capacity will make a difference is on blackouts that are > 2 minutes, but less than 5. If you regularly hit that zone it might make the difference, if they're usually longer, your servers will still have to shut down, if they're usually under 2 minutes the other batteries don't buy you much.
That said. I would feel quite justified, if I paid cash for a smartups 1400, and could verify the current coming out of it was at 50% load, and the run time was only half of what it should be, in telling APC to fix it or refund my money.
As I bought mine broken on ebay, I had no room to complain
Every admin who has been reflexively typing 'yes' to the
The RSA host key for yoursite.com has changed, use new key?
prompt is now shuddering to think how many passwords s/he might have handed the "Man in the Middle."
Good Job.
I have been asked to fix a number of UPS's and set up hugh battery banks for telcom. carriers with very large UPS's, and I've observed a couple things.
:) ) and see how it performs.
/. so we can buy them up off of ebay.
FuturePower (above) was right, every UPS I've seen has current limited charge circuitry. Not because they are anticipating larger battery packs, but because that is the easiest way to do it.
The cheap systems just had a current limiter on the float charger. They tried to bring the battery to some float voltage (let's assume a 12V system) like 13.6 and limited the current to an amp, and that was it. This of course is a lousy way to charge the battery, that will take forever to get it to a full charge, but it's cheap and easy.
The better systems were dual mode. They would set a higher target charge voltage like 14.5 until and limit the current to something like 6 amps until the current dropped down to a couple amps, and then kicked over to their float mode for the last bit of charge. These systems recover properly and well.
If the voltages match, I would try it out, with the actual equipment (you are using the ext3 file system right
The only two things that you might want to tweak are float voltage and cooling.
You'll be very lucky if there is a POT (varible resistor with a screwdriver or thumbwheel adjustment) that lets you adjust the float voltage. If there is, please post the make and model to
If not, you'll probably have to have someone who knows his electronics look at the charger stage and tell you where the adjustment resistor is. It may be the only 1% (always five striped, often blue) resistor in the charging circuity. If you can spot it, my favorite trick would be to use two of the pin-cups from a machine pinned socket and solder them in where the resistor was, then you can try several resistors just by forming their leads and jamming them in.
The whole "float voltage varies by temperature" issue is important for a remote mountaintop installation, but if this is going on your home, do the calcs for 70 degrees and leave it. The variance between 60 degree nights and 80 degree days isn't going to have any measurable effect on your battery life.
The other issue is cooling. As others have pointed out, the engineers that were selling a UPS to operate for five minutes at a particular load can safely choose (cheaper) components that will overheat in 10 minutes. The quick and dirty fix for these is a fan. Easiest way to hook it up would be to use a double pole relay with a 120V coil and contacts rated for at least 12V (they will probably be rated for much more, but that's ok). You choose the connections such that when the relay is energized it opens the circuit. If you use a 12V battery, then the circuit is a 12V fan connected to the 12V battery with the relay in between. When power is on, the circuit is open, the fan is off, when power is off the relay closes the fan comes on. The problem with this, is that if the power goes off while you're away for a couple days, the fan will drain the batteries flat (bad for the batteries, but not dangerous).
The slightly more complicated solution uses the relay plus a 5V 100ma. fan (found everywhere) and a 6.2V 1Watt zener diode (found lots of places but worst case Digikey 1N4735AMSCT-ND 25cents (min. order required; good excuse to buy cables and connectors)). You hook it up as before, but with the diode reverse biased so it drops ~6.2V in the circuit with the fan running. This won't move as much air, so you'll have to figure out what gets hot and get the fan positioned to blow on it and get some good ventilation holes in the case. The good part is, it will stop conducting at 6.2V (probably 7V in a practical circuit), and won't drain your batteries dry.
Your article reminded me to test the 68Ah worth of batteries I added to my SmartUPS 1400 five years ago.
This article typed to you on battery power. Good luck.
I'm not picking. REALLY. It's just too funny that someone complaining about bad mathmatics in the thread, and the C compiler, in the same post, would live on a planet with a 10 month year.
// should yeild better results.
float y = (float) 1/2 * x;
Someone needs to invent two over the counter drugs to counter these effects.
1) A morning beverage with a central nervous system stimulant. Preferably served hot for those in cold climates.
2) A mellow tasty central nervous system depressant that goes well with pizza and will help you get a good nights sleep.
Wait a minute...
If?
I can't see any "If" in this.
Flash is (for most people) a browser plug in. It is totally at the mercy of the browser.
Somewhere on the Microsoft campus near sub-level 27 the "Steering Committee for Things We Need to Crush under our Boots" is meeting.
Hundreds of megabytes of PowerPoint presentations will be displayed, doughnuts and espresso will disappear like wild leaves that before the wild hurricane fly. And in the end, the fate of MacroMedia will be decided by one Excel spreadsheet, displayed with the new MakeEmotionallyComfortingHolographicImage Wizard.
That graph will show the convergence of three metrics:
1) The value of owning Macromedia flash.
2) The perceived cost of implementing an inferior equivalent as IE's new default âoeplayer.â
3) The damage to Bill's feelings of omniscience by not owning Flash [measured in billions].
Stop it. Just STOP it!
This message brought to you by the Society for the Preservation of Astronomical Zealotry
First off any company who employs deceptive practices to gather information (no matter how useless) should have to pay for it 100k sounds like a good start.
That said I would like to address one of your other points:
How's every single detail of my life going to help them make a better game? Does my street, house number and phone number really help their design process?
Actually it does. One of the most important aspects of design is knowing who your designing for, and geographic influences are often significant. The company in question might want your data for some kind of ugly database but that's beside my point as well.
One of the scariest moments in business is after you have a successful product and some surplus cash, and want to know what to do with it. Two things come to mind, advertise and improve your product. For both of them it is critical to know your target audience. If you're selling new hip looking mp3 players and your registration cards come back and you find that their being bought up by 9-13 year old girls living in hawaii, then advertise on Sabrina, offer neon-colors, consider a water-resistant unit. If they're being purchased by 25-35 year old men living in Seattle, Chicago and Philly, then advertise on Frasier, offer leather and wood-like finishes, and consider a Palm-Direct transfer feature. Making these decisions properly will often make or break your company, and any information that can help has value.
In the OpenSource community the need to have something drives us to create it. We are therefore very often part of our target audience, and if not, we receive bug mail from them that makes it very clear exactly what they are doing with it.
Consumer Product development and marketing models are very different from ours, but they exist because they work. So have a Coke(r) and a smile.
The coolest form of this data gathering I found was on some little electronic tool (power screwdriver I think). They offered a one year warranty by default and an extra year if you filled out their silly little card, with the added bonus that doing so meant you could misplace the receipt and still get it repaired free of charge for two years.
5 seconds of recorded data seems fair and reasonable.
I have a problem with where they draw the line though. Since it's currently somewhere reasonable, I guess this makes me a privacy-freak.
It doesn't seem like it would be hard to pass a "Car Consumer Saftey Protection Act" (with riders for new child restraints or something equally popular) to mandate that it also store the top speed in the last 15 minutes. If that act also mandated a standard interface, little greedy municipalitities all over the country would be issuing their officers the readers and making it legal for them to be able to interface with any car they pull over.
Odds are no Congress person will spend any "juice" putting a law on the books that keeps this to a reasonable 5 seconds.
So I agree it's not a problem today, but is it not just a matter of time?