The whole point of "The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy" was that it was on the wireless, and therefore there were no pictures outside of your own head. This meant you had to work harder to suspend your disbelief.
Adapting it to TV was always going to be difficult because some of the people who had heard it on the radio would have developed their own ideas of how the characters looked and acted, which would not tally with the TV producer's ideas. Now, I know the BBC's special effects were a little on the cheesey side, but a TV licence was cheaper in those days - especially as there were still many people watching in mono and paying an even cheaper licence. {Stating the obvious, the BBC is funded from TV licence fees and does not carry advertising. This means, in theory at least, that the programmes it shows are ones that people have paid to watch, rather than ones that advertisers have paid to show in order to interrupt}. Again, you had to suspend your disbelief: make a conscious effort to believe that that lampshade dangling on a length of fishing line was really a spaceship.
Maybe I'm just being pessimistic, but I can't imagine Hollywood making anything but a massive pig's ear of the story. Today, a mass of special effects are generally used to cover up a thin plot {invariably with some kind of sex angle added} and/or one-dimensional characters {and ac(tors|tresses) who were chosen more for their unrealistic conformance to the ideal of Conventional Beauty than anything else}. In mediaeval paintings, before anyone had worked out that light travels in straight lines and so distant objects appear smaller than close ones, the most important character in the scene was painted the biggest. In Hollywood movies, the most important character is either the "prettiest" or "ugliest" depending on whether they are a "goodie" or a "baddie". Plots, too, are reduced to a simple battle of "good" versus "evil". This doesn't work for complex characters, so sometimes characters are distorted so as better to fit the stereotype. {Can you imagine Hollywood's take on something like "Trainspotting"? All the characters are basically on the same side. Disney probably would make them all the Baddies, and introduce a young orphan boy for the Goodie. Or it might be more politically correct to have a girl this time. Uh, yeah, maybe we could use that baby instead of making her a cot death victim. [Never mind that the whole point of that scene was that you were hoping all along that she wasn't dead, but at the same time you knew she was anyway - and the confirmation knocked the wind out of you]. Said child meets a Special Friend - an improbable character, who {after a little playfighting and banter} helps them break into an underground laboratory and poison a batch of junk. Renton and Sick Boy are seen cooking up in the Mother Superior's flat. Child looks out of window. Dead bodies lie still. Solitary church bell rings. Tommy [not dead of AIDS] and Spud solemnly promise never to touch junk again. Tearful scene in which Special Friend departs forever, while outside the sun is shining. The end}. And, while my imagination is generally capable of making up for poor SFX, I find plots and characters harder.
For an example of what I mean, look at Star Wars Episode I. There are just too many things out of that film that don't gel when you come to think about them afterward. Explosions, obviously. Pod racers? Someone's having a giraffe. What keeps the outside part of those engines from rotating? Battle droids? Come on, if you're going to make an entire army of foldy-uppy robots, you should at least give them proper weapons. The original Star Wars {now re-named Episode four - A New Hope} stood up far better to post-movie analysis.
An RPM package upgrade can, in principle, delete arbitrary files, so why shouldn't this upgrade code?
An RPM package upgrade is performed only when and because the root user says so. This is quite different from arbitrary code downloading itself from a remote server, executing itself and deleting files without your say-so.
I still stand by my earlier statement about closed-source code. Why should I trust any executable if the authors won't even let me look at the source code? Surely if they had nothing to hide, then they would have nothing to fear.
If the idea behind this thing becomes popular, it's a matter of time before someone starts knocking out something similar on the cheap. All-in-one mobos are cheap as chips, and drivers don't seem to be as much of a problem as they used to be anymore. Stick one in a case, add a hard drive and maybe a DVD-ROM and pop your favourite distro on it. If it has TV-out, supply a SCART to phono and 3.5mm stereo lead {you may have to solder this yourself} and it'll run into any modern enough telly. A TV receiver / video capture card would make it into a tapeless VCR.
It might need a console-based configuration utility for setting its IP address. Once that's done, and the machine is on a network, everything else can be done through a web browser with a bit of p(hp|erl|ython) scripting.
It could firewall off your vulnerable Windows boxes from your ADSL connection, and provide a proxy to block ad.doubleclick.net and other objectionable sites. No ADSL? Then it can do on-demand dialling. It could collect your e-mail from several different servers and distribute it amongst several desktop machines - you can use POP3 to collect it and thus obviate the need for a static IP address. With the video and audio outputs, it could be a telejuke.
And, because it's programmable, some loon will almost certainly find a use for it none of us have thought of yet.
The software has been out for six months and nobody spotted an exploit? How come? Don't you people inspect the source code of every piece of software you ever install? That is the only way to avoid being bitten by malicious code. Either read the source code or show it to someone who understands it. {This includes your OS distributor. Anything you downloaded from their site should be fairly safe}.
Oh, wait, it was a closed-source Windows application. Well, as far as I can see, if you play with something and you don't really know what it does, you get what you deserve.
Wise up, people! Insist on seeing the full source code. If they won't show it to you, ask yourself what they're so keen to hide. And if you're so keen to share your files, just use Apache, for crying out loud.
Points grudgingly accepted. Excuse me while I adjust the wick on my paraffin lamp:-)
I can see that it's rather inefficient to run all processes sequentially during boot-up. I can see how some of them could be parallelised.
Maybe I should try some experiments myself - start next to nothing before going multiuser, then login as root and start the real script. This would spawn a bunch of processes to bring each service into play. Some of them wait for an environment variable, or a combination of variables, to be set before proceeding. Some of them set an environment variable as they finish. Just checking an environment variable is not going to take much time, so the unready processes won't hog cycles too many precious cycles.
But, it still might not be any quicker. After all, the CPU still has to execute the same number of instructions. More if it's switching between tasks.....
It would not be too hard to verify Open Office.org's market share by experiment. All we need to do is start sending out.sxw and.sxc attachments. If we get e-mails asking what programme opens them, we tell them Open Office {though I'd expect MS Office to be able to open them just fine; after all, the Open Office.org file formats are public knowledge, whereas the MS office file formats are closely-guarded secrets}.
Also, it might give some people a dose of their own medicine.
The Linux startup process works. Is there any need to muck about with it? On Red Hat et al and Debian, there's the powerful but complicated init.d directory; while Slackware users have a less sophisticated system to contend with.
And hey, it's not like we have to boot all that often, is it;-)
Copyright law was originally proposed as a means of encouraging creativity, by granting originators of works a certain time-limited monopoly over their distribution in return for a promise that the work would eventually pass into the public domain for the benefit of everyone. I believe the original term was 25 years or until the death of the author, whichever occurred sooner. At the time when copyright was first conceived, this might well have been a good idea. Many authors would have been too poor to afford their own printing presses, and would have had to rely on the services of a commercial printer to see their work enter print. An unscrupulous printer might attempt to pass off a client's work as their own. So some sort of law to protect authors from being ripped off by their printers probably was in order. Copying books by hand would have been too much effort for all but the most determined. However, this is conjecture on my part as I Was Not There.
What is certain is that in recent times, copyright has been abused. What was originally intended to encourage the creation of new works eventually to enter the public domain, is now being used just to scrape up cash and actually discourage entry of new works into the public domain. I would not hesitate to call that "subversive". Check my sig - progress has value only if it is shared by all. Conversely, any attempt to deny access to the benefits of progress devalues progress. What do you suppose would have happened to the human race if the person who discovered how to make fire tried to keep the secret to themself, or licence it only to a select few?
The GPL is something like jiu-jitsu - the idea that you can use your enemy's strength and weight to your own advantage. As I stated above, there is currently no protection for works in the public domain against being lifted and copyrighted. Were there such a law, which would have to mean that any derivative work based on a work already in the public domain would be uncopyrightable {a work which merely draws its inspiration, or takes only a tiny portion of content, from a public domain work would be analogous to "fair use" of a copyrighted work}, it is quite likely that there would be no need for the GPL, because anyone who wanted their work available to everybody could simply release it into the public domain.
Believe me, the only thing I would like more than such a properly protected public domain would be the simple and outright prohibition of closed-source software. That actually very nearly happened.
Why the hell should I pay someone to take stuff away from me? If anything, they should be paying me to let them have it!
Currently, however, it is cheaper for manufacturers to mine raw materials out of the ground than to recycle existing materials. However, the Earth's resources really belong to our children and their children, so mining is really a form of theft {albeit from victims who may not yet have been born}. This is only likely to change when raw materials start becoming scarce, but by that time it may well be too late.
What is required is a tax on the extraction of virgin raw materials where a recycled substitute is available: a tax so heavy that manufacturing companies will pay good money for anything they can recycle, in order to avoid as far as possible having to mine new raw materials. It would also be necessary to place a tax {or an outright ban - cf. ivory} on imported finished goods made where virgin material extraction was untaxed.
Of course this will affect domestic and international trade. So did the abolition of slavery. What's your point? Just because you've been getting away with doing something which is so obviously wrong for a long time, does not make it right.
The problem is that if you make equipment that lasts forever, you can only ever sell one product to each person. Then you get to retire and go home. Whereas, if your products need replacing annually, you theoretically can sell one product to each person each year. Then you count the money stacking up, but you die of a heart attack before you get to spend any of it.
Except that if I buy a product expecting it to last forever {which I usually do; belts, brushes, batteries, bulbs, blades and bearings wear out, but good equipment should be designed so such parts can easily be replaced}, and it breaks after a year, then I will actively avoid buying anything from that supplier ever again. I am sure I am not the only person to think this way. Unfortunately, the market is so flooded with crap that producers of quality equipment simply cannot afford to compete.
Under the GPL, you (the author) are REQUIRED to grant ALL parties the right to make copies of your work.
But copyright holders are not required by law to use the GPL; they have agreed voluntarily to its terms.
Without the additional rights given by the GPL, Joe User can only make copies subject to the "fair use" provisions of the law, as determined by the courts. If it ever came to court that someone had been taping albums to play in their car, they could claim fair use and no jury in the world would convict them, at least, not if two or more of them had cassette decks in their cars:-) Of course, if by some freak chance, RMS, Linus, ESR, Bruce Perens and eight others from the Free Software community ever got called up for jury service in a copyright case where the defendant was claiming fair use, then, we might well see a new legal precedent set. Or a great fight:-)
If someone writes a piece of software but doesn't release it under the GPL, then anyone can still attempt to obtain permission to make a copy of it, and there are even a few copyright holders who will grant such permission. There is no legal grey area there. As the copyright holder, that is their right for a limited time, and such permission as they grant to you is legally valid as long as you comply with any enforceable conditions.
But if the author believes that it is more important that everyone should have access to their software than that they should have the right to deny access to certain people, and chooses to release their software under the GPL, then that is their own decision. The GPL explicitly grants users limited rights to distribute software. However, the GPL specifically does not give users the right to appropriate software for use in non-GPL projects. This is the crucial difference between GPL and PD. The public domain does not have any protection from plundering. If you place a piece of software in the public domain, someone else can steal it in its entirety, repackage it, claim copyright on it and take you to court for violating their copyright. If they tried that with a piece of GPL software, your copyright would stop them from doing that. {A new law making it illegal to lift material from the public domain and copyright it would have the same effect. The problem is that with no copyright holder, there would be no-one to bring action in such a case}.
Read The Flaming Licence. The GPL gives you specific rights in addition to any rights you may have under the law. Those rights cannot legally be taken away -- anyone who tries is breaking the law. Anything in the GPL which tried to take away your statutory rights would be considered null and void, but the remaining terms of the licence would still stand.
Copyright law grants the originator of a work certain limited privileges. For a limited time, authors may control distribution of their work. For a limited period, copying - beyond a level of "fair use" to be determined by the courts - without proper authorisation is an offence.
The GPL is exactly such authorisation; which, under copyright law, the copyright holder is entitled to grant. If you accept the GPL, then you are permitted by that agreement to do things that might otherwise constitute a violation of copyright.
No court in the world could ever find fault with the GPL, because there is no fault to be found.
If I were an employer and I had an employee that hurt a business relationship by using their status as a security expert (which either the got from my company or perpetuated through my company), I would fire them on the spot.
And you would most probably get sued for unfair dismissal. What your employees do outside of company time has nothing to do with you. Private lives are just that - private.
Exactly. If you kowtow to the demands of everyone who tells you they are helping you out by letting you work for them, you are making things worse, not better, for everyone else. If you conform to unreasonable expectations instead of protesting at them, you merely reinforce the company's idea that their expectations are reasonable. Then they start expecting even more unreasonable things. That's how your rights get eaten.
But it's a fundamental law that anything anybody does on their own time, at their own expense and away from company premises is their own business. Not their employer's. When knocking-off time comes around, workers are free of all obligations to their employees save turning up for work the next day. If my boss doesn't like dogs, there is nothing he can do to stop me from owning a dog, as long as I don't bring it into work with me. My workplace might have a no-smoking policy, but as long as I could last the day without a puff, I'm free to smoke all the fags I want the minute I'm off the premises. Even if I had lived out a fantasy and beaten my old boss up in an alleyway, as long as that incident took place away from company premises, it would never have been sufficient grounds in and of itself for dismissal.
You seem to be implying that the boss is doing a favour to the workers by giving them a job, rather than the way it really is. The workers' labour is worth more to the company than the company's wages are to the workers. As long as I've a hand on each arm and a head on my shoulders, I won't go short. A boss hasn't that luxury.....
It is still unfair dismissal. As long as his name was on the report, then the report is his words, not his employer's, and if someone can't understand, well, that's their problem. You cannot be dismissed from a job simply for disliking your boss, otherwise there would be many more on the dole than working.
In my last job, I made no secret what I thought of my boss. My co-workers {as, one by one, they left the company; some had nervous breakdowns, some got other jobs, some were desperate enough that they would forego six weeks' giro by leaving a job voluntarily; one went into what he described as a less stressful job - teaching!} felt the same way. In this job, I'm fortunate to have a boss I get on with really well. Even if I didn't, that would not be grounds for dismissal.
Also, there is a commonly-overlooked defence to libel, and that is that it was true.
There are good reasons why you might want to search a person's trash. If they have put recyclables in with stuff going for landfill, then they deserve to be punished, and punished hard, for pollution. {Murder: victim is one person. Treason: victim is a whole nation. Pollution: victim is an entire planet.} Everyone who puts recyclable goods in for landfill is stealing from the local council, twice over: firstly in the cost of landfilling the goods, and secondly in the money not paid by the scrap merchant for the goods recovered.
Sounds like a clear case for limiting powers. Hunting down and killing polluters is all fair as far as I am concerned. Making use of information that was not volunteered to you, or disclosing it to a third party, is not. There's obviously a line to be drawn somewhere.....
Look at the BBC for an example of how TV should be.
Follow the Money, right? With the BBC, you pay to watch it, not pay to be on it. Stands to reason you get a better standard of programmes, at least from the point of view of the viewer.
Yes, I am bound to blow the trumpet for my own country's TV service. No doubt other countries also have a publicly-owned, advertisment-free television service with up to eight channels {2 on analogue terrestrial, 1 full-time digital, 5 part-time digital of which 2 kids' channels}. See also them.
An easier way to find out the speed of light is to get two MW radio receivers, one having its tuning scale in metres and the other in kilohertz. Tune the wavelength-labelled set into a station and write down its wavelength. Then, tune the frequency-labelled set into the same station and write down its frequency {which will be a multiple of 9kHz, by the way}. The product is the speed of light, with any multipliers still in effect {so if you multiply kHz by m, you will get km/sec}.
Or, you could ring up and ask the frequency in kHz and the wavelength in metres.
For example, before they went FM stereo,Radio Derby's old MW wavelength was 269m. Their MW frequency was 1116kHz. This gives c = 300204 km/s.
When you have replaced all your filament bulbs with fluorescents, insulated everything you can, changed your boiler for a pilotless condensing one and you have the most fuel-efficient car you can buy, what else is there that you can do to save energy?
All energy conservation really achieves, is staving off the inevitable by passing the buck along a generation or two.
The answer would seem to be local combined heating and power plants. These would burn organic matter segregated from domestic waste {in a pyrolysing process to reduce emissions of nasties}, and some of the surplus heat could be used for heating homes.
However, Joe Moron, who is convinced that it's fine to dig up fossil fuels out of the ground to use for generating electricity {increasing atmospheric CO2 levels}, OK to dump energy-rich organic matter in landfill where it will decay into methane {which is a better heat trap than CO2 -- better in the sense it traps more heat, not better environmentally}, and harmless to burn god knows what on bonfires in back gardens, somehow thinks that if we were to burn less fossil fuel, use burnable rubbish {much of which is plant-based, i.e. derived from CO2 that has been abstracted from the atmosphere; even the carbon in animals originally came from plants at some stage along the way} instead of some of it, in a high-tech pyrolysing furnace that combines as near as damn is to swearing all the fuel with oxygen, and save on logistics by not having to transport waste materials so far, then that would somehow be worse for the environment.
Just an observation, I can't figure it.
Re:OK, here's how they work
on
NYT on RFID
·
· Score: 1
How can the tags understand that? Its my understanding that these are passive things, a chip of memory powered by an antenna and RF field. Hit 'em with a field, and watch 'em transmit.
As I said, it needs a few more smarts to do stuff like that. The primitive ones rely on their short working range, and maybe a directional antenna in the receiver, for their discrimination; they are basically a shift register spitting out bits in sequence, plus the PSU and timing stuff. It's not really passive; it's doing a fair bit electronically, but it just speaks without really listening. The carrier is just there to power it. The more sophisticated ones act a bit more like a serial NVM {93LC46 for example}, where you feed commands in {e.g. "read word at address 0x13" or "write 0x1234 into address 0x3f"}, and data comes out if appropriate, in time with clock pulses from the host. In an RFID device, the clock is obtained by dividing down the RF carrier. There could easily be commands for inverted and conditional reads.
Actually, there are read/write RFID tags on the market now. They're more expensive than read-only tags, obviously.
As I said, When a scientist says something is possible they are usually right; when a scientist says something is impossible they are usually wrong..... it's been awhile since I've been near a real live RFID device. I stand corrected, though not at all surprised.
BTW, does your Java card dealey run Java bytecode as its native instruction set? That'd be cool. Of course with a credit card form factor, you have more land to use for an antenna, so it's to be expected that you can couple more energy into the thing, therefore more sophistication. I'd also expect you to be able to get away with using fewer cycles of carrier per bit of data if the working range is shorter, just from thinking how pulses behave over increasing distance.
Re:OK, here's how they work
on
NYT on RFID
·
· Score: 1
How does the transmitter differentiate between multiple RFID tags? If they're all active, the bitstream "interpreted" by the transmitter is going to be garbage.
Short answer, it doesn't. Whichever one is nearest - or, maybe, whichever one has the lowest on resistance - will tend to win. The short working range is what keeps it at all workable.
A more sophisticated solution could use check digits, so the transmitter at least knows that what returned was corrupt. Also, the tags would have to be able to be controlled by commands sent over the RF. Then it's just maths. If both tags are transmitting zeros, the transmitter will see zero back; if either is transmitting a one, the transmitter will see a one back. From the first cycle you get the positions of all the double-zeros. Then you make the tags transmit the complement of their codes, so you get the positions of all the double-ones. Finally you need some sort of conditional-transmit command which will make the tag stop transmitting if its code doesn't match what the transmitter wants.
Simplifying it to 8 bits {plus check digits - we'll ignore these for the time being} and two tags, suppose our tag codes are 11010100 and 01000110. We will see 11010110, so the codes are xx0x0xx0 and yy0y0yy0. We say "send the opposite of your code" and we see 10111011, so the codes must be x10x01x0 and y10y01y0. Now we say something like "Only send your code if it starts with a 0". Now we see 01000110 and a valid set of check digits, so we know one of the codes is 01000110. Then we say "Only send your code if it starts with a 1". We see "11010100" back, the check digits are valid, and we know how many codes we have and what they were.
Slashdot Mirror
The whole point of "The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy" was that it was on the wireless, and therefore there were no pictures outside of your own head. This meant you had to work harder to suspend your disbelief.
Adapting it to TV was always going to be difficult because some of the people who had heard it on the radio would have developed their own ideas of how the characters looked and acted, which would not tally with the TV producer's ideas. Now, I know the BBC's special effects were a little on the cheesey side, but a TV licence was cheaper in those days - especially as there were still many people watching in mono and paying an even cheaper licence. {Stating the obvious, the BBC is funded from TV licence fees and does not carry advertising. This means, in theory at least, that the programmes it shows are ones that people have paid to watch, rather than ones that advertisers have paid to show in order to interrupt}. Again, you had to suspend your disbelief: make a conscious effort to believe that that lampshade dangling on a length of fishing line was really a spaceship.
Maybe I'm just being pessimistic, but I can't imagine Hollywood making anything but a massive pig's ear of the story. Today, a mass of special effects are generally used to cover up a thin plot {invariably with some kind of sex angle added} and/or one-dimensional characters {and ac(tors|tresses) who were chosen more for their unrealistic conformance to the ideal of Conventional Beauty than anything else}. In mediaeval paintings, before anyone had worked out that light travels in straight lines and so distant objects appear smaller than close ones, the most important character in the scene was painted the biggest. In Hollywood movies, the most important character is either the "prettiest" or "ugliest" depending on whether they are a "goodie" or a "baddie". Plots, too, are reduced to a simple battle of "good" versus "evil". This doesn't work for complex characters, so sometimes characters are distorted so as better to fit the stereotype. {Can you imagine Hollywood's take on something like "Trainspotting"? All the characters are basically on the same side. Disney probably would make them all the Baddies, and introduce a young orphan boy for the Goodie. Or it might be more politically correct to have a girl this time. Uh, yeah, maybe we could use that baby instead of making her a cot death victim. [Never mind that the whole point of that scene was that you were hoping all along that she wasn't dead, but at the same time you knew she was anyway - and the confirmation knocked the wind out of you]. Said child meets a Special Friend - an improbable character, who {after a little playfighting and banter} helps them break into an underground laboratory and poison a batch of junk. Renton and Sick Boy are seen cooking up in the Mother Superior's flat. Child looks out of window. Dead bodies lie still. Solitary church bell rings. Tommy [not dead of AIDS] and Spud solemnly promise never to touch junk again. Tearful scene in which Special Friend departs forever, while outside the sun is shining. The end}. And, while my imagination is generally capable of making up for poor SFX, I find plots and characters harder.
For an example of what I mean, look at Star Wars Episode I. There are just too many things out of that film that don't gel when you come to think about them afterward. Explosions, obviously. Pod racers? Someone's having a giraffe. What keeps the outside part of those engines from rotating? Battle droids? Come on, if you're going to make an entire army of foldy-uppy robots, you should at least give them proper weapons. The original Star Wars {now re-named Episode four - A New Hope} stood up far better to post-movie analysis.
I still stand by my earlier statement about closed-source code. Why should I trust any executable if the authors won't even let me look at the source code? Surely if they had nothing to hide, then they would have nothing to fear.
If the idea behind this thing becomes popular, it's a matter of time before someone starts knocking out something similar on the cheap. All-in-one mobos are cheap as chips, and drivers don't seem to be as much of a problem as they used to be anymore. Stick one in a case, add a hard drive and maybe a DVD-ROM and pop your favourite distro on it. If it has TV-out, supply a SCART to phono and 3.5mm stereo lead {you may have to solder this yourself} and it'll run into any modern enough telly. A TV receiver / video capture card would make it into a tapeless VCR.
It might need a console-based configuration utility for setting its IP address. Once that's done, and the machine is on a network, everything else can be done through a web browser with a bit of p(hp|erl|ython) scripting.
It could firewall off your vulnerable Windows boxes from your ADSL connection, and provide a proxy to block ad.doubleclick.net and other objectionable sites. No ADSL? Then it can do on-demand dialling. It could collect your e-mail from several different servers and distribute it amongst several desktop machines - you can use POP3 to collect it and thus obviate the need for a static IP address. With the video and audio outputs, it could be a telejuke.
And, because it's programmable, some loon will almost certainly find a use for it none of us have thought of yet.
The software has been out for six months and nobody spotted an exploit? How come? Don't you people inspect the source code of every piece of software you ever install? That is the only way to avoid being bitten by malicious code. Either read the source code or show it to someone who understands it. {This includes your OS distributor. Anything you downloaded from their site should be fairly safe}.
Oh, wait, it was a closed-source Windows application. Well, as far as I can see, if you play with something and you don't really know what it does, you get what you deserve.
Wise up, people! Insist on seeing the full source code. If they won't show it to you, ask yourself what they're so keen to hide. And if you're so keen to share your files, just use Apache, for crying out loud.
Points grudgingly accepted. Excuse me while I adjust the wick on my paraffin lamp :-)
.....
I can see that it's rather inefficient to run all processes sequentially during boot-up. I can see how some of them could be parallelised.
Maybe I should try some experiments myself - start next to nothing before going multiuser, then login as root and start the real script. This would spawn a bunch of processes to bring each service into play. Some of them wait for an environment variable, or a combination of variables, to be set before proceeding. Some of them set an environment variable as they finish. Just checking an environment variable is not going to take much time, so the unready processes won't hog cycles too many precious cycles.
But, it still might not be any quicker. After all, the CPU still has to execute the same number of instructions. More if it's switching between tasks
Ah, you saw right through it. :-)
It would not be too hard to verify Open Office.org's market share by experiment. All we need to do is start sending out .sxw and .sxc attachments. If we get e-mails asking what programme opens them, we tell them Open Office {though I'd expect MS Office to be able to open them just fine; after all, the Open Office.org file formats are public knowledge, whereas the MS office file formats are closely-guarded secrets}.
Also, it might give some people a dose of their own medicine.
The Linux startup process works. Is there any need to muck about with it? On Red Hat et al and Debian, there's the powerful but complicated init.d directory; while Slackware users have a less sophisticated system to contend with.
;-)
And hey, it's not like we have to boot all that often, is it
I have read and agree with the GNU manifesto.
Copyright law was originally proposed as a means of encouraging creativity, by granting originators of works a certain time-limited monopoly over their distribution in return for a promise that the work would eventually pass into the public domain for the benefit of everyone. I believe the original term was 25 years or until the death of the author, whichever occurred sooner. At the time when copyright was first conceived, this might well have been a good idea. Many authors would have been too poor to afford their own printing presses, and would have had to rely on the services of a commercial printer to see their work enter print. An unscrupulous printer might attempt to pass off a client's work as their own. So some sort of law to protect authors from being ripped off by their printers probably was in order. Copying books by hand would have been too much effort for all but the most determined. However, this is conjecture on my part as I Was Not There.
What is certain is that in recent times, copyright has been abused. What was originally intended to encourage the creation of new works eventually to enter the public domain, is now being used just to scrape up cash and actually discourage entry of new works into the public domain. I would not hesitate to call that "subversive". Check my sig - progress has value only if it is shared by all. Conversely, any attempt to deny access to the benefits of progress devalues progress. What do you suppose would have happened to the human race if the person who discovered how to make fire tried to keep the secret to themself, or licence it only to a select few?
The GPL is something like jiu-jitsu - the idea that you can use your enemy's strength and weight to your own advantage. As I stated above, there is currently no protection for works in the public domain against being lifted and copyrighted. Were there such a law, which would have to mean that any derivative work based on a work already in the public domain would be uncopyrightable {a work which merely draws its inspiration, or takes only a tiny portion of content, from a public domain work would be analogous to "fair use" of a copyrighted work}, it is quite likely that there would be no need for the GPL, because anyone who wanted their work available to everybody could simply release it into the public domain.
Believe me, the only thing I would like more than such a properly protected public domain would be the simple and outright prohibition of closed-source software. That actually very nearly happened.
Why the hell should I pay someone to take stuff away from me? If anything, they should be paying me to let them have it!
Currently, however, it is cheaper for manufacturers to mine raw materials out of the ground than to recycle existing materials. However, the Earth's resources really belong to our children and their children, so mining is really a form of theft {albeit from victims who may not yet have been born}. This is only likely to change when raw materials start becoming scarce, but by that time it may well be too late.
What is required is a tax on the extraction of virgin raw materials where a recycled substitute is available: a tax so heavy that manufacturing companies will pay good money for anything they can recycle, in order to avoid as far as possible having to mine new raw materials. It would also be necessary to place a tax {or an outright ban - cf. ivory} on imported finished goods made where virgin material extraction was untaxed.
Of course this will affect domestic and international trade. So did the abolition of slavery. What's your point? Just because you've been getting away with doing something which is so obviously wrong for a long time, does not make it right.
The problem is that if you make equipment that lasts forever, you can only ever sell one product to each person. Then you get to retire and go home. Whereas, if your products need replacing annually, you theoretically can sell one product to each person each year. Then you count the money stacking up, but you die of a heart attack before you get to spend any of it.
Except that if I buy a product expecting it to last forever {which I usually do; belts, brushes, batteries, bulbs, blades and bearings wear out, but good equipment should be designed so such parts can easily be replaced}, and it breaks after a year, then I will actively avoid buying anything from that supplier ever again. I am sure I am not the only person to think this way. Unfortunately, the market is so flooded with crap that producers of quality equipment simply cannot afford to compete.
Ultimately it comes down to greed.
Without the additional rights given by the GPL, Joe User can only make copies subject to the "fair use" provisions of the law, as determined by the courts. If it ever came to court that someone had been taping albums to play in their car, they could claim fair use and no jury in the world would convict them, at least, not if two or more of them had cassette decks in their cars
If someone writes a piece of software but doesn't release it under the GPL, then anyone can still attempt to obtain permission to make a copy of it, and there are even a few copyright holders who will grant such permission. There is no legal grey area there. As the copyright holder, that is their right for a limited time, and such permission as they grant to you is legally valid as long as you comply with any enforceable conditions.
But if the author believes that it is more important that everyone should have access to their software than that they should have the right to deny access to certain people, and chooses to release their software under the GPL, then that is their own decision. The GPL explicitly grants users limited rights to distribute software. However, the GPL specifically does not give users the right to appropriate software for use in non-GPL projects. This is the crucial difference between GPL and PD. The public domain does not have any protection from plundering. If you place a piece of software in the public domain, someone else can steal it in its entirety, repackage it, claim copyright on it and take you to court for violating their copyright. If they tried that with a piece of GPL software, your copyright would stop them from doing that. {A new law making it illegal to lift material from the public domain and copyright it would have the same effect. The problem is that with no copyright holder, there would be no-one to bring action in such a case}.
Read The Flaming Licence. The GPL gives you specific rights in addition to any rights you may have under the law. Those rights cannot legally be taken away -- anyone who tries is breaking the law. Anything in the GPL which tried to take away your statutory rights would be considered null and void, but the remaining terms of the licence would still stand.
Copyright law grants the originator of a work certain limited privileges. For a limited time, authors may control distribution of their work. For a limited period, copying - beyond a level of "fair use" to be determined by the courts - without proper authorisation is an offence.
The GPL is exactly such authorisation; which, under copyright law, the copyright holder is entitled to grant. If you accept the GPL, then you are permitted by that agreement to do things that might otherwise constitute a violation of copyright.
No court in the world could ever find fault with the GPL, because there is no fault to be found.
Exactly. If you kowtow to the demands of everyone who tells you they are helping you out by letting you work for them, you are making things worse, not better, for everyone else. If you conform to unreasonable expectations instead of protesting at them, you merely reinforce the company's idea that their expectations are reasonable. Then they start expecting even more unreasonable things. That's how your rights get eaten.
But it's a fundamental law that anything anybody does on their own time, at their own expense and away from company premises is their own business. Not their employer's. When knocking-off time comes around, workers are free of all obligations to their employees save turning up for work the next day. If my boss doesn't like dogs, there is nothing he can do to stop me from owning a dog, as long as I don't bring it into work with me. My workplace might have a no-smoking policy, but as long as I could last the day without a puff, I'm free to smoke all the fags I want the minute I'm off the premises. Even if I had lived out a fantasy and beaten my old boss up in an alleyway, as long as that incident took place away from company premises, it would never have been sufficient grounds in and of itself for dismissal.
You seem to be implying that the boss is doing a favour to the workers by giving them a job, rather than the way it really is. The workers' labour is worth more to the company than the company's wages are to the workers. As long as I've a hand on each arm and a head on my shoulders, I won't go short. A boss hasn't that luxury .....
It is still unfair dismissal. As long as his name was on the report, then the report is his words, not his employer's, and if someone can't understand, well, that's their problem. You cannot be dismissed from a job simply for disliking your boss, otherwise there would be many more on the dole than working.
In my last job, I made no secret what I thought of my boss. My co-workers {as, one by one, they left the company; some had nervous breakdowns, some got other jobs, some were desperate enough that they would forego six weeks' giro by leaving a job voluntarily; one went into what he described as a less stressful job - teaching!} felt the same way. In this job, I'm fortunate to have a boss I get on with really well. Even if I didn't, that would not be grounds for dismissal.
Also, there is a commonly-overlooked defence to libel, and that is that it was true.
Even a complete idiot could see this is a clear cut case of unfair dismissal. Ting! Next, please.
There are good reasons why you might want to search a person's trash. If they have put recyclables in with stuff going for landfill, then they deserve to be punished, and punished hard, for pollution. {Murder: victim is one person. Treason: victim is a whole nation. Pollution: victim is an entire planet.} Everyone who puts recyclable goods in for landfill is stealing from the local council, twice over: firstly in the cost of landfilling the goods, and secondly in the money not paid by the scrap merchant for the goods recovered.
.....
Sounds like a clear case for limiting powers. Hunting down and killing polluters is all fair as far as I am concerned. Making use of information that was not volunteered to you, or disclosing it to a third party, is not. There's obviously a line to be drawn somewhere
Look at the BBC for an example of how TV should be.
Follow the Money, right? With the BBC, you pay to watch it, not pay to be on it. Stands to reason you get a better standard of programmes, at least from the point of view of the viewer.
Yes, I am bound to blow the trumpet for my own country's TV service. No doubt other countries also have a publicly-owned, advertisment-free television service with up to eight channels {2 on analogue terrestrial, 1 full-time digital, 5 part-time digital of which 2 kids' channels}. See also them.
An easier way to find out the speed of light is to get two MW radio receivers, one having its tuning scale in metres and the other in kilohertz. Tune the wavelength-labelled set into a station and write down its wavelength. Then, tune the frequency-labelled set into the same station and write down its frequency {which will be a multiple of 9kHz, by the way}. The product is the speed of light, with any multipliers still in effect {so if you multiply kHz by m, you will get km/sec}.
Or, you could ring up and ask the frequency in kHz and the wavelength in metres.
For example, before they went FM stereo,Radio Derby's old MW wavelength was 269m. Their MW frequency was 1116kHz. This gives c = 300204 km/s.
Ever heard of the Law of Diminishing Returns?
When you have replaced all your filament bulbs with fluorescents, insulated everything you can, changed your boiler for a pilotless condensing one and you have the most fuel-efficient car you can buy, what else is there that you can do to save energy?
All energy conservation really achieves, is staving off the inevitable by passing the buck along a generation or two.
The answer would seem to be local combined heating and power plants. These would burn organic matter segregated from domestic waste {in a pyrolysing process to reduce emissions of nasties}, and some of the surplus heat could be used for heating homes.
However, Joe Moron, who is convinced that it's fine to dig up fossil fuels out of the ground to use for generating electricity {increasing atmospheric CO2 levels}, OK to dump energy-rich organic matter in landfill where it will decay into methane {which is a better heat trap than CO2 -- better in the sense it traps more heat, not better environmentally}, and harmless to burn god knows what on bonfires in back gardens, somehow thinks that if we were to burn less fossil fuel, use burnable rubbish {much of which is plant-based, i.e. derived from CO2 that has been abstracted from the atmosphere; even the carbon in animals originally came from plants at some stage along the way} instead of some of it, in a high-tech pyrolysing furnace that combines as near as damn is to swearing all the fuel with oxygen, and save on logistics by not having to transport waste materials so far, then that would somehow be worse for the environment.
Just an observation, I can't figure it.
BTW, does your Java card dealey run Java bytecode as its native instruction set? That'd be cool. Of course with a credit card form factor, you have more land to use for an antenna, so it's to be expected that you can couple more energy into the thing, therefore more sophistication. I'd also expect you to be able to get away with using fewer cycles of carrier per bit of data if the working range is shorter, just from thinking how pulses behave over increasing distance.
A more sophisticated solution could use check digits, so the transmitter at least knows that what returned was corrupt. Also, the tags would have to be able to be controlled by commands sent over the RF. Then it's just maths. If both tags are transmitting zeros, the transmitter will see zero back; if either is transmitting a one, the transmitter will see a one back. From the first cycle you get the positions of all the double-zeros. Then you make the tags transmit the complement of their codes, so you get the positions of all the double-ones. Finally you need some sort of conditional-transmit command which will make the tag stop transmitting if its code doesn't match what the transmitter wants.
Simplifying it to 8 bits {plus check digits - we'll ignore these for the time being} and two tags, suppose our tag codes are 11010100 and 01000110. We will see 11010110, so the codes are xx0x0xx0 and yy0y0yy0. We say "send the opposite of your code" and we see 10111011, so the codes must be x10x01x0 and y10y01y0. Now we say something like "Only send your code if it starts with a 0". Now we see 01000110 and a valid set of check digits, so we know one of the codes is 01000110. Then we say "Only send your code if it starts with a 1". We see "11010100" back, the check digits are valid, and we know how many codes we have and what they were.