1. As previously noted (I think on/.) the one thing you do not do with an unpatched WinXP system is to go onto the 'Net. Indeed, ISO's with patches or prepatched install CD's might be a solution but I think that the virus/worm/malware writers can also get these and patch their wares. Given MS's track record it'll be weeks at least before the problem is recognized or solved. It might be better to not take any WinXP system onto an open network.
2. I note that despite increased awareness and MS's increased focus on security the average survival time shows a downward trend, with slight peaks shortly after high profile worm events. How come? Is the average user slacking off? Or are the worms/viruses/trojans/whathaveyou getting smarter? Or are there ever more on the loose, resulting in an ever increasing number of probes? Looking at my firewall, the number of probes I receive remains more or less constant (although I had a few more than usual on port 8000 today) so maybe that is not a good explanation (for the Netherlands at least). Anyone?
Maybe I am being cynical. I do not doubt that there are more such as you, who are truly involved and care about the content of politics. More power to you. However, when I read on AdvoKit's web site that its success is measured in the amount of money generated by using it, I get cynical feelings. Why is it not measured in terms of the number of people gotten to rally behind a cause such as equal rights for a minority (gay marriage, anyone?). I do appreciate the difficulties in reaching an audience of 300 million people, but I do not see why that should be so expensive if all that really mattered was content. The way it looks from abroad, American politics is about throwing huge parties, gaining support for your cause by besmirching the other and getting into bed with companies that stand to gain from your gains. I really, really hope that more people such as you take control and see to it that politics again is about trying to make the world a better place for the people.
More like Astroturf if you ask me. If I understand it correctly, the software is meant to tie people together in a way suitable to a political cause, specifically to raise money by judging from the AdvoKit introduction. Reading that, I'd say this is about raising money to finance these ridiculously expensive campaigns (to us Dutch, American politics sometimes seems to revolve around money and little else...) and not about furthering democracy. Tying people together into a pre-arranged framework with the sole purpose of raising money and/or support for a particular cause is not grass-roots, it's Astroturf. Or fund raising, take your pick.
In a perfect world, there would be new organs for all who needed them. In the imperfect world that we have to live in, there are waiting lists. Todd jumped the queue, the donor's liver would otherwise have gone to the number one on the list. One life saved at the expense, possibly, of another. I wish Todd and his family all the best, but I have nagging doubts about the ethicality of this thing. The precedent it sets is potentially nasty. It reminds one of drowning men climbing on each other's shoulders to get to the surface, drowning those beneath them.
yadda, yadda, yadda. Please spare me this pseudo-noble nonsense. Property exists and will always exist, it's human nature. Even in communist states it used to be that those in power accorded themselves privileges such as nice villa's, ie property. It's human nature, man. But we're missing the point here. The spectrum is not "owned" by anyone, in the same way that no-one owns the photons that make it up. What you CAN own simply because it is being sold by a regulatory body, is the *right* to emit a bunch of photons in a certain spectrum, meaning that you pay for a certain amount of bandwidth to use for your purposes. You pay for your cable/DSL, right?
I would welcome new ways of making use of the available bandwidth (pity that the poster did not link to any insightful papers here), but bandwidth IS limited, like it or not. If you want to take some to make money, for instance, you have to pay for it.
I am not exactly familiar with US patent law. In Holland where I live such a thing would be quite difficult. The problem here is that you either sue a natural person or a legal entity. Suing several natural persons from the kernel mailing list at once for an infringement made would be difficult at the very least because
a) it would be difficult to reconstruct who is responsible for the patent infringement (of course you could track CVS or whatever to check who checked in what and when, but still) because many persons contributed to one and the same set of code
b) suing the group as a whole would require it to be an entity which it isn't.
I doubt whether this would stand up in Dutch court, even after the recent unfortunate EU rulings. I may be wrong, IANAL after all.
I find this a very intriguing question although you might want to phrase it differently: whom to sue if a patent is infringed upon by the Linux kernel? In the cooperative development environment that is Linux, no-one really *owns* the kernel if I understand the GPL correctly. I think that is what has the microsofts of this world so worried - no single entity to attack and subdue. I would be most interested to see what a patent lawyer would come up with. I note that this issue is not mentioned in the article. Anyone?
Really, it does, at least here in Europe. My father had this Nokia cell phone that he brought into my (then, now it's a Cisco router) Airport network. It did not exactly interfere, instead, it hopped onto the network (it wasn't a WAP phone or whatever, it only made calls you know) and appeared as a kind of zombie client. It was present but didn't do anything. Weird. He got another phone later on (a Siemens) and I never had that problem again. Seems that European dual band cell phones also operate in the 2.4 GHz range:)
Is that it represents the first step towards real ubiquitous computing. With this technology, there's really no need to have the computer be bound to the actual physical box. You can put the chips in just about anything as long as they can communicate, basically. So you could literally be surrounded by a computer when stepping into a room with chips embedded in the walls. Now that's pervasive computing, we could have real "smart" buildings!
As to the purpose of these screenshots? I find the article moderately informative- ie if I want a desktop I won't go Slack, if I want a server I probably do, but, what are the screenshots meant to illustrate? They do not illustrate any point of the paper, reminding me instead of the screenshots of yore when men were men and windowmanagers were windowmanagers, showing just a big heap of windows on a screen trying to look cool. In all, IMHO not a very good article with lousy illustrations. If I were interested in Slack I wouldn't waste any time reading beyond the first two paragraphs.
From how I read the review I got the impression that this book sorta glorifies the use of hallucinogenic drugs. Well, they have interesting effects but troubling side effects, such as the infamous LSD flashback. The latter outweigh the former, believe me. If you're interested in what it's REALLY like, go and read Burroughs' Naked Lunch. That should cure ya:)
How all of you geeks find time to read all that non-work related stuff? All I ever get around to reading is scientific periodicals - Nature, Cell, Science, J Invest Dermatol, Am J Med Genet, Hum Mol Genet, Am J Hum Genet, Br J Dermatol and that's about all I can handle if I want to read an actual BOOK every now and then or goof around on slashdot! Do you have time management skills that I need??
Re:no more oil from the middle east.
on
Drilling Under the Sea
·
· Score: 5, Informative
You confuse fuel with energy source. The problem with alternative fuels is that you need energy to generate the most promising of those, ie hydrogen. So we would need solar, nuclear, wind or whatever power to get us the hydrogen. Fusion is not here yet. Non-fossil fuel is not trivial. Vegetable or other biomass fuels will also generate hydrocarbons. And I agree with you that as long as we keep looking for oil and keep getting it there will be little incentive for the big players (oil companies...) to go into renewable energy sources. So for the time being, unfortunately, we'll keep our dependence upon the middle east.
By the way - oil is not only fuel. Plastics and so on are also made from it. That may even be the worst dependence. Imagine a world without plastics. If only for that reason we'll keep using oil for at least a couple of decades.
We'll know that they're really close to being like humans when they start asking ridiculous salaries, wear interesting hairdo's and date has-been pop stars:)
if they offer all of that extra storage space without a good search ability to go with it. AND MS is going to ask money for the increased storage space. Right. I am slowly moving from.mac to gmail for all of the above reasons -storage, SEARCH and money. I cannot think why someone would want to use and pay for hotmail or something if there is a service such as gmail available. Just my 2 eurocents...
Just wanted to say THANK YOU to all the friendly/.'ers who mailed in offering a gmail invite! I of course accepted one but cannot accept all of them (although I was tempted:) ). So, thanks again for the friendliness and generosity, it is greatly appreciated.
Cow
Giving something back implies that they took something from the users (?) and are now paying back. So, what did they take? Is there F/OSS code in their code? Or do they just want to thank the users for using their services? In that case, I'd take a Gmail account, please:)
isn't it, that the inventor of the Restaurant at the End of the Universe should project his voice back across time and death?
I can't wait to hear this, one of my best memories of late childhood is hearing the Hitchiker's Guide radio series on the BBC.
Dear Microsoft,
Don't bother. I have Mozilla, Firefox, Safari, Camino and Thunderbird and they are all wonderful browsers that allow me to experience the web to its full extent. They are not integrated in the OS, so I don't have to worry too much about security issues with registry changes, ActiveX controls that do stuff I didn't ask for, spyware, adware and what have you. You can stuff your disregard of standards, where sites "created for IE" won't render properly in my browsers of choice. You can keep IE and put it where the sun don't shine. O, and keep Longhorn too 'cause I'm happy with my Linux and OSX.
Regards,
Cow
But search capability is. I find it amazing that everybody and his grandmother keeps trippin' about the 1G of storage. Who cares. If I want to keep old emails around I archive them in a tarball that I keep handy somewhere. I receive large amounts of non-spam email and what I really, really need is a decent search capability (not only on literals but also on categories and so on). Mailsmith (MacOSX app) does a decent job. It uses grep and indexing iirc. In my tarballs, I just grep for what I want. But it feels clunky in a way, so if Google can offer ueber search capability and allows for intelligent filtering of incoming mails, I'll sign up the moment it reaches 1.0
At $3600, it will be something of a luxury laptop and a gizmo, considering the number of Linux users who are in disciplines that deal with 3D imaging. Except, perhaps, game and movie designers I think. Most molecular imaging people that I know use SUN, SGI or HP hardware still. I don't think that stuff like RasMol or Cn3D (for protein structure viewing) currently supports it. Knowing the Linux community, it pobably soon will be. Then, this machine can potentially be a great tool for scientists. You can go and view all of your proteins in 3D which will help immensely with the interpretation of mutations for instance, while avoiding the need for proprietary hardware and OSes. Then we can break free of friggin' MS. You won't believe how many times I cannot fill out a grant application because it's a.exe.. A vital app such as 3d molecular imaging should be a good place to start.
What struck me most on their page (apart from the subject being mostly maths - why?) was the statement that they were "going for a book". What's a book, then? Apparently, they intend to publish something on paper. That costs money. How to get that in a F/OSS setting? Also, why should a book be on paper? They could be really innovative here, reinvent the textbook and have it available as an online, CVS-updated resource (i believe some other group does that already, I forget which one). How do we choose to define a book? If we really want this kind of endeavor to take off, methinks we need to rethink the definition of "book" and maybe also include web-based knowledge repositories as such. What's your take?
I do not agree entirely - your degree is certainly not a measure of your worth as a human being (for how do you measure such a thing?) but it IS a honorific. Therefore, if you behave dishonorably and - for want of a better word - besmirch your title, you should IMO lose it. You keep it, other people's PhD's will suffer inflation and lose their value as indicators of past achievements. I feel that it is an adequate punishment.
Slashdot Mirror
1. As previously noted (I think on /.) the one thing you do not do with an unpatched WinXP system is to go onto the 'Net. Indeed, ISO's with patches or prepatched install CD's might be a solution but I think that the virus/worm/malware writers can also get these and patch their wares. Given MS's track record it'll be weeks at least before the problem is recognized or solved. It might be better to not take any WinXP system onto an open network.
2. I note that despite increased awareness and MS's increased focus on security the average survival time shows a downward trend, with slight peaks shortly after high profile worm events. How come? Is the average user slacking off? Or are the worms/viruses/trojans/whathaveyou getting smarter? Or are there ever more on the loose, resulting in an ever increasing number of probes? Looking at my firewall, the number of probes I receive remains more or less constant (although I had a few more than usual on port 8000 today) so maybe that is not a good explanation (for the Netherlands at least). Anyone?
Maybe I am being cynical. I do not doubt that there are more such as you, who are truly involved and care about the content of politics. More power to you. However, when I read on AdvoKit's web site that its success is measured in the amount of money generated by using it, I get cynical feelings. Why is it not measured in terms of the number of people gotten to rally behind a cause such as equal rights for a minority (gay marriage, anyone?). I do appreciate the difficulties in reaching an audience of 300 million people, but I do not see why that should be so expensive if all that really mattered was content. The way it looks from abroad, American politics is about throwing huge parties, gaining support for your cause by besmirching the other and getting into bed with companies that stand to gain from your gains. I really, really hope that more people such as you take control and see to it that politics again is about trying to make the world a better place for the people.
More like Astroturf if you ask me. If I understand it correctly, the software is meant to tie people together in a way suitable to a political cause, specifically to raise money by judging from the AdvoKit introduction. Reading that, I'd say this is about raising money to finance these ridiculously expensive campaigns (to us Dutch, American politics sometimes seems to revolve around money and little else...) and not about furthering democracy. Tying people together into a pre-arranged framework with the sole purpose of raising money and/or support for a particular cause is not grass-roots, it's Astroturf. Or fund raising, take your pick.
In a perfect world, there would be new organs for all who needed them. In the imperfect world that we have to live in, there are waiting lists. Todd jumped the queue, the donor's liver would otherwise have gone to the number one on the list. One life saved at the expense, possibly, of another. I wish Todd and his family all the best, but I have nagging doubts about the ethicality of this thing. The precedent it sets is potentially nasty. It reminds one of drowning men climbing on each other's shoulders to get to the surface, drowning those beneath them.
yadda, yadda, yadda. Please spare me this pseudo-noble nonsense. Property exists and will always exist, it's human nature. Even in communist states it used to be that those in power accorded themselves privileges such as nice villa's, ie property. It's human nature, man. But we're missing the point here. The spectrum is not "owned" by anyone, in the same way that no-one owns the photons that make it up. What you CAN own simply because it is being sold by a regulatory body, is the *right* to emit a bunch of photons in a certain spectrum, meaning that you pay for a certain amount of bandwidth to use for your purposes. You pay for your cable/DSL, right? I would welcome new ways of making use of the available bandwidth (pity that the poster did not link to any insightful papers here), but bandwidth IS limited, like it or not. If you want to take some to make money, for instance, you have to pay for it.
I am not exactly familiar with US patent law. In Holland where I live such a thing would be quite difficult. The problem here is that you either sue a natural person or a legal entity. Suing several natural persons from the kernel mailing list at once for an infringement made would be difficult at the very least because a) it would be difficult to reconstruct who is responsible for the patent infringement (of course you could track CVS or whatever to check who checked in what and when, but still) because many persons contributed to one and the same set of code b) suing the group as a whole would require it to be an entity which it isn't. I doubt whether this would stand up in Dutch court, even after the recent unfortunate EU rulings. I may be wrong, IANAL after all.
I find this a very intriguing question although you might want to phrase it differently: whom to sue if a patent is infringed upon by the Linux kernel? In the cooperative development environment that is Linux, no-one really *owns* the kernel if I understand the GPL correctly. I think that is what has the microsofts of this world so worried - no single entity to attack and subdue. I would be most interested to see what a patent lawyer would come up with. I note that this issue is not mentioned in the article. Anyone?
Really, it does, at least here in Europe. My father had this Nokia cell phone that he brought into my (then, now it's a Cisco router) Airport network. It did not exactly interfere, instead, it hopped onto the network (it wasn't a WAP phone or whatever, it only made calls you know) and appeared as a kind of zombie client. It was present but didn't do anything. Weird. He got another phone later on (a Siemens) and I never had that problem again. Seems that European dual band cell phones also operate in the 2.4 GHz range :)
Is that it represents the first step towards real ubiquitous computing. With this technology, there's really no need to have the computer be bound to the actual physical box. You can put the chips in just about anything as long as they can communicate, basically. So you could literally be surrounded by a computer when stepping into a room with chips embedded in the walls. Now that's pervasive computing, we could have real "smart" buildings!
They are probably using a big sewerpipe :)
Always knew that one day, wi-fi would go down the drain.
As to the purpose of these screenshots? I find the article moderately informative- ie if I want a desktop I won't go Slack, if I want a server I probably do, but, what are the screenshots meant to illustrate? They do not illustrate any point of the paper, reminding me instead of the screenshots of yore when men were men and windowmanagers were windowmanagers, showing just a big heap of windows on a screen trying to look cool. In all, IMHO not a very good article with lousy illustrations. If I were interested in Slack I wouldn't waste any time reading beyond the first two paragraphs.
From how I read the review I got the impression that this book sorta glorifies the use of hallucinogenic drugs. Well, they have interesting effects but troubling side effects, such as the infamous LSD flashback. The latter outweigh the former, believe me. If you're interested in what it's REALLY like, go and read Burroughs' Naked Lunch. That should cure ya :)
How all of you geeks find time to read all that non-work related stuff? All I ever get around to reading is scientific periodicals - Nature, Cell, Science, J Invest Dermatol, Am J Med Genet, Hum Mol Genet, Am J Hum Genet, Br J Dermatol and that's about all I can handle if I want to read an actual BOOK every now and then or goof around on slashdot! Do you have time management skills that I need??
You confuse fuel with energy source. The problem with alternative fuels is that you need energy to generate the most promising of those, ie hydrogen. So we would need solar, nuclear, wind or whatever power to get us the hydrogen. Fusion is not here yet. Non-fossil fuel is not trivial. Vegetable or other biomass fuels will also generate hydrocarbons. And I agree with you that as long as we keep looking for oil and keep getting it there will be little incentive for the big players (oil companies...) to go into renewable energy sources. So for the time being, unfortunately, we'll keep our dependence upon the middle east. By the way - oil is not only fuel. Plastics and so on are also made from it. That may even be the worst dependence. Imagine a world without plastics. If only for that reason we'll keep using oil for at least a couple of decades.
We'll know that they're really close to being like humans when they start asking ridiculous salaries, wear interesting hairdo's and date has-been pop stars :)
if they offer all of that extra storage space without a good search ability to go with it. AND MS is going to ask money for the increased storage space. Right. I am slowly moving from .mac to gmail for all of the above reasons -storage, SEARCH and money. I cannot think why someone would want to use and pay for hotmail or something if there is a service such as gmail available. Just my 2 eurocents...
Just wanted to say THANK YOU to all the friendly /.'ers who mailed in offering a gmail invite! I of course accepted one but cannot accept all of them (although I was tempted :) ). So, thanks again for the friendliness and generosity, it is greatly appreciated.
Cow
Giving something back implies that they took something from the users (?) and are now paying back. So, what did they take? Is there F/OSS code in their code? Or do they just want to thank the users for using their services? In that case, I'd take a Gmail account, please :)
isn't it, that the inventor of the Restaurant at the End of the Universe should project his voice back across time and death? I can't wait to hear this, one of my best memories of late childhood is hearing the Hitchiker's Guide radio series on the BBC.
Dear Microsoft, Don't bother. I have Mozilla, Firefox, Safari, Camino and Thunderbird and they are all wonderful browsers that allow me to experience the web to its full extent. They are not integrated in the OS, so I don't have to worry too much about security issues with registry changes, ActiveX controls that do stuff I didn't ask for, spyware, adware and what have you. You can stuff your disregard of standards, where sites "created for IE" won't render properly in my browsers of choice. You can keep IE and put it where the sun don't shine. O, and keep Longhorn too 'cause I'm happy with my Linux and OSX. Regards, Cow
But search capability is. I find it amazing that everybody and his grandmother keeps trippin' about the 1G of storage. Who cares. If I want to keep old emails around I archive them in a tarball that I keep handy somewhere. I receive large amounts of non-spam email and what I really, really need is a decent search capability (not only on literals but also on categories and so on). Mailsmith (MacOSX app) does a decent job. It uses grep and indexing iirc. In my tarballs, I just grep for what I want. But it feels clunky in a way, so if Google can offer ueber search capability and allows for intelligent filtering of incoming mails, I'll sign up the moment it reaches 1.0
At $3600, it will be something of a luxury laptop and a gizmo, considering the number of Linux users who are in disciplines that deal with 3D imaging. Except, perhaps, game and movie designers I think. Most molecular imaging people that I know use SUN, SGI or HP hardware still. I don't think that stuff like RasMol or Cn3D (for protein structure viewing) currently supports it. Knowing the Linux community, it pobably soon will be. Then, this machine can potentially be a great tool for scientists. You can go and view all of your proteins in 3D which will help immensely with the interpretation of mutations for instance, while avoiding the need for proprietary hardware and OSes. Then we can break free of friggin' MS. You won't believe how many times I cannot fill out a grant application because it's a .exe.. A vital app such as 3d molecular imaging should be a good place to start.
What struck me most on their page (apart from the subject being mostly maths - why?) was the statement that they were "going for a book". What's a book, then? Apparently, they intend to publish something on paper. That costs money. How to get that in a F/OSS setting? Also, why should a book be on paper? They could be really innovative here, reinvent the textbook and have it available as an online, CVS-updated resource (i believe some other group does that already, I forget which one). How do we choose to define a book? If we really want this kind of endeavor to take off, methinks we need to rethink the definition of "book" and maybe also include web-based knowledge repositories as such. What's your take?
To being watched :)
I do not agree entirely - your degree is certainly not a measure of your worth as a human being (for how do you measure such a thing?) but it IS a honorific. Therefore, if you behave dishonorably and - for want of a better word - besmirch your title, you should IMO lose it. You keep it, other people's PhD's will suffer inflation and lose their value as indicators of past achievements. I feel that it is an adequate punishment.