Second, the biggest mistake most people make in CD archival is to write on the CDs with magic marker -- DO NOT DO THIS. The ink will, given several years, leach through the extremely thin plastic on the labelled side of the CD and pollute the optical layer, resulting in a ruined CD.
Got some studies supporting that? I did my own little study after highly doubting this rumor. Here's how I think the rumor got started:
1. Buy cheapest Taiwanese media 2. Write on it with a Sharpie 3. Down the road, blame the Sharpie for media failure
My (unscientific, but the only data point I'm aware of) test:
In 1996, I wrote all over a Japanese Taiyo-Yuden made, unbranded Sony CD-R. In 2003, I tested the data, which was fine. I then cleaned the Sharpie ink off the disc with carburator cleaner (harsh treatment, for sure). It wiped off in seconds with no trace whatsoever, so in 7 years the ink did not migrate into the disc at all. After this, the data was still good.
Conclusion: Buy good media and quit worrying about writing on the discs. They'll take it fine, and if they die, it wasn't the pen that killed them.
Anybody use Mitsui's gold CD-Rs and have problems?
I've had no problems with Mitsui (now called MAM-A) ever. Their silver discs (which use the same dye) are also excellent and cost half as much. As a test, I burned one of these and left it in the California summer sun on the back deck for a couple of months trying to kill it, but it was still readable. The blue/green discs were toast the first week.
Really, what do you expect when most people pick up spindles that all some from the crappy Ritek or Princo plants in Taiwan because they can get them for $9 a spindle? I've had those go blank on my shelf too, and now I know better.
Want a long lasting CD-R? Search the spindles to find the ones that are made in Japan. Sometimes these will be on the same shelf with the Taiwan ones, wearing the same packaging, and for the same price (if you're lucky). Usually these are made by Taiyo-Yuden, a high-quality CD-R manufacturer (and one of the co-developers of CD-R technology). Look for a frosted hub for positive ID.
For archival quality, you'll need to spend a couple of bucks a disc on media that has a gold reflective layer. The standard here has always been Mitsui (now branded as MAM-A). Even their silver discs are a cut above in quality.
Oh, while I'm here. In 1996 I scribbled all over a burned CD-R with various colored Sharpies, then last year cleaned it all off with carb cleaner. It hadn't migrated into the disc at all, and cleaned off without a trace. The data was fine. Anyway, I mention this because I hear people claim Sharpies kill CD-Rs all the time, and think it's nonsense. These people probably bought the cheap-o discs and are looking for something other than their own cheapness to blame it on. Oh, BTW, the scribble disc was a Sony, made by Taiyo-Yuden.
Really, this seems like a no-brainer to me. When ClearChannel took over most of the stations in the Fargo area, trying to get any kind of news or weather report out of the radio became a lot harder. Perhaps because they pipe these broadcasts all over the state of North Dakota, they don't want to localize them too much or people will "catch on" (like they haven't already).
Instead of whining to the government about their perceived competition, why don't they start a competing satellite service? They might be forced to learn a thing or two about what the listeners want instead of pushing the same tired station "formats".
The problem is that the standard for what constitutes a security hole has become (in some cases) ridiculously low. A few years ago, you'd have to have a demonstratable exploit to get a vendors attention. These days, someone notices an overflow, or an off-by-one error in the source code, and makes a post to full-disclosure or BugTraq, and next thing you know all the vendors have to patch it even if it doesn't pan out to have real security implications. On top of this, you've got the vendors themselves issuing advisories for low-level risk issues which forces the other vendors to issue advisories themselves.
After crying wolf so many times, it's no wonder advisories concerning critical security holes can get lost in the shuffle.
Not to defend unsafe driving, but the reason that nearly everyone speeds is that many speed limits are set so such a low common denominator that you'd assume that brain-damaged chimpanzees were used as the baseline cases. Most people will drive a reasonable speed regardless of what's posted. There are always a few idiots that will drive at insane speeds regardless of what's posted.
However, the higher the speed limit is set, the faster traffic will go, so I think they set the numbers on the signs with some idea of how fast the traffic will actually respond.
...and on that note, in California the authorities have to regularly survey the average traffic speeds in places where they wish to do traffic enforcement and unless you're exceeding average speed by some amount (I believe it's 10%), you are not supposed to be pulled over for speeding. Of course, sometimes you still are, but you can get a ticket dropped in court if you either fall within this margin or they can't produce a recent enough speed survey for the area. I like this, because it prevents most "speed traps", and lets the traffic set the real speed limit (regardless of what the sign says).
Will those distros continue to go with XFree86 now that the X.Org Foundation is not just talking about it but is also actually delivering a forward moving, credible alternative?
And what is this alternative? A rebranded XFree86 4.3.0.1 with the various updates that could be easily found online? You know, when XFree86 began working on the X codebase it wouldn't even run on an x86 PC - they've done some remarkable work. X.org, on the other hand, has only so far made some noise about not wanting to be forced to give XFree86 some well-deserved credit, applied some debatable updates to the code (using an unstable freetype2 is probably not wise), and now they've put it back up for download.
No. Their code has, however, been taken over by a team that's owned by HP. I'm sure they'll quickly figure out a way to make things compiled under X.org fail to run on XFree86 systems.
How widespread do you think Linux would be if it had the same license as Qt?
The Linux kernel does have the same license as Qt, the GPL. Qt having an additional proprietary license option isn't making it less widespread, and wouldn't have had that effect on the kernel, either.
Unfortunately, this is a typical GPL zealot reaction to Qt. They often like to pretend that the GPL option doesn't exist and act like the proprietary license is the only licensing option for Qt. This attitude isn't exactly going to encourage more companies to offer a GPL licensing option. It's probably a side-effect of the GNOME vs. KDE mentality, but it's not doing anybody any good so far as I can see.
Now the license is different. I often wish there was a small-business or starting-business license, but this is only pertanant if you are going commercial work. for GPL work it is completely free.
There's no reason a small business can't do commercial work and license it under the GPL. It's done all the time by the Linux distributors both large and small, and many other development groups.
Anyway, I see this misconception about QT's licensing all the time, and I think part of it stems from Trolltech's own use of the word commercial to describe their other license. The word they (and you) are looking for is proprietary, not commercial. If you don't want to use the GPL (usually because you're paranoid about people stealing the ideas, or because you want to link with some other proprietary code), then you have to pay for commercial (i.e. proprietary) Qt licensing. However, you're free to use the free (GPL) version of Qt commercially, as long as you follow the GPL.
If everyone mirrored/posted links to mirrors more often perhaps the/. effect wouldn't be nearly as harsh and sites wouldn't take to drastic measures to try to keep their sites going.
Mirroring a site without written permission from the copyright holder(s) is a clear violation of copyright, while simply linking to the site is not. My bet is that if LinuxToday had mirrored the articles they'd be looking at a lawsuit from CMP instead of just being blocked. Mirrors just aren't a practical solution against a slashdotting under the current circumstances because there's no real time to get the required permission to set them up.
At some level, all distros are forks, so they're all compatible, right? My worry is they'll put some wierd X extension in it, and then make GNOME require that extension.
Anyway, what was the big deal with the XFree86 license again? Buncha massive overreaction if you ask me, but I think certain groups were looking for any excuse to hijack XFree86.
Frankly, I'm amazed that they can sell any of these for $3400 (the telecaster basic installation fee), when a Hipshot is making a bridge called the Trilogy that can do essentially the same thing mechanically and costs less than 200 dollars. With the Trilogy, you have a three position lever for each string, and can tune each position to any note you want. This gives you over 700 combinations with the notes you've tuned into the bridge.
Not only that, but off by two cents might cut it for live rock, but doesn't seem nearly accurate enough for serious use. I've got a Hipshot Drop-D lever on my guitar's low E, and use a strobe tuner to tune it. When I flip back and forth, I get a standing wave on both the D and E settings, and the tuner is good to one tenth of a cent. That's what I like to see (and hear), and is probably the same accuracy you'd get with the Trilogy bridge, though I've not tried one myself (and have no affiliation with Hipshot other than being a satisfied customer... just passing along the info).
I had a series one Philips TiVo and liked it a lot, so I replaced it with a Pioneer series two TiVo with DVD-R. The remote control is 99% similar, but the button in the lower left that was 'clear' on the Philips (used to kill the guide display and all kinds of other things) is now 'TV power'.
It's been 3 months and I still kill the TV power about every 20 minutes...
The next release of Fedora Core, due in just over a month, won't have XFree 4.4 either.
Yeah, well trying to claim it has anything to do with the license changes is pure FUD. I've followed the discussions about this from Mike Harris, and (since you clearly haven't) I'll quote:
Q) What release of XFree86 will Fedora Core 2 be shipping?
A) XFree86 4.3.0 is what will ship in Fedora Core 2. It will contain a number of bug fixes, Radeon driver fixes and other improvements to further stabilize the 4.3.0 series, and give Fedora Core a relatively mature XFree86 base. I would also like to update the "via" driver to Alan Cox's new DRI enabled via driver, so that VIA EPIA users can enjoy 3D acceleration. I'm probably going to do a number of other video driver updates and scan bugzilla for the most critical issues to spend some time on. Any large-risk issues will likely not be addressed until 4.4.0 is integrated into the distro however if I believe the risk of regression to be too great to be worth taking for a given problem. I've considered a great number of technical and other issues/factors in coming to this decision.
I'm not sure if this is just a publicity stunt, or what, but you can bet even if Mandrake refuses to ever update XFree86 again (which would be REAL healthy for them, since there's no alternative on the immediate horizon), that plenty of distributions with common sense WILL. Personally, I do not find the new XFree86 license to be unreasonable, or incompatible with the GPL. And is the FSF or some other organization going to sue a Linux distributor over shipping XFree86? They'd have to be on crack to want a test case for the GPL like that.
My advice: go ahead and ship it, remembering the old Grace Hopper quote. You won't benefit by watching your user base defect.
Ethanol takes energy to make. Lots of energy, possibly more than it contains.
Are you sure about that? I would think that the farmers growing corn could be relying on ethanol for all of their energy needs, and the ethanol plant itself could be run off part of the ethanol it produces, but that the reason this isn't happening now is that it's cheaper to buy fossil fuels than to utilize the more expensive ethanol. Ethanol production can't be so inefficient that it would not be possible to fuel the entire production chain with a fraction of the produced product, can it?
One of the easiest forms of counterfeiting is to just bleach ink out of hte money and reprint it for a higher denomination. HP color lasers make this easy.
The fact that all US money is the same size doesn't help. In many countries, the less a bill is worth the smaller it is. This also makes it possible for blind or visually impaired people to tell two denominations apart.
For being a sexist tool? Maybe if you were making the case for better driver education requirements for everyone, but you didn't. Or license class requirements for excessive vehicle weight or engine power for everyone, but apparently in your world only women need those restrictions.
In New York state they're considering a bill to reclass large SUVs so that you'd have to stick to marked truck routes whenever possible or be fined, which is a more reasonable idea IMHO.
It was a blind phreaker named Denny that showed John Draper what the whistle could do. cap'n Crunch just got popular because of it.
Actually, the blind phreak was named Joe Engressia, and he didn't need the plastic whistle to produce 2600 Hz or other multifrequency tones. He could simply whistle them. IIRC, John did discover that the whistle would cause long-distance calls to drop. If only I could find my old '71 Esquire issue...
Trivia: Joe now lives in Minneapolis and has changed his name to Joybubbles.
To me it says that 75% of the Apache administrators on Linux boxes have tought about security. Sure, it's an Apache server, but do you really need to show which distribution you are using ?
Exactly. There's little reason for a distribution to identify itself. Security wise, it's a lousy default.
Of course, not providing distro identification doesn't help when trying to brag about market share...
A big draw to outsourcing in India is the high quality of the graduates from the Indian Institute of Technology (or institutes, rather, as they have several campuses). I've heard that this is quite possibly the best CS school on the planet, is harder to get into that any of the top schools in the US or Europe, and has by far the most challenging curriculum. Most of the tech companies in India are led by people schooled at IIT, as are a large number of companies in the US and elsewhere in the world.
It's amazing that IIT is not a household name like MIT and Harvard.
Slashdot Mirror
Second, the biggest mistake most people make in CD archival is to write on the CDs with magic marker -- DO NOT DO THIS. The ink will, given several years, leach through the extremely thin plastic on the labelled side of the CD and pollute the optical layer, resulting in a ruined CD.
Got some studies supporting that? I did my own little study after highly doubting this rumor. Here's how I think the rumor got started:
1. Buy cheapest Taiwanese media
2. Write on it with a Sharpie
3. Down the road, blame the Sharpie for media failure
My (unscientific, but the only data point I'm aware of) test:
In 1996, I wrote all over a Japanese Taiyo-Yuden made, unbranded Sony CD-R. In 2003, I tested the data, which was fine. I then cleaned the Sharpie ink off the disc with carburator cleaner (harsh treatment, for sure). It wiped off in seconds with no trace whatsoever, so in 7 years the ink did not migrate into the disc at all. After this, the data was still good.
Conclusion: Buy good media and quit worrying about writing on the discs. They'll take it fine, and if they die, it wasn't the pen that killed them.
Anybody use Mitsui's gold CD-Rs and have problems?
I've had no problems with Mitsui (now called MAM-A) ever. Their silver discs (which use the same dye) are also excellent and cost half as much. As a test, I burned one of these and left it in the California summer sun on the back deck for a couple of months trying to kill it, but it was still readable. The blue/green discs were toast the first week.
Really, what do you expect when most people pick up spindles that all some from the crappy Ritek or Princo plants in Taiwan because they can get them for $9 a spindle? I've had those go blank on my shelf too, and now I know better.
Want a long lasting CD-R? Search the spindles to find the ones that are made in Japan. Sometimes these will be on the same shelf with the Taiwan ones, wearing the same packaging, and for the same price (if you're lucky). Usually these are made by Taiyo-Yuden, a high-quality CD-R manufacturer (and one of the co-developers of CD-R technology). Look for a frosted hub for positive ID.
For archival quality, you'll need to spend a couple of bucks a disc on media that has a gold reflective layer. The standard here has always been Mitsui (now branded as MAM-A). Even their silver discs are a cut above in quality.
Oh, while I'm here. In 1996 I scribbled all over a burned CD-R with various colored Sharpies, then last year cleaned it all off with carb cleaner. It hadn't migrated into the disc at all, and cleaned off without a trace. The data was fine. Anyway, I mention this because I hear people claim Sharpies kill CD-Rs all the time, and think it's nonsense. These people probably bought the cheap-o discs and are looking for something other than their own cheapness to blame it on. Oh, BTW, the scribble disc was a Sony, made by Taiyo-Yuden.
Really, this seems like a no-brainer to me. When ClearChannel took over most of the stations in the Fargo area, trying to get any kind of news or weather report out of the radio became a lot harder. Perhaps because they pipe these broadcasts all over the state of North Dakota, they don't want to localize them too much or people will "catch on" (like they haven't already).
Instead of whining to the government about their perceived competition, why don't they start a competing satellite service? They might be forced to learn a thing or two about what the listeners want instead of pushing the same tired station "formats".
This only weakens the concept of intellectual property.
Good, because that concept sucks.
Why invent if you're just going to have to fight legal battles for the length of your patent?
Then don't invent. If you're not truly inspired we probably don't need another obvious patent stifling everyone else's progress.
"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any
good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats."
-- Howard Aiken
The problem is that the standard for what constitutes a security hole has become (in some cases) ridiculously low. A few years ago, you'd have to have a demonstratable exploit to get a vendors attention. These days, someone notices an overflow, or an off-by-one error in the source code, and makes a post to full-disclosure or BugTraq, and next thing you know all the vendors have to patch it even if it doesn't pan out to have real security implications. On top of this, you've got the vendors themselves issuing advisories for low-level risk issues which forces the other vendors to issue advisories themselves.
After crying wolf so many times, it's no wonder advisories concerning critical security holes can get lost in the shuffle.
A cross between Kentucky Bluegrass and California Sensimilla. Especially if I'm going to be playing 18 holes on it.
Not to defend unsafe driving, but the reason that nearly everyone speeds is that many speed limits are set so such a low common denominator that you'd assume that brain-damaged chimpanzees were used as the baseline cases. Most people will drive a reasonable speed regardless of what's posted. There are always a few idiots that will drive at insane speeds regardless of what's posted.
...and on that note, in California the authorities have to regularly survey the average traffic speeds in places where they wish to do traffic enforcement and unless you're exceeding average speed by some amount (I believe it's 10%), you are not supposed to be pulled over for speeding. Of course, sometimes you still are, but you can get a ticket dropped in court if you either fall within this margin or they can't produce a recent enough speed survey for the area. I like this, because it prevents most "speed traps", and lets the traffic set the real speed limit (regardless of what the sign says).
However, the higher the speed limit is set, the faster traffic will go, so I think they set the numbers on the signs with some idea of how fast the traffic will actually respond.
Will those distros continue to go with XFree86 now that the X.Org Foundation is not just talking about it but is also actually delivering a forward moving, credible alternative?
And what is this alternative? A rebranded XFree86 4.3.0.1 with the various updates that could be easily found online? You know, when XFree86 began working on the X codebase it wouldn't even run on an x86 PC - they've done some remarkable work. X.org, on the other hand, has only so far made some noise about not wanting to be forced to give XFree86 some well-deserved credit, applied some debatable updates to the code (using an unstable freetype2 is probably not wise), and now they've put it back up for download.
Yessir, hand 'em the crown...
Did they just essentially commit suicide?
No. Their code has, however, been taken over by a team that's owned by HP. I'm sure they'll quickly figure out a way to make things compiled under X.org fail to run on XFree86 systems.
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
How widespread do you think Linux would be if it had the same license as Qt?
The Linux kernel does have the same license as Qt, the GPL. Qt having an additional proprietary license option isn't making it less widespread, and wouldn't have had that effect on the kernel, either.
Unfortunately, this is a typical GPL zealot reaction to Qt. They often like to pretend that the GPL option doesn't exist and act like the proprietary license is the only licensing option for Qt. This attitude isn't exactly going to encourage more companies to offer a GPL licensing option. It's probably a side-effect of the GNOME vs. KDE mentality, but it's not doing anybody any good so far as I can see.
Now the license is different. I often wish there was a small-business or starting-business license, but this is only pertanant if you are going commercial work. for GPL work it is completely free.
There's no reason a small business can't do commercial work and license it under the GPL. It's done all the time by the Linux distributors both large and small, and many other development groups.
Anyway, I see this misconception about QT's licensing all the time, and I think part of it stems from Trolltech's own use of the word commercial to describe their other license. The word they (and you) are looking for is proprietary, not commercial. If you don't want to use the GPL (usually because you're paranoid about people stealing the ideas, or because you want to link with some other proprietary code), then you have to pay for commercial (i.e. proprietary) Qt licensing. However, you're free to use the free (GPL) version of Qt commercially, as long as you follow the GPL.
If everyone mirrored/posted links to mirrors more often perhaps the /. effect wouldn't be nearly as harsh and sites wouldn't take to drastic measures to try to keep their sites going.
Mirroring a site without written permission from the copyright holder(s) is a clear violation of copyright, while simply linking to the site is not. My bet is that if LinuxToday had mirrored the articles they'd be looking at a lawsuit from CMP instead of just being blocked. Mirrors just aren't a practical solution against a slashdotting under the current circumstances because there's no real time to get the required permission to set them up.
this is a fork so it should be compatible
At some level, all distros are forks, so they're all compatible, right? My worry is they'll put some wierd X extension in it, and then make GNOME require that extension.
Anyway, what was the big deal with the XFree86 license again? Buncha massive overreaction if you ask me, but I think certain groups were looking for any excuse to hijack XFree86.
Frankly, I'm amazed that they can sell any of these for $3400 (the telecaster basic installation fee), when a Hipshot is making a bridge called the Trilogy that can do essentially the same thing mechanically and costs less than 200 dollars. With the Trilogy, you have a three position lever for each string, and can tune each position to any note you want. This gives you over 700 combinations with the notes you've tuned into the bridge.
Not only that, but off by two cents might cut it for live rock, but doesn't seem nearly accurate enough for serious use. I've got a Hipshot Drop-D lever on my guitar's low E, and use a strobe tuner to tune it. When I flip back and forth, I get a standing wave on both the D and E settings, and the tuner is good to one tenth of a cent. That's what I like to see (and hear), and is probably the same accuracy you'd get with the Trilogy bridge, though I've not tried one myself (and have no affiliation with Hipshot other than being a satisfied customer... just passing along the info).
I had a series one Philips TiVo and liked it a lot, so I replaced it with a Pioneer series two TiVo with DVD-R. The remote control is 99% similar, but the button in the lower left that was 'clear' on the Philips (used to kill the guide display and all kinds of other things) is now 'TV power'.
It's been 3 months and I still kill the TV power about every 20 minutes...
The next release of Fedora Core, due in just over a month, won't have XFree 4.4 either.
Yeah, well trying to claim it has anything to do with the license changes is pure FUD. I've followed the discussions about this from Mike Harris, and (since you clearly haven't) I'll quote:
Q) What release of XFree86 will Fedora Core 2 be shipping?
A) XFree86 4.3.0 is what will ship in Fedora Core 2. It will contain a number of bug fixes, Radeon driver fixes and other improvements to further stabilize the 4.3.0 series, and give Fedora Core a relatively mature XFree86 base. I would also like to update the "via" driver to Alan Cox's new DRI enabled via driver, so that VIA EPIA users can enjoy 3D acceleration. I'm probably going to do a number of other video driver updates and scan bugzilla for the most critical issues to spend some time on. Any large-risk issues will likely not be addressed until 4.4.0 is integrated into the distro however if I believe the risk of regression to be too great to be worth taking for a given problem. I've considered a great number of technical and other issues/factors in coming to this decision.
I'm not sure if this is just a publicity stunt, or what, but you can bet even if Mandrake refuses to ever update XFree86 again (which would be REAL healthy for them, since there's no alternative on the immediate horizon), that plenty of distributions with common sense WILL. Personally, I do not find the new XFree86 license to be unreasonable, or incompatible with the GPL. And is the FSF or some other organization going to sue a Linux distributor over shipping XFree86? They'd have to be on crack to want a test case for the GPL like that.
My advice: go ahead and ship it, remembering the old Grace Hopper quote. You won't benefit by watching your user base defect.
Ethanol takes energy to make. Lots of energy, possibly more than it contains.
Are you sure about that? I would think that the farmers growing corn could be relying on ethanol for all of their energy needs, and the ethanol plant itself could be run off part of the ethanol it produces, but that the reason this isn't happening now is that it's cheaper to buy fossil fuels than to utilize the more expensive ethanol. Ethanol production can't be so inefficient that it would not be possible to fuel the entire production chain with a fraction of the produced product, can it?
One of the easiest forms of counterfeiting is to just bleach ink out of hte money and reprint it for a higher denomination. HP color lasers make this easy.
The fact that all US money is the same size doesn't help. In many countries, the less a bill is worth the smaller it is. This also makes it possible for blind or visually impaired people to tell two denominations apart.
For being a sexist tool? Maybe if you were making the case for better driver education requirements for everyone, but you didn't. Or license class requirements for excessive vehicle weight or engine power for everyone, but apparently in your world only women need those restrictions.
In New York state they're considering a bill to reclass large SUVs so that you'd have to stick to marked truck routes whenever possible or be fined, which is a more reasonable idea IMHO.
...targets the BBC's website.
Well, I'm off to do some coding!
It was a blind phreaker named Denny that showed John Draper what the whistle could do. cap'n Crunch just got popular because of it.
Actually, the blind phreak was named Joe Engressia, and he didn't need the plastic whistle to produce 2600 Hz or other multifrequency tones. He could simply whistle them. IIRC, John did discover that the whistle would cause long-distance calls to drop. If only I could find my old '71 Esquire issue...
Trivia: Joe now lives in Minneapolis and has changed his name to Joybubbles.
To me it says that 75% of the Apache administrators on Linux boxes have tought about security.
Sure, it's an Apache server, but do you really need to show which distribution you are using ?
Exactly. There's little reason for a distribution to identify itself. Security wise, it's a lousy default.
Of course, not providing distro identification doesn't help when trying to brag about market share...
A big draw to outsourcing in India is the high quality of the graduates from the Indian Institute of Technology (or institutes, rather, as they have several campuses). I've heard that this is quite possibly the best CS school on the planet, is harder to get into that any of the top schools in the US or Europe, and has by far the most challenging curriculum. Most of the tech companies in India are led by people schooled at IIT, as are a large number of companies in the US and elsewhere in the world.
It's amazing that IIT is not a household name like MIT and Harvard.