If we are talking about world domination with the goal of being the overthow of M$ and MAC then the story is quite correct. Linux still has a shot at workstations and turnkey PC applications that use a caned desktop. Finally, if certain critical applications such as Open (Libre) Office can improve themselves to the point of being a real substitute for their M$ counterparts Linux still has a shot as the desktop OS in office settings that stick to the basics. Of course, it will remain the desktop of choice for open source developers, home brew 'Makers' and computer hobby types.
I've installed Linux on an older ThinkPad after discovering that the Windows Wifi support didn't work (and I did NOT have the restore CD or partition) while Linux DID get my Wifi to work. My desktop dual boots between Windows 7 and Linux, though I rarely use Windows, it's there for the occasional something that hasn't been ported to Linux yet.
Let the companies trying to make money selling Linux on the desktop worry about the lack of adoption, while those of us who are using it just enjoy. It ain't going away.
Would RMS blow a gasket if a device had a "Works with BSD" on it?
I'm SICK of his "GNU/Linux" rant. Sure GNU deserves credit for the parts of most Linux distributions writen for the GNU system. But there is a lot of OTHER stuff in them that came from BSD or other places. It would be quite a mouthfull to say GNU/BSD/Apache/Mozila/Linux wouldn't it? Yet all of these different licensed software programs all deserve credit. Finally, you could just chuck all of the GNU out of Linux and replace those pieces with BSD code. BSD systems have NO GNU in them AFAIK. I even think there is a Debian project to do just that.
Look at the comments on the site where the video was linked to. Most of the comments were negative toward OO. However it seems that the biggest issues are compatibility (with M$), ease of use (complaints from people who had learned WP and SS apps on M$ Office), speed and support. Since the 'world standard' for WP files seems to be M$.doc format and this is always a moving target the compatibility complaint is real. Ease of use is an issue, and OO does need to improve in this area. Having more 'training' documentation, perhaps some YouTube videos for this would help. I don't know how much of OO is still built on java, but getting rid of this layer and re-writing EVERYTHING in some good HL language (C, C++, etc) would help with the speed issue. I'm guessing that the Java runtime layer is taking a godawfull time to initialize and suck up all the resources it needs. Finally there is support. There is decent on-line support for OO, but it's all over the place. You might have to google all afternoon to find the right URL to find answers to your questions. I don't know if you can buy OO support from Conical (Ubuntu), but there is an oportunitiy there for them to fill.
I use OO writer at home to write documents, and their spredsheet mostly to view excel files (which it does rather well, once I allow it to convert them to native format). I've had tons of problems with fixing format of documents imported from M$ word however. Once I get the format right on the screen it doesn't always print the same way. It's a WYSIAWYG problem. (What you see is ALMOST what you get). Mind you, OO (OK from now on LO) has promise and maybe now that it's been forked from Scum/Oriface it may improve as a true open source project. Gnu Cash took a while to get as good as it is, now it rivals the commerical product. Hopefully LO will improve to this point.
"If a majority of the examiners (who should be experts in the field of the patent) produce any solution sketches that are largely similar to the patent, the patent is rejected - because clearly, if when experts in the field set their minds to solving that problem they come up with the to-be-patented invention, then it's not novel; it's just an obvious evolution no one else has gotten around to doing yet."
Except that many non software patents boil down to this. Take the incandesant lamp. The principle of heating a wire to white hot to produce light was well known in Edisons time. The problem was how to keep the material from burning up. The answer was obvious, heat it in a vacuum (or at least in an atmosphere containing no oxygen). Edison was the first person to come up with a way of doing this, but many others had the same idea. Edison was simply the first to produce a working model and get his ass to the patent office.
At least in his time, a patent required a working model.
Done right, the series hybrid is NOT a bad idea. A TRUE series hybrid would use an engine/generator combo that is designed for the job. To drive the wheels an engine must provide power over a wide range of RPMs, something that reduces effeciency. OTOH in a generator application the engine runs at a constant RPM (though NOT at a constant throttle setting). Gas turbine engines are very suitable for this kind of application. They have fewer moving parts and burn less fuel than piston engines. Gas turbines don't work very well directly driving the wheels, they like to run at a constant RPM. (At there already IS an automobile based on this formula).
The Volt is mostly a SERIES hybrid, one in which the gas engine drives a generator to charge the batteries and power electric motors which directly drive the wheels. The Volt is also a PARALLEL hybrid when the gas engine will directly drive the wheels. Since this mode kicks in at highway speeds only, a transmission (gear box) might not be needed since the drive ratio at these speeds is usually 1:1 (unless they are using overdrive). Lacking a gearbox would make the original claim closer to the truth.
The term "Wintel" has sometimes been used for "pc's" but that isn't even right since it ignores AMD (who invented the 64 bit standard now used by BOTH Intel and AMD processors). "Linux box" describes ANYTHING that could run Linux from a single board embedded appliance to a hunking IBM mainframe.
IBM coined the term PC, but today's machines don't have ANYTHING in common with the hardware that IBM introduced (It's evolved too much). Then again, so has the MAC platform.
So just give it up. As the Bart said, "A rose by any other name....."
They didn't tell him not to call his lawyer because he isn't in trouble (but he probably isn't). They said that because they don't want to get sued for violation of his civil rights. Some shyster will want the case.
His insurance company will be VERY ticked off that they had to pay for the total lose of the house becase the local fire department refused to do their civic duty over a matter of a tax dispute. That insurance company will then sue the county for the cost. IF someone had died, then which ever brainiac squelched that 911 call would (hopefully) have been charged with manslaughter.
to help him fix the problem. The customer is probably not the villian here and probably doesn't even know that he is botnet infested (after all, ALL windows machines slow down eventually and have to have the OS re-installed, right?). The ISP should try to contact the customer by phone, email or snail mail and first let him know of the problem. Perhaps send him some general information on how to fix his problem, or just point him to the right URL's on the net where he can find the information he needs to fix his problem. (other than by using an Axe on the computer).
As others have already pointed out you have to be at least 60 miles up to be in outer space so this wasn't a true space craft. It probably did get high enough to see the curvature of the earth and a black (or at least violet) sky. Aircraft with air breathing engines have gotten up this high so there is still atmosphere up this high. Maybe someday someone will try attaching a large model rocket similarly equipped to a balloon that will ignite at 100K ft. Something like that might get into space. (This has been done in the past with sounding rockets).
That's not what they want to do. They want money from Hulu and Youtube to give THEIR packets 'special treatment'. I don't think it's fair to charge the end user who receives the content as the user didn't make any money from the deliver. Hulu MAKES money from the content (via the commericals or their proposed pay for view system).
Ah but the point is that you didn't PUT the content on the net did you, you just consumed it. People like you shouldn't have to pay, and THAT'S what the FCC needs to regulate.
You could build a single turbine with counter rotating blades geared together to a single shaft which would counteract the gyro effect. When the turbine drives a generator (which could be build on the same shaft as the turbine so no gear box is needed) things get simple since the turbine can now run at a constant speed (something it can't do when connected to a tranny to drive the wheels directly). Also the high temperatures reached in the combustion in a turbine allow the fuel to always be completly burned resulting in little if any CO in the exhaust, though NO2 compounds might have to be filtered out with a cat' converter. Good news is CC's work better at higher exhaust temperatures.
"Phone and cable companies insist they need flexibility so high-bandwidth applications don't slow down their systems." Fine. Let them charge the content producers by bandwidth. The wider bandwidth your content needs, the more you will pay. Low bandwidth content (most web pages actually) would get a free ride, things like Hulu and Youtube would probaby have to open their wallets to help support the inferstructure. Just so long as nobody gets priority over anybody else. First come first serve, but if you take more than average you pay for it.
while driving so help me I'm going to smash their window with my club, grab that phone or blackberry from them and shove it up where the sun don't shine. Hopefully the Lion battery will then explode.
Get caught texting while driving you once you lose your license for a year. Get caught twice, or cause an accident doing it and you lose your license for life.
Earlier in the Earth's history such hits probably happened a lot more often. So it IS true that our local space is clearer than it once was. So maybe a real big rock gets in our way once every 100 million years instead of every 1 million. Smaller rocks get though more often. The LAST one of any major size was probably in the early 1900's in Tungusta.
They JUST found this thing. The amount of data available to determine it's orbit isn't enough to know exactly where it is going. HOWEVER when they dig up some old sky photos they will find earlier positions of this thing. The more earlier data points the better they will be able to predict it's path. Usually this means that the odds of an Earth impact will go down. It's happened before with other newly discovered objects.
One of the photos DOES show a few tiles on the nose and underbelly near the front. It might be the real thing, the scaffolding might have been welded on as a platform to help disassemble part of it. (Note the wings are missing). I'm sure they did make some partial mockups in order to build the real thing, IIRC there were two obitors built, one was tested on top of a large aircraft. I don't know if any made it into space.
They have NOTHING to do with audio or video, and I'm sure they predate the iPod. Their product is "Portable On Demand Storage" (of your physical crap, not data).
Slashdot Mirror
If we are talking about world domination with the goal of being the overthow of M$ and MAC then the story is quite correct. Linux still has a shot at workstations and turnkey PC applications that use a caned desktop. Finally, if certain critical applications such as Open (Libre) Office can improve themselves to the point of being a real substitute for their M$ counterparts Linux still has a shot as the desktop OS in office settings that stick to the basics. Of course, it will remain the desktop of choice for open source developers, home brew 'Makers' and computer hobby types.
I've installed Linux on an older ThinkPad after discovering that the Windows Wifi support didn't work (and I did NOT have the restore CD or partition) while Linux DID get my Wifi to work. My desktop dual boots between Windows 7 and Linux, though I rarely use Windows, it's there for the occasional something that hasn't been ported to Linux yet.
Let the companies trying to make money selling Linux on the desktop worry about the lack of adoption, while those of us who are using it just enjoy. It ain't going away.
Would RMS blow a gasket if a device had a "Works with BSD" on it?
I'm SICK of his "GNU/Linux" rant. Sure GNU deserves credit for the parts of most Linux distributions writen for the GNU system. But there is a lot of OTHER stuff in them that came from BSD or other places. It would be quite a mouthfull to say GNU/BSD/Apache/Mozila/Linux wouldn't it? Yet all of these different licensed software programs all deserve credit. Finally, you could just chuck all of the GNU out of Linux and replace those pieces with BSD code. BSD systems have NO GNU in them AFAIK. I even think there is a Debian project to do just that.
Look at the comments on the site where the video was linked to. Most of the comments were negative toward OO. However it seems that the biggest issues are compatibility (with M$), ease of use (complaints from people who had learned WP and SS apps on M$ Office), speed and support. Since the 'world standard' for WP files seems to be M$.doc format and this is always a moving target the compatibility complaint is real. Ease of use is an issue, and OO does need to improve in this area. Having more 'training' documentation, perhaps some YouTube videos for this would help. I don't know how much of OO is still built on java, but getting rid of this layer and re-writing EVERYTHING in some good HL language (C, C++, etc) would help with the speed issue. I'm guessing that the Java runtime layer is taking a godawfull time to initialize and suck up all the resources it needs. Finally there is support. There is decent on-line support for OO, but it's all over the place. You might have to google all afternoon to find the right URL to find answers to your questions. I don't know if you can buy OO support from Conical (Ubuntu), but there is an oportunitiy there for them to fill.
I use OO writer at home to write documents, and their spredsheet mostly to view excel files (which it does rather well, once I allow it to convert them to native format). I've had tons of problems with fixing format of documents imported from M$ word however. Once I get the format right on the screen it doesn't always print the same way. It's a WYSIAWYG problem. (What you see is ALMOST what you get). Mind you, OO (OK from now on LO) has promise and maybe now that it's been forked from Scum/Oriface it may improve as a true open source project. Gnu Cash took a while to get as good as it is, now it rivals the commerical product. Hopefully LO will improve to this point.
"If a majority of the examiners (who should be experts in the field of the patent) produce any solution sketches that are largely similar to the patent, the patent is rejected - because clearly, if when experts in the field set their minds to solving that problem they come up with the to-be-patented invention, then it's not novel; it's just an obvious evolution no one else has gotten around to doing yet."
Except that many non software patents boil down to this. Take the incandesant lamp. The principle of heating a wire to white hot to produce light was well known in Edisons time. The problem was how to keep the material from burning up. The answer was obvious, heat it in a vacuum (or at least in an atmosphere containing no oxygen). Edison was the first person to come up with a way of doing this, but many others had the same idea. Edison was simply the first to produce a working model and get his ass to the patent office.
At least in his time, a patent required a working model.
Done right, the series hybrid is NOT a bad idea. A TRUE series hybrid would use an engine/generator combo that is designed for the job. To drive the wheels an engine must provide power over a wide range of RPMs, something that reduces effeciency. OTOH in a generator application the engine runs at a constant RPM (though NOT at a constant throttle setting). Gas turbine engines are very suitable for this kind of application. They have fewer moving parts and burn less fuel than piston engines. Gas turbines don't work very well directly driving the wheels, they like to run at a constant RPM. (At there already IS an automobile based on this formula).
The Volt is mostly a SERIES hybrid, one in which the gas engine drives a generator to charge the batteries and power electric motors which directly drive the wheels. The Volt is also a PARALLEL hybrid when the gas engine will directly drive the wheels. Since this mode kicks in at highway speeds only, a transmission (gear box) might not be needed since the drive ratio at these speeds is usually 1:1 (unless they are using overdrive). Lacking a gearbox would make the original claim closer to the truth.
The term "Wintel" has sometimes been used for "pc's" but that isn't even right since it ignores AMD (who invented the 64 bit standard now used by BOTH Intel and AMD processors). "Linux box" describes ANYTHING that could run Linux from a single board embedded appliance to a hunking IBM mainframe.
IBM coined the term PC, but today's machines don't have ANYTHING in common with the hardware that IBM introduced (It's evolved too much).
Then again, so has the MAC platform.
So just give it up. As the Bart said, "A rose by any other name ....."
They didn't tell him not to call his lawyer because he isn't in trouble (but he probably isn't). They said that because they don't want to get sued for violation of his civil rights. Some shyster will want the case.
His insurance company will be VERY ticked off that they had to pay for the total lose of the house becase the local fire department refused to do their civic duty over a matter of a tax dispute. That insurance company will then sue the county for the cost. IF someone had died, then which ever brainiac squelched that 911 call would (hopefully) have been charged with manslaughter.
to help him fix the problem. The customer is probably not the villian here and probably doesn't even know that he is botnet infested (after all, ALL windows machines slow down eventually and have to have the OS re-installed, right?). The ISP should try to contact the customer by phone, email or snail mail and first let him know of the problem. Perhaps send him some general information on how to fix his problem, or just point him to the right URL's on the net where he can find the information he needs to fix his problem. (other than by using an Axe on the computer).
As others have already pointed out you have to be at least 60 miles up to be in outer space so this wasn't a true space craft. It probably did get high enough to see the curvature of the earth and a black (or at least violet) sky. Aircraft with air breathing engines have gotten up this high so there is still atmosphere up this high. Maybe someday someone will try attaching a large model rocket similarly equipped to a balloon that will ignite at 100K ft. Something like that might get into space. (This has been done in the past with sounding rockets).
That's not what they want to do. They want money from Hulu and Youtube to give THEIR packets 'special treatment'. I don't think it's fair to charge the end user who receives the content as the user didn't make any money from the deliver. Hulu MAKES money from the content (via the commericals or their proposed pay for view system).
Ah but the point is that you didn't PUT the content on the net did you, you just consumed it. People like you shouldn't have to pay, and THAT'S what the FCC needs to regulate.
You could build a single turbine with counter rotating blades geared together to a single shaft which would counteract the gyro effect. When the turbine drives a generator (which could be build on the same shaft as the turbine so no gear box is needed) things get simple since the turbine can now run at a constant speed (something it can't do when connected to a tranny to drive the wheels directly). Also the high temperatures reached in the combustion in a turbine allow the fuel to always be completly burned resulting in little if any CO in the exhaust, though NO2 compounds might have to be filtered out with a cat' converter. Good news is CC's work better at higher exhaust temperatures.
"Phone and cable companies insist they need flexibility so high-bandwidth applications don't slow down their systems."
Fine. Let them charge the content producers by bandwidth. The wider bandwidth your content needs, the more you will pay. Low bandwidth content (most web pages actually) would get a free ride, things like Hulu and Youtube would probaby have to open their wallets to help support the inferstructure. Just so long as nobody gets priority over anybody else. First come first serve, but if you take more than average you pay for it.
while driving so help me I'm going to smash their window with my club, grab that phone or blackberry from them and shove it up
where the sun don't shine. Hopefully the Lion battery will then explode.
Someone tell the Mythbusters, they tried to build something like that once.
Get caught texting while driving you once you lose your license for a year.
Get caught twice, or cause an accident doing it and you lose your license for life.
Earlier in the Earth's history such hits probably happened a lot more often. So it IS true that our local space is clearer than it once was. So maybe a real big rock gets in our way once every 100 million years instead of every 1 million. Smaller rocks get though more often. The LAST one of any major size was probably in the early 1900's in Tungusta.
They JUST found this thing. The amount of data available to determine it's orbit isn't enough to know exactly where it is going. HOWEVER when they dig up some old sky photos they will find earlier positions of this thing. The more earlier data points the better they will be able to predict it's path. Usually this means that the odds of an Earth impact will go down. It's happened before with other newly discovered objects.
Black Jack is a Manga character of Osamu Tezuka.
One of the photos DOES show a few tiles on the nose and underbelly near the front. It might be the real thing, the scaffolding might have been welded on as a platform to help disassemble part of it. (Note the wings are missing). I'm sure they did make some partial mockups in order to build the real thing, IIRC there were two obitors built, one was tested on top of a large aircraft. I don't know if any made it into space.
I seem to remember a slashdot story from a few years ago that the Russians had put the shuttle up for sale on Ebay.
www.pods.com
They have NOTHING to do with audio or video, and I'm sure they predate the iPod.
Their product is "Portable On Demand Storage" (of your physical crap, not data).
Check out the Tweet-a-watt from AdaFruit.
http://www.adafruit.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=32&zenid=d5308340ddf8717aa16168614312ae0e