Intriguing question, with my hometown of San Francisco (900K folks) having a multiplicity of delivery types, all sourced from 100% GHG-free power from Yosemite-area hydro.
We have quaint cable cars, the EM motive force then converted to mechanical force.
We have light rail and traditional trolley streetcars, both sourced with overhead wires.
We have surface-only buses which started to be petroleum diesel until 2007, then B20 biodiesel until 2015, now renewable plant "green" diesel, supplemented with hybrid batteries for regen, and now with bigger batts for diesel-free "green zones". Note: These will all shift to pure BEV buses starting 2025 when the other buses wear out. So the question becomes -- when this transmogrification to battery-electric happens, will the overhead trolley wires be torn down? I think that would be very natural due to maintenance requirements.
P.S. Then there is also high-speed BART, now competing with Tesla EVs which are growing like weeds in this town. In short, SF is blessed this way, so take that, coal country!
Yes, by a serotonergic selective 5-HT(2C) receptor agonist which suppresses the appetite, at least for rats and humans, available now at a pharmacy near you. [And stock available at a brokerage near you.] Dunno the right dose for pets named Tubby, though...
Link desired? I'm not a physicist, but I remember "Schwartzchild radius" from high school, and, as per usual, Wikipedia fills in the blanks coming up with closed-form solutions for stellar black holes near 3 solar masses, to wit:
When the Dead Kennedy's Jello-of-"California Uber Alles"-and-"Holiday in Cambodia"-fame (amongst other faves) was running for mayor of San Francisco, one of his heartfelt pleas was that he'd be the first politician to spearhead the idea of "landing a man on the sun".
Writing as a old fart, Unix (not the warmed-over clone called Linux) was *itself* declared dead by Rob Pike in 1991, infamously with the flip "Unix is not only dead, but it's starting to smell really bad". Yet young whippersnapper Torvalds didn't listen, nor did Sun Microsystems listen to Bill Joy and kept hacking on the kernel (yes Solaris was already a solved problem called BSD).
All while the likes of Apple took the best extant Unix and built something interesting upon it. Although already retired from Unix/Linux world, trading all my shares in the likes of SUNW / RHAT and their ilk for AAPL was "technically sweet", (old term from J. Robert Oppenheimer).
Ideas that survive are ones which stand on the shoulders of giants, in this case Ritchie and Thompson, not a bunch of mere acolytes.
I'm old enough to have written code in the public domain, before the new-fangled Berne Copyright Convention came to the fore in 1986 to change the default on assignment of literary works (aka software) "fixed in a tangible medium".
Writing code this way was possible if you worked for a university or the U.S. government while managers (and especially lawyers) looked the other way. Much of this got neatly bottled up into the form of BSD Unix -- you just put your code up on UUCP, it propagated
(without the use of @ signs, even!), and if it won in a bakeoff it became part of the Unix DNA.
Even though the two- or three-clause BSD license was overkill compared to true PD (public domain), BSD via its variant licensing remains a breath of fresh air next to GNU. Cute recursivity and a good position on software patents notwithstanding, Stallmanites at M.I.T offered up complicated restrictions compared to the Berkeley spirit.
What does the hackjob Linux clone of Unix actually offer over BSD in practice? In the world of science and engineering, it's just a "me too" product. BSD evils supposedly included Microsoft forking and hiding the TCP/IP stack, but Apple software has now consigned Windows to history's dustbin. Apple is supposedly evil for running with BSD by elegantly layering their inscrutable APIs atop it. But the underlying foundation of BSD is free, for anyone to add value for profit or for non-profit.
Perhaps it's too late for a return to the yesteryore of public domain, but GNU folk have got themselves all worked up into their own hairball of complexity over Talmudic interpretations of licensing in silly spy-vs.-spy games. The BSD "license" keeps this all dead simple.
To discern environmental damage properly, shouldn't their 0-10 scale ratings be muliplied by the actual weight of the goods sold, including packaging? High-volume Nintendo might still remain low, but Apple would look better than Dell/HP/Sony due to market share. This can be tricky, e.g. Sony makes tiny cameras but large TVs.
Regarding Apple's progress, I thought it intriguing that they are now optimizing packaging (especially for iPods) specifically to reduce air-freight transport costs, which could be a non-trivial fraction of COGS, at least for the initial rollout (vs. slow boat). That's a very holistic approach. Now that the lead is out of CRT yokes, Apple's use of LEDs vs. yucky fluorescent tubes is another nice trend. Recyclable aluminum + glass vs. plastic is another one. If only Greenpeace could be so creative...
Hmm... only ~50 Wh/kg in the pack containing 2000g of 4.2 Ah x 2.4V, hardly different than NiMH. Perhaps it's not cheaper or more efficient energy-density- per-unit-weight/volume wise, but has better cycling.
lists "Carcinogenicity: None" for gallium nitride, the grist of Cree "white" high-power LEDs, which are really blue LEDs dusted with a yellowish phosphor.
On the other hand, the delicious red & yellow ones in those Xmas strings contain gallium arsenide.
Copyright provenance as the initial question
on
Grokking SCO's Demise
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Although many of us pointed out the question of Novell's ownership of the actual copyrights at the outset, why isn't the law structured to eliminate much sturm and drang by hoisting this test out of the loop as an initial cutoff? Or were the parallel lawsuits invoked without common sense serialization just done for fun? I suspect the real reason is that the motion practice follies made for good billable hours...
Oops, one more datapoint -- The tuner is whatever is inside that Samsung 52" LCD dealie, was $3500, now $2K. Is the implication here that the MPEG-2 decoder is subpar, or is it the lack of attention paid to whether I, just a Joe Schmoe consumer, don't know whether I have a state-of-the-art 8-VSB vs. COFDM DTV receiver implementation?
Yup, KQED HD from Sutro Tower in Frisco transmits a bunch of MPEG-2 fast-motion squares alright, probably de-rezzed due to the statmux of all of their (four or five or six, I've lost count) licensed "sister channels".
Phuq that spit! I guess that's why I have Apple TV.
Granted that Microsoft could (hamhandedly) internally snuff BSD for their own use. Fortunately, because of the license, anyone can absorb the strong points of BSD for whatever they are worth.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Apple is using BSD to eat Microsoft's lunch.
This stuff is all regurgitated from Diamond v. Diehr (1981), in turn barfed up from Parker v. Flook (1978), wherein it is largely accepted black-letter law that:
'insignificant post-solution activity will not transform an unpatentable principle into a patentable process'
Totally ancient. Even Slashdot's own 'djb' (Daniel J. Bernstein) recognized the veracity of the "mental steps" doctrine as applied to software.
Another answer direct from the May 14, 2007 blog of Sun CTO Greg Papadopolous: _____
"We will *never* (yes, I said *never*) sue anyone who uses our ZFS codebase and follows the terms of the license: they publish their improvements, propagate the license, and not sue anyone else who uses the ZFS codebase. And look at the innovation not only with ZFS in OpenSolaris, but its adoption by Mac OS X and BSD.
But under what conditions would we enforce our patents? How would we feel if someone did a cleanroom version of ZFS and kept the resulting code proprietary?
We wouldn't feel good, to be sure. But I'd put the burden back on us (certainly as a large company) that if such a thing were to happen it was because we were failing to *continue to* innovate around our original code. Being sanguine about patent protection as an exclusive right would result in less innovation, not more." _____
GPL3 will make this all moot, whereby Stallman's GNU/Linux will merge with Solaris which will disintermediate the Linus GPL2 version, left behind as the Unix clone it was originally intended to be. Ultimately, a "me too" Unix such will have little reason to exist, when one can get the real thing under the new laws of free software, courtesy BSD/GPL3, and Sun's patent peace.
Yikes, as a Generation U or V (before X/Y/Z) this reality also reflects what the Apple Retail Store "genii" relay -- Apple is constantly having to deal with what MySparse junkies do with the freebie Internet cafe that is the Apple retail experience in a mall near you. Yup, it's myspace.com
All.
Day.
Long.
If this is what the future holds for my pre-teens (er, tweens), then where do I go to surrender? Nevermind, I've already made megabucks as an Apple shareholder...
OK, so now substitute 'microsoft' for 'apple' in that same google search. You will get about the same number of hits (though for dumb reasons).
However, look at the top hits to discover that Microsoft did a similar trick in the 90s, taking a $217M charge (more than double that of Apple).
It appears that Gates copies Jobs' good stuff, whereas Jobs copies Gates' bad stuff...
All of this is moot after Solaris/Unix goes GPL
on
SCO Vs. Groklaw
·
· Score: 1
The core beef is that IBM put non-trivial real Unix stuff into a Unix clone (Linux).
Since Sun's Unix (BSD + Sys 5 + lots o' innovation like proper kernel locks + ZFS + DTrace) is as good as Unix gets (except for the libertine licensing and a decent GUI like MacOS X), once is goes GPL (2 or 3, no matter), there is no need for a Unix clone like Linux to even exist. Linux served its purpose to make Unix functionality free for the taking. Now on to bigger and better things, in the spirit of Rob Pike's immortal quotation "Not only is Unix dead, but it's starting to smell really bad."
Here's one from the "young whippersnapper" department.
When I was a boy, we programmed air/space craft simultations for NASA. Not the just abstract videogame types, but actual mechanically-linked 3D motion simulators that jerked (jerk is a derivative of acceleration, in turn a derivative of velocity, thence a derivative of position) human test pilots in a shaker cockpit.
Aside: the computer coding involved aviation control math models -> Ratfor -> FORTRAN-> real-time assembly language -> custom digital I/O in the simulation cockpit, debugged via toggle switch breakpoints set on a Xerox Sigma 9 console, later supplanted by Foonly machine efforts.
To make a long story short, the aerospace models often attempted divide-by-zero, either from outright programming bugs or ill-conditioned equations.
So, did we then smash the test pilot into the cabin walls at a high rate-of-change? No, the intrepid project mechanical engineers, who grokked servo mechanisms and could care less about snotnose Unix-head punks simply used "mechanical rate limiters" to overcome and smooth over these "divide-by-zero" disasters.
I'm telling you, even Professor Kahan's IEEE floating-point NAN nomenclature for calculations didn't save the day for renormalizing these infinities -- how could it, no self-respecting kernel (Unix or otherwise) has ever executed FP operations, which still doesn't absolve integer div-zero horrors and concomitant analog duct tape patchwork to save the day.
Slashdot Mirror
Intriguing question, with my hometown of San Francisco (900K folks) having
a multiplicity of delivery types, all sourced from 100% GHG-free
power from Yosemite-area hydro.
We have quaint cable cars, the EM motive force then converted to mechanical force.
We have light rail and traditional trolley streetcars, both sourced with overhead wires.
We have surface-only buses which started to be petroleum diesel until 2007,
then B20 biodiesel until 2015, now renewable plant "green" diesel,
supplemented with hybrid batteries for regen, and now with bigger batts
for diesel-free "green zones". Note: These will all shift to pure BEV buses
starting 2025 when the other buses wear out. So the question becomes -- when this
transmogrification to battery-electric happens, will the overhead trolley
wires be torn down? I think that would be very natural due to maintenance
requirements.
P.S. Then there is also high-speed BART, now competing with Tesla EVs
which are growing like weeds in this town. In short, SF is blessed this way,
so take that, coal country!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... shows that John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie were ~4X these new pikers in today's dollars.
edsgar dijkstra rules! so glad I learned SNOBOL first, so I didn't get dane bramage.
emil post's rewriting systems were tres reserche, too.
and mccarthy's "lots of tiny parentheses", as well.
Yes, by a serotonergic selective 5-HT(2C) receptor agonist ...
which suppresses the appetite, at least for rats and humans, available now
at a pharmacy near you. [And stock available at a brokerage near you.]
Dunno the right dose for pets named Tubby, though
Granted, this is more difficult post- Berne Copyrigt Convention.
Link desired? I'm not a physicist, but I remember "Schwartzchild radius"
from high school, and, as per usual, Wikipedia fills in the blanks coming
up with closed-form solutions for stellar black holes near 3 solar masses,
to wit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzschild_radius
When the Dead Kennedy's Jello-of-"California Uber Alles"-and-"Holiday in Cambodia"-fame
(amongst other faves) was running for mayor of San Francisco,
one of his heartfelt pleas was that he'd be the first politician to spearhead the idea of
"landing a man on the sun".
Writing as a old fart, Unix (not the warmed-over clone called Linux)
was *itself* declared dead by Rob Pike in 1991, infamously with
the flip "Unix is not only dead, but it's starting to smell really bad".
Yet young whippersnapper Torvalds didn't listen, nor did
Sun Microsystems listen to Bill Joy and kept hacking on the
kernel (yes Solaris was already a solved problem called BSD).
All while the likes of Apple took the best extant Unix and built
something interesting upon it. Although already retired from
Unix/Linux world, trading all my shares in the likes of
SUNW / RHAT and their ilk for AAPL was "technically sweet",
(old term from J. Robert Oppenheimer).
Ideas that survive are ones which stand on the shoulders of
giants, in this case Ritchie and Thompson, not a bunch of
mere acolytes.
I'm old enough to have written code in the public domain, before the new-fangled
Berne Copyright Convention came to the fore in 1986 to change the default on
assignment of literary works (aka software) "fixed in a tangible medium".
Writing code this way was possible if you worked for a university or the U.S. government
while managers (and especially lawyers) looked the other way. Much of this got neatly
bottled up into the form of BSD Unix -- you just put your code up on UUCP, it propagated
(without the use of @ signs, even!), and if it won in a bakeoff it became part of the Unix DNA.
Even though the two- or three-clause BSD license was overkill compared to
true PD (public domain), BSD via its variant licensing remains a breath of
fresh air next to GNU. Cute recursivity and a good position on software
patents notwithstanding, Stallmanites at M.I.T offered up complicated restrictions
compared to the Berkeley spirit.
What does the hackjob Linux clone of Unix actually offer over BSD in practice?
In the world of science and engineering, it's just a "me too" product.
BSD evils supposedly included Microsoft forking and hiding the TCP/IP stack,
but Apple software has now consigned Windows to history's dustbin.
Apple is supposedly evil for running with BSD by elegantly layering
their inscrutable APIs atop it. But the underlying foundation of BSD
is free, for anyone to add value for profit or for non-profit.
Perhaps it's too late for a return to the yesteryore of public domain,
but GNU folk have got themselves all worked up into their own
hairball of complexity over Talmudic interpretations of licensing
in silly spy-vs.-spy games. The BSD "license" keeps this all dead simple.
To discern environmental damage properly, shouldn't their 0-10 scale
ratings be muliplied by the actual weight of the goods sold, including packaging?
High-volume Nintendo might still remain low, but Apple would look better
than Dell/HP/Sony due to market share. This can be tricky, e.g. Sony makes
tiny cameras but large TVs.
Regarding Apple's progress, I thought it intriguing that they are now optimizing
packaging (especially for iPods) specifically to reduce air-freight transport
costs, which could be a non-trivial fraction of COGS, at least for
the initial rollout (vs. slow boat). That's a very holistic approach.
Now that the lead is out of CRT yokes, Apple's use of LEDs vs. yucky
fluorescent tubes is another nice trend. Recyclable aluminum + glass vs. plastic
is another one. If only Greenpeace could be so creative...
Hmm ... only ~50 Wh/kg in the pack containing
2000g of 4.2 Ah x 2.4V, hardly different than NiMH.
Perhaps it's not cheaper or more efficient energy-density-
per-unit-weight/volume wise, but has better cycling.
Correct,
http://www.espimetals.com/msds's/galliumnitride.pdf
lists "Carcinogenicity: None" for gallium nitride, the grist
of Cree "white" high-power LEDs, which are really blue LEDs
dusted with a yellowish phosphor.
On the other hand, the delicious red & yellow ones in those Xmas strings contain gallium arsenide.
http://ledmuseum.home.att.net/xmas1.htm
Although many of us pointed out the question of Novell's
ownership of the actual copyrights at the outset, why isn't the
law structured to eliminate much sturm and drang by hoisting
this test out of the loop as an initial cutoff? Or were
the parallel lawsuits invoked without common sense
serialization just done for fun? I suspect the real reason
is that the motion practice follies made for good
billable hours...
Oops, one more datapoint -- The tuner is whatever is inside
that Samsung 52" LCD dealie, was $3500, now $2K.
Is the implication here that the MPEG-2 decoder is subpar,
or is it the lack of attention paid to whether I, just a Joe Schmoe
consumer, don't know whether I have a state-of-the-art
8-VSB vs. COFDM DTV receiver implementation?
For teevee, I don't have cable, just OTA indoor antenna, courtesy
Zenith via Radio Shack. You mean this isn't supposed
to work, per FCC regulation?
Yup, KQED HD from Sutro Tower in Frisco transmits
a bunch of MPEG-2 fast-motion squares alright, probably
de-rezzed due to the statmux of all of their (four or
five or six, I've lost count) licensed "sister channels".
Phuq that spit! I guess that's why I have Apple TV.
Granted that Microsoft could (hamhandedly) internally
snuff BSD for their own use. Fortunately, because of the
license, anyone can absorb the strong points of BSD
for whatever they are worth.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Apple is using BSD to
eat Microsoft's lunch.
This stuff is all regurgitated from Diamond v. Diehr (1981), in turn
barfed up from Parker v. Flook (1978), wherein it is largely accepted
black-letter law that:
'insignificant post-solution activity will not transform an unpatentable principle into a patentable process'
Totally ancient. Even Slashdot's own 'djb' (Daniel J. Bernstein) recognized
the veracity of the "mental steps" doctrine as applied to software.
v.i.z. (circa 1996):
http://www.aber.ac.uk/~phiwww/pm/
One answer, directly from Sun (a non-trivial ZFS subset is already GPL2):
_ already_exists
http://blogs.sun.com/darren/entry/zfs_under_gplv2
Another answer direct from the May 14, 2007 blog of Sun CTO Greg Papadopolous:
_____
"We will *never* (yes, I said *never*) sue anyone who uses our ZFS codebase and follows the terms of the license: they publish their improvements, propagate the license, and not sue anyone else who uses the ZFS codebase. And look at the innovation not only with ZFS in OpenSolaris, but its adoption by Mac OS X and BSD.
But under what conditions would we enforce our patents? How would we feel if someone did a cleanroom version of ZFS and kept the resulting code proprietary?
We wouldn't feel good, to be sure. But I'd put the burden back on us (certainly as a large company) that if such a thing were to happen it was because we were failing to *continue to* innovate around our original code. Being sanguine about patent protection as an exclusive right would result in less innovation, not more."
_____
GPL3 will make this all moot, whereby Stallman's GNU/Linux will merge with Solaris
which will disintermediate the Linus GPL2 version, left behind as the
Unix clone it was originally intended to be. Ultimately, a "me too" Unix
such will have little reason to exist, when one can get the real thing
under the new laws of free software, courtesy BSD/GPL3, and Sun's patent peace.
That's "fully sick", as Thorpie would say.
Yikes, as a Generation U or V (before X/Y/Z)
this reality also reflects what the Apple Retail Store "genii" relay --
Apple is constantly having to deal with what MySparse junkies do
with the freebie Internet cafe that is the Apple retail experience
in a mall near you. Yup, it's myspace.com
All.
Day.
Long.
If this is what the future holds for my pre-teens (er, tweens),
then where do I go to surrender? Nevermind, I've already made
megabucks as an Apple shareholder...
OK, so now substitute 'microsoft' for 'apple' in that same google search.
You will get about the same number of hits (though for dumb reasons).
However, look at the top hits to discover that Microsoft did a similar
trick in the 90s, taking a $217M charge (more than double that of Apple).
It appears that Gates copies Jobs' good stuff,
whereas Jobs copies Gates' bad stuff...
The core beef is that IBM put non-trivial real Unix stuff into a Unix clone (Linux).
Since Sun's Unix (BSD + Sys 5 + lots o' innovation like
proper kernel locks + ZFS + DTrace) is as good as Unix gets
(except for the libertine licensing and a decent GUI like MacOS X),
once is goes GPL (2 or 3, no matter), there is no need for a Unix clone
like Linux to even exist. Linux served its purpose to make Unix
functionality free for the taking. Now on to bigger and better
things, in the spirit of Rob Pike's immortal quotation
"Not only is Unix dead, but it's starting to smell really bad."
Here's one from the "young whippersnapper" department.
When I was a boy, we programmed air/space craft simultations for NASA.
Not the just abstract videogame types, but actual mechanically-linked 3D motion simulators
that jerked (jerk is a derivative of acceleration, in turn a derivative of velocity, thence a
derivative of position) human test pilots in a shaker cockpit.
Aside: the computer coding involved aviation control math models -> Ratfor -> FORTRAN-> real-time
assembly language -> custom digital I/O in the simulation cockpit, debugged via toggle switch
breakpoints set on a Xerox Sigma 9 console, later supplanted by Foonly machine efforts.
To make a long story short, the aerospace models often attempted divide-by-zero, either from
outright programming bugs or ill-conditioned equations.
So, did we then smash the test pilot into the cabin walls at a high rate-of-change?
No, the intrepid project mechanical engineers, who grokked servo mechanisms and could care less
about snotnose Unix-head punks simply used "mechanical rate limiters" to
overcome and smooth over these "divide-by-zero" disasters.
I'm telling you, even Professor Kahan's IEEE floating-point NAN nomenclature
for calculations didn't save the day for renormalizing these infinities -- how could it,
no self-respecting kernel (Unix or otherwise) has ever executed FP operations, which still
doesn't absolve integer div-zero horrors and concomitant analog duct tape patchwork
to save the day.