to each other without the &%#&% baby bells?
For years, no provider would bring any kind of high speed internet to my town [despite its relatively high percapita incomes] because the subscriber density was low. DSL has never penetrated to most of our neighborhoods and we have no fiber. Cell phones go dead around here too...hilly and people are too snooty to tolerate a cell tower in THEIR back yard. So some of us got together and purchased a fractional T1 connection and started going house to house with shares of that connection. This scheme was dropped when comcast finally turned on the cable modem support in the cable that had long been in town. But having a monopoly on high speed internet has meant Comcast can [and does] raise the monthly charge. How can the phone co. legally stop us from setting up WiFi in a cell configuration with a few transmitters and links? Verizon is going to drag its feet bringing fiber here just like it did on the DSL [and for the same reason] so I say screw'em. If they think neighboring towns are a more lucrative market, fine but if technology exists that is reliable, needs no wires [and the townies happen to be able to afford], I don't see how they could stop us from providing ourselves a service that they, the telcos, refuse to provide.
... what's your alternative... Use less energy, much less. I bike to work. I heat with passive solar and burn a little wood for back up...and I live in the Boston area so my heat load is a non-trivial 6000 degree-days...I designed my own super insulated house instead of taking some half-insulated spec-built shitbox....if you don't lose energy, you don't have to scrape the planet clean looking for it in the first place. I also live on a sustainable plot...I can start growing my own food when diesel gets too scarce/expensive to truck food in from out of state or out of country. I'm banking compost against the day when I just don't feel like spending money for $10 carrots. you can use a lot less energy and still live pretty well. What's your alternative? I mean what are YOU going to do, not what are you going to tell me "we" or our government ought to do [because I don't think "we" are ever going to get off our asses until its way too late].
Well, I have a BS in physics. Chemistry would do even better for settling this. Anyway, the powdered Al and iron oxide in the paint on the Hindenburg is essentailly the same formula as
thermite, an incindiary bomb ingredient and also used in industrial welding.
I should know, I never could get work as a physicist:-( There are
other
analyses that say a hydrogen economy is a daydream. you still have to GET the energy from some where If that is to be done without further burning of fossil fuels, we have to commandeer a huge amount of land for solar and wind farms and those are political and financial undertakings that are NOT an easy sell. Especially when the biggest fossil burning country reneges on Kyoto accords and is run by former president and vice president of oil or oil services companies.
I'll suggest everybody who has not yet done so should RTF precedents for such a study...it is as ancient as it is true:
Brooks "Mythical Man Month" describes the reasons projects blow up pretty well. For all the technology heaped on software development in the 30 years since the book came out, very little has changed: Software projects are complicated beasts attempted by mere humans.
Steve McConnel's books will be more familiar to/. readers and his approach to project management tries to head off the "changed requirements" fiascos with a feedback and correction mechanism of frequent critical project reviews...I wonder if that actually has worked for anyone:-(
...Next thing you know, telecoms will be liable for medical malpractice if the network connections fail during remote robotic surgery."...
I like lawyer bashing as much as the next human but buy just about any grade of service from any telco and you have signed an agreement which, in some obscure paragraph, says more or less "provider will not be held liable for consequential damages that may result from interrupted service". The
Disruption of Service clause for Cablevision is typical.
wang 700, Scientific Data Systems, Fortran 1970
then IBM 360 assembler 1972, Then Burroughs 5500 Cobol 1973, Then DEC machines of every flavor, OS and Language [you all remember BLISS, right?]. In other words, I was simply starved for programming oportunities from the day I was born...its a nice extra that they pay for programming [even in India!]
No one showed me to a computer...I broke into places to get my hands on the blinky beauties!
Being a geek, I married a geekette. but surprise surprise, our first kid turned out to be a hippie...absolutely hated the computer summer camp and never did more than word process and play computer games on the Mac. Now 30 something, she thinks nothing of downloading BIOS upgrades for her laptop...but that level of interest and experience was 15 years in the making.
Our second was all but born at a keyboard, can't handwrite a legible word but learns any app you put in front of him in about an hour, excelerator keys and all. I gave him a Mepis live CD last week and he was suddenly liberated from MS. He installs HW and reconfigures SW with RTFM. He could not get a computer of his own soon enough.
REALLY it depends much more on the nature of the kid than on what the parent does.
...The average user has no desire to be the sysadmin of their machine(s), and telcos and cable companies would be glad to take this task from them...
Agree strongly that being forced to juggle patches and tinker with firewalls is a constant pain in the ass...I didn't mean to become a sysadmin just to share the broadband connection with my home network. For now, [ in the future, every operating system will be infamous for 15 minutes] MS sloth and cluelessnes are my main culprit but soon my home network may have only one or two MS boxen and to the one OSX and the one Mepis/Linux on my LAN, I may drop Win2000 for a BSD at the fire wall and could even try Solaris 10...which brings me to my issue:
if you only run windows, it is easy to imagine comcast, for instance, selling you a management service on top of your connection contract but it will have to remain an option because all they could do with some home brew heterogeneous network is screw it up for you.
Do you paint your windows too? If the stuff really works, you are NOT going to be able to use your
lap top out in the back yard. My aluminum siding probably works just as well and affords me a little fire protection into the bargain. Besides, Home Depot makes huge donations to the republican party.
fuhgiddaboudit!
To wasting time learning a job skill in a country
that's run by companies and politicians who, to judge the results, don't give a s**t if your job
goes somewhere that pays less for work: From the article:
He faces a maximum 15 years in prison on felony counts of copyright infringement and conspiracy.
So far in my career as a programmer I have worked at 18 different companies and only a few of those jobs lasted longer than 2 years. This fellow has found a way to stay fed and sheltered from cold [though not from inmates one supposes] for 15 years. Someone remind why I am knocking myself out to keep a job that doesn't want to keep me? And its true that from jail, I would not meet many nice girls but I can't see that my programming career has been much better in that regard [or is that just me?...don't answer that!] Here I am castigating my son the college kid for wasting good homework time on his immoral filesharing networks but maybe he has a more surefire plan than I do!
[ha! they don't have mod points for sarcasm!] I don't mean to tar all employers as potential outsourcers...many of those 18 employers might still be in business if my wages and health bennies didn't cost so much But I am getting seriously OT here.
Thank you. I stand informed. No offense taken. I think a little harshness is the lightest penalty imposed on/.ers who post their guesswork as if it were fact. You needn't be so modest about your knowledge of these matters: the question you posed to google is not one most of us have handy.
I'd suggest either feigning a stroke that has caused you to "forget" everything you ever knew about computers or download the ISO from mepis.org and burn a bunch of live CDs to give out to your clueless friends. My son's old laptop utterly refused to be upgraded to XP and its ME was hosed...it got so bad you couldnt even get a chance to break into the BIOS. I gave him the Mepis CD and just let him fool with it for a while. At breakfast the next morning, he was beaming. He'd figured out how the partion editor worked, wiped the microshit completely off the HD and was enjoying his trip up the KDE learning curve. We have gone from "I think its a doorstop now" to "its a little slow opening files and I think we need to find the right driver for my PCMCIA ethernet card".
Give those friends and relatives an opportunity to experience winning, to experience being just a little bit competant with a computer and there is a chance that they will be both bothering you less and talking to you more intelligently in the future. But for godsake don't let them leave the room if you have to be in the driver's seat for the repair sessions: make'em bring you a drink and make them listen and describe in their own words each step you take at the keyboard
Re:Is the RIAA ok with this?
on
Re-Pet a Reality
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
its fair to mod this funny but do keep in mind that your PTO grants patents on plants. In particular, plant species newly discovered or produced for the first time by some form of hybridization...so what, other than religous dogma, would keep them from granting patents on strains of cat or dog? The
notion of proprietary interest in a particular compliment of genes is established in law and the way breeders try to make money off dogs, cats, goldfish and, of course, race horses pretty well establishes the monitary motivation for those proprietary interests in genetic "Intellectual Property"...go ahead and laugh...That's what many do when they should be scared.
if two groups of coders parted ways but are still being paid by the same company, you put yer f***ing egos on the coatrack when you come to work and anything that anybody thinks up that makes any product better should be available to all within the company. "credit" is just for performance reviews. Attribution may be either useful or detrimental for code reviews, depending strongly on the culture of development in the company.
DARPA, as above posters mentioned, paid for some
moderately effective teleoperated suits or parts of
same. But that that same DARPA DOES offer prize money for the autonomous vehicle cross country race [at which all contestants failed miserably] so you
might not need private donations to get this
prize money.
...Microsoft has made this as easy as possible. maybe even easier! I knew better than to take the SP2 in the first place but got annoyed at the constant nagging. I didn't used to take auto-updates by choice and by deliberatly configuring the update service. But after the SP2 install, I either slept through the config dialog for update service or it defaulted to full-auto without asking my preference....all water over the dam now. I have since set config back to just warn me it has new stuff. I will stand by my complaint of high handedness though: I would rather make my own mistakes than have so many of them automated for me. Maybe I should run Linux for a while just for the sake of equal opportunity kvetching;?)
Its my best and most reliable system and it stays up for weeks on end. Heretofore, I only lost stuff if
we lost power [right, no UPS]. If I know we are in for bad weather, I save. If I have been doing a lot of typing, I save. I lost more confidence than content this time around. As for why use XP/SP2...
indeed! why? see my reply to my own post [ I cut the original short, seeing as it was a first post, and then continued it in the reply.]
"tipping point" : e.g. the moment when the sheep notices that he is a ram and that outweighing the dog is more productive than outrunning it.
I put off the SP2 upgrade for months because I heard of all the trouble that came with the fixes. I had my XP box set to tell me of patches but not install them. Then, in a fit of carelessness, I just clicked on the darned "Apply updates" dialog. I am used to being asked which of the patches I want but this time it just shot the whole wad into my poor machine. I got WMP10, I got DRMcrap.dll's up the wazoo, I got icons all over my desktop. Nero, which had been burning stuff for me flawlessly stopped working with "no access permission for D: drive" or some such message. It took some fooling around to get Nero back and to keep WMP from running all my different media file types....arggghh! and to top it all off, thinking they couldn't screw it up any worse than it was, I let XP run auto-updatable. Well, now I know that I endured SP2 just to get a buggy firewall config and that I can expect unannounced patches to blow away my session whenever I turn my back. I swear I don't need this. I run Open Office and Cygwin on the damned machine anyway. If somebody could show me a URL and a few lines of commands to FTP down a decent BSD or Linux distro meant for the windows-competent but Linux-challenged, I'd flush the XP crap all the way back to Redmond.
my xp box shut down in the middle of the night
last weekend, tossing some unsaved mozilla composer
pages away in the process....I HATE microsofts high handedness.
The art. confuses me: How would a DMCA-style law which spells out copyright obligations of ISPs, users, etc have any impact on porn? I don't see that DMCA has stemmed the tide of porn in the US.
FAIK, the laws against porn in the US have an unintended consequence of reducing access and penalizing copying in ways that DMCA was supposed to provide for legit content and thus the ultimate beneficiary of the laws is the producers and scum-runners who don't have to compete with as much free copies of their "product" as do the musicians and legal movie industry. Have you seen a smut-peddler's equivalent of MPAA going to judges and slapping subpoena's on file sharers?...maybe they don't need to do that?
Slashdot Mirror
to each other without the &%#&% baby bells?
For years, no provider would bring any kind of high speed internet to my town [despite its relatively high percapita incomes] because the subscriber density was low. DSL has never penetrated to most of our neighborhoods and we have no fiber. Cell phones go dead around here too...hilly and people are too snooty to tolerate a cell tower in THEIR back yard.
So some of us got together and purchased a fractional T1 connection and started going house to house with shares of that connection. This scheme was dropped when comcast finally turned on the cable modem support in the cable that had long been in town. But having a monopoly on high speed internet has meant Comcast can [and does] raise the monthly charge.
How can the phone co. legally stop us from setting up WiFi in a cell configuration with a few transmitters and links? Verizon is going to drag its feet bringing fiber here just like it did on the DSL [and for the same reason] so I say screw'em. If they think neighboring towns are a more lucrative market, fine but if technology exists that is reliable, needs no wires [and the townies happen to be able to afford], I don't see how they could stop us from providing ourselves a service that they, the telcos, refuse to provide.
... what's your alternative...
Use less energy, much less. I bike to work. I heat with passive solar and burn a little wood for back up...and I live in the Boston area so my heat load is a non-trivial 6000 degree-days...I designed my own super insulated house instead of taking some half-insulated spec-built shitbox....if you don't lose energy, you don't have to scrape the planet clean looking for it in the first place.
I also live on a sustainable plot...I can start growing my own food when diesel gets too scarce/expensive to truck food in from out of state or out of country. I'm banking compost against the day when I just don't feel like spending money for $10 carrots.
you can use a lot less energy and still live pretty well. What's your alternative? I mean what are YOU going to do, not what are you going to tell me "we" or our government ought to do [because I don't think "we" are ever going to get off our asses until its way too late].
Well, I have a BS in physics. Chemistry would do even better for settling this. Anyway, the powdered Al and iron oxide in the paint on the Hindenburg is essentailly the same formula as thermite, an incindiary bomb ingredient and also used in industrial welding.
I should know, I never could get work as a physicist:-( There are other analyses that say a hydrogen economy is a daydream. you still have to GET the energy from some where If that is to be done without further burning of fossil fuels, we have to commandeer a huge amount of land for solar and wind farms and those are political and financial undertakings that are NOT an easy sell. Especially when the biggest fossil burning country reneges on Kyoto accords and is run by former president and vice president of oil or oil services companies.
Well, it looks like I'll get to read it after a few thousand other /. readers have had a go at it:(
I'll suggest everybody who has not yet done so should RTF precedents for such a study...it is as ancient as it is true: Brooks "Mythical Man Month" describes the reasons projects blow up pretty well. For all the technology heaped on software development in the 30 years since the book came out, very little has changed: Software projects are complicated beasts attempted by mere humans. Steve McConnel's books will be more familiar to /. readers and his approach to project management tries to head off the "changed requirements" fiascos with a feedback and correction mechanism of frequent critical project reviews...I wonder if that actually has worked for anyone:-(
...Next thing you know, telecoms will be liable for medical malpractice if the network connections fail during remote robotic surgery."...
I like lawyer bashing as much as the next human but buy just about any grade of service from any telco and you have signed an agreement which, in some obscure paragraph, says more or less "provider will not be held liable for consequential damages that may result from interrupted service". The Disruption of Service clause for Cablevision is typical.
wang 700, Scientific Data Systems, Fortran 1970
then IBM 360 assembler 1972, Then Burroughs 5500 Cobol 1973, Then DEC machines of every flavor, OS and Language [you all remember BLISS, right?]. In other words, I was simply starved for programming oportunities from the day I was born...its a nice extra that they pay for programming [even in India!]
No one showed me to a computer...I broke into places to get my hands on the blinky beauties!
Being a geek, I married a geekette. but surprise surprise, our first kid turned out to be a hippie...absolutely hated the computer summer camp and never did more than word process and play computer games on the Mac. Now 30 something, she thinks nothing of downloading BIOS upgrades for her laptop...but that level of interest and experience was 15 years in the making.
Our second was all but born at a keyboard, can't handwrite a legible word but learns any app you put in front of him in about an hour, excelerator keys and all. I gave him a Mepis live CD last week and he was suddenly liberated from MS. He installs HW and reconfigures SW with RTFM. He could not get a computer of his own soon enough.
REALLY it depends much more on the nature of the kid than on what the parent does.
...The average user has no desire to be the sysadmin of their machine(s), and telcos and cable companies would be glad to take this task from them...
Agree strongly that being forced to juggle patches and tinker with firewalls is a constant pain in the ass...I didn't mean to become a sysadmin just to share the broadband connection with my home network. For now, [ in the future, every operating system will be infamous for 15 minutes] MS sloth and cluelessnes are my main culprit but soon my home network may have only one or two MS boxen and to the one OSX and the one Mepis/Linux on my LAN, I may drop Win2000 for a BSD at the fire wall and could even try Solaris 10...which brings me to my issue:
if you only run windows, it is easy to imagine comcast, for instance, selling you a management service on top of your connection contract but it will have to remain an option because all they could do with some home brew heterogeneous network is screw it up for you.
I totally agree!
...
Uh, you are in earnest here, no?
...our new Cognitive overloads!
And all this time, I just thought I had developed adult onset ADD!
Do you paint your windows too? If the stuff really works, you are NOT going to be able to use your lap top out in the back yard. My aluminum siding probably works just as well and affords me a little fire protection into the bargain. Besides, Home Depot makes huge donations to the republican party. fuhgiddaboudit!
Here I am castigating my son the college kid for wasting good homework time on his immoral filesharing networks but maybe he has a more surefire plan than I do!
[ha! they don't have mod points for sarcasm!]
I don't mean to tar all employers as potential outsourcers...many of those 18 employers might still be in business if my wages and health bennies didn't cost so much But I am getting seriously OT here.
Maybe we should be glad they didn't have any real news to report?
Thank you. I stand informed. No offense taken. I think a little harshness is the lightest penalty imposed on /.ers who post their guesswork as if it were fact.
You needn't be so modest about your knowledge of these matters: the question you posed to google is not one most of us have handy.
I'd suggest either feigning a stroke that has caused you to "forget" everything you ever knew about computers or download the ISO from mepis.org and burn a bunch of live CDs to give out to your clueless friends. My son's old laptop utterly refused to be upgraded to XP and its ME was hosed...it got so bad you couldnt even get a chance to break into the BIOS. I gave him the Mepis CD and just let him fool with it for a while. At breakfast the next morning, he was beaming. He'd figured out how the partion editor worked, wiped the microshit completely off the HD and was enjoying his trip up the KDE learning curve. We have gone from "I think its a doorstop now" to "its a little slow opening files and I think we need to find the right driver for my PCMCIA ethernet card".
Give those friends and relatives an opportunity to experience winning, to experience being just a little bit competant with a computer and there is a chance that they will be both bothering you less and talking to you more intelligently in the future. But for godsake don't let them leave the room if you have to be in the driver's seat for the repair sessions: make'em bring you a drink and make them listen and describe in their own words each step you take at the keyboard
its fair to mod this funny but do keep in mind that your PTO grants patents on plants. In particular, plant species newly discovered or produced for the first time by some form of hybridization...so what, other than religous dogma, would keep them from granting patents on strains of cat or dog? The notion of proprietary interest in a particular compliment of genes is established in law and the way breeders try to make money off dogs, cats, goldfish and, of course, race horses pretty well establishes the monitary motivation for those proprietary interests in genetic "Intellectual Property"...go ahead and laugh...That's what many do when they should be scared.
if two groups of coders parted ways but are still being paid by the same company, you put yer f***ing egos on the coatrack when you come to work and anything that anybody thinks up that makes any product better should be available to all within the company. "credit" is just for performance reviews. Attribution may be either useful or detrimental for code reviews, depending strongly on the culture of development in the company.
DARPA, as above posters mentioned, paid for some moderately effective teleoperated suits or parts of same. But that that same DARPA DOES offer prize money for the autonomous vehicle cross country race [at which all contestants failed miserably] so you might not need private donations to get this prize money.
Probably could handle Fedora, thanks for the recommendation. What about Knoppix or, assuming I might want training wheels, Mepis?
...Microsoft has made this as easy as possible. ;?)
maybe even easier! I knew better than to take the SP2 in the first place but got annoyed at the constant nagging. I didn't used to take auto-updates by choice and by deliberatly configuring the update service. But after the SP2 install, I either slept through the config dialog for update service or it defaulted to full-auto without asking my preference....all water over the dam now. I have since set config back to just warn me it has new stuff. I will stand by my complaint of high handedness though: I would rather make my own mistakes than have so many of them automated for me.
Maybe I should run Linux for a while just for the sake of equal opportunity kvetching
Its my best and most reliable system and it stays up for weeks on end. Heretofore, I only lost stuff if we lost power [right, no UPS]. If I know we are in for bad weather, I save. If I have been doing a lot of typing, I save. I lost more confidence than content this time around. As for why use XP/SP2... indeed! why? see my reply to my own post [ I cut the original short, seeing as it was a first post, and then continued it in the reply.]
"tipping point" : e.g. the moment when the sheep notices that he is a ram and that outweighing the dog is more productive than outrunning it.
I put off the SP2 upgrade for months because I heard of all the trouble that came with the fixes. I had my XP box set to tell me of patches but not install them. Then, in a fit of carelessness, I just clicked on the darned "Apply updates" dialog. I am used to being asked which of the patches I want but this time it just shot the whole wad into my poor machine. I got WMP10, I got DRMcrap.dll's up the wazoo, I got icons all over my desktop. Nero, which had been burning stuff for me flawlessly stopped working with "no access permission for D: drive" or some such message. It took some fooling around to get Nero back and to keep WMP from running all my different media file types....arggghh!
and to top it all off, thinking they couldn't screw it up any worse than it was, I let XP run auto-updatable. Well, now I know that I endured SP2 just to get a buggy firewall config and that I can expect unannounced patches to blow away my session whenever I turn my back.
I swear I don't need this. I run Open Office and Cygwin on the damned machine anyway. If somebody could show me a URL and a few lines of commands to FTP down a decent BSD or Linux distro meant for the windows-competent but Linux-challenged, I'd flush the XP crap all the way back to Redmond.
my xp box shut down in the middle of the night last weekend, tossing some unsaved mozilla composer pages away in the process....I HATE microsofts high handedness.
The art. confuses me: How would a DMCA-style law which spells out copyright obligations of ISPs, users, etc have any impact on porn?
I don't see that DMCA has stemmed the tide of porn in the US. FAIK, the laws against porn in the US have an unintended consequence of reducing access and penalizing copying in ways that DMCA was supposed to provide for legit content and thus the ultimate beneficiary of the laws is the producers and scum-runners who don't have to compete with as much free copies of their "product" as do the musicians and legal movie industry.
Have you seen a smut-peddler's equivalent of MPAA going to judges and slapping subpoena's on file sharers?...maybe they don't need to do that?