Certainly it could be thought that RIAA is so upset with Napster et al. just because of some potential lost sales. However, they have to know that the Napster user is their best customer. They aren't stupid.
So, why are they so upset? Because having people able to choose what they listen to for themselves destroys their ability to dictate what people listen to.
RIAA owns the entire current 'popularization channel' from MTV to Radio to concerts to the music store chains. What happens to this investment if the listeners suddenly don't have to be forced to spend their money on the things that RIAA promotes? RIAA loses control of the channel and its members lose billions of dollars.
They are prepared to overhead a little song exchanging, they always have been. In some countries, you already pay a tax to support lost revenue when you use a recordable CD. So it's obviously OK with RIAA if you use it in this fashion, you've already paid for that priviledge.
What's not OK with RIAA is for you to start having a choice about what you listen to without their permission.
Any time they want to make a few more hundreds of millions of dollars, all they have to do is sign some non-terrible band and force the channel to promote them. The record goes platinum, the concerts sell out and some label makes a pile of money. Sometimes they don't even bother to find a band that people can stand to listen to. (I'm sure you can think of several bands that are talentless, I know I can.)
So when they lose control of their popularization channel, they lose all of their instantaneous guaranteed profits. They decide what is 'cool', they make everyone else decide that it is cool, too. People have plenty of money, especially those who are most impressionable. First comes some targeted marketing kiddie crap from some predatory company. Then when the little zombies get a little older, start spoon feeding them their choices about what entertainment to experience. It's pathetic, but there is something we can do about it.
But if you want to hurt RIAA, listen to digital music and personally decide what to hear. You will be denying them the opportunity to control you.
Just find out if they are Open Source or Free Software friendly. That's what I'm planning to do since my employers are going to be looking for more help soon. I won't necessarily say why I'm asking about their opinion of Linux, etc., but their answer counts tremendously.
I won't even consider anyone who responds negatively about Free Software. They had better both know what it is and appreciate its purpose or we're not going to hire them. The place is a closed-source vertical-market software shop but we do use open source software (more of it all the time). The last thing I want is yet another droid who thinks that the solution to every problem is to buy some software.
That we should establish a few non-profit organizations that act as charities that employ hackers for projects based on donations from the community. Sort of like the developer networks except that they are tax writeoffs for the donors.
I'm no tax code expert but it seems to me that you could set up a real 503C corporation, employ actual programmers full or part time and pay for it all with donations. It seems legit to me. Most charities have a staff that either directly does things or tells volunteers what to do. They get paid and the people donating their salaries get a tax deduction for so doing.
We could even set it up as a church;-) Let's elect Linus as our patron saint! "Ha ha, only serious, world domination now" (tm). CaTB as the bible.
Good point. There is some really good talent out there. I'll admit that I'm probably more spoiled than most, I grew up in a market that had some of the best radio talent anywhere. Good 'ol KGGO out of Des Moines. Jack Emerson is _the_ best DJ alive, best voice, eloquent, smart, funny, just what you want... They even had a good mix of music, good rock, any era.
Too bad that lately they were taken over and now the're just another oldies station... Very sad.
But the point is that when I moved to my current radio market, I was very spoiled by KGGO at their best (except for the morning show, they brought on a comedian and the dynamic fell apart) Then I get here to KC and every single show has too much talk and _awful_ station promos. Try listening to the same 5 2 second song clips between every song for hours on end.. Grrr..
Thank goodness for Napster, I don't have to put up with that anymore. I just need a player in my car and I'll be set. Nice to see that radio is annoying itself out of existence just as a better way to distribute music has come along.
Is it just me or are the DJ's getting entirely too annoying recently? They don't seem to add anything at all to the content of a typical Rock music station. The morning programs are the worst of all, getting downright disgusting.
So maybe this will make a few radio stations get rid of the DJ's alltogether. I'd rather listen to commercials than some of their blathering. If I'm tuned into a 'music' station, I expect to at least occasionally hear MUSIC during the hours between 6am and 10am.
So, anyway, I'd like to see the union get taken down a notch for this. After all, it's the number of people listening to the commercials that pays their salaries. Getting more people listening over the internet should be a money-making proposition.
After all, it's a lot harder to switch stream channels than changing radio stations, more people listen to the ads on a stream than listen to them on a broadcast station. The whole ergonomic design of a car has gone to making it absurdly easy to play with the radio, but no one has yet come out with a peripheral that changes the stream channel for you.
We all sat around and laughed about the tobacco industry lawyers keeping a straight face when claiming that smoking had no adverse health consequences. Now we have another group of certified liars coming out with rubbish like 'open source stiffles innovation'.
I see this as a positive sign. Now everyone knows that tobacco is harmful, the industry has to pay $250B to settle the lawsuits. Looks to me like M$ is going to be in the same boat in a few years. All that they can do now is lie about their own as well as their competitor's products, the end must be near.
PPC Linux has always been about getting the right patches to get a bootable system. No one in the official kernel seems to care that the deviations between the 'Linus' kernel and that which will boot a PPC box have been getting larger all of the time. It's pretty hard to keep up with nowadays. It is apparently getting worse.
My personal experience: I have an SMP PowerMac. It can run LinuxPPC or YellowDog in uniprocessor mode only. Any attempt to get the other processor working results in an unbootable kernel. There are no patches for it, there are no tools for debugging the problems, there is simply no way to get the system working correctly.
Then you have to take into consideration how difficult it is to actually get a new kernel installed on the system. The kernel has to reside in the HFS partition. The kernel cannot safely write to the HFS partition. Using a second box as an intermediate FTP server is the only way to change kernels. Maybe it's better now, I wouldn't know, it's too depressing to try to fix, every time you try to do something you have to reinstall. It's like windoze.
The whole edifice of running Linux on a Mac depends on just using the kernels that came with the computer. Which, by the way, they don't tell you how to build or what options they used. The LinuxPPC guys are trying their hardest but the system is still years behind the usability of Intel Linux. (and another problem, no ECC memory on the Macs, either, constant rebooting is necessary)
So, I'm back to MacOS. It would be nice to have a usable Linux system but it's looking like that will never happen. I wanted to use it for validating MSB code but it's too unusable. Maybe someday.
It's not like all of our MP3's suddenly turn into pumpkins. It's not like the "OpenNAP" servers suddenly will shut down. Does this change anything?
And I still don't know of any way to pay what a radio station pays for a person to hear a song they broadcast. Any higher fee is unreasonable. Any fee for listening to a song that you own on prerecorded media is unreasonable.
OK, RIAA, now it's your turn. Tell us how we can pay you fair fees for listening. Remember that most of this music has been and is being broadcast, so we are legally entitled to record that broadcast. Then go public with the information about how much of the money the artists get.
I don't even feel the least little bit bad about using Napster-like services. How else should I pre-listen to a recording that I'm thinking of buying? Wait for the radio to play it? Heck, if I do that, I can just record the broadcast and own a legal copy. It's up to the RIAA; if they want me to stop buying prerecorded music, it's fine with me.
It's nice that they have finally decided to go public with the information. I suspect that infertile (and same-sex) couples have been beating down the doors of genetics researchers for such attempts since the Scottish sheep announcement. There has probably already been clandestine attempts and maybe even a success.
But it all has to start somewhere. I don't see how it's possible to go from knowing that cloning is possible straight to what I see as the goal of the research, which is to be able to clone specific organs or whole blood. I think that you have to start by building a few whole bodies, since that's the simplest thing to do. If we can do so under the moniker of 'helping childless couples', fine, as long as the research gets done.
I don't think anyone wants to be the last person to die from failing to get an organ transplant. This research is vitally important, it has to start somewhere.
Yes, I know that the world is overpopulated. Genetic research may provide solutions to that, too, better food, more efficiency, trees that grow up to be houses, who knows?
I know that someone will probably try to 'engineer' a nine foot tall basketball hero. But, really, who is going to be able to get away with such nonsense in the media circus/infopocalypse we have today? Everyone can find out anything they want to know about anyone they want to research. Do you think that no one is going to notice when two short people have gigantic athlete offspring?
This is the world we live in. Morality will adjust itself to the concept of cloning soon since it's pro-survival. Our concepts of ethics are based on the continuation of our society, and ultimately cloning will benefit humanity.
Well, that's certainly true. I'd much rather have a nice, short program that did the same thing.
The point is, whether new or just updated, the lines of code edited per year has been dropping steadily. I think that this is because of the large number of newbie programmers flooding the marketplace, not only bringing the average down with their output but also by taking time away from the experts for trivialities.
When it comes down to it, the average productivity has dropped, no matter what scale you use. Propping up mediocrity, as all unions do, is more inappropriate for the tech industry because of the wide variance in productivity. Take the best UAW worker versus the worst, how much more productive is the shining star? ALmost not at all, they are on an assembly line, it goes a certain speed. Take an Alan Cox or some other genius versus the most clueless newbie, the productivity ratio is enormous.
Let's get rid of the unproductive programmers who will never amount to crap and get back to work.
There is a startling difference between the traditional laborer and the tech industry: The very best tech workers can be up to 100 times more productive than the average. There is no way in hell that a manual laborer could be even 2 times more productive than average, they are slowed down by physics and the other workers around them. Not true of tech workers, someone else's slowness is independent of your own speed.
Good programmers know that they can crank out thousands of lines of code in a day if the requirements are well defined. The industry average for lines of code per year dropped to 6500 from 9000 per programmer. Is this because the requirements aren't there? Probably in large measure, but in any case, the average productivity stinks. You elite programmers out there: doesn't the average year of output sound like a slow month?
I'm using this to conclude that we do not need a union for the tech industries. There is no need to try to protect the other half of the bell curve. They can get a job that they can handle, and stop trying to pretend that they are techies. If they want unions so bad, let them go make cars.
It doesn't necessarily imply mass transfer from a binary. Remember, this star has been flying through the galaxy for quite a while, and the galaxy is pretty far from empty. I imagine that it could stay hot just by accreting interstellar dust.
It could still be hot from the last time it smashed into a pre-space flight civilization's planet =-]
This Torino scale seems pretty strange. It needs to be two-dimensional. Damage vs. log(Likelyhood).
But now we have a new name for the release of windoze 2001 or the election of (insert dreaded politician's name): We'll just say '10 on the Torino scale'
Sounds good. More jargon that only geeks will understand...
-40 in what? Farenheit or Celsius? Makes a big difference, you know... =-p
What is the purpose of this article? It's almost as bad as the polls, thousands of ameteur commedians trying to one-up each other. I'll have to admit that some of the posts have been funny, but wasn't there another purpose than insulting Canada?
Why worry about seeding the atmosphere of Mars with pollutants when it _still_ won't result in a human breathable atmosphere? We'd still have to live underground (or should, to keep away from the ultraviolet and cosmic radiation). Mars doesn't have a big moon, so the crust may not be as radioactive as Earth's (ref: Asimov's Robots and Empire). Living underground is about the only viable option, so who needs an atmosphere?
Then again, why don't we just put up a set of big mirrors in the Mercury-Venus trojan points and have them reflect sunlight at Mars? We could warm up the planet pretty quickly that way. Once the planet gets warmer, the fossil water and ice caps should melt and form a better atmosphere, making it warmer still through the greenouse effect. Sounds simpler than sending billions of tons of chemicals around the solar system.
Heck, we could even warm up Canada the same way! Or at least melt the Prime Minister's igloo...
"What other frontiers or environments are left for computers to work in?" How about the typical windoze office, none of the computers there seem to work at all.
I think that corporations and governments will be fairly easy to get away from considering that, like in Montana, it will be easy to move elsewhere. You'll probably need to have a self-sustaining pressurized home, who says that you will want to have it near everyone else's? When you have airlocks, you can keep pretty much anyone out just by latching open the inner door. By then we'll all be using secure communication channels, so there goes another privacy concern.
In short, I'm not too worried that the future colonists of Mars are going to worry about what some large, faceless, off-planet corporation thinks of what they do with their time.
How much does the fact that U-Haul sucks affect your life after you move? Do you think that the people that colonized North America worried much about the government or some companies back in Europe? I don't think that everyone will be working for some mega-corp and I do think that you'll have to post a bond for your return voyage before anyone will take you to another planet. Real colonization will probably wait for regularly scheduled voyages, if only to keep the barrier to entry low.
Yes but Humans can stand far lower atmospheric pressure than flies can, plus cold temperatures. All we have to do is either depressurize or freeze a compartment and all of the insects will die. Neither of those would be hard to do in space.
I'd like to move to Mars. Getting away from the government and megacorps would be good with me.
I think that most people wouldn't move no matter what. As Heinlein pointed out, most people in Pompeii knew that Vesuvius was rumbling and didn't leave town. Most would just die here.
Those of us who left would probably be the intelligent ones, so it may not be bad for OUR species. Can't say that it would help all of the other species much. I won't miss the flies.
But I don't think that Earth will become uninhabitable. Once the atmosphere starts killing people, there'll be less people to pollute it, so we'll have some negative feedback in the system.
But just in case, let's make sure that IPv6 has lots of addresses set aside for other planets =-]
You have to remember that XFS and JFS journal all data and metadata changes whereas ReiserFS and EXT3 only journal metadata. Thus, [XJ]FS protect your data from becoming corrupted where the others just help you boot faster after a crash (with respect to their journalling).
Ext3 can be used (once it's stable) on a preexisting Ext2 filesystem. The others cannot directly migrate from anything 'official'.
I like the ideas of all four. It may be that you want to have a combination of all of them in your system, but that would be pushing it.
I've used JFS a lot and it is really bulletproof if you set it up properly. It's heavily tied to the LVM in AIX, so I wouldn't expect much progress without LVM for Linux being a stable API. So, call it post 2.4.0 at least.
Lewinsky! It goes right to the center of things and sucks like a demon. Its emissions from its job of sucking are widely discussed and clearly visible on the fabric of the dress, er, I mean spacetime...
I'd also like to see some way of not only restoring the previous congif files, but restoring the whole old package. AIX has this feature; it can keep the entire old package around and if you decide that you don't like the new version, you can get rid of it.
We absolutely need to have a way to find the dependancies. RPM sucks in this regard. Telling me that I need libfoo without any way of telling me where to find said library is worse than useless. It should be a requirement to provide a URL for all of the non-standard libraries that your package depends upon. Yes, I realize that means we need to define what are standard packages. Perhaps a central repository to define libname <-> location.
I still think it would be convenient to have the packages install in their own, personal directory tree and set links to their exe's, libs and docs within the system directories.
While we're at it, let's get rid of GNU info files and go to HTML/SGML/XML documentation. Let's get rid of manpages in their current format while we're at it. We're long past the days when those independant formats are useful. Trying to explain to newbies that the help files might be man, info or only available through the help menu just makes them think that UNIX is confusing on purpose.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm giving up. Maybe I should have stayed in grad school.
Certainly it could be thought that RIAA is so upset with Napster et al. just because of some potential lost sales. However, they have to know that the Napster user is their best customer. They aren't stupid.
So, why are they so upset? Because having people able to choose what they listen to for themselves destroys their ability to dictate what people listen to.
RIAA owns the entire current 'popularization channel' from MTV to Radio to concerts to the music store chains. What happens to this investment if the listeners suddenly don't have to be forced to spend their money on the things that RIAA promotes? RIAA loses control of the channel and its members lose billions of dollars.
They are prepared to overhead a little song exchanging, they always have been. In some countries, you already pay a tax to support lost revenue when you use a recordable CD. So it's obviously OK with RIAA if you use it in this fashion, you've already paid for that priviledge.
What's not OK with RIAA is for you to start having a choice about what you listen to without their permission.
Any time they want to make a few more hundreds of millions of dollars, all they have to do is sign some non-terrible band and force the channel to promote them. The record goes platinum, the concerts sell out and some label makes a pile of money. Sometimes they don't even bother to find a band that people can stand to listen to. (I'm sure you can think of several bands that are talentless, I know I can.)
So when they lose control of their popularization channel, they lose all of their instantaneous guaranteed profits. They decide what is 'cool', they make everyone else decide that it is cool, too. People have plenty of money, especially those who are most impressionable. First comes some targeted marketing kiddie crap from some predatory company. Then when the little zombies get a little older, start spoon feeding them their choices about what entertainment to experience. It's pathetic, but there is something we can do about it.
But if you want to hurt RIAA, listen to digital music and personally decide what to hear. You will be denying them the opportunity to control you.
Let's hope that they don't figure out some way of embedding CPRM into the hard disk surface, too.
Yes, I am joking. I hope...
Just find out if they are Open Source or Free Software friendly. That's what I'm planning to do since my employers are going to be looking for more help soon. I won't necessarily say why I'm asking about their opinion of Linux, etc., but their answer counts tremendously.
I won't even consider anyone who responds negatively about Free Software. They had better both know what it is and appreciate its purpose or we're not going to hire them. The place is a closed-source vertical-market software shop but we do use open source software (more of it all the time). The last thing I want is yet another droid who thinks that the solution to every problem is to buy some software.
Wish me luck.
Thanks to everyone for the input. I'll look into the suggestions.
/. thought I was posting anonymously...)
(Now I just have to figure out why
That we should establish a few non-profit organizations that act as charities that employ hackers for projects based on donations from the community. Sort of like the developer networks except that they are tax writeoffs for the donors.
;-) Let's elect Linus as our patron saint! "Ha ha, only serious, world domination now" (tm). CaTB as the bible.
I'm no tax code expert but it seems to me that you could set up a real 503C corporation, employ actual programmers full or part time and pay for it all with donations. It seems legit to me. Most charities have a staff that either directly does things or tells volunteers what to do. They get paid and the people donating their salaries get a tax deduction for so doing.
We could even set it up as a church
Good point. There is some really good talent out there. I'll admit that I'm probably more spoiled than most, I grew up in a market that had some of the best radio talent anywhere. Good 'ol KGGO out of Des Moines. Jack Emerson is _the_ best DJ alive, best voice, eloquent, smart, funny, just what you want... They even had a good mix of music, good rock, any era.
Too bad that lately they were taken over and now the're just another oldies station... Very sad.
But the point is that when I moved to my current radio market, I was very spoiled by KGGO at their best (except for the morning show, they brought on a comedian and the dynamic fell apart) Then I get here to KC and every single show has too much talk and _awful_ station promos. Try listening to the same 5 2 second song clips between every song for hours on end.. Grrr..
Thank goodness for Napster, I don't have to put up with that anymore. I just need a player in my car and I'll be set. Nice to see that radio is annoying itself out of existence just as a better way to distribute music has come along.
Is it just me or are the DJ's getting entirely too annoying recently? They don't seem to add anything at all to the content of a typical Rock music station. The morning programs are the worst of all, getting downright disgusting.
So maybe this will make a few radio stations get rid of the DJ's alltogether. I'd rather listen to commercials than some of their blathering. If I'm tuned into a 'music' station, I expect to at least occasionally hear MUSIC during the hours between 6am and 10am.
So, anyway, I'd like to see the union get taken down a notch for this. After all, it's the number of people listening to the commercials that pays their salaries. Getting more people listening over the internet should be a money-making proposition.
After all, it's a lot harder to switch stream channels than changing radio stations, more people listen to the ads on a stream than listen to them on a broadcast station. The whole ergonomic design of a car has gone to making it absurdly easy to play with the radio, but no one has yet come out with a peripheral that changes the stream channel for you.
We all sat around and laughed about the tobacco industry lawyers keeping a straight face when claiming that smoking had no adverse health consequences. Now we have another group of certified liars coming out with rubbish like 'open source stiffles innovation'.
I see this as a positive sign. Now everyone knows that tobacco is harmful, the industry has to pay $250B to settle the lawsuits. Looks to me like M$ is going to be in the same boat in a few years. All that they can do now is lie about their own as well as their competitor's products, the end must be near.
PPC Linux has always been about getting the right patches to get a bootable system. No one in the official kernel seems to care that the deviations between the 'Linus' kernel and that which will boot a PPC box have been getting larger all of the time. It's pretty hard to keep up with nowadays. It is apparently getting worse.
My personal experience: I have an SMP PowerMac. It can run LinuxPPC or YellowDog in uniprocessor mode only. Any attempt to get the other processor working results in an unbootable kernel. There are no patches for it, there are no tools for debugging the problems, there is simply no way to get the system working correctly.
Then you have to take into consideration how difficult it is to actually get a new kernel installed on the system. The kernel has to reside in the HFS partition. The kernel cannot safely write to the HFS partition. Using a second box as an intermediate FTP server is the only way to change kernels. Maybe it's better now, I wouldn't know, it's too depressing to try to fix, every time you try to do something you have to reinstall. It's like windoze.
The whole edifice of running Linux on a Mac depends on just using the kernels that came with the computer. Which, by the way, they don't tell you how to build or what options they used. The LinuxPPC guys are trying their hardest but the system is still years behind the usability of Intel Linux. (and another problem, no ECC memory on the Macs, either, constant rebooting is necessary)
So, I'm back to MacOS. It would be nice to have a usable Linux system but it's looking like that will never happen. I wanted to use it for validating MSB code but it's too unusable. Maybe someday.
It's not like all of our MP3's suddenly turn into pumpkins. It's not like the "OpenNAP" servers suddenly will shut down. Does this change anything?
And I still don't know of any way to pay what a radio station pays for a person to hear a song they broadcast. Any higher fee is unreasonable. Any fee for listening to a song that you own on prerecorded media is unreasonable.
OK, RIAA, now it's your turn. Tell us how we can pay you fair fees for listening. Remember that most of this music has been and is being broadcast, so we are legally entitled to record that broadcast. Then go public with the information about how much of the money the artists get.
I don't even feel the least little bit bad about using Napster-like services. How else should I pre-listen to a recording that I'm thinking of buying? Wait for the radio to play it? Heck, if I do that, I can just record the broadcast and own a legal copy. It's up to the RIAA; if they want me to stop buying prerecorded music, it's fine with me.
It's nice that they have finally decided to go public with the information. I suspect that infertile (and same-sex) couples have been beating down the doors of genetics researchers for such attempts since the Scottish sheep announcement. There has probably already been clandestine attempts and maybe even a success.
But it all has to start somewhere. I don't see how it's possible to go from knowing that cloning is possible straight to what I see as the goal of the research, which is to be able to clone specific organs or whole blood. I think that you have to start by building a few whole bodies, since that's the simplest thing to do. If we can do so under the moniker of 'helping childless couples', fine, as long as the research gets done.
I don't think anyone wants to be the last person to die from failing to get an organ transplant. This research is vitally important, it has to start somewhere.
Yes, I know that the world is overpopulated. Genetic research may provide solutions to that, too, better food, more efficiency, trees that grow up to be houses, who knows?
I know that someone will probably try to 'engineer' a nine foot tall basketball hero. But, really, who is going to be able to get away with such nonsense in the media circus/infopocalypse we have today? Everyone can find out anything they want to know about anyone they want to research. Do you think that no one is going to notice when two short people have gigantic athlete offspring?
This is the world we live in. Morality will adjust itself to the concept of cloning soon since it's pro-survival. Our concepts of ethics are based on the continuation of our society, and ultimately cloning will benefit humanity.
Well, that's certainly true. I'd much rather have a nice, short program that did the same thing.
The point is, whether new or just updated, the lines of code edited per year has been dropping steadily. I think that this is because of the large number of newbie programmers flooding the marketplace, not only bringing the average down with their output but also by taking time away from the experts for trivialities.
When it comes down to it, the average productivity has dropped, no matter what scale you use. Propping up mediocrity, as all unions do, is more inappropriate for the tech industry because of the wide variance in productivity. Take the best UAW worker versus the worst, how much more productive is the shining star? ALmost not at all, they are on an assembly line, it goes a certain speed. Take an Alan Cox or some other genius versus the most clueless newbie, the productivity ratio is enormous.
Let's get rid of the unproductive programmers who will never amount to crap and get back to work.
There is a startling difference between the traditional laborer and the tech industry: The very best tech workers can be up to 100 times more productive than the average. There is no way in hell that a manual laborer could be even 2 times more productive than average, they are slowed down by physics and the other workers around them. Not true of tech workers, someone else's slowness is independent of your own speed.
Good programmers know that they can crank out thousands of lines of code in a day if the requirements are well defined. The industry average for lines of code per year dropped to 6500 from 9000 per programmer. Is this because the requirements aren't there? Probably in large measure, but in any case, the average productivity stinks. You elite programmers out there: doesn't the average year of output sound like a slow month?
I'm using this to conclude that we do not need a union for the tech industries. There is no need to try to protect the other half of the bell curve. They can get a job that they can handle, and stop trying to pretend that they are techies. If they want unions so bad, let them go make cars.
It doesn't necessarily imply mass transfer from a binary. Remember, this star has been flying through the galaxy for quite a while, and the galaxy is pretty far from empty. I imagine that it could stay hot just by accreting interstellar dust.
It could still be hot from the last time it smashed into a pre-space flight civilization's planet =-]
This Torino scale seems pretty strange. It needs to be two-dimensional. Damage vs. log(Likelyhood).
But now we have a new name for the release of windoze 2001 or the election of (insert dreaded politician's name): We'll just say '10 on the Torino scale'
Sounds good. More jargon that only geeks will understand...
Ya, I know, that's why I put the 'tongue sticking out smiley face'... "=-p"
There's gotta be a better emoticon for "look I'm making a joke"...
-40 in what? Farenheit or Celsius? Makes a big difference, you know... =-p
What is the purpose of this article? It's almost as bad as the polls, thousands of ameteur commedians trying to one-up each other. I'll have to admit that some of the posts have been funny, but wasn't there another purpose than insulting Canada?
Why worry about seeding the atmosphere of Mars with pollutants when it _still_ won't result in a human breathable atmosphere? We'd still have to live underground (or should, to keep away from the ultraviolet and cosmic radiation). Mars doesn't have a big moon, so the crust may not be as radioactive as Earth's (ref: Asimov's Robots and Empire). Living underground is about the only viable option, so who needs an atmosphere?
Then again, why don't we just put up a set of big mirrors in the Mercury-Venus trojan points and have them reflect sunlight at Mars? We could warm up the planet pretty quickly that way. Once the planet gets warmer, the fossil water and ice caps should melt and form a better atmosphere, making it warmer still through the greenouse effect. Sounds simpler than sending billions of tons of chemicals around the solar system.
Heck, we could even warm up Canada the same way! Or at least melt the Prime Minister's igloo...
"What other frontiers or environments are left for computers to work in?" How about the typical windoze office, none of the computers there seem to work at all.
Windoze enhanced security mode: shut off
I think that corporations and governments will be fairly easy to get away from considering that, like in Montana, it will be easy to move elsewhere. You'll probably need to have a self-sustaining pressurized home, who says that you will want to have it near everyone else's? When you have airlocks, you can keep pretty much anyone out just by latching open the inner door. By then we'll all be using secure communication channels, so there goes another privacy concern.
In short, I'm not too worried that the future colonists of Mars are going to worry about what some large, faceless, off-planet corporation thinks of what they do with their time.
How much does the fact that U-Haul sucks affect your life after you move? Do you think that the people that colonized North America worried much about the government or some companies back in Europe? I don't think that everyone will be working for some mega-corp and I do think that you'll have to post a bond for your return voyage before anyone will take you to another planet. Real colonization will probably wait for regularly scheduled voyages, if only to keep the barrier to entry low.
Yes but Humans can stand far lower atmospheric pressure than flies can, plus cold temperatures. All we have to do is either depressurize or freeze a compartment and all of the insects will die. Neither of those would be hard to do in space.
And no, Mr. dsfox, I'm not modest.
I'd like to move to Mars. Getting away from the government and megacorps would be good with me.
I think that most people wouldn't move no matter what. As Heinlein pointed out, most people in Pompeii knew that Vesuvius was rumbling and didn't leave town. Most would just die here.
Those of us who left would probably be the intelligent ones, so it may not be bad for OUR species. Can't say that it would help all of the other species much. I won't miss the flies.
But I don't think that Earth will become uninhabitable. Once the atmosphere starts killing people, there'll be less people to pollute it, so we'll have some negative feedback in the system.
But just in case, let's make sure that IPv6 has lots of addresses set aside for other planets =-]
You have to remember that XFS and JFS journal all data and metadata changes whereas ReiserFS and EXT3 only journal metadata. Thus, [XJ]FS protect your data from becoming corrupted where the others just help you boot faster after a crash (with respect to their journalling).
Ext3 can be used (once it's stable) on a preexisting Ext2 filesystem. The others cannot directly migrate from anything 'official'.
I like the ideas of all four. It may be that you want to have a combination of all of them in your system, but that would be pushing it.
I've used JFS a lot and it is really bulletproof if you set it up properly. It's heavily tied to the LVM in AIX, so I wouldn't expect much progress without LVM for Linux being a stable API. So, call it post 2.4.0 at least.
Lewinsky! It goes right to the center of things and sucks like a demon. Its emissions from its job of sucking are widely discussed and clearly visible on the fabric of the dress, er, I mean spacetime...
I'd also like to see some way of not only restoring the previous congif files, but restoring the whole old package. AIX has this feature; it can keep the entire old package around and if you decide that you don't like the new version, you can get rid of it.
We absolutely need to have a way to find the dependancies. RPM sucks in this regard. Telling me that I need libfoo without any way of telling me where to find said library is worse than useless. It should be a requirement to provide a URL for all of the non-standard libraries that your package depends upon. Yes, I realize that means we need to define what are standard packages. Perhaps a central repository to define libname <-> location.
I still think it would be convenient to have the packages install in their own, personal directory tree and set links to their exe's, libs and docs within the system directories.
While we're at it, let's get rid of GNU info files and go to HTML/SGML/XML documentation. Let's get rid of manpages in their current format while we're at it. We're long past the days when those independant formats are useful. Trying to explain to newbies that the help files might be man, info or only available through the help menu just makes them think that UNIX is confusing on purpose.