If massive oil deposits are found in Antarctica, I'm sure the U.N. would take over and run an efficent oil program and share it's wealth equally among it's member countries. We all know how well the U.N. runs oil programs.
http://www.cbn.com/CBNNews/News/040513a.asp
I think space is big enough for private and public and whoever else wants to put a space station up. Any planetary ventures will probably be conducted jointly by the ESA, NASA, China and the like, especially when Bush increases mandates on NASA then cuts their budget.
You get problems in places like Chicago, where boxes of ballots end up in the river or stashed in closets. Then there's one of my favorite Saturday Night Live skits (a late-night comedy show here in the US) where Jimmy Carter goes to a third world country to "Monitor" votes. There's a cardboard box on a table where people deposit their votes, underneath they fall into a fire where a man is cooking a chicken. Pretty funny.
IMHO in the ideal system, there are big buttons with the candidates names on them. You push the buttons for the candidates you want. The button lights up. You can't push another button in the same category, unless you deselect the person you voted for by pressing their button again. When you're done, you pull a lever and your votes are instantly sent to a central tally machine over a dedicated hard line (with strong encryption) The results are then printed on a ticker-tape behind glass so you can review them, when you're done the ticker-tape scrolls up so the next person cannot read it. Fairly simple, except for the encrypted link which will need some custom hardware.
The problem is, converting from one lossy compression format to another equals BIG loss in quality. Perceptual encoding, which both ATRAC and MP3 use, depends on a clean incoming signal. The compression, when played back, introduces artifacts that show up as harmonic distortion. When you use another perceptual encoder to compress THAT file, the harmonic distortion is re-encoded and amplified. It ends up sounding anywhere from annoyingly bad to unlistenable.
I think Sony, as a mega-meda-electronics conglomerate, wants to protect it's music business, so uses it's own propriatary format to make sure it can do DRM or whatever other controls it wants.
They can change UNIXWare to BOB, and OpenServer to NewtonOS.
Then they can change all their employee's first names to John, ala Buckaroo Bonzai. Darl kind of reminds me of Lord John Whorfin. "Laugh while you can, monkey boy!"
Make the core filesystem small, robust and fast. Journalling, realtime and not much else. Make add-on modules for fancy things like ACL's, quota, compression, encryption, compatability, extended attributes, etc... Put in shims for calling attributes from a database (db or SQL or whatever)
XFS comes close, ReiserFS 4 is nice, too. The most important thing is keeping the base filesystem simple and FAST. You think NTFS is fast? Try deleting a complete Cygwin install (>30K files) It takes AGES, even from the command prompt. I've deleted 15K files (That's 15 THOUSAND files) on Reiser 3 on the same machine, it took a few seconds.
DO NOT make a database driven filesystem. Some day we will have a true, document based desktop paradigm (OpenDoc anyone?) but probably not for several years, until then we need SPEED.
Just look at the statistics in the table, Windows is in more PDA's and Cell Phones, Linux is in more Robots. What's cooler, a PDA or a Robot? A PDA keeps track of your phone numbers, a robot will push you down the stairs. Linux wins again!
Let's see, Green Hills Software makes closed, embedded operating systems. Direct competition with uLinux, RTlinux and eCos. Self-serving comments? Couldn't be.
'Sides, is the army really worried their HP print server will send out copies to an outside IP? I'm assuming they have better security then that. Maybe I could be mistaken...
Entec case fans, Swiftech water cooling with dual radiators, Thermaltake fanless PSU, PC Power bay coolers, the works! Lian-Li designed the case to the BTX standard, and the radiation-hardened 486 is overclocked to 100MHz! All they need now is the NASA case badge...
Actually it would be kind of funny, an army of Mr. T's! Gold chains and all. Not necessarily Orcs, just a bunch of really badass clones. George Peppard could be saurmon. "Face" would be wormtounge. They all get together and trick out horse carriges into war machines.
If Mr. T as an army of Orcs is racist then "Macho Man" Randy Savage would work, too.
Anything Brin writes is automatically posted now? I'm from the same age, I get the casting choices, and I don't think it's funny. It's not that it's insulting or too crazy or anything, just not funny.
1. Integration with GnuPG and/or PGP. Yes I know of engimail, I think it's essential enough it should be built-in.
2. Integration with Jabber. IM + Email would be cool. I like how Windows Messenger does this, but with Thunderbird it would actually be secure:)
3. Better LDAP integration. Current LDAP implementation is kludgy, I wish they would make it smoother.
4. Fix the calendar app. It's nice, but could be a whole lot nicer. The original Netscape calendar app wasn't bad, I much prefer it over Outlook.
5. Import/Export filters. There are third party filters already, it would be nice if they were built in. Import.mbox, maildirs, Outlook PST, Outlook Express directories, Eudora, MacOS Mail.app, etc...
6. How about a text mode interface for uberhackers? It could be really lightweight, just ctrl- to go back and forth, ctrl-r to reply, etc...
That's it. It shouldn't add too much bloat, the basic Jabber protocol is small and GnuPG integration should be cake. Any other ideas?
People are apathetic because it's to be expected. Every day you hear of government waste and fraud, especially from the federal branches, and there isn't much you can do about it. Most of these agencies are executive branch, whose directors and secretaries are appointed by the president, usually as favors for his political constituents. There is really no oversight. Congress doesn't bother, especially when it takes a quarter of the session to pass a phonebook sized budget.
The best/worst example of mismanagement is the Bureau of Indian/Native American affairs. They've *lost* billions of dollars earmarked for Native Americans, from oil drilling and logging done on their lands. That's right, they've LOST it. Noone seems to care. I heard that Bush was going to do something about it before the whole war on terror thing started, but I guess he's been to busy since then.
If you think electing a new Democratican or Republican president will change things, you're wrong.
With the availability of cheap, huge drives, I'd do a RAID 1 of two big drives. This would be fine for a personal file server. For personal use I wouldn't worry too much about performance, I'd worry more about data integrity/security. Modern hard drive throughput can flood a 100Mbs, or even a 1000Mbs network with no problems.
Here's an interesting review of chipset-based RAID solutions. RAID performance isn't always what you think.... http://tech-report.com/reviews/2004q2/c hipset-raid/index.x?pg=1
First step is letting neophytes know what is out there. There are loads of different distributions, applications and desktops, and it's difficult for new users to figure out what they want.
What would be helpful is a site like Freshmeat, but set up for new users, ideally like a software store. You could look for apps under various headings, and install them by clicking a link. Maybe a Mozilla plugin that autodetects what OS you're running on and grabs the appropriate rpm/deb/ebuild/whatever. Ximian has something like this, as does Lindows, I think. But it needs to be even easier to use than their systems.
While we're wishing, how about a consistant interface for help? Base it on XML (Docbook?) and make it possible to import info and man pages, and make it auto-update from the net with bugfixes, changes, and news. I really like the old Microsoft help format, about Win98 vintage, not HTML help yet but it could display HTML and had a nice contents page and tree-style index. Hmm, time to start coding...
Put a couple larger models to tag along outside the Shuttle, or Mir, and tie them into shipboard millimeter RADAR. They can manouvre in between the ship and/or shuttle and absorb/deflect any micrometeors that fly by. They can double as outboard cameras to monitor the station (ala satellite of love:) or redundant comms relays. If there's too much intertia a few ounces of shaped-charge high explosives goes a long way.
I wonder if this would make it into the kernel configuration, similar to low-latency patches now. Have a nice switch in menuconfig/xconfig to put graphics/sound/UI modules into the kernel and running as kernel processes, similar to AGP/DRI support now. Maybe even a kernel configuration giving certain kernel calls and userspace programs priority over others so updatedb doesn't hammer my machine when I'm playing Quake.
I've heard rumors of making parts of Bochs a kernel module for accelerating WINE. Then there's Tux...
Someone a bit down wants to drop the "." bit. I think it should be used to make the Z in ZORG hard, so you say it with a gutteral, German burst. "TS-OR-GH!":)
XFree86.org changes a few words in their license, and within four months almost every major Linux distribution and BSD has dumped it. How much longer does it have left? I'd guess by the end of the year the team will be disbanded as the independant OSS people move to x.org. Oh well, I never like the name XFree86, especially after it was ported to other architectures (XFree68? XFreePPC?:)
>It also runs enforcement and regulation for our >radio frequencies and guards against things such >as harmful interference, stepping in with action >when needed.
Talking to a bunch of radio and cell phone tower guys a few weeks ago, their main complaint is the FCC does NOTHING about interference, especially if you're a "Little guy" and the interferrer is from a "Big guy" Even after one of the broadcasters took measurements themselves and sent them to the FCC filing a formal complaint, they did NOTHING. SQUAT. Their response was "We're looking into it." They "Looked into it" for about a year and did nothing. I've heard this is commonplace, it's up to the broadcaster to seek remedy in civil court.
>Furthermore, the FCC guards our markets and >prevents monopolies from snatching up too much of >a particular spectrum, service, or market.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Sorry, not happening. In fact, FCC rules usually protect monopolies, usually for the excuse of "Stability"
>Also, the FCC does already regulates our spectrum >based upon our monopoly laws. Which other >government agency would handle this for us?
Did you read the article? If the EM spectrum was sold off, it's value would run into the trillions of dollars. No single, or group of companies has the capital to buy it all. The SEC is capable of smacking monopolies around, although they did a typically government-awful job of fixing Microsoft.
The main problem, as I see it, is the FCC's job is a very complicated and technical one. Congress passes new guidelines the FCC is supposed to enforce. The president fills the cushy post with a political appointee (What qualifications does Michael Powell have to run a communications regulation agency? He used to work for an anti-trust law firm in DC, but his Bio doesn't say he passed the bar anywhere) You get politicians trying to force political solutions to technical problems. That almost never works, politics and engineering are always ugly together.
I remember an old episode of Beyond 2000 (http://www.techtv.com/beyond2000/ , but the old Australian version) where they showed an anti-noise system that would fit into a car's exhaust system. Microphones would pick up the noise from the exhaust manifold, a DSP would generate the appropriate "Anti-noise" then subwoofers would inject the Anti-noise sound into a specially designed muffler. The demonstration would drive a big V8 Holden muscle car around, clicking the noise reduction in and out. Without it sounded like, well, a muscle car. With noise cancellation it sounded like a Rolls Royce, that is, you didn't really hear the exhaust at all, just tires rolling on pavement and wind. Really cool, but probably too expensive to implement in most consumer vehicles:(
My house is sheltered from the street by a thick strand of trees and planters. Hopefully the federales will use this information to keep out of my impatiens when they storm my house.
1. Republicans are for less government. Regan authorized spending on an A$$LOAD of money in the 80's. Remember, Congress spends money, the President just authorizes it. Heck, just about every Republican president in the last 30 years spent more money than the last.
2. Democrats are for corporate responsibility Except for those companies who pay their bills. The Pirate Act is sponsored by Patrick Leahy (D. VT)
It's simple, if you want less government control: http://www.lp.org/
If you want more, http://www.gp.org/ http://sp-usa.org/ (To ns more. Lots of people like government regulation it seems. Sigh.)
1. Stealing is illegal If the argument for the proposed law is that sharing files is stealing, that is already covered by current law.
2. Piracy is illegal If the argument for the proposed law is that sharing files is pirating them, that is already covered by current law.
3. New crime If sharing is neither piracy or stealing, it is a new crime and new law must be written. However, the crime being perpetrated only hurts one entity, whomever owns the copyright on the file being shared. It's not really a crime, however, it's just a violation of that entity's copyright. Violating copyright is NOT a federal offence, to the best of my knowledge, and should not be otherwise. It would be akin to violating a EULA a federal crime. "You tried to benchmark the.Net framework against the terms of your EULA! JAIL FOR YOU!"
Hope that clears things up. I guess I made too many assumptions about the semantic connectedness of my statements. I'll post a Visio diagram if anyone needs more clarification:)
Just what we need. The DOJ must have TONS of resources left over from finding terrorists, rapists, murderers, drug smuggling rings, human smuggling rings, organized crime, white-collar fraud, embezzlers, etc... etc...
This should *clearly* be left a civil matter. Stealing is already illegal. Piracy is already illegal. It should NOT be a federal offence to share a file, even if it is copyrighted. There are plenty of civil remidies for copyright holders already.
From causal perusal, and IANAL, at least 30% of the US code should be ditched. There's a lot of redundant, unenforcable bloatlaw in there.
Slashdot Mirror
If massive oil deposits are found in Antarctica, I'm sure the U.N. would take over and run an efficent oil program and share it's wealth equally among it's member countries. We all know how well the U.N. runs oil programs.
http://www.cbn.com/CBNNews/News/040513a.asp
I think space is big enough for private and public and whoever else wants to put a space station up. Any planetary ventures will probably be conducted jointly by the ESA, NASA, China and the like, especially when Bush increases mandates on NASA then cuts their budget.
You get problems in places like Chicago, where boxes of ballots end up in the river or stashed in closets. Then there's one of my favorite Saturday Night Live skits (a late-night comedy show here in the US) where Jimmy Carter goes to a third world country to "Monitor" votes. There's a cardboard box on a table where people deposit their votes, underneath they fall into a fire where a man is cooking a chicken. Pretty funny.
IMHO in the ideal system, there are big buttons with the candidates names on them. You push the buttons for the candidates you want. The button lights up. You can't push another button in the same category, unless you deselect the person you voted for by pressing their button again. When you're done, you pull a lever and your votes are instantly sent to a central tally machine over a dedicated hard line (with strong encryption) The results are then printed on a ticker-tape behind glass so you can review them, when you're done the ticker-tape scrolls up so the next person cannot read it. Fairly simple, except for the encrypted link which will need some custom hardware.
The problem is, converting from one lossy compression format to another equals BIG loss in quality. Perceptual encoding, which both ATRAC and MP3 use, depends on a clean incoming signal. The compression, when played back, introduces artifacts that show up as harmonic distortion. When you use another perceptual encoder to compress THAT file, the harmonic distortion is re-encoded and amplified. It ends up sounding anywhere from annoyingly bad to unlistenable.
I think Sony, as a mega-meda-electronics conglomerate, wants to protect it's music business, so uses it's own propriatary format to make sure it can do DRM or whatever other controls it wants.
They can change UNIXWare to BOB, and OpenServer to NewtonOS.
Then they can change all their employee's first names to John, ala Buckaroo Bonzai. Darl kind of reminds me of Lord John Whorfin. "Laugh while you can, monkey boy!"
Make the core filesystem small, robust and fast. Journalling, realtime and not much else. Make add-on modules for fancy things like ACL's, quota, compression, encryption, compatability, extended attributes, etc... Put in shims for calling attributes from a database (db or SQL or whatever)
XFS comes close, ReiserFS 4 is nice, too. The most important thing is keeping the base filesystem simple and FAST. You think NTFS is fast? Try deleting a complete Cygwin install (>30K files) It takes AGES, even from the command prompt. I've deleted 15K files (That's 15 THOUSAND files) on Reiser 3 on the same machine, it took a few seconds.
DO NOT make a database driven filesystem. Some day we will have a true, document based desktop paradigm (OpenDoc anyone?) but probably not for several years, until then we need SPEED.
Just look at the statistics in the table, Windows is in more PDA's and Cell Phones, Linux is in more Robots. What's cooler, a PDA or a Robot? A PDA keeps track of your phone numbers, a robot will push you down the stairs. Linux wins again!
Let's see, Green Hills Software makes closed, embedded operating systems. Direct competition with uLinux, RTlinux and eCos. Self-serving comments? Couldn't be.
'Sides, is the army really worried their HP print server will send out copies to an outside IP? I'm assuming they have better security then that. Maybe I could be mistaken...
Entec case fans, Swiftech water cooling with dual radiators, Thermaltake fanless PSU, PC Power bay coolers, the works! Lian-Li designed the case to the BTX standard, and the radiation-hardened 486 is overclocked to 100MHz! All they need now is the NASA case badge...
Actually it would be kind of funny, an army of Mr. T's! Gold chains and all. Not necessarily Orcs, just a bunch of really badass clones. George Peppard could be saurmon. "Face" would be wormtounge. They all get together and trick out horse carriges into war machines.
If Mr. T as an army of Orcs is racist then "Macho Man" Randy Savage would work, too.
Anything Brin writes is automatically posted now? I'm from the same age, I get the casting choices, and I don't think it's funny. It's not that it's insulting or too crazy or anything, just not funny.
It may already be copyrighted, however I don't think it will apply in non-governmental areas of the world.
d uc ed/icestationzero.shtml
http://www.yojoe.com/action/other/extreme/unpro
1. Integration with GnuPG and/or PGP. Yes I know of engimail, I think it's essential enough it should be built-in.
:)
.mbox, maildirs, Outlook PST, Outlook Express directories, Eudora, MacOS Mail.app, etc...
2. Integration with Jabber. IM + Email would be cool. I like how Windows Messenger does this, but with Thunderbird it would actually be secure
3. Better LDAP integration. Current LDAP implementation is kludgy, I wish they would make it smoother.
4. Fix the calendar app. It's nice, but could be a whole lot nicer. The original Netscape calendar app wasn't bad, I much prefer it over Outlook.
5. Import/Export filters. There are third party filters already, it would be nice if they were built in. Import
6. How about a text mode interface for uberhackers? It could be really lightweight, just ctrl- to go back and forth, ctrl-r to reply, etc...
That's it. It shouldn't add too much bloat, the basic Jabber protocol is small and GnuPG integration should be cake. Any other ideas?
People are apathetic because it's to be expected. Every day you hear of government waste and fraud, especially from the federal branches, and there isn't much you can do about it. Most of these agencies are executive branch, whose directors and secretaries are appointed by the president, usually as favors for his political constituents. There is really no oversight. Congress doesn't bother, especially when it takes a quarter of the session to pass a phonebook sized budget.
The best/worst example of mismanagement is the Bureau of Indian/Native American affairs. They've *lost* billions of dollars earmarked for Native Americans, from oil drilling and logging done on their lands. That's right, they've LOST it. Noone seems to care. I heard that Bush was going to do something about it before the whole war on terror thing started, but I guess he's been to busy since then.
If you think electing a new Democratican or Republican president will change things, you're wrong.
With the availability of cheap, huge drives, I'd do a RAID 1 of two big drives. This would be fine for a personal file server. For personal use I wouldn't worry too much about performance, I'd worry more about data integrity/security. Modern hard drive throughput can flood a 100Mbs, or even a 1000Mbs network with no problems.
c hipset-raid /index.x?pg=1
Here's an interesting review of chipset-based RAID solutions. RAID performance isn't always what you think....
http://tech-report.com/reviews/2004q2/
First step is letting neophytes know what is out there. There are loads of different distributions, applications and desktops, and it's difficult for new users to figure out what they want.
What would be helpful is a site like Freshmeat, but set up for new users, ideally like a software store. You could look for apps under various headings, and install them by clicking a link. Maybe a Mozilla plugin that autodetects what OS you're running on and grabs the appropriate rpm/deb/ebuild/whatever. Ximian has something like this, as does Lindows, I think. But it needs to be even easier to use than their systems.
While we're wishing, how about a consistant interface for help? Base it on XML (Docbook?) and make it possible to import info and man pages, and make it auto-update from the net with bugfixes, changes, and news. I really like the old Microsoft help format, about Win98 vintage, not HTML help yet but it could display HTML and had a nice contents page and tree-style index. Hmm, time to start coding...
Put a couple larger models to tag along outside the Shuttle, or Mir, and tie them into shipboard millimeter RADAR. They can manouvre in between the ship and/or shuttle and absorb/deflect any micrometeors that fly by. They can double as outboard cameras to monitor the station (ala satellite of love :) or redundant comms relays. If there's too much intertia a few ounces of shaped-charge high explosives goes a long way.
I wonder if this would make it into the kernel configuration, similar to low-latency patches now. Have a nice switch in menuconfig/xconfig to put graphics/sound/UI modules into the kernel and running as kernel processes, similar to AGP/DRI support now. Maybe even a kernel configuration giving certain kernel calls and userspace programs priority over others so updatedb doesn't hammer my machine when I'm playing Quake.
I've heard rumors of making parts of Bochs a kernel module for accelerating WINE. Then there's Tux...
Someone a bit down wants to drop the "." bit. I think it should be used to make the Z in ZORG hard, so you say it with a gutteral, German burst. "TS-OR-GH!" :)
XFree86.org changes a few words in their license, and within four months almost every major Linux distribution and BSD has dumped it. How much longer does it have left? I'd guess by the end of the year the team will be disbanded as the independant OSS people move to x.org. Oh well, I never like the name XFree86, especially after it was ported to other architectures (XFree68? XFreePPC? :)
>It also runs enforcement and regulation for our
>radio frequencies and guards against things such
>as harmful interference, stepping in with action >when needed.
Talking to a bunch of radio and cell phone tower guys a few weeks ago, their main complaint is the FCC does NOTHING about interference, especially if you're a "Little guy" and the interferrer is from a "Big guy" Even after one of the broadcasters took measurements themselves and sent them to the FCC filing a formal complaint, they did NOTHING. SQUAT. Their response was "We're looking into it." They "Looked into it" for about a year and did nothing. I've heard this is commonplace, it's up to the broadcaster to seek remedy in civil court.
>Furthermore, the FCC guards our markets and
>prevents monopolies from snatching up too much of
>a particular spectrum, service, or market.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Sorry, not happening. In fact, FCC rules usually protect monopolies, usually for the excuse of "Stability"
>Also, the FCC does already regulates our spectrum >based upon our monopoly laws. Which other
>government agency would handle this for us?
Did you read the article? If the EM spectrum was sold off, it's value would run into the trillions of dollars. No single, or group of companies has the capital to buy it all. The SEC is capable of smacking monopolies around, although they did a typically government-awful job of fixing Microsoft.
The main problem, as I see it, is the FCC's job is a very complicated and technical one. Congress passes new guidelines the FCC is supposed to enforce. The president fills the cushy post with a political appointee (What qualifications does Michael Powell have to run a communications regulation agency? He used to work for an anti-trust law firm in DC, but his Bio doesn't say he passed the bar anywhere) You get politicians trying to force political solutions to technical problems. That almost never works, politics and engineering are always ugly together.
I remember an old episode of Beyond 2000 (http://www.techtv.com/beyond2000/ , but the old Australian version) where they showed an anti-noise system that would fit into a car's exhaust system. Microphones would pick up the noise from the exhaust manifold, a DSP would generate the appropriate "Anti-noise" then subwoofers would inject the Anti-noise sound into a specially designed muffler. The demonstration would drive a big V8 Holden muscle car around, clicking the noise reduction in and out. Without it sounded like, well, a muscle car. With noise cancellation it sounded like a Rolls Royce, that is, you didn't really hear the exhaust at all, just tires rolling on pavement and wind. Really cool, but probably too expensive to implement in most consumer vehicles :(
My house is sheltered from the street by a thick strand of trees and planters. Hopefully the federales will use this information to keep out of my impatiens when they storm my house.
False Assumptions:
o ns more. Lots of people like government regulation it seems. Sigh.)
1. Republicans are for less government.
Regan authorized spending on an A$$LOAD of money in the 80's. Remember, Congress spends money, the President just authorizes it. Heck, just about every Republican president in the last 30 years spent more money than the last.
2. Democrats are for corporate responsibility
Except for those companies who pay their bills. The Pirate Act is sponsored by Patrick Leahy (D. VT)
It's simple, if you want less government control:
http://www.lp.org/
If you want more,
http://www.gp.org/
http://sp-usa.org/
(T
1. Stealing is illegal
.Net framework against the terms of your EULA! JAIL FOR YOU!"
:)
If the argument for the proposed law is that sharing files is stealing, that is already covered by current law.
2. Piracy is illegal
If the argument for the proposed law is that sharing files is pirating them, that is already covered by current law.
3. New crime
If sharing is neither piracy or stealing, it is a new crime and new law must be written. However, the crime being perpetrated only hurts one entity, whomever owns the copyright on the file being shared. It's not really a crime, however, it's just a violation of that entity's copyright. Violating copyright is NOT a federal offence, to the best of my knowledge, and should not be otherwise. It would be akin to violating a EULA a federal crime. "You tried to benchmark the
Hope that clears things up. I guess I made too many assumptions about the semantic connectedness of my statements. I'll post a Visio diagram if anyone needs more clarification
Just what we need. The DOJ must have TONS of resources left over from finding terrorists, rapists, murderers, drug smuggling rings, human smuggling rings, organized crime, white-collar fraud, embezzlers, etc... etc...
This should *clearly* be left a civil matter. Stealing is already illegal. Piracy is already illegal. It should NOT be a federal offence to share a file, even if it is copyrighted. There are plenty of civil remidies for copyright holders already.
From causal perusal, and IANAL, at least 30% of the US code should be ditched. There's a lot of redundant, unenforcable bloatlaw in there.