I also think the closed proprietary model of software development is wrong, but the same laws that uphold their proprietary licenses uphold my GPL and BSD licenses. If it is wrong for people to violate those licenses (and I think it is), then it is wrong to break a EULA from Microsquish or whomever.
Your conclusion does not follow from the premise. The GPL is not an EULA -- you do not have to agree to it to use the software. The GPL only depends on copyright law. The EULA's depend on contract law. Some think that existing contract law does not or should not permit EULA's.
Also, it is certainly possible to have a moral system where an EULA saying "You must not use this program to develop nerve gas" would be considered moral whereas an EULA saying "You must give me your firstborn child" would not.
electric? the amount of coal being burnt to charge your mower is more then if you were to just get a gas mower...
This is not something I will accept without references. Most gas mowers are extremely inefficient. It is rarely a parameter people care about when buying them. Also, a study in Denmark showed that a typical new gas mower pollutes more per hour than a typical new car (mixed driving, and excluding CO2 in both cases). A modern coal fired plant with filters should be way cleaner for the same amount of energy, except possibly for CO2.
...has decided to deploy an advanced warning system, due to the number of missiles coming from Earth that have been hitting or narrowly missing Mars in recent years. While planetary defenses have had a decent intercept rate, some of the missiles are still getting through. Hopefully the new early warning system will enable the Martian Space Defense to improve intercept rates considerably.
It depends what you count as Unix. I do not believe QNX has virtual memory, at least not in the sense of paging to disk, and I think QNX is POSIX compliant. In the beginning Unix swapped complete processes, not pages, and that is also not what would normally be called virtual memory.
So, because limitations in Linux' kernel design, Apache 2.0 is held back?
Actually it is the other way around. Linux has the smallest process creation and process switching overhead of any Unix with virtual memory. It is simply not possible for threads to be all that much faster than that. Apache 2 is optimizing something that simply was not all that expensive on Linux in the first place.
On cold, dark, windless winter days the combined heat-electric natural gas or biomass fired plants will be running at full capacity in order to heat people's homes. The electricity is almost free at those times. Denmark cannot shut those plants down anyway; it will always be necessary to have a way to heat the cities.
Denmark is flat. There is only one hydroelectric dam, and it is only run as a museum. Geothermal is a possibility, but so far it has proved to be a troublesome source of energy. Wind is plentiful in Denmark, and windmills are becoming relatively cheap.
If Denmark is to live up to its very aggressive emission targets in the Kyoto protocol, wind power is definitely the most cost effective solution to get there. (The 1990 reference year happens to be a year where most of the electricity came from Swedish and Norwegian hydro plants, and therefore the emission were very low. These days Denmark is a net exporter of electricity, so emissions will naturally be higher. Yet the target is 22% below the 1990 level.)
In a storm Denmarks combined heat-electricity plants are most likely running full tilt to heat homes anyway, so electricity at those times is mostly a byproduct. A quiet day is more of a problem, but right now there is spare capacity from coal and natural gas fired plants.
Assuming that the windmills produced 50% of the electricity on average, peak production would be significantly higher than total Danish consumption. Ideally this would be exported to Norway and Sweden who could then save the water in the reservoirs. They would reexport the energy on quiet days. Oh and they would make a healthy profit on the exchange, of course, due to the very volatile energy prices in that scenario.
There are economies of scale in windmills. Once you manage to get the technology right, building a windmill twice as large is not twice as expensive. This is why new windmills are generally at least 1MW, and 5MW mills are being designed.
Windmills in rough areas such as on buildings do not generate very much electricity. The wind is not even enough. They are also subject to large stresses from the turbulent flow, which reduces the lifetime. The site in the article has more details.
The entire thing that got me started, was a downloaded Slackware ISO from an unofficial mirror, that had the correct checksum, but was hopelessly corrupt due to transmission errors close to my side. There was enough change in the ISO that by fluke chance, the MD5 checksum was identical. That is already a 512 bit checksum that was defeated, albeit in-advertantly.
The MD5 checksum is 128 bit, not 512 bit. Weaknesses have been shows in it, but so far noone has been able to produce two files with the same MD5 checksum. If you have the corrupted ISO with the same checksum, you have the chance to become famous. Until I see proof I will remain rather sceptical.
Oh and about the 384 bit checksum made from a 512 bit checksum, yes of course the 384 bit checksum is weaker. Otherwise people would use it all the time. There is no reason to think that it is any weaker than a checksum giving 384 bit directly, though. It is believed that if you chop off half of the output bits of SHA-160 (the old SHA) you will have an 80-bit checksum with no weaknesses except for brute force.
One of the arguments I have heard for choosing PIX is that it is a "hardware firewall" and therefore presumably more reliable, faster, and less likely to break. Perhaps this will make more people realize that the PIX is just a piece of software running on a PC -- just like almost all other firewalls in the market.
Such taxes are common elsewhere, perhaps Australia has them too. The neat thing is that the tax is then usually given to private companies. I just love supporting corporations with my tax money, getting nothing in return.
The Linux Standard Base mandates that all compliant distributions must be able to install software that comes as an RPM. There is more information here. RPM's are universal.
I sure hope that average US homes use less than 2kW on average. According to a Danish power company a typical Danish family living in a house uses between 4000 and 5000 kWh a year, which should come to an average of something like 450 to 550W. Admittedly Danish homes rarely have air conditioning. (According to the same link, a Danish family living in an apartment typically uses between 2000 and 2500 kWh a year, 230 to 280W average.)
No. The answer is easy because the only reasonable way to connect high speed to a standard PC is via the standard 33MHz 32-bit PCI bus. That is 1056Mbps theoretically, but you'll be lucky to see 900Mbps in practice. Therefore an average PC can almost utilize the speed of gigabit ether. 10 gigabit is out of the question.
The solution is to go to PCI-X which is a 64-bit 133MHz bus in version 1. Even then, the theoretical bandwidth of ~8Gbps cannot saturate 10Gbps ether. PCI-X version 2.0 will provide 266MHz and 533MHz speeds, but whether that ever shows up in a standard PC is doubtful.
Is it time for the BIOS to go the way of the BASIC interpreter provided in the original PC ROMS?
The trend is in the opposite direction. Things like ACPI have made the BIOS code vastly larger and more complex. This is especially troubling for Linux, since the testing of a BIOS seems to be "Does it boot Windows?" "Most of the time" "Ship it!". Other vendors have taken to putting switches in the BIOS setup where the users pick a BIOS that is suited for the particular OS they intend to use.
There has been long debates on the linux-kernel list of whether ACPI should be used by Linux. Using it the way it was intended means calling into BIOS code quite often. Since it seems no vendor has managed to produce an ACPI-implementation that is both reasonably bug-free and reasonably complete, there are worries stability and security. Imagine a backdoor in an ACPI BIOS... The shipping Linux kernel uses ACPI as little as possible, but it is not clear that it can be avoided forever.
The only thing about the BIOS that might go away is the name. It isn't really basic or about I/O anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do everyone think the guy got 33 years and not 33 months?
Your conclusion does not follow from the premise. The GPL is not an EULA -- you do not have to agree to it to use the software. The GPL only depends on copyright law. The EULA's depend on contract law. Some think that existing contract law does not or should not permit EULA's.
Also, it is certainly possible to have a moral system where an EULA saying "You must not use this program to develop nerve gas" would be considered moral whereas an EULA saying "You must give me your firstborn child" would not.
This is not something I will accept without references. Most gas mowers are extremely inefficient. It is rarely a parameter people care about when buying them. Also, a study in Denmark showed that a typical new gas mower pollutes more per hour than a typical new car (mixed driving, and excluding CO2 in both cases). A modern coal fired plant with filters should be way cleaner for the same amount of energy, except possibly for CO2.
...has decided to deploy an advanced warning system, due to the number of missiles coming from Earth that have been hitting or narrowly missing Mars in recent years. While planetary defenses have had a decent intercept rate, some of the missiles are still getting through. Hopefully the new early warning system will enable the Martian Space Defense to improve intercept rates considerably.
It depends what you count as Unix. I do not believe QNX has virtual memory, at least not in the sense of paging to disk, and I think QNX is POSIX compliant. In the beginning Unix swapped complete processes, not pages, and that is also not what would normally be called virtual memory.
Actually it is the other way around. Linux has the smallest process creation and process switching overhead of any Unix with virtual memory. It is simply not possible for threads to be all that much faster than that. Apache 2 is optimizing something that simply was not all that expensive on Linux in the first place.
On cold, dark, windless winter days the combined heat-electric natural gas or biomass fired plants will be running at full capacity in order to heat people's homes. The electricity is almost free at those times. Denmark cannot shut those plants down anyway; it will always be necessary to have a way to heat the cities.
Denmark is flat. There is only one hydroelectric dam, and it is only run as a museum. Geothermal is a possibility, but so far it has proved to be a troublesome source of energy. Wind is plentiful in Denmark, and windmills are becoming relatively cheap.
If Denmark is to live up to its very aggressive emission targets in the Kyoto protocol, wind power is definitely the most cost effective solution to get there. (The 1990 reference year happens to be a year where most of the electricity came from Swedish and Norwegian hydro plants, and therefore the emission were very low. These days Denmark is a net exporter of electricity, so emissions will naturally be higher. Yet the target is 22% below the 1990 level.)
In a storm Denmarks combined heat-electricity plants are most likely running full tilt to heat homes anyway, so electricity at those times is mostly a byproduct. A quiet day is more of a problem, but right now there is spare capacity from coal and natural gas fired plants.
Assuming that the windmills produced 50% of the electricity on average, peak production would be significantly higher than total Danish consumption. Ideally this would be exported to Norway and Sweden who could then save the water in the reservoirs. They would reexport the energy on quiet days. Oh and they would make a healthy profit on the exchange, of course, due to the very volatile energy prices in that scenario.
There are economies of scale in windmills. Once you manage to get the technology right, building a windmill twice as large is not twice as expensive. This is why new windmills are generally at least 1MW, and 5MW mills are being designed.
Windmills in rough areas such as on buildings do not generate very much electricity. The wind is not even enough. They are also subject to large stresses from the turbulent flow, which reduces the lifetime. The site in the article has more details.
This should set you straight. Australia is not twice as large as Europe. It is, in fact, smaller than Europe.
The MD5 checksum is 128 bit, not 512 bit. Weaknesses have been shows in it, but so far noone has been able to produce two files with the same MD5 checksum. If you have the corrupted ISO with the same checksum, you have the chance to become famous. Until I see proof I will remain rather sceptical.
Oh and about the 384 bit checksum made from a 512 bit checksum, yes of course the 384 bit checksum is weaker. Otherwise people would use it all the time. There is no reason to think that it is any weaker than a checksum giving 384 bit directly, though. It is believed that if you chop off half of the output bits of SHA-160 (the old SHA) you will have an 80-bit checksum with no weaknesses except for brute force.
So far it seems to me they were right. A serious punishment does not seem to be in the cards currently.
One of the arguments I have heard for choosing PIX is that it is a "hardware firewall" and therefore presumably more reliable, faster, and less likely to break. Perhaps this will make more people realize that the PIX is just a piece of software running on a PC -- just like almost all other firewalls in the market.
How much heat do you get from C6H12O6 + 6O => 12H + 6CO2? And what is the molecular mass of C6H12O6?
Such taxes are common elsewhere, perhaps Australia has them too. The neat thing is that the tax is then usually given to private companies. I just love supporting corporations with my tax money, getting nothing in return.
The Linux Standard Base mandates that all compliant distributions must be able to install software that comes as an RPM. There is more information here. RPM's are universal.
I sure hope that average US homes use less than 2kW on average. According to a Danish power company a typical Danish family living in a house uses between 4000 and 5000 kWh a year, which should come to an average of something like 450 to 550W. Admittedly Danish homes rarely have air conditioning. (According to the same link, a Danish family living in an apartment typically uses between 2000 and 2500 kWh a year, 230 to 280W average.)
...and I still hear people calling for the open sourcing of WordPerfect. How many office suites do we need?
If you put a 200W light source in, the room will be heated by 200W. Unless it has lots of windows to let the light out, but that seems unlikely.
According to Internet Traffic Report the router defra229-tc.ebone.ne is not responding. Several other KPNQwest/Ebone routers are still up though.
No. The answer is easy because the only reasonable way to connect high speed to a standard PC is via the standard 33MHz 32-bit PCI bus. That is 1056Mbps theoretically, but you'll be lucky to see 900Mbps in practice. Therefore an average PC can almost utilize the speed of gigabit ether. 10 gigabit is out of the question.
The solution is to go to PCI-X which is a 64-bit 133MHz bus in version 1. Even then, the theoretical bandwidth of ~8Gbps cannot saturate 10Gbps ether. PCI-X version 2.0 will provide 266MHz and 533MHz speeds, but whether that ever shows up in a standard PC is doubtful.
There has been long debates on the linux-kernel list of whether ACPI should be used by Linux. Using it the way it was intended means calling into BIOS code quite often. Since it seems no vendor has managed to produce an ACPI-implementation that is both reasonably bug-free and reasonably complete, there are worries stability and security. Imagine a backdoor in an ACPI BIOS... The shipping Linux kernel uses ACPI as little as possible, but it is not clear that it can be avoided forever.
The only thing about the BIOS that might go away is the name. It isn't really basic or about I/O anymore.
...wouldnt know QA if it hit them on the head with a mallet...