"bombshell", "complete disarray", "bleak future", "river of blood", "endangered", "abysmal", "corpse", "charnel house", "dim", "decay", "Nothing short of a miracle could save it"
so, um, how do you like its chances?
p.s. -- nothing wrong with that parrot, it's just sleeping.
Maybe her back hurts, and standing just feels better. Or maybe she just decided that standing up gives her a better view. Or maybe she simply likes all the attention it's bringing her.
"Senate judiciary staff are eager to get the legislation moving because they are worried that a federal appeals court in California will uphold an April 2003 court decision that did not hold peer-to-peer companies liable for their users' copyright infringement. The so-called Grokster case was argued before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in February, and a decision is expected soon."
I'm puzzled. Even if the court rules favorably to p2p before the bill is passed, why would that prevent the bill from passing (and being enforced) later? After all, courts didn't prevent the US from zig-zagging on issues like Prohibition, slavery, womens' suffrage, etc.
"Who in their right mind would want to hack into the democratic convention? The only ones I can think of are Republicans, and we all know they never do anything illegal like that..."
They only need to say that it's part of a terrorism investigation, and then the carrier is required to let them snoop the wired network, and the carrier is prohibited from revealing the snooping -- EVER, even long after the fact -- and, oh yeah, I forgot to mention, no judge or warrant required.
They don't have to do it illegally, just invisibly.
And it's four years old. http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid= 7170
"LinuxBIOS runs on a wide range of platforms. Fifty supported motherboards are in the source tree, but we have found that many motherboards are so similar that a LinuxBIOS for one motherboard can work on another. Companies build code for one motherboard, run it on another motherboard and do not always get around to telling us.
LinuxBIOS works on 64-bit and 32-bit CPUs. CPUs supported include the Alpha, K8, K7, PowerPC, P4, PIII, PII, Cyrix (VIA), Geode (now AMD) and SC520 (AMD). Chipsets are too numerous to list. Form factors of mainboards range from the smallest PC/104 systems to the largest K8 systems. An IBM PPC 970 port is in progress.
Chipset Secrets
One of the most common phrases we heard from chip vendors in the first few years was "we'll never tell you that." "That" being CPU information, chipset information, motherboard information or any combination of the three. The designs for these three systems constitute highly guarded secrets. It seems amazing, even now, that vendors are able to let us build a GPLed BIOS that by its nature exposes some of these secrets.
How was it possible for us to get this type of information? Simple, businesses are not charities. If there is no business case for releasing this information to us, they do not do it. If, however, there is a business case, then it happens--sometimes with astonishing speed.
From what we can see, the two factors in our success were competition and the creation of a market. Competition gave us a wide variety of choices as to motherboard, chipset and CPU. Once there was a reasonable market, vendors were concerned about being left out.
The experience at LANL is revealing. LANL's last two large cluster RFPs have specified LinuxBIOS as a mandatory requirement. Spending on these RFPs has come in at over $19 million US. Companies that had decided not to become involved in LinuxBIOS could not respond to these RFPs. Companies that had the foresight to get involved in LinuxBIOS early in the game were equipped to respond. Foresight, in this case, conferred a competitive advantage.
Conclusions
LinuxBIOS has come a long way in four years--as one person put it, from "I'm Possible" to "In Production". LinuxBIOS is used on everything from the largest Linux clusters yet built to the small--test instruments, MP3 players and portable clusters.
LinuxBIOS makes it possible to build systems without PC hardware baggage. The systems can be optimized for Linux and thus can be more compact and simpler. There is increasingly a business case for such systems.
LinuxBIOS is now in its second version, with four years, at least six CPUs and over 50 motherboards' worth of experience behind it. It now takes only days in some cases to do a port to a new system; originally, it took months. LinuxBIOS' impact on the world of computing is only beginning."
"of course i can't be bothered to RTFA, but when will we have laws making it a mandatory requirement for companies like this to fully disclose events like this to the public"
can you be bothered to contact your legislators, or consumersunion.org, or epic.org?
While I understand and even applaud his warm&fuzzy feeling about what might better be called participatory democracy, the campaign's openness to public input is merely an *analogue* to OSS.
Whether or not it was an "OSS campaign" (whatever that might mean) is determined by the software choices they made, and nothing more.
Furthermore, even it was truly a "grass-roots" participatory campaign in those senses, I'm skeptical that the campaign strategies and decisions and post-mortems were conducted in the same way that Debian or Mandrake or Slackware or X-window or kernel development are managed.
Let's not make OS into a label so general as to be meaningless.
You're comments are all on-point. And the scientists are probably right.
Nonetheless, it's STILL circular to say, "The meteorite is Martian, and so it confirms the telemetry from the probes" and "The telemetry from Mars missions confirms that the meteorite is Martian."
There are many alternative (although unlikely) explanations. The point is this: the scientific community TYPICALLY demands a maddeningly-strict standard for "common-sense" hypotheses -- especially when there's an axe to grind, e.g. professional envy, or belittling people who say "It's obvious that animals have emotions." So the standard should be consistent.
"On a Focus, the engine IS the rev-limiter.;-)" ==> "Tell that to Marko Martin"
Well, obviously, a WRC car is different. I think you'd agree that the original "Ford Focus" poster was essentially asking, "Can I disable the thing which is limiting my **street speed** on my **mass market** car?"
No offense intended, Marko -- I'd still love to have a ride, anytime you're available. (And you too, Colin, Marcus, Carlos, Matti!:-)
"He would machine custom parts for his motorcycle . . . Before they closed the doors, he sand blasted then powder coated dozens of various parts for his bike. It would have cost a FORTUNE to do all that without the benefit of his employer."
original article posting: "this Antarctic meteorite offers Mars researchers a reality check on the data coming back from the various probes currently on Mars."
posting #9762667: Q: "How can they be sure that it comes from Mars?" A: "The Viking landers of the 70s identified the unique chemical compostion of Mars rocks."
Let me see . . . We know this meteorite is from Mars, because of evidence from space missions. And we know that we can trust the space-mission data, because it agrees with this meteorite from Mars.
"Most of the limits in California apply to things like lowering cars below a certain level, exceeding noise or pollution limits, or blatant safety violations. So far as I know, there are few, if any, that require any kind of review before they can be used on the road."
WRONG. Their rules apply to anything which has the REMOTE possibility of affecting those things. Basically, those rules take a guilty-until-proven-innocent approach.
Look at the ads in any popular car-modder mag, such as "Turbo" or "Sport Compact Car". Read the fine print, and see how many products are described as "CARB certified". "CARB" = "California Air Resources Board", and it DOESN'T necessarily cover only things which affect pollution.
Read the REALLY fine print, and you'll see ads which say, "Not legal for use on public roads in California."
"But you have to be caught by law enforcement . . . to be cited for it." WRONG AGAIN. Just wait until you try to (re-)register OR sell your car. And (IANAL) I wouldn't want to be the modder defendant in any accident-related legal action.
And if the mod IS something which is easily visible to a LEO, remember everything else which the officer is allowed to do, once you've provided the slightest excuse to stop you. And they WILL stop you: in particular, CHP and LAPD, unlike a lot of other places, are VERY aggressive about equipment transgressions and will eagerly use any opportunity to "toss" you, in the hope of stumbling onto something bigger.
Even something as simple as a K&N air filter is affected. Because California is such a large market, the economics of producing multiple versions dominates the availability of products in the rest of the country, just as many US laws unofficially dominate the rest of the world.
btw, OT, this is the big problem with the European Union that most people failed to foresee. The EU was originally seen as a way to eliminate harmful trade frictions. But it's becoming a Big Brother on many other things, to all EU residents, such as the recent decision to give the US their air-passenger data for *everyone*, not just non-US'ers whose destination is the US.
"demanding more money for multi-core is ridiculous. if you're going to do that, why not charge more for faster CPUs?"
1. Nothing new. It has been done for years on mainframes.
2. Don't assume that the two scenarios are equivalent. Ignoring issues of scaling at the hardware- or OS-level, aspects of *application* architecture may affect whether a 2Ghz processor has better or worse throughput than 2x 1Ghz.
(for now). I've already seen official statements by vendors, explicitly saying that multi-core won't affect their licensing. I've seen none even hinting the other way. If this article says otherwise -- explicitly, naming names -- then that's news.
"[SCO is] the software vendor's version of Kim Il Jong of North Korea. The guy claims to have invented the Internet, the television, radar, automobiles, and any other technology the country has."
Use a portable device for data collection, i.e. a PDA, or Tablet PC, or one of the various intermediate form-factors. When the user is ready, data is transmitted either wirelessly or by briefly docking the device. Authentication is inherent in the ID of the transmitting device. If user-acceptance of data-entry into a small device is a problem, then spread around some full-size docking keyboards for shared use.
Also, I'd bet money that there are already vendors or VARs who offer vertically-integrated solutions for your requirements.
misses the point. Dunford's being disingenuous by mentioning the implied consideration of economy/waste, as the only explicitly acknowledged motivation for wanting to keep the monitors.
Rephrase my question however you like, so as to exceed *any* cost-related considerations he might name -- even going so far as to make the city *profit* handsomely on the transaction -- and then see how he explains his reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
"bombshell", "complete disarray", "bleak future", "river of blood", "endangered", "abysmal", "corpse", "charnel house", "dim", "decay", "Nothing short of a miracle could save it"
so, um, how do you like its chances?
p.s. -- nothing wrong with that parrot, it's just sleeping.
Maybe her back hurts, and standing just feels better.
Or maybe she just decided that standing up gives her a better view.
Or maybe she simply likes all the attention it's bringing her.
just read that Oracle has recently changed their license explicitly to say that each core counts as a processor.
"Senate judiciary staff are eager to get the legislation moving because they are worried that a federal appeals court in California will uphold an April 2003 court decision that did not hold peer-to-peer companies liable for their users' copyright infringement. The so-called Grokster case was argued before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in February, and a decision is expected soon."
I'm puzzled. Even if the court rules favorably to p2p before the bill is passed, why would that prevent the bill from passing (and being enforced) later? After all, courts didn't prevent the US from zig-zagging on issues like Prohibition, slavery, womens' suffrage, etc.
"That's the job of undercover police officers trying to make protestors look bad (I joke, I joke, such a thing could never, ever happen, huh?)"
you mean, like this picture of the undercover agitator who was caught at Bush's inauguration? http://www.civil-rights.net/
"Who in their right mind would want to hack into the democratic convention? The only ones I can think of are Republicans, and we all know they never do anything illegal like that..."
They only need to say that it's part of a terrorism investigation, and then the carrier is required to let them snoop the wired network, and the carrier is prohibited from revealing the snooping -- EVER, even long after the fact -- and, oh yeah, I forgot to mention, no judge or warrant required.
They don't have to do it illegally, just invisibly.
"I'll get this guy for you. Please send me a $1000 retainer, Western Union (NO USPS money orders!).
-- signed, Sal"
And it's four years old.= 7170
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid
"LinuxBIOS runs on a wide range of platforms. Fifty supported motherboards are in the source tree, but we have found that many motherboards are so similar that a LinuxBIOS for one motherboard can work on another. Companies build code for one motherboard, run it on another motherboard and do not always get around to telling us.
LinuxBIOS works on 64-bit and 32-bit CPUs. CPUs supported include the Alpha, K8, K7, PowerPC, P4, PIII, PII, Cyrix (VIA), Geode (now AMD) and SC520 (AMD). Chipsets are too numerous to list. Form factors of mainboards range from the smallest PC/104 systems to the largest K8 systems. An IBM PPC 970 port is in progress.
Chipset Secrets
One of the most common phrases we heard from chip vendors in the first few years was "we'll never tell you that." "That" being CPU information, chipset information, motherboard information or any combination of the three. The designs for these three systems constitute highly guarded secrets. It seems amazing, even now, that vendors are able to let us build a GPLed BIOS that by its nature exposes some of these secrets.
How was it possible for us to get this type of information? Simple, businesses are not charities. If there is no business case for releasing this information to us, they do not do it. If, however, there is a business case, then it happens--sometimes with astonishing speed.
From what we can see, the two factors in our success were competition and the creation of a market. Competition gave us a wide variety of choices as to motherboard, chipset and CPU. Once there was a reasonable market, vendors were concerned about being left out.
The experience at LANL is revealing. LANL's last two large cluster RFPs have specified LinuxBIOS as a mandatory requirement. Spending on these RFPs has come in at over $19 million US. Companies that had decided not to become involved in LinuxBIOS could not respond to these RFPs. Companies that had the foresight to get involved in LinuxBIOS early in the game were equipped to respond. Foresight, in this case, conferred a competitive advantage.
Conclusions
LinuxBIOS has come a long way in four years--as one person put it, from "I'm Possible" to "In Production". LinuxBIOS is used on everything from the largest Linux clusters yet built to the small--test instruments, MP3 players and portable clusters.
LinuxBIOS makes it possible to build systems without PC hardware baggage. The systems can be optimized for Linux and thus can be more compact and simpler. There is increasingly a business case for such systems.
LinuxBIOS is now in its second version, with four years, at least six CPUs and over 50 motherboards' worth of experience behind it. It now takes only days in some cases to do a port to a new system; originally, it took months. LinuxBIOS' impact on the world of computing is only beginning."
"of course i can't be bothered to RTFA, but when will we have laws making it a mandatory requirement for companies like this to fully disclose events like this to the public"
can you be bothered to contact your legislators, or consumersunion.org, or epic.org?
While I understand and even applaud his warm&fuzzy feeling about what might better be called participatory democracy, the campaign's openness to public input is merely an *analogue* to OSS.
Whether or not it was an "OSS campaign" (whatever that might mean) is determined by the software choices they made, and nothing more.
Furthermore, even it was truly a "grass-roots" participatory campaign in those senses, I'm skeptical that the campaign strategies and decisions and post-mortems were conducted in the same way that Debian or Mandrake or Slackware or X-window or kernel development are managed.
Let's not make OS into a label so general as to be meaningless.
why is this story filed in YRO?
"Posting #9764821 explains . . . "
Yep, sure does. And as I said:
"And the scientists are probably right. Nonetheless, it's STILL circular."
You're comments are all on-point. And the scientists are probably right.
Nonetheless, it's STILL circular to say, "The meteorite is Martian, and so it confirms the telemetry from the probes" and "The telemetry from Mars missions confirms that the meteorite is Martian."
There are many alternative (although unlikely) explanations.
The point is this:
the scientific community TYPICALLY demands a maddeningly-strict standard for "common-sense" hypotheses -- especially when there's an axe to grind, e.g. professional envy, or belittling people who say "It's obvious that animals have emotions." So the standard should be consistent.
"On a Focus, the engine IS the rev-limiter. ;-)" ==> "Tell that to Marko Martin"
:-)
Well, obviously, a WRC car is different. I think you'd agree that the original "Ford Focus" poster was essentially asking, "Can I disable the thing which is limiting my **street speed** on my **mass market** car?"
No offense intended, Marko -- I'd still love to have a ride, anytime you're available.
(And you too, Colin, Marcus, Carlos, Matti!
"He would machine custom parts for his motorcycle . . . Before they closed the doors, he sand blasted then powder coated dozens of various parts for his bike. It would have cost a FORTUNE to do all that without the benefit of his employer."
;-)
And they went out of business? I'm shocked!
original article posting: "this Antarctic meteorite offers Mars researchers a reality check on the data coming back from the various probes currently on Mars."
posting #9762667: Q: "How can they be sure that it comes from Mars?" A: "The Viking landers of the 70s identified the unique chemical compostion of Mars rocks."
Let me see . . . We know this meteorite is from Mars, because of evidence from space missions. And we know that we can trust the space-mission data, because it agrees with this meteorite from Mars.
Hmmm . . .
Excuse me while I go call my broker to check the price on cattle futures.
On a Focus, the engine IS the rev-limiter. ;-)
"Most of the limits in California apply to things like lowering cars below a certain level, exceeding noise or pollution limits, or blatant safety violations. So far as I know, there are few, if any, that require any kind of review before they can be used on the road."
WRONG. Their rules apply to anything which has the REMOTE possibility of affecting those things. Basically, those rules take a guilty-until-proven-innocent approach.
Look at the ads in any popular car-modder mag, such as "Turbo" or "Sport Compact Car". Read the fine print, and see how many products are described as "CARB certified". "CARB" = "California Air Resources Board", and it DOESN'T necessarily cover only things which affect pollution.
Read the REALLY fine print, and you'll see ads which say, "Not legal for use on public roads in California."
"But you have to be caught by law enforcement . . . to be cited for it."
WRONG AGAIN. Just wait until you try to (re-)register OR sell your car. And (IANAL) I wouldn't want to be the modder defendant in any accident-related legal action.
And if the mod IS something which is easily visible to a LEO, remember everything else which the officer is allowed to do, once you've provided the slightest excuse to stop you. And they WILL stop you: in particular, CHP and LAPD, unlike a lot of other places, are VERY aggressive about equipment transgressions and will eagerly use any opportunity to "toss" you, in the hope of stumbling onto something bigger.
Even something as simple as a K&N air filter is affected. Because California is such a large market, the economics of producing multiple versions dominates the availability of products in the rest of the country, just as many US laws unofficially dominate the rest of the world.
btw, OT, this is the big problem with the European Union that most people failed to foresee. The EU was originally seen as a way to eliminate harmful trade frictions. But it's becoming a Big Brother on many other things, to all EU residents, such as the recent decision to give the US their air-passenger data for *everyone*, not just non-US'ers whose destination is the US.
"demanding more money for multi-core is ridiculous. if you're going to do that, why not charge more for faster CPUs?"
1. Nothing new. It has been done for years on mainframes.
2. Don't assume that the two scenarios are equivalent. Ignoring issues of scaling at the hardware- or OS-level, aspects of *application* architecture may affect whether a 2Ghz processor has better or worse throughput than 2x 1Ghz.
(for now). I've already seen official statements by vendors, explicitly saying that multi-core won't affect their licensing. I've seen none even hinting the other way. If this article says otherwise -- explicitly, naming names -- then that's news.
. . . keep up with the volume of SCO's FUD-filings and press releases.
"[SCO is] the software vendor's version of Kim Il Jong of North Korea. The guy claims to have invented the Internet, the television, radar, automobiles, and any other technology the country has."
Actually, you're two generations behind. When I was a kid, this was a common (and justified) subject for TV stand-up comics. Long before the North Korean state (let alone Kim) even existed, the Russians claimed to have invented everything from the lightbulb, radio, television, rockets, cars, parachutes, steam engines, airplanes, neck ties, and blue jeans, to baseball, ice cream and electricity.
[btw, i think the guy's name is KJI, not KIJ.]
Use a portable device for data collection, i.e. a PDA, or Tablet PC, or one of the various intermediate form-factors. When the user is ready, data is transmitted either wirelessly or by briefly docking the device. Authentication is inherent in the ID of the transmitting device. If user-acceptance of data-entry into a small device is a problem, then spread around some full-size docking keyboards for shared use.
Also, I'd bet money that there are already vendors or VARs who offer vertically-integrated solutions for your requirements.
misses the point. Dunford's being disingenuous by mentioning the implied consideration of economy/waste, as the only explicitly acknowledged motivation for wanting to keep the monitors.
Rephrase my question however you like, so as to exceed *any* cost-related considerations he might name -- even going so far as to make the city *profit* handsomely on the transaction -- and then see how he explains his reasons.