Spamhaus was not the central issue or cause of the disconnection. If you read the article, you will see that there was a paper that was researched and published with regard to Intercage/Atrivo activities. The fact that I/A ended up on Spamhaus was simply a reflection of their activities. Not the cause of their disconnection. The network operators who each independently made a decision to not accomodate I/A traffic did so based on the merits of their own knowledge, some of which came from that paper and the rest of which came from their own experiences, and a tiny bit coming from spamhaus which, as noted elsewhere in this thread has a reputation of its own. (good and/or bad. )
Email discussion about this modern version/equivalent of the "Internet Death penalty" (IDP) has been ongoing in the email list for network operators for the past several days. One side's consensus in this case seems to be "Intercage/Atrivo" has been a problem for years, has never adequately responded to abuse complaints, and is responding with a protestation of innocence that has all the credibility of 'The check is in the mail", "I'll only put it in an inch", and "of course I love you".
There is the other side of the story with protestations of innocence. Unfortunately those cries are exactly what any party, guilty or innocent, would make. How to tell the difference?
And what next?
Will more ISP's/Hosters refuse to do business with "questionable" parties? Doesn't seem likely, but we can hope. Will the IDP be used on any other parties? Will there be damage to innocent parties? There are no easy answers or ready solutions for this issue.
I was a scout during the late 60's and early 70's. Back then there was no restriction on Homosexuals in the Scouts. While I had a wonderful time in scouting, this change to an attitude of prejudice and intolerance is NOT what I learned Scouting was about. In fact, its directly the opposite of the actual principles of the Boy Scouts. The religious bigots who manipulated the system to add this expression of hatred and intolerance to Scouting need to be kicked out of the BSA and their rules with them. No help for the BSA until they return to their former, better policies.
background info - 2 years at religious christian college, BS in Comp-Sci, married, 2 kids (Yes, I am a middle American. Would someone please kick the flaming idiot neo-cons and intolerant-hate-mongering religion-ists out of Washington DC? Please! )
to want a pleasurable internet experience. I use adblock and flashblock to make sure I don't have to see irritating ads. I let all the simple, non animated ads come right through.
The answer is simple. In order for advertisers to not get their ads blocked, "Don't be a dick!"
I'm surprised so many people here don't understand how big the issue here is. Here we have a corporate mouthpiece, John Bonomo, caught telling an outright lie about something as specific as a fire. (Yes - I'll take the word of a firefighter over that of PR flack who probably didn't even see the incident or visit afterwards. Big surprise right? )
The important thing here is the opportunity to teach corporate PR a lesson about the new dynamics of human culture now that it has been internet enabled. If we publically discuss the premise created by this event: "John Bonomo is a lying cheating scumbag." it create a situation where people will question any information that comes from that individual in the future. If he did lie, then of course he should never be trusted again. But only if his name becomes heavily linked to the behaivor. And of course other people will take the other viewpoint which will also be linked to. To be sure that his name is linked to this issue you have to mention his name in your text.
The notion that a few weather sensors spead out over a tiny tiny tiny land area the size of cambridge MA somheow represents something significant is pathetic. That someone actually expended the effort and column space to put this in an IT Journal aimed at corporate officer level management, (CIO's) is simply incredible.
" By Ben Ames" Watch this name folks. He's bound to produce more boners in the future.
"Horseshit. I've been using products.... for the last 30 years without having any of those kinds of problems."
Then you have avoided those problems by choosing to purchase from companies (IBM, SUN , MS etc) who are very unlikely to suddenly go out of business. So YOU are exactly the type of business manager who makes the type of risk avaoidance desicions that Microsoft is counting the Novell agreement to cause. This is not just idle speculation. As a former IDC manager of software tooling analysis I can tell you that this type of risk avoidance was ALWAYS present in the minds of people with software purchasing and software developing areas of responsibility. If you are buying software applications, you have to ask will the vendor still be there in 5 years with support and upgrades along the way, and if building software you have to ask "will people buy from us, since they have no way of knowing whether we will still be around in 5 years". Any company whose business was under a serious legal cloud was always drastically affected by same.
Horseshit indeed.
The FSF if quite correct to start this investigation. Novell's agreement with MS is a definitive attempt to surrmount/avoid the requirements inherent in the GPL. Novell's lack of concern about their actions poisoning the F/OSS community environment is typical of shortsighted Amercian style business managament which must (by legal requirement in the form of fudiciary duty to stockholders) always make the numbers for the quarter.
And just in case some executive actually has some notion of running the company for the long term rather than the short term, the wage disparity here in Amnerica where CEO compensation is (on average) 800 times more than employee compensation, will quickly overcome those long term notions. (hmm two more years in this job and I get $$$, versus, if I don't make the numbers this quarter, the board fires my ass, Its a simple decision, and I would do the same thing. I'm human too.)
Its clear from both your first comment and your reply to my response that you did not and do not understand the definitions. Further you made a very sad attempt to post-claim a position where you had had none at all and where you had said nothing at all related to that position in your first post. In your first work you spoke only of natural rights and your "work", referring only to either copyright or patents, the only thing the discussion is focused on. This attempt to re-write your position reminds me of something... what is it? Oh yes, Thats it. The Bush Administration. Perhaps you can get a job as the next press secretary to be chewed up and spit out.:-)
I suggest you re-read everything you wrote and examine the second post for lack of relevancy.
Thread is done. You already lost. Next time please make a reply worth reading. Put some thought into it The key point here is that you have NO natural rights to your ideas, only artificial ones. Crao, I'm not even going to review this.
I'm sorry, but you are very confused about what natural rights are concerning the idea of copyright.
Summary of "Natural rights' for an idea/story etc : The natural state of ownership of any idea, a story, a song, whatever, is zero. You may write a story, and you own only the physical copy you created. The story itself can be used by anyone to do anything they want. That is the state of your "natural rights" to your story. After you create it you have almost no ownership of the idea. I'm sorry, but thats just the way it is and the way it has been for most of human history.
Now - Enter the idea of a copyright (and patents). (last what, 300 or 400 years?)
Their purpose was to give people a better reason to create things. With the "natural rights" you had almost no reason to create a story or song except for the immediate reward you might get for performing it, but there was no "copy protection" at all. Anyone who heard it could (and would) copy it and perform it themselves. Now, with "Un-natural rights", bestowed upon you by a government in the form of a copyright or patent you can make much more money from your ideas so you have more reason to come up with new things, songs, tools etc...
Your thought that you had a any natural rights to your own ideas is a problem that comes from living in a society that is being brainwashed by large media companies who want eternal copyright control over their creations. That will result in cultural stagnation. The limit to copyright should be 17 years, just as it should be for patents. (perhaps it should be 17 years for corporations and 50 years for private individuals).
Ideas are not physical things. They cannot be owned. Society can, however, create a scheme to reward you for being creative by giving a form of psuedo ownership. I would prefer to call it a "creators license" that guarantees the creator exclusive control over the creation for a specific period of time. This reduces the confusion caused by terms like "patent owner" or "copyright owner" and most especially the egregious "Intellectual Property". The last being a phrase made up completely out of glue sniffing, hypoxic hallucination. (Not unlike Bush's fever dreams of being competent).
As for the upcoming rebuttals saying that people own many things that are not physical, you will find that all of those "ownerships" are actually either forms of societal license or lease-holdings granted by the actual owner. (example - "mineral rights")
Traffic accidents and fatalities will be rising to unprecedented new levels as millions of drivers try drive while looking down at their GPS units, trying to figure where to go/turn next.
Another wonderful example of doing the stupid thing for the right reason.
I was actually a little concerned about this issue until I saw who wrote the article. Its our old friend and "eyeball whore", John Dvorak. While he is an intelligent and (usually) informed individual, his technology columns have degenerated with the rise of the Internet. Virtually everything he writes today has little to no bearing on actual reality. Most of his columns these days are designed to provoke and irritate just to get readers to look at his columns. Its degenerate journalism of the lowest tabloid nature
John, I'm sorry, years ago I was a fan, but since you've become an "eyeball whore" (see "crack whore") I've had to just stop believeing anything you write. Its very sad.
The majority of the african continent can and will use these PC's In fact I worry that they will become too popular and that the kids won't get them. True, there is famine and deep poverty in Africa, but its is not pervasive. It is small part of the entire continent. Further Africa is not the only place these units will be deployed. Even The Govenor of Massachusetts has expressed a desire to give one to every school child in Massaschusetts. other areas include South America, countries around the Pacific Rim, and Eastern Europe.
If the parent is correct, then clearly Novell must now be excommunicated from all GPL/FOSS activities unless they can show/prove that every bit of everything they contribute to to GPL/FOSS community is totally free of IP encumbrances especially encumbrances from Microsoft. And, frankly, the additional effort that would require would cost more than what they would contribute. Buh-bye Novell!
This/.submission was created using Dragon's NaturallySpeaking speech recognition software running under wine on Linux system.
This technology is actually over a decade old. In the early 1990s, at Dragon Systems, the creators of Dragon NaturallySpeaking the world's first continuous speech recognition software product,a hand-held system which did exactly the same thing between English and the languages used in the Serbian and Croatian regions of Europe was demonstrated.
This device was deployed for use as a translator to gather information from non-english speaking persons in that region.
The owners of Dragon Systems, Jim and Janet Baker, started the company when Apple ][e's were considered state-of-the-art technology. They sold the company in the late 1990s(iirc) but their software, "NaturallySpeaking" is still probably the best continuous speech recognition product on the market. What you consider that they were able to package a translator in a hand-held unit over a decade ago, you have to consider the genius of being able to accomplish that within the constraints of the hardware that was available then.
The scientists and software developers who worked at Dragon Systems were a very special group working at a very special company.
The big question today, since speech recognition software is still only 98 percent accurate when it is optimally configured and the user's optimally trained. That means two words out of every 100 are wrong. This leads us to the big question: since a 2 percent error rate is much too large for speech recognition tools to be useful in the mass market, when and how will speech recognition systems be able to reach an accuracy level, and ease-of-use that people will actually find useful and comfortable?
The error rate necessary for large-scale acceptance of speech recognition software is much much smaller than 2 percent. Before speech recognition software can be useful for the general public the error rate needs to be pushed down to 0.02 percent, which is an error rate of 2 wrong words per every 10,000 words. To achieve that level of accuracy using the current techniques would require that the speech data models being used increase in size by 20 to 30 orders of magnitude (maybe), and would require who knows how much more computing power.
Another columnist saying something to generate heat and debate and draw lots of readers to his column. This will make the Infoworld advertisers happy and he'll get paid. His content is crap.
Perhaps we can just start calling him John Dvorak Junior.:-)
I spoke briefly to Jeff Kinz (a Linux developer and former IDC software analyst) who doesn't agree with with Yager. Kinz says that Apple has enjoyed several advantages over Linux. Among them being a marketing department with a budget. Despite having several advantages over the years Apple's desktop share and the reported Linux desktop share are equal. This means that the actual numbers of running Linux systems is larger than Apples because there is no way to measure, nor any revenue to reflect how many Linux systems are installed and working. This is made even more true by the fact that Linux effectively runs on all hardware platforms unlike apple which until recently ran only on its own closed, proprietary (and expensive-ish) hardware. Other sourced hardware is continually being re-sourced as Linux systems. They are effectively immune to the web based malware that exists today and their security design makes them inherently safer to have in the corporate environment than many others."
Further Kinz goes on to point out the following:
While both Linux and Apple serve capably in the server room, support and licenses for Apple will always be priced at a premium level. This is the nature of the Apple approach. While both platforms have proven themselves to be quite capable, and indeed they now share the same basic architectural underpinnings because of Apples switch to a UNIX/BSD derived operating system, Linux has several advantages going forward:
The first advantage for Linux is of course the cost of license acquisition and the cost of support options. While companies like Red Hat are also charging a premium for their server licenses with support included there are identical clones of the Red Hat products like the versions available at "centos.org" available for the simple cost of a download. Centos uses all of red hats publicly available source code and simply builds the same product. They remove all references to the Company's trademarks which was requested by Red Hat. They even use Red Hat's documentation. The major difference between Red Hat's product and the centos product are the support options.
Since centos is a Red Hat based there are large numbers of users who provide mutual support to each other, including the centos users for free using forms, e-mail lists and real-time text communications on the Web. Mr. Kinz has been observing these communication channels for the past few months and notes that they run 24 hours a day seven days a week. Most of the time, he says, "helpful information and solutions come back faster, in many cases under a minute and just as accurately, if not more so, then a vendor often provides." He also notes "I have never seen any vendor achieve that level of immediate responsiveness. I attribute this level of, well, call it 'aggressive supportedness' to a kind of social competition between Linux afficianados to show how much they know. The communication channels are public and densely populated so the people offering help and solutions are effectively performing in front of hundreds or thousands of their peers (and perhaps potential future employers)."
Another advantage states Mr. Kinz "is Apple's approach to the market perception. Apple continually tries to be a ' different' from everybody else. Linux, on the other hand, strives for and is implementing compatibility with everything. As examples Mr. Kinz notes the existence of tools which allow the Linux systems to integrate with Windows systems. The Linux systems can mount, manage and administrative Windows filesystem shares using the common formats and protocols which Microsoft supports, even when those file systems are on the disk drives of the Linux box itself. Linux can replace the active directory tools currently bei
Isn't it interesting that the "reporter" called the government of India's southern state of Kerala: "Communist".
Hmm - India has a democratic government, perhaps better or worse than our own. (The USA) but not a communist government.
Hmm.. Is it perhaps possible that AMELIA GENTLEMAN, of the International Herald Tribune has his own agenda?
I think so. Its shameful to see this kind of obviously biased reporting get into the New York Times.
Amelia seems upset that the indian government banned Coke and Pesi recently, but Reuters news service says : "In a report published earlier this month, environmental group The Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) said it found traces of pesticides far above permissible levels in the products of the two global beverage companies."
Whats interesting about that? Many schools here in the US are banning Coke and Pepsi too, because the stuffs unhealthy and contributes to the 30% rise in America obesity levels. I guess they're all communists too.
Another interesting note. According to the article MS sells windows in to schools in India for between $25 and $30 per computer. The Indian ministry of education as 1.86 million dollars to spend on computer technology for 1 million children. Yup, Thats $1.86 per kid. Hey MS ? Can you get that price a down a bit more? You know, like $0? Hmm.. if the OLPC hits its price point ($100) They can buy 180 thousand laptops. Thats almost 1 for every five kids. Maybe the gates foundation has spare money they can help out on this with. For a mere 8.14 million additional they can get an OLPC laptop for the rest of those kids! (yeah, I know, the OLPC isn't down t0 $100 yet. Using $100 makes the math easy...:) )
This is another columnist saying something he knows is going to generate lots of heat and debate and draw lots of readers to his column. This will make the Infoworld advertisers happy and he'll get paid.
Perhaps we can just start calling him John Dvorak Junior.:-)
I spoke briefly to Jeff Kinz (a Linux developer and former IDC software analyst) who doesn't agree with with Yager. Kinz says that Apple has enjoyed several advantages over Linux. Among them being a marketing department with a budget. Despite having several advantages over the years Apple's desktop share and the reported Linux desktop share are equal. This means that the actual numbers of running Linux systems is larger than Apples because there is no way to measure, nor any revenue to reflect how many Linux systems are installed and working. This is made even more true by the fact that Linux effectively runs on all hardware platforms unlike apple which until recently ran only on its own closed, proprietary (and expensive-ish) hardware. Other sourced hardware is continually being re-sourced as Linux systems. They are effectively immune to the web based malware that exists today and their security design makes them inherently safer to have in the corporate environment than many others."
Further Kinz goes on to point out the following:
While both Linux and Apple serve capably in the server room, support and licenses for Apple will always be priced at a premium level. This is the nature of the Apple approach. While both platforms have proven themselves to be quite capable, and indeed they now share the same basic architectural underpinnings because of Apples switch to a UNIX/BSD derived operating system, Linux has several advantages going forward:
The first advantage for Linux is of course the cost of license acquisition and the cost of support options. While companies like Red Hat are also charging a premium for their server licenses with support included there are identical clones of the Red Hat products like the versions available at "centos.org" available for the simple cost of a download. Centos uses all of red hats publicly available source code and simply builds the same product. They remove all references to the Company's trademarks which was requested by Red Hat. They even use Red Hat's documentation. The major difference between Red Hat's product and the centos product are the support options.
Since centos is a Red Hat based there are large numbers of users who provide mutual support to each other, including the centos users for free using forms, e-mail lists and real-time text communications on the Web. Mr. Kinz has been observing these communication channels for the past few months and notes that they run 24 hours a day seven days a week. Most of the time, he says, "helpful information and solutions come back faster, in many cases under a minute and just as accurately, if not more so, then a vendor often provides." He also notes "I have never seen any vendor achieve that level of immediate responsiveness. I attribute this level of, well, call it 'aggressive supportedness' to a kind of social competition between Linux afficianados to show how much they know. The communication channels are public and densely populated so the people offering help and solutions are effectively performing in front of hundreds or thousands of their peers (and perhaps potential future employers)."
Another advantage states Mr. Kinz "is Apple's approach to the market perception. Apple continually tries to be a ' different' from everybody else. Linux, on the other hand, strives for and is implementing compatibility with everything. As examples Mr. Kinz notes the existence of tools which allow the Linux systems to integrate with Windows systems. The Linux systems can mount, manage and administrative Windows filesystem shares using the common formats and protocols which Microsoft supports, even when those file systems are on the disk drives of the Linux box itself. Linux can replace the active
These types of CF bulbs have been availabe for 99 cents each at hardware stores for at least three years, further and laugahably, two weeks before the article came out I was buying CF bulbs in Wal-Mart for 74 cents each. Not $2 - $3 apiece.
As a final note - LED lights sources are being refined for mass production right now. The most efficient form of these will be "multi-LED" "Light sources" They will be called LED bulbs, but they will contain multiple LED's within the same "bulb". The reason for this is that lower power LEDs are more efficient in terms of power use. Since cost of operation will be the chief reason for switching to LED bulbs they must provide an advantage over CF bulbs in order to succeed in the market. This will push the LED manufactuers into the Multi-LED configuration.
PS - Don't buy the fancy "K2" style LED bulbs- your paying for packaging. Wait until some enterprising far east importer ships in a few 40 foot container of pre-assembled LED bulbs and starts selling them for 50 cents each.
Simple, For the first one, The people who need the most help with chidbirthing and pre-natal can't get it. They don't have health insurance or money. In the US that sentences you to almost no health care, except emergency room visits.
For the second one "HFCS" (High Fructose Corn Syrup) and Portion sizes
The use of HFCS in American foods have gone up by several hundered percent over the last 30 years and portion sizes in most restaurants have also gone up, largely due to the influence of the Super sized portions being marketed by the fats food chains. (and no "fats" wasn't a typo there.:)
Get the book "fat land " by Greg Critser from your library, small book, quick easy read, explains what happened economically and calorically to America since Earl Butz "saved the American dinner budget". Also goes into what HFCS is doing to kids in terms of causing early onset of Type II (adult) diabetes.
For the third one (mumps), many people no longer believe that vaccinations are needed. "we got rid ofthat disease didn't we?" They will change their mind after someone in their family gets crippled or killed by one of the dieases we "got rid of".
> Either make it free ( as in beer) or let it be. Even if > a kid wanted to save up 100$ do you think the poor > family will allow it's kids to save up 100$ to buy a > computer? Are you kidding me? That 100$ are needed for > the family to survive.To buy animals.To buy clothes.
Functional method is apparently functionally illiterate or just completely out of touch. These laptops will only be purchased by governments or non-profit organizations in huge lots, and will be given to students FREE. DUH. Read the older articles on this project.
> This makes the assumption that school districts use hardware that can > network boot. I've run into this problem many times. Plus, as cool as > terminal clients are, it is hard to muster up the hardware to support > the server side. Remember your budget is often somewhere close or below > 0.
Most PC's manufactured for approximately the last 8 years have the built in ability to do a "PXE" boot without ever activating a hard drive, cd-rom or floppy. The PXE boot means the machine can boot up an Operating System from across the network. They don't need any Operating system to be resident in the PC itself.
Uses existing PC hardware, COST $ZERO
These machines are the easiest to convert to thin clients because they are already capable of diskless operation.
Now you can remove the hard drive, floppy and cd-rom from the PC, reducing hardware issues and the amount of electricity consumed by PC's. What do you do with all the extra drives? Keep some for spares and sell the rest on Ebay to pay for PXE NIC cards.:-) (see below)
For machines which lack built-in PXE boot capabilities there are several techniques which can be used to give them PXE capabilities:
#1: wipe the hard drive, and image it with a PXE boot instead of an OS Free images here: http://www.etherboot.org/
Uses existing PC hardware, COST $ZERO
#2: same as number three, but image is on a floppy. (make it permanent by moving the floppy drive inside the case and covering the slot with a normal empty drive slot panel. Set the bios to boot from floppy.
Uses existing PC hardware, COST $ZERO
#3: Same as 3 & 4, but do it with a cd-rom drive.
Uses existing PC hardware, COST $ZERO
#4: Add a PXE boot rom to the current NIC cost ~$15-20 per. (Remember that empty socket you see on most NIC's? This is what its for.:)
#5: install a PXE capable Network card, cost ~$20-50 per
#6: Need a large number of boot roms? buy a rom flashing device and blanks roms, download an image from etherboot.org and flash the roms yourself. Cost ~$6 per ROM. Eprom programmer cost ~$40 to "as much as you want to spend". Chances are someone in the district has one you can borrow. Especially if there is an electronics class in the high school.(and if they won't lend it to you, then they can flash the ROMs for you!)
SERVERS: Issue - "We're too poor to buy a server!:( "
RESPONSE: In this case, "server" does not mean what you think.
Typical Thin Client server Needs:
1 GB RAM for every 10 clients ~10 - 20 GB hard drive, any number of clients Two Network Cards 1Ghz+ CPU
Thin client servers are typically underloaded. Since the diskless client does all the work to display the screen, the server only does the behind the scenes calculations. A 1.3 GHz celeron chip, with 2 GB of RAM can easily serve 20 diskless clients doing web browsing and word processing, fairly memory intensive applications. Given that this is possible, any robustly configured desktop PC, puchased with the last three years can be used for a server as long as you make sure it has enough RAM. Since your diskless clients only absolutely need 64 MB of RAM, you will have plenty to scavenge from to fill up your server. Don't have simms/dimms large enough to get enough RAM in the server because the mainboard only has two RAM slots? Sell the extras (pulled from now diskless clients) on EBAY and use the $ to purchase larger sticks of RAM. COST: 1 GB stick, ~$75 - $150 per.
Got Questions or need help? Want more info? Leave me a message in my jounal.
The best (only!) way to survive adminning a school district is to convert every desktop machine to a diskless client., No hard drives, and no floppies on the desktop machines. (USB Key's are Ok for students and they don't have any moving parts or heads that need maintenance)
Stick one server in each room where there are more than N clients and make a subnet out of the room. N varies based on network speed, server size and typical client load.
Server is headless, keyboardless, mouseless, administered remotely.
Diskless clients almost never breakdown, and need very little RAM to run effectively.
All this concentrates your admin work to the servers and network equipment. (and replacing mice and kybds). And user accounts are more easily admined as well. Of course all user accounts should be managed on a centralized server/authorization system.
If licensing and managing licensing for all the servers and clients and user's email etc.. becomes problemsome or too expensive, all licensing concerns can be eliminated by using k12ltsp, a proven thin client system allready in operation at many schools in the USA and many other countries.
Slashdot Mirror
Spamhaus was not the central issue or cause of the disconnection. If you read the article, you will see that there was a paper that was researched and published with regard to Intercage/Atrivo activities. The fact that I/A ended up on Spamhaus was simply a reflection of their activities. Not the cause of their disconnection. The network operators who each independently made a decision to not accomodate I/A traffic did so based on the merits of their own knowledge, some of which came from that paper and the rest of which came from their own experiences, and a tiny bit coming from spamhaus which, as noted elsewhere in this thread has a reputation of its own. (good and/or bad. )
Email discussion about this modern version/equivalent of the "Internet Death penalty" (IDP) has been ongoing in the email list for network operators for the past several days. One side's consensus in this case seems to be "Intercage/Atrivo" has been a problem for years, has never adequately responded to abuse complaints, and is responding with a protestation of innocence that has all the credibility of 'The check is in the mail", "I'll only put it in an inch", and "of course I love you".
There is the other side of the story with protestations of innocence. Unfortunately those cries are exactly what any party, guilty or innocent, would make. How to tell the difference?
And what next?
Will more ISP's/Hosters refuse to do business with "questionable" parties? Doesn't seem likely, but we can hope. Will the IDP be used on any other parties? Will there be damage to innocent parties? There are no easy answers or ready solutions for this issue.
I was a scout during the late 60's and early 70's. Back then there was no restriction on Homosexuals in the Scouts. While I had a wonderful time in scouting, this change to an attitude of prejudice and intolerance is NOT what I learned Scouting was about. In fact, its directly the opposite of the actual principles of the Boy Scouts. The religious bigots who manipulated the system to add this expression of hatred and intolerance to Scouting need to be kicked out of the BSA and their rules with them. No help for the BSA until they return to their former, better policies.
background info - 2 years at religious christian college, BS in Comp-Sci, married, 2 kids (Yes, I am a middle American. Would someone please kick the flaming idiot neo-cons and intolerant-hate-mongering religion-ists out of Washington DC? Please! )
rmoyer@nop.org is NOT inkling @nop.org.
inkling is merrick johnson
Dear Kansas City school board:
The "Creator" is apparently making some people "Unintelligent by Design!".
Perhaps this explains how the "Intelligent by Design" theory came about.
Superb response. If I hadn't already commented on this thread I'd be modding you up.
:-)
Well written, well structured, well put. Nice job.
to want a pleasurable internet experience. I use adblock and flashblock to make sure I don't have to see irritating ads. I let all the simple, non animated ads come right through.
The answer is simple. In order for advertisers to not get their ads blocked, "Don't be a dick!"
I'm surprised so many people here don't understand how big the issue here is. Here we have a corporate mouthpiece, John Bonomo, caught telling an outright lie about something as specific as a fire. (Yes - I'll take the word of a firefighter over that of PR flack who probably didn't even see the incident or visit afterwards. Big surprise right? )
The important thing here is the opportunity to teach corporate PR a lesson about the new dynamics of human culture now that it has been internet enabled. If we publically discuss the premise created by this event: "John Bonomo is a lying cheating scumbag." it create a situation where people will question any information that comes from that individual in the future. If he did lie, then of course he should never be trusted again. But only if his name becomes heavily linked to the behaivor. And of course other people will take the other viewpoint which will also be linked to. To be sure that his name is linked to this issue you have to mention his name in your text.
Cambridge and MIT are already building a FREE public access Wi-Fi system called roofnet.
s /2006/02/02/cambridge_mit_plan_citywide_wifi/
They started long
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/roofnet/doku.php
Interestingly harvard has stated plans to join roofnet.
http://www.boston.com/business/technology/article
The notion that a few weather sensors spead out over a tiny tiny tiny land area the size of cambridge MA somheow represents something significant is pathetic. That someone actually expended the effort and column space to put this in an IT Journal aimed at corporate officer level management, (CIO's) is simply incredible.
" By Ben Ames" Watch this name folks. He's bound to produce more boners in the future.
When were the cleartype patents filed? Patents only last 17 years.
"Horseshit. I've been using products .... for the last 30 years without having any of those kinds of problems."
Then you have avoided those problems by choosing to purchase from companies (IBM, SUN , MS etc) who are very unlikely to suddenly go out of business. So YOU are exactly the type of business manager who makes the type of risk avaoidance desicions that Microsoft is counting the Novell agreement to cause. This is not just idle speculation. As a former IDC manager of software tooling analysis I can tell you that this type of risk avoidance was ALWAYS present in the minds of people with software purchasing and software developing areas of responsibility. If you are buying software applications, you have to ask will the vendor still be there in 5 years with support and upgrades along the way, and if building software you have to ask "will people buy from us, since they have no way of knowing whether we will still be around in 5 years". Any company whose business was under a serious legal cloud was always drastically affected by same.
Horseshit indeed.
The FSF if quite correct to start this investigation. Novell's agreement with MS is a definitive attempt to surrmount/avoid the requirements inherent in the GPL. Novell's lack of concern about their actions poisoning the F/OSS community environment is typical of shortsighted Amercian style business managament which must (by legal requirement in the form of fudiciary duty to stockholders) always make the numbers for the quarter.
And just in case some executive actually has some notion of running the company for the long term rather than the short term, the wage disparity here in Amnerica where CEO compensation is (on average) 800 times more than employee compensation, will quickly overcome those long term notions. (hmm two more years in this job and I get $$$, versus, if I don't make the numbers this quarter, the board fires my ass, Its a simple decision, and I would do the same thing. I'm human too.)
Its clear from both your first comment and your reply to my response that you did not and do not understand the definitions. Further you made a very sad attempt to post-claim a position where you had had none at all and where you had said nothing at all related to that position in your first post. In your first work you spoke only of natural rights and your "work", referring only to either copyright or patents, the only thing the discussion is focused on. This attempt to re-write your position reminds me of something... what is it? Oh yes, Thats it. The Bush Administration. Perhaps you can get a job as the next press secretary to be chewed up and spit out. :-)
I suggest you re-read everything you wrote and examine the second post for lack of relevancy.
Thread is done. You already lost. Next time please make a reply worth reading. Put some thought into it
The key point here is that you have NO natural rights to your ideas, only artificial ones. Crao, I'm not even going to review this.
I'm sorry, but you are very confused about what natural rights are concerning the idea of copyright.
Summary of "Natural rights' for an idea/story etc :
The natural state of ownership of any idea, a story, a song, whatever, is zero. You may write a story, and you own only the physical copy you created. The story itself can be used by anyone to do anything they want. That is the state of your "natural rights" to your story. After you create it you have almost no ownership of the idea. I'm sorry, but thats just the way it is and the way it has been for most of human history.
Now - Enter the idea of a copyright (and patents). (last what, 300 or 400 years?)
Their purpose was to give people a better reason to create things. With the "natural rights" you had almost no reason to create a story or song except for the immediate reward you might get for performing it, but there was no "copy protection" at all. Anyone who heard it could (and would) copy it and perform it themselves. Now, with "Un-natural rights", bestowed upon you by a government in the form of a copyright or patent you can make much more money from your ideas so you have more reason to come up with new things, songs, tools etc...
Your thought that you had a any natural rights to your own ideas is a problem that comes from living in a society that is being brainwashed by large media companies who want eternal copyright control over their creations. That will result in cultural stagnation. The limit to copyright should be 17 years, just as it should be for patents. (perhaps it should be 17 years for corporations and 50 years for private individuals).
Ideas are not physical things. They cannot be owned. Society can, however, create a scheme to reward you for being creative by giving a form of psuedo ownership. I would prefer to call it a "creators license" that guarantees the creator exclusive control over the creation for a specific period of time. This reduces the confusion caused by terms like "patent owner" or "copyright owner" and most especially the egregious "Intellectual Property". The last being a phrase made up completely out of glue sniffing, hypoxic hallucination. (Not unlike Bush's fever dreams of being competent).
As for the upcoming rebuttals saying that people own many things that are not physical, you will find that all of those "ownerships" are actually either forms of societal license or lease-holdings granted by the actual owner. (example - "mineral rights")
Traffic accidents and fatalities will be rising to unprecedented new levels as millions of drivers try drive while looking down at their GPS units, trying to figure where to go/turn next.
Another wonderful example of doing the stupid thing for the right reason.
I was actually a little concerned about this issue until I saw who wrote the article. Its our old friend and "eyeball whore",
John Dvorak. While he is an intelligent and (usually) informed individual, his technology columns have degenerated with the rise of the Internet. Virtually everything he writes today has little to no bearing on actual reality. Most of his columns these days are designed to provoke and irritate just to get readers to look at his columns. Its degenerate journalism of the lowest tabloid nature
John, I'm sorry, years ago I was a fan, but since you've become an "eyeball whore" (see "crack whore") I've had to just stop believeing anything you write. Its very sad.
The majority of the african continent can and will use these PC's In fact I worry that they will become too popular and that the kids won't get them. True, there is famine and deep poverty in Africa, but its is not pervasive. It is small part of the entire continent. Further Africa is not the only place these units will be deployed. Even The Govenor of Massachusetts has expressed a desire to give one to every school child in Massaschusetts. other areas include South America, countries around the Pacific Rim, and Eastern Europe.
If the parent is correct, then clearly Novell must now be excommunicated from all GPL/FOSS activities unless they can show/prove that every bit of everything they contribute to to GPL/FOSS community is totally free of IP encumbrances especially encumbrances from Microsoft. And, frankly, the additional effort that would require would cost more than what they would contribute. Buh-bye Novell!
This/.submission was created using Dragon's NaturallySpeaking speech
:-)
recognition software running under wine on Linux system.
This technology is actually over a decade old. In the early 1990s,
at Dragon Systems, the creators of Dragon NaturallySpeaking the world's
first continuous speech recognition software product,a hand-held system
which did exactly the same thing between English and the languages
used in the Serbian and Croatian regions of Europe was demonstrated.
This device was deployed for use as a translator to gather information
from non-english speaking persons in that region.
The owners of Dragon Systems, Jim and Janet Baker, started the
company when Apple ][e's were considered state-of-the-art technology.
They sold the company in the late 1990s(iirc) but their software,
"NaturallySpeaking" is still probably the best continuous speech
recognition product on the market. What you consider that they were
able to package a translator in a hand-held unit over a decade ago, you
have to consider the genius of being able to accomplish that within the
constraints of the hardware that was available then.
The scientists and software developers who worked at Dragon Systems were
a very special group working at a very special company.
The big question today, since speech recognition software is still
only 98 percent accurate when it is optimally configured and the user's
optimally trained. That means two words out of every 100 are wrong.
This leads us to the big question: since a 2 percent error rate is
much too large for speech recognition tools to be useful in the mass
market, when and how will speech recognition systems be able to reach an
accuracy level, and ease-of-use that people will actually find useful
and comfortable?
The error rate necessary for large-scale acceptance of speech
recognition software is much much smaller than 2 percent. Before speech
recognition software can be useful for the general public the error rate
needs to be pushed down to 0.02 percent, which is an error rate of 2
wrong words per every 10,000 words. To achieve that level of accuracy
using the current techniques would require that the speech data models
being used increase in size by 20 to 30 orders of magnitude (maybe),
and would require who knows how much more computing power.
Clearly a better approach is needed.
Another columnist saying something to generate heat and debate and draw lots of readers to his column. This will make the Infoworld advertisers happy and he'll get paid. His content is crap.
:-)
Perhaps we can just start calling him John Dvorak Junior.
I spoke briefly to Jeff Kinz (a Linux developer and former IDC software analyst) who doesn't agree with with Yager.
Kinz says that Apple has enjoyed several advantages over Linux. Among them being a marketing department with a budget. Despite having several advantages over the years Apple's desktop share and the reported Linux desktop share are equal. This means that the actual numbers of running Linux systems is larger than Apples because there is no way to measure, nor any revenue to reflect how many Linux systems are installed and working. This is made even more true by the fact that Linux effectively runs on all hardware platforms unlike apple which until recently ran only on its own closed, proprietary (and expensive-ish) hardware. Other sourced hardware is continually being re-sourced as Linux systems. They are effectively immune to the web based malware that exists today and their security design makes them inherently safer to have in the corporate environment than many others."
Further Kinz goes on to point out the following:
While both Linux and Apple serve capably in the server room, support and licenses for Apple will always be priced at a premium level. This is the nature of the Apple approach. While both platforms have proven themselves to be quite capable, and indeed they now share the same basic architectural underpinnings because of Apples switch to a UNIX/BSD derived operating system, Linux has several advantages going forward:
The first advantage for Linux is of course the cost of license acquisition and the cost of support options. While companies like Red Hat are also charging a premium for their server licenses with support included there are identical clones of the Red Hat products like the versions available at "centos.org" available for the simple cost of a download. Centos uses all of red hats publicly available source code and simply builds the same product. They remove all references to the Company's trademarks which was requested by Red Hat. They even use Red Hat's documentation. The major difference between Red Hat's product and the centos product are the support options.
Since centos is a Red Hat based there are large numbers of users who provide mutual support to each other, including the centos users for free using forms, e-mail lists and real-time text communications on the Web. Mr. Kinz has been observing these communication channels for the past few months and notes that they run 24 hours a day seven days a week. Most of the time, he says, "helpful information and solutions come back faster, in many cases under a minute and just as accurately, if not more so, then a vendor often provides." He also notes "I have never seen any vendor achieve that level of immediate responsiveness. I attribute this level of, well, call it 'aggressive supportedness' to a kind of social competition between Linux afficianados to show how much they know. The communication channels are public and densely populated so the people offering help and solutions are effectively performing in front of hundreds or thousands of their peers (and perhaps potential future employers)."
Another advantage states Mr. Kinz "is Apple's approach to the market perception. Apple continually tries to be a ' different' from everybody else. Linux, on the other hand, strives for and is implementing compatibility with everything. As examples Mr. Kinz notes the existence of tools which allow the Linux systems to integrate with Windows systems. The Linux systems can mount, manage and administrative Windows filesystem shares using the common formats and protocols which Microsoft supports, even when those file systems are on the disk drives of the Linux box itself. Linux can replace the active directory tools currently bei
Isn't it interesting that the "reporter" called the government of India's southern state of Kerala: "Communist".
:) )
Hmm - India has a democratic government, perhaps better or worse than our own. (The USA) but not a communist government.
Hmm.. Is it perhaps possible that AMELIA GENTLEMAN, of the International Herald Tribune has his own agenda?
I think so. Its shameful to see this kind of obviously biased reporting get into the New York Times.
Amelia seems upset that the indian government banned Coke and Pesi recently, but Reuters news service says :
"In a report published earlier this month, environmental group The Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) said it found traces of pesticides far above permissible levels in the products of the two global beverage companies."
Whats interesting about that? Many schools here in the US are banning Coke and Pepsi too, because the stuffs unhealthy and contributes to the 30% rise in America obesity levels. I guess they're all communists too.
Another interesting note. According to the article MS sells windows in to schools in India for between $25 and $30 per computer. The Indian ministry of education as 1.86 million dollars to spend on computer technology for 1 million children. Yup, Thats $1.86 per kid. Hey MS ? Can you get that price a down a bit more? You know, like $0? Hmm.. if the OLPC hits its price point ($100) They can buy 180 thousand laptops. Thats almost 1 for every five kids. Maybe the gates foundation has spare money they can help out on this with. For a mere 8.14 million additional they can get an OLPC laptop for the rest of those kids! (yeah, I know, the OLPC isn't down t0 $100 yet. Using $100 makes the math easy...
This is another columnist saying something he knows is going to generate lots of heat and debate and draw lots of readers to his column. This will make the Infoworld advertisers happy and he'll get paid.
:-)
Perhaps we can just start calling him John Dvorak Junior.
I spoke briefly to Jeff Kinz (a Linux developer and former IDC software analyst) who doesn't agree with with Yager.
Kinz says that Apple has enjoyed several advantages over Linux. Among them being a marketing department with a budget. Despite having several advantages over the years Apple's desktop share and the reported Linux desktop share are equal. This means that the actual numbers of running Linux systems is larger than Apples because there is no way to measure, nor any revenue to reflect how many Linux systems are installed and working. This is made even more true by the fact that Linux effectively runs on all hardware platforms unlike apple which until recently ran only on its own closed, proprietary (and expensive-ish) hardware. Other sourced hardware is continually being re-sourced as Linux systems. They are effectively immune to the web based malware that exists today and their security design makes them inherently safer to have in the corporate environment than many others."
Further Kinz goes on to point out the following:
While both Linux and Apple serve capably in the server room, support and licenses for Apple will always be priced at a premium level. This is the nature of the Apple approach. While both platforms have proven themselves to be quite capable, and indeed they now share the same basic architectural underpinnings because of Apples switch to a UNIX/BSD derived operating system, Linux has several advantages going forward:
The first advantage for Linux is of course the cost of license acquisition and the cost of support options. While companies like Red Hat are also charging a premium for their server licenses with support included there are identical clones of the Red Hat products like the versions available at "centos.org" available for the simple cost of a download. Centos uses all of red hats publicly available source code and simply builds the same product. They remove all references to the Company's trademarks which was requested by Red Hat. They even use Red Hat's documentation. The major difference between Red Hat's product and the centos product are the support options.
Since centos is a Red Hat based there are large numbers of users who provide mutual support to each other, including the centos users for free using forms, e-mail lists and real-time text communications on the Web. Mr. Kinz has been observing these communication channels for the past few months and notes that they run 24 hours a day seven days a week. Most of the time, he says, "helpful information and solutions come back faster, in many cases under a minute and just as accurately, if not more so, then a vendor often provides." He also notes "I have never seen any vendor achieve that level of immediate responsiveness. I attribute this level of, well, call it 'aggressive supportedness' to a kind of social competition between Linux afficianados to show how much they know. The communication channels are public and densely populated so the people offering help and solutions are effectively performing in front of hundreds or thousands of their peers (and perhaps potential future employers)."
Another advantage states Mr. Kinz "is Apple's approach to the market perception. Apple continually tries to be a ' different' from everybody else. Linux, on the other hand, strives for and is implementing compatibility with everything. As examples Mr. Kinz notes the existence of tools which allow the Linux systems to integrate with Windows systems. The Linux systems can mount, manage and administrative Windows filesystem shares using the common formats and protocols which Microsoft supports, even when those file systems are on the disk drives of the Linux box itself. Linux can replace the active
These types of CF bulbs have been availabe for 99 cents each at hardware stores for at least three years, further and laugahably, two weeks before the article came out I was buying CF bulbs in Wal-Mart for 74 cents each. Not $2 - $3 apiece.
As a final note - LED lights sources are being refined for mass production right now. The most efficient form of these will be "multi-LED" "Light sources" They will be called LED bulbs, but they will contain multiple LED's within the same "bulb". The reason for this is that lower power LEDs are more efficient in terms of power use. Since cost of operation will be the chief reason for switching to LED bulbs they must provide an advantage over CF bulbs in order to succeed in the market. This will push the LED manufactuers into the Multi-LED configuration.
PS - Don't buy the fancy "K2" style LED bulbs- your paying for packaging. Wait until some enterprising far east importer ships in a few 40 foot container of pre-assembled LED bulbs and starts selling them for 50 cents each.
Simple, For the first one, The people who need the most help with chidbirthing and pre-natal can't get it. They don't have health insurance or money. In the US that sentences you to almost no health care, except emergency room visits.
:)
For the second one "HFCS" (High Fructose Corn Syrup) and Portion sizes
The use of HFCS in American foods have gone up by several hundered percent over the last 30 years and portion sizes in most restaurants have also gone up, largely due to the influence of the Super sized portions being marketed by the fats food chains. (and no "fats" wasn't a typo there.
Get the book "fat land " by Greg Critser from your library, small book, quick easy read, explains what happened economically and calorically to America since Earl Butz "saved the American dinner budget". Also goes into what HFCS is doing to kids in terms of causing early onset of Type II (adult) diabetes.
For the third one (mumps), many people no longer believe that vaccinations are needed. "we got rid ofthat disease didn't we?" They will change their mind after someone in their family gets crippled or killed by one of the dieases we "got rid of".
> Either make it free ( as in beer) or let it be. Even if
> a kid wanted to save up 100$ do you think the poor
> family will allow it's kids to save up 100$ to buy a
> computer? Are you kidding me? That 100$ are needed for
> the family to survive.To buy animals.To buy clothes.
Functional method is apparently functionally illiterate or just completely out of touch. These laptops will only be purchased by governments or non-profit organizations in huge lots, and will be given to students FREE. DUH. Read the older articles on this project.
> This makes the assumption that school districts use hardware that can
:-) (see below)
:)
:( "
> network boot. I've run into this problem many times. Plus, as cool as
> terminal clients are, it is hard to muster up the hardware to support
> the server side. Remember your budget is often somewhere close or below
> 0.
Most PC's manufactured for approximately the last 8 years have the built in ability to do a "PXE" boot without ever activating a hard drive, cd-rom or floppy. The PXE boot means the machine can boot up an Operating System from across the network. They don't need any Operating system to be resident in the PC itself.
Uses existing PC hardware, COST $ZERO
These machines are the easiest to convert to thin clients because they are already capable of diskless operation.
Now you can remove the hard drive, floppy and cd-rom from the PC, reducing hardware issues and the amount of electricity consumed by PC's. What do you do with all the extra drives? Keep some for spares and sell the rest on Ebay to pay for PXE NIC cards.
For machines which lack built-in PXE boot capabilities there are several techniques which can be used to give them PXE capabilities:
#1: wipe the hard drive, and image it with a PXE boot instead of an OS Free images here: http://www.etherboot.org/
Uses existing PC hardware, COST $ZERO
#2: same as number three, but image is on a floppy. (make it permanent by moving the floppy drive inside the case and covering the slot with a normal empty drive slot panel. Set the bios to boot from floppy.
Uses existing PC hardware, COST $ZERO
#3: Same as 3 & 4, but do it with a cd-rom drive.
Uses existing PC hardware, COST $ZERO
#4: Add a PXE boot rom to the current NIC cost ~$15-20 per. (Remember that empty socket you see on most NIC's? This is what its for.
#5: install a PXE capable Network card, cost ~$20-50 per
#6: Need a large number of boot roms? buy a rom flashing device and blanks roms, download an image from etherboot.org and flash the roms yourself. Cost ~$6 per ROM. Eprom programmer cost ~$40 to "as much as you want to spend". Chances are someone in the district has one you can borrow. Especially if there is an electronics class in the high school.(and if they won't lend it to you, then they can flash the ROMs for you!)
SERVERS: Issue - "We're too poor to buy a server!
RESPONSE: In this case, "server" does not mean what you think.
Typical Thin Client server Needs:
1 GB RAM for every 10 clients
~10 - 20 GB hard drive, any number of clients
Two Network Cards
1Ghz+ CPU
Thin client servers are typically underloaded. Since the diskless client does all the work to display the screen, the server only does the behind the scenes calculations. A 1.3 GHz celeron chip, with 2 GB of RAM can easily serve 20 diskless clients doing web browsing and word processing, fairly memory intensive applications. Given that this is possible, any robustly configured desktop PC, puchased with the last three years can be used for a server as long as you make sure it has enough RAM. Since your diskless clients only absolutely need 64 MB of RAM, you will have plenty to scavenge from to fill up your server. Don't have simms/dimms large enough to get enough RAM in the server because the mainboard only has two RAM slots? Sell the extras (pulled from now diskless clients) on EBAY and use the $ to purchase larger sticks of RAM. COST: 1 GB stick, ~$75 - $150 per.
Got Questions or need help? Want more info? Leave me a message in my jounal.
The best (only!) way to survive adminning a school district is to convert every desktop machine to a diskless client., No hard drives, and no floppies on the desktop machines. (USB Key's are Ok for students and they don't have any moving parts or heads that need maintenance)
Stick one server in each room where there are more than N clients and make a subnet out of the room. N varies based on network speed, server size and typical client load.
Server is headless, keyboardless, mouseless, administered remotely.
Diskless clients almost never breakdown, and need very little RAM to run effectively.
All this concentrates your admin work to the servers and network equipment. (and replacing mice and kybds). And user accounts are more easily admined as well. Of course all user accounts should be managed on a centralized server/authorization system.
If licensing and managing licensing for all the servers and clients and user's email etc.. becomes problemsome or too expensive, all licensing concerns can be eliminated by using k12ltsp, a proven thin client system allready in operation at many schools in the USA and many other countries.
http://www.k12ltsp.org/