Daylight savings doesn't save energy, but it does do something. It gives us more daylight at night. Which gives us more time for shopping and spending money. I read a report showing a jump in retail sales the last the last time they changed daylight savings.
And this year the candy companies hit the holy grail. An hour more light for halloween, and trick-or-treating.
Print-friendly link. It drives me crazy that, just to drive up page views for advertisers, webpages break their articles down into 30 parts. And I'm looking at you Tom's Hardware.
This article seems to be a troll drummed up to get page views, or just plain ignorant. My company had this discussion, and we basically agreed that just because we can't *see* the code in closed source apps doesn't mean we have indemnification for bundling it in our software if it violates software patents or copyrights. There is no inherent risk open source puts you at that closed source doesn't. However, there are some risks closed source put you at that open source doesn't. We use both open and closed source 3rd party software in our product, if the closed-source stuff is pulled, bundled with a nasty eula, or no long developed, we're SOL. This has happened to us. However, if the open-source stuff is pulled, no longer developed, whatever, we'll maintain it. This has happened too, and it isn't *nearly* as disruptive.
Using GPL v. BSD licensed stuff can be a concern, but you can work around that (see proprietary drivers and the linux kernel), and it isn't different than restrictive licensing with proprietary stuff--proprietary licenses can require about anything--release your derivative code, pay royalties, or even listen to abba while coding. Not to mention, it isn't *always* a bad thing to release your code. Sure the competitors get it, but if the GPL stuff you are using really gives you a significant advantage, your competitors will have to adopt your model, or try to replicate all of your code, all the while avoiding the copyright minefield that comes with rewriting.
This article seems also to suggest that piracy and overusing licenses is more of a problem with OSS than proprietary. This is almost always wrong, OSS almost always has more lenient licensing policies than closed-source. We moved our CRM from Salesforce to Sugar for this very reason, the licenses were costing us an arm and a leg, and we couldn't configure it to our liking. Now we pay for support on Sugar (which is OSS), and we get better support, save money, and it is more powerful. We're happy.
Actually that isn't quite correct. As with any apt system you can do the following:
1. Add the CD to your/etc/apt/sources.list file (I know synaptic has a gui way of doing this)
2. If you don't want to use internet sources, comment them out with a # (synaptic can also do this with a gui)
3. Now apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade
I had to walk a friend on dial-up through this once over the phone. He had a liveCD but his internet was too slow to even think about doing a dist-upgrade. He's still up and hasn't had problems. It isn't the easiest thing to do, but it works, and I dare say updating Windows isn't that easy either.
Sample to your hearts content without permission, if you have a winner, then you pay for the license. It looks like Timbaland just forgot the last part. If the song never gets released and popular, no harm no foul right? But if you have a winner you'll be able and happy to pay for the license, so it is a no brainer to sample without permission, until you want to release it. Of course this only seems to work for those with the ability to make money off a release (big record labels), independent musicians without the exposure and protection of a big label probably won't be able to pay off the copyright holder anyway.
But Tempest is right, there is no way this'd be worth it to fight. For example Talib Kweli recently violated Ben Kweller's copyright (or more likely his label's copyright) from the song "In Other Words". Kweller replied at the end episode 7 of his youtube show One Minute Pop Song. If a fairly well known artist, Ben Kweller, can't fight it, someone like Tempest has pretty poor chances.
Home sampling is probably fair use, but certainly using a sample on a record is not. If Timbaland samples Tempest at home, I think that is great. If Timbaland wants to include it on an album, there has to be some kind of recourse for the little guy covering such obvious infringement. You know if Tempest released an album (even just on the internet) sampling Timbaland the RIAA would be all over it with Lawyers. Remember The Grey Album?
You are right, but it is even better than that. There is realistically no way ANYONE can take money out of the economy. No unless. If Scrooge McDuck puts all his money in a silo and never spends it, it benefits everyone else by contracting the money supply and subsequently makes your money more valuable. If McDuck suddenly unloads the money, and there is enough of it, he will depress the value of the money and lose a ton of buying power (as does everyone else, but the fed can take money out of circulation or combat that in a number of ways).
My economics department tried very hard to think of a way harm a country with money. The rules were as follows - It must be legal (no funding revolutions) It must be feasible (no buying nukes and nuking the country) It most be done with currency or something currency can buy (no buying all children and executing them) It must not hurt the "doer" more than the country they are trying to hurt (no snatching up all domestic currency, holding it, then dumping it back to deflate its value) It must not be easily countered
Apart from printing gobs of it and causing inflation--which only the treasury can do--we couldn't think of anything.
I'd love for a small Taiwanese company to make a peice of hardware that *just works*, is multifunctional, unencumbered, and relatively inexpensive. The problem is, it is really tough to do. This kind of thing is still in the realm of IT professionals and enthusiasts, because it is hard.
Forcing users to stream wmv, mp4 or whatever is a lock-in tactic, I won't debate that, but it does make a lot of other things easier. Everything from a bad MPEG header, to higher than normal latency will break an app like this. I'm on the VLC Streaming list, and really smart competent people come with problems of this sort all of the time. VLC is great, and has been around for a long time, but we can't get it right either.
I work for a small software company, when we sell software a server goes with it. It is necessary for what we are doing, but it is a huge pain in the rear. Half of the time you can't get anyone competent to ask about their network setup (even to get something as trivial as a static IP or proxy exception), and when you do half of the time they don't know what is going on. I hear lines like "I didn't set this up, I don't know" and "well I don't know what the heck that does" all the time in server rooms. My point is this--if companies and schools can't keep their networks straight, a home user can't either. I know home networks are much less complex, but if you add a server that handles phones, TV, music, and who knows what else, it is going to get a lot more complex.
And without guidance to their network you'd have to have one heck of a product to have it *just work*. And the networking is just half of it, you also have to get an easy-to-use, cross-platform, nice looking, reliable desktop app to couple with the set up.
Unless this company does a really good job like Tivo or get bought up by *a large well known tech company*, I don't think the general public would buy it because of name recognition. But more importantly, I think this kind of thing is really hard to get right. The Windows Home Server seems to be the closest thing to a consumer server out there, but without an XBOX 360, this still won't hook up to your TV. To add games, music, VOIP capability (I have a Vonage phone and I occasionally have trouble with it) and whatever else, seems to be beyond anyone's current capability.
None of these are new, but they are the ones that I keep coming back to. Neverball (my wife likes Neverputt more), and Tremulous. I occasionally play Sauerbraten, Nexuiz, and a few others, but the first two listed are my favorites (and in the Debian repos).
Let me just say, thank you. You are one of the most impressive/. posters. You consistently respond to posters on several websites, many of which are out and out trolls, and that is impressive. You take the time to explain things over and over again, and that is impressive. You always respond in a kind and positive way, even when the posters are trolls, flamebaiters, or just plain ignorant & lazy.
Anyhow, thanks for being on the people's side. I know there is more money on the other side, but less satisfaction I hope.
Competition will only serve customers. If there are three vendors selling the equivalent of an OLPC, it can only help the governments/poor looking to buy these things. The companies will have to compete on services and price, which is good. That is, so long as no one vendor can put excessive pressure (think bribes/threats) on buyers.
As much as I don't like Microsoft cruft they deserve a chance to get into these markets as much as anyone else, so long as they don't get into these markets by using illicit means. Plus, the OLPC project does have a significant headstart, and they have thought about the project very carefully. I can see a poorly executed Microsoft Windows CE implementation failing pretty miserably.
Sure why the heck not? We've got rfid passports and government IDs, rfid in our cars (toll passes), and rfid boarding passes just on the horizon. I mean, we've even got rfid in our TIRES making is possible to TRACK OUR CARS!!
Would/. trust rfid atm cards? No. Will the general public? If it is either pushed on them (see the rfid tires) or if it adds some kind of convenience (see the toll passes) you bet they'll trust it and they'll love it.
I don't think this is a good idea, but it sure isn't as bad as some of the rfid implementations we ALREADY have. We should loudly oppose this implentation, but we should fight the existing ones.
You have the tax break backwards. It isn't to get people to have kids directly, it is to give a break to those already with kids. So people are more likely to be able to afford kids--they are expensive. A small tax break only helps a bit with that.
This comes up again and again. Pure FUD by the ISPs. What TFA describes is an issue with QoS NOT an aggregate bandwidth issue. The problem isn't that there isn't enough bandwidth for everyone--they could lay more fiber if they were worried about that. The problem is that if they promise you a certain latency and a certain size pipe, you should get it regardless of how much youtube your neighbor is watching. Again this is a QoS issue. The ISPs already prioritize certain traffic--those of their higher paying customers--Net Neutrality is about restricting them from selling bandwidth twice, once for use and once for "access" to customers.
If net neutrality goes away, best case scenario, competition forces ISPs to keep everything essentially how it is now. Worst case scenario, fragmentation of the internet, Google has to pay Bell to access Bell customers, Time Warner to access their customers and Qwest to access theirs. If Google pays some and not others, aside from the ISPs controlling content (which I don't like) we could see the internet's interoperability broken. I think this is a good rule of thumb-if the best something can do is what we have now, we should probably leave it.
QoS - Quality of Service refers to the probability of your connection meeting a specific throughput. Telecommunication firms oversell capacity, but if you always get the capacity you were guaranteed when you signed up, there should be no problems with night elfs dying because someone was watching IPTV.
I wonder when the US (and some other countries) will recognize that non-lethal doesn't equate to humane. Most forms of torture are designed to be non-lethal, but that doesn't make them OK. I'm not saying police should never use force, but rubber bullets, mace, tasers and batons--while sometimes necessary--like lethal force, they should be used as a *last* resort. In any case, with the selective suspension of habeus corpus, secret prisons, widespread surveillance, and the recent bill "redefining" the torture under the Geneva Conventions, tazers may be the least of our problems.
Regardless of what anyone says, tazers are dangerous to people with pacemakers, heart trouble, and certain other medical conditions; and in some cases, tazers can be lethal . The UCLA video is chilling, and it isn't the only instance of taser-misuse.
I don't see what unfettered immigration has to do with overpopulation. If anything it reduces population growth. While it is true immigrants have higher birthrates than their those in their new country, it is also true they generally have lower birthrates than those in the country from which they came. I've heard the claim that people move to have more space so they can have larger families but that doesn't hold up empirically. People move for money, not space.
Immigration is generally from poor countries to a rich ones. Rich countries generally have lower birth rates than poor countries. While immigrants initially have birthrates like their country of origin, as their children become more wealthy, their birthrate drops to be similar to the rich countries birth rate.
I don't know if the overall effect is substantial enough to encourage immigration to reduce population growth, but I doubt it. There are plenty of good reasons to oppose unfettered immigration; population growth is NOT one of them.
Seeing as how its impossible for jet fuel to melt steel (jet fuel burns from 800F to 1500F depending on conditions) and that steel melts at 2750F.
From TFA: Jet fuel burns at 800 to 1500F, not hot enough to melt steel (2750F). However, experts agree that for the towers to collapse, their steel frames didn't need to melt, they just had to lose some of their structural strength"Steel loses about 50 percent of its strength at 1100F, and at 1800F it is probably at less than 10 percent." Plus jet fuel wasn't the only thing burning. While the jet fuel was the catalyst for the WTC fires, the resulting inferno was intensified by the combustible material inside the buildings, including rugs, curtains, furniture and paper. It was the rest of the stuff burning afterward that was responsible for the heat transfer that eventually brought them down."
There are plenty of weird things to point your finger at, but lets look at what the experts in their fields are saying, not what one BYU physics professor and a slew of nutcases are claiming.
You are looking for this: TrackMeNot, a Firefox Extension.
TrackMeNot runs in Firefox as a low-priority background process that periodically issues randomized search-queries to popular search engines, e.g., AOL, Yahoo!, Google, and MSN. It hides users' actual search trails in a cloud of indistinguishable 'ghost' queries, making it difficult, if not impossible, to aggregate such data into accurate or identifying user profiles. TrackMeNot integrates into the Firefox 'Tools' menu and includes a variety of user-configurable options.
Neat idea. Sadly, the implementation as well as the idea is spectacularly flawed. If you want to be really safe (like the people actually engaging in child pornography) block all cookies, set the browser cache to zero, the browser history to zero, tell your browser not to save passwords/data forms/anything of any kind, run noscript, and run TOR. If this isn't enough, you might want to do all that in Knoppix at a WAP somewhere far from your home, and blow up the computer after you use it.
Just like security, there is no such thing as perfect anonymity, given the motivation law enforcement will track anyone down. Since the afore mentioned ideas will seriously reduce the usefulness of the Web, clearing private data when closing the webbrowser and TOR are probably enough for you.
Back to the reason this "flooding the data miners" idea is flawed, Bruce Schneier wrote:
One, it doesn't hide your searches. If the government wants to know who's been searching on "al Qaeda recruitment centers," it won't matter that you've made ten thousand other searches as well -- you'll be targeted. Two, it's too easy to spot. There are only 1,673 search terms in the program's dictionary. Here, as a random example, are the program's "G" words... The program's authors claim that this list is temporary, and that there will eventually be a TrackMeNot server with an ever-changing word list. Of course, that list can be monitored by any analysis program -- as could any queries to that server. In any case, every twelve seconds -- exactly -- the program picks a random pair of words and sends it to either AOL, Yahoo, MSN, or Google. My guess is that your searches contain more than two words, you don't send them out in precise twelve-second intervals, and you favor one search engine over the others. Three, some of the program's searches are worse than yours. The dictionary includes... Does anyone reall think that searches on "erotic rape," "mailbombing bibles," and "choking virgins" will make their legitimate searches less noteworthy? And four, it wastes a whole lot of bandwidth. A query every twelve seconds translates into 2,400 queries a day, assuming an eight-hour workday. A typical Google response is about 25K, so we're talking 60 megabytes of additional traffic daily. Imagine if everyone in the company used it. I suppose this kind of thing would stop someone who has a paper printout of your searches and is looking through them manually, but it's not going to hamper computer analysis very much. Or anyone who isn't lazy. But it wouldn't be hard for a computer profiling program to ignore these searches. Yes, data mining is a signal-to-noise problem. But artificial noise like this isn't going to help much. If I were going to improve on this idea, I would make the plugin watch the user's search patterns. I would make it send queries only to the search engines the user does, only when he is actually online doing things. I would randomize the timing. (There's a comment to that effect in the code, so presumably this will be fixed in a later version of the program.) And I would make it monitor the web pages the user looks at, and send queries based on keywords it finds on those pages. And I would make it send queries in the form the user tends to use, whether it be single words, pair
and I know I've seen an article here on/. where someone figured out how to embed a virus in a wma file. Microsoft just said the virus writer was using the same api (of sorts) that they use for drm and no patch would be forthcoming. Only a matter of time before someone writes a virus that runs on one of these things. Put the two together, slap them all over kazaa, and anyone with a zune, within wifi distance of an infected one, is hosed.
OTOH there has to be two zunes close together for it to work, and the chance that more than two people get these, let alone two people in the same city, is pretty negligable. : )
Techarp has a great comparison between just about every major video card ever from just about every major video card maker ever. The 7900GS included. The format of the comparison (images) is terrible since you can't search through, but it is a pretty sweet chart. The comparison is more a technical one than a performance one, so take it with a grain of salt, but here are the results for a few cards.
The Kyoto protocol is about dead because of the US and China opting out. That is true. But it was crap anyhow.
The basic idea was to put a global cap on emissions, i.e. pick the quantity side of the economic chart. Thus the price has to adjust for the given quantity. This seems like a good idea, it has worked pretty well in the US over SO2 emissions. So what is the problem with Kyoto?
The first problem was the base year for emissions - 1990. This was a year where US & Chinese emissions were relatively low, but Russian emissions were relatively high. By using this as a base year the Russians would be given a huge amount of the "certificates to pollute" so to speak. Since US emissions are higher now, and Russian ones are lower, this misallocation would cause a huge shift of wealth from the US & China into Russia, for no reason other than they polluted more in 1990. This means the distribution of emissions and burdens is not even and the amount of income transfers required isn't close to feasible
This isn't the only problem. The overall level and trajectory of emissions is highly volatile. SO2 prices in the US started out reasonably, they're now something like $1000 per ton. That has become expensive enough to bar any entrants into the energy market: even the low emissions ones we are trying to encourage. Other issues include: no one agrees on the right level of emissions, the protocol is not based on any economic objective, and quantity baselines are troublesome from uncertainty.
Another issue is that picking quantity makes sense if you assume costs are linear and benefits nonlinear. This doesn't seem to be the case. If benefits are linear and costs are nonlinear, a global tax makes much more sense. There is good reason to think that marginal costs are sharply increasing, and benefits depend on the huge stock (amount of gas in air now), not the flow, so benefits are likely to be linear.
Price is a better choice than quantity in this case. For governments there is a fiscal advantage of taxing, so they are likely to enforce the limits. However, when choosing quantity, governments have far less strong incentives to enforce the resolution (they may even have negative incentives). When choosing quantity, both buyer and seller benefit from corruption. In choosing price the taxer wants to be paid. A few other assorted issues include: taxing creates no artificial scarcity, & measurement issues between rich and poor countries on quantity don't exist on price.
Choosing price isn't foolproof, we'd have require careful track of hidden subsidies (since governments could just rebate the tax to the companies and thus defeat the purpose). Another issue would be that we'd have to include existing taxes as part of the tax burden - i.e. much of Europe already has high taxes on this sort of thing, there is no need to double existing taxes. But that is tricky because it requires a careful calculation of existing taxes.
Anyhow, we do need to do something about the emissions problem. Absolutely we do. But the Kyoto protocol was a horribly flawed idea addressing a very real problem. We need to scrap this dead pseudo-treaty and do something else.
I think if we are going to do extra searches, we may as well make them as likely to turn up something, as possible. That means, no random searches (or only semi-random searches). There is little reason to believe 90 year old grannies are going to blow up planes, if they make it through the first security checkpoint, no random checks on them. The same goes for certain other groups of people (if you are afraid of terrorists getting grannies to do thier work for them, you could rotate the "out" profiles).
But profiling isn't fair. It isn't just to Arabs to check them for no reason other than race. So here is what I propose we do. Charge each passenger an extra dollar. Do profiling in our searches, or semi-random searches. Take the extra dollar/passenger (anywhere between $50 for a small plane to $300 for large ones) and give it to those we inconvenience. "I'm sorry for inconveniencing you Mr. Terry Rist, but here is $100 for compensation."
Then not only are those who were profiled not as mad (and perhaps happier), but other passengers will be happy too because - no one's time was wasted by interrogating granny, and those more likely to attack a plane have been checked twice. Everyone is safer, and freqently profiled people (such as myself) are compensated for their troubles.
Mod parent up, this is absolutely right, and has been forever. We went from Vinyl to Cassettes despite a noticeable drop in quality and obvious sound degradation after a few months of playing. Why? It was more convenient to carry a tape in your pocket than a record.
Same reason VHS won out - betamax required swapping tapes in most cases. Who cares that beta looked better? It was a pain in the neck.
I think this is the reason many people own movies. I only watch most movies once, and going to the theater (once) is cheaper than buying a VHS deck (in the 80s/90s) or a DVD player (in the 90s/00s) and the accompanying movies. Yet I still own a lot of movies. Why? It is more convenient to pick up a movie at walmart than to go to a theater, even though the theater gives a higher quality product.
Same for CDs and DVDs beating out cassettes and VHS. Luckily in this case the quality was better too so it was win/win. Anywho, enough beating a dead horse, convenience trumps quality, it always has (player piano v. musician), it is right now (tivo) and it will into the future (dvd vs. HD disc).
You know what makes me mad? When big firms seem to find it more profitable to run a PR campaign, buy a politician, or influence a debate, than actually make a better product. This isn't just Microsoft, but I hate to see corporations competing on anything other than services/products. When they run a PR campaign (different from advertising), buy a law, or weigh in on a debate--and if they are successful--they are distracting from the real competition in the marketplace over goods and services. Call it "sales diversion" or something.
I know Microsoft has a gazillion talented engineers, but I can't help but feel that if they worried more about Vista, and not about an academic/government debate (or the Mass. open doc format, or whatever else they are in the news for), we might have a workable Vista beta, or *gasp* Vista might have been closer to on time.
Slashdot Mirror
Daylight savings doesn't save energy, but it does do something. It gives us more daylight at night. Which gives us more time for shopping and spending money. I read a report showing a jump in retail sales the last the last time they changed daylight savings.
And this year the candy companies hit the holy grail. An hour more light for halloween, and trick-or-treating.
Print-friendly link. It drives me crazy that, just to drive up page views for advertisers, webpages break their articles down into 30 parts. And I'm looking at you Tom's Hardware.
This article seems to be a troll drummed up to get page views, or just plain ignorant. My company had this discussion, and we basically agreed that just because we can't *see* the code in closed source apps doesn't mean we have indemnification for bundling it in our software if it violates software patents or copyrights. There is no inherent risk open source puts you at that closed source doesn't. However, there are some risks closed source put you at that open source doesn't. We use both open and closed source 3rd party software in our product, if the closed-source stuff is pulled, bundled with a nasty eula, or no long developed, we're SOL. This has happened to us. However, if the open-source stuff is pulled, no longer developed, whatever, we'll maintain it. This has happened too, and it isn't *nearly* as disruptive.
Using GPL v. BSD licensed stuff can be a concern, but you can work around that (see proprietary drivers and the linux kernel), and it isn't different than restrictive licensing with proprietary stuff--proprietary licenses can require about anything--release your derivative code, pay royalties, or even listen to abba while coding. Not to mention, it isn't *always* a bad thing to release your code. Sure the competitors get it, but if the GPL stuff you are using really gives you a significant advantage, your competitors will have to adopt your model, or try to replicate all of your code, all the while avoiding the copyright minefield that comes with rewriting.
This article seems also to suggest that piracy and overusing licenses is more of a problem with OSS than proprietary. This is almost always wrong, OSS almost always has more lenient licensing policies than closed-source. We moved our CRM from Salesforce to Sugar for this very reason, the licenses were costing us an arm and a leg, and we couldn't configure it to our liking. Now we pay for support on Sugar (which is OSS), and we get better support, save money, and it is more powerful. We're happy.
I had to walk a friend on dial-up through this once over the phone. He had a liveCD but his internet was too slow to even think about doing a dist-upgrade. He's still up and hasn't had problems. It isn't the easiest thing to do, but it works, and I dare say updating Windows isn't that easy either.
Sample to your hearts content without permission, if you have a winner, then you pay for the license. It looks like Timbaland just forgot the last part. If the song never gets released and popular, no harm no foul right? But if you have a winner you'll be able and happy to pay for the license, so it is a no brainer to sample without permission, until you want to release it. Of course this only seems to work for those with the ability to make money off a release (big record labels), independent musicians without the exposure and protection of a big label probably won't be able to pay off the copyright holder anyway.
But Tempest is right, there is no way this'd be worth it to fight. For example Talib Kweli recently violated Ben Kweller's copyright (or more likely his label's copyright) from the song "In Other Words". Kweller replied at the end episode 7 of his youtube show One Minute Pop Song. If a fairly well known artist, Ben Kweller, can't fight it, someone like Tempest has pretty poor chances.
Home sampling is probably fair use, but certainly using a sample on a record is not. If Timbaland samples Tempest at home, I think that is great. If Timbaland wants to include it on an album, there has to be some kind of recourse for the little guy covering such obvious infringement. You know if Tempest released an album (even just on the internet) sampling Timbaland the RIAA would be all over it with Lawyers. Remember The Grey Album?
You are right, but it is even better than that. There is realistically no way ANYONE can take money out of the economy. No unless. If Scrooge McDuck puts all his money in a silo and never spends it, it benefits everyone else by contracting the money supply and subsequently makes your money more valuable. If McDuck suddenly unloads the money, and there is enough of it, he will depress the value of the money and lose a ton of buying power (as does everyone else, but the fed can take money out of circulation or combat that in a number of ways).
My economics department tried very hard to think of a way harm a country with money. The rules were as follows -
It must be legal (no funding revolutions)
It must be feasible (no buying nukes and nuking the country)
It most be done with currency or something currency can buy (no buying all children and executing them)
It must not hurt the "doer" more than the country they are trying to hurt (no snatching up all domestic currency, holding it, then dumping it back to deflate its value)
It must not be easily countered
Apart from printing gobs of it and causing inflation--which only the treasury can do--we couldn't think of anything.
I'd love for a small Taiwanese company to make a peice of hardware that *just works*, is multifunctional, unencumbered, and relatively inexpensive. The problem is, it is really tough to do. This kind of thing is still in the realm of IT professionals and enthusiasts, because it is hard.
Forcing users to stream wmv, mp4 or whatever is a lock-in tactic, I won't debate that, but it does make a lot of other things easier. Everything from a bad MPEG header, to higher than normal latency will break an app like this. I'm on the VLC Streaming list, and really smart competent people come with problems of this sort all of the time. VLC is great, and has been around for a long time, but we can't get it right either.
I work for a small software company, when we sell software a server goes with it. It is necessary for what we are doing, but it is a huge pain in the rear. Half of the time you can't get anyone competent to ask about their network setup (even to get something as trivial as a static IP or proxy exception), and when you do half of the time they don't know what is going on. I hear lines like "I didn't set this up, I don't know" and "well I don't know what the heck that does" all the time in server rooms. My point is this--if companies and schools can't keep their networks straight, a home user can't either. I know home networks are much less complex, but if you add a server that handles phones, TV, music, and who knows what else, it is going to get a lot more complex.
And without guidance to their network you'd have to have one heck of a product to have it *just work*. And the networking is just half of it, you also have to get an easy-to-use, cross-platform, nice looking, reliable desktop app to couple with the set up.
Unless this company does a really good job like Tivo or get bought up by *a large well known tech company*, I don't think the general public would buy it because of name recognition. But more importantly, I think this kind of thing is really hard to get right. The Windows Home Server seems to be the closest thing to a consumer server out there, but without an XBOX 360, this still won't hook up to your TV. To add games, music, VOIP capability (I have a Vonage phone and I occasionally have trouble with it) and whatever else, seems to be beyond anyone's current capability.
None of these are new, but they are the ones that I keep coming back to. Neverball (my wife likes Neverputt more), and Tremulous. I occasionally play Sauerbraten, Nexuiz, and a few others, but the first two listed are my favorites (and in the Debian repos).
/. user, akaimbatman, wrote a pretty good article on this very topic in his blog:s s/archives/27#comments
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http://akaimbatman.intelligentblogger.com/wordpre
Enjoy
Let me just say, thank you. You are one of the most impressive /. posters. You consistently respond to posters on several websites, many of which are out and out trolls, and that is impressive. You take the time to explain things over and over again, and that is impressive. You always respond in a kind and positive way, even when the posters are trolls, flamebaiters, or just plain ignorant & lazy.
Anyhow, thanks for being on the people's side. I know there is more money on the other side, but less satisfaction I hope.
Competition will only serve customers. If there are three vendors selling the equivalent of an OLPC, it can only help the governments/poor looking to buy these things. The companies will have to compete on services and price, which is good. That is, so long as no one vendor can put excessive pressure (think bribes/threats) on buyers.
As much as I don't like Microsoft cruft they deserve a chance to get into these markets as much as anyone else, so long as they don't get into these markets by using illicit means. Plus, the OLPC project does have a significant headstart, and they have thought about the project very carefully. I can see a poorly executed Microsoft Windows CE implementation failing pretty miserably.
Would You Trust RFID-Enabled ATM Cards?
/. trust rfid atm cards? No. Will the general public? If it is either pushed on them (see the rfid tires) or if it adds some kind of convenience (see the toll passes) you bet they'll trust it and they'll love it.
Sure why the heck not? We've got rfid passports and government IDs, rfid in our cars (toll passes), and rfid boarding passes just on the horizon. I mean, we've even got rfid in our TIRES making is possible to TRACK OUR CARS!!
Would
I don't think this is a good idea, but it sure isn't as bad as some of the rfid implementations we ALREADY have. We should loudly oppose this implentation, but we should fight the existing ones.
You have the tax break backwards. It isn't to get people to have kids directly, it is to give a break to those already with kids. So people are more likely to be able to afford kids--they are expensive. A small tax break only helps a bit with that.
This comes up again and again. Pure FUD by the ISPs. What TFA describes is an issue with QoS NOT an aggregate bandwidth issue. The problem isn't that there isn't enough bandwidth for everyone--they could lay more fiber if they were worried about that. The problem is that if they promise you a certain latency and a certain size pipe, you should get it regardless of how much youtube your neighbor is watching. Again this is a QoS issue. The ISPs already prioritize certain traffic--those of their higher paying customers--Net Neutrality is about restricting them from selling bandwidth twice, once for use and once for "access" to customers.
If net neutrality goes away, best case scenario, competition forces ISPs to keep everything essentially how it is now. Worst case scenario, fragmentation of the internet, Google has to pay Bell to access Bell customers, Time Warner to access their customers and Qwest to access theirs. If Google pays some and not others, aside from the ISPs controlling content (which I don't like) we could see the internet's interoperability broken. I think this is a good rule of thumb-if the best something can do is what we have now, we should probably leave it.
QoS - Quality of Service refers to the probability of your connection meeting a specific throughput. Telecommunication firms oversell capacity, but if you always get the capacity you were guaranteed when you signed up, there should be no problems with night elfs dying because someone was watching IPTV.
I wonder when the US (and some other countries) will recognize that non-lethal doesn't equate to humane. Most forms of torture are designed to be non-lethal, but that doesn't make them OK. I'm not saying police should never use force, but rubber bullets, mace, tasers and batons--while sometimes necessary--like lethal force, they should be used as a *last* resort. In any case, with the selective suspension of habeus corpus, secret prisons, widespread surveillance, and the recent bill "redefining" the torture under the Geneva Conventions, tazers may be the least of our problems.
Regardless of what anyone says, tazers are dangerous to people with pacemakers, heart trouble, and certain other medical conditions; and in some cases, tazers can be lethal . The UCLA video is chilling, and it isn't the only instance of taser-misuse.
What would Solaris get?
Drivers.
I don't see what unfettered immigration has to do with overpopulation. If anything it reduces population growth. While it is true immigrants have higher birthrates than their those in their new country, it is also true they generally have lower birthrates than those in the country from which they came. I've heard the claim that people move to have more space so they can have larger families but that doesn't hold up empirically. People move for money, not space.
Immigration is generally from poor countries to a rich ones. Rich countries generally have lower birth rates than poor countries. While immigrants initially have birthrates like their country of origin, as their children become more wealthy, their birthrate drops to be similar to the rich countries birth rate.
I don't know if the overall effect is substantial enough to encourage immigration to reduce population growth, but I doubt it. There are plenty of good reasons to oppose unfettered immigration; population growth is NOT one of them.
Popular Mechanics wrote a whole article debunking myths such as these.
Seeing as how its impossible for jet fuel to melt steel (jet fuel burns from 800F to 1500F depending on conditions) and that steel melts at 2750F.
From TFA: Jet fuel burns at 800 to 1500F, not hot enough to melt steel (2750F). However, experts agree that for the towers to collapse, their steel frames didn't need to melt, they just had to lose some of their structural strength"Steel loses about 50 percent of its strength at 1100F, and at 1800F it is probably at less than 10 percent." Plus jet fuel wasn't the only thing burning. While the jet fuel was the catalyst for the WTC fires, the resulting inferno was intensified by the combustible material inside the buildings, including rugs, curtains, furniture and paper. It was the rest of the stuff burning afterward that was responsible for the heat transfer that eventually brought them down."
There are plenty of weird things to point your finger at, but lets look at what the experts in their fields are saying, not what one BYU physics professor and a slew of nutcases are claiming.
There is an old saying - "the deeper the pockets, the more buzzing flies."
With AMD behind ATI, ATI is worth a lot more. And yes, I just made that saying up.
Neat idea. Sadly, the implementation as well as the idea is spectacularly flawed. If you want to be really safe (like the people actually engaging in child pornography) block all cookies, set the browser cache to zero, the browser history to zero, tell your browser not to save passwords/data forms/anything of any kind, run noscript, and run TOR. If this isn't enough, you might want to do all that in Knoppix at a WAP somewhere far from your home, and blow up the computer after you use it.
Just like security, there is no such thing as perfect anonymity, given the motivation law enforcement will track anyone down. Since the afore mentioned ideas will seriously reduce the usefulness of the Web, clearing private data when closing the webbrowser and TOR are probably enough for you.
Back to the reason this "flooding the data miners" idea is flawed, Bruce Schneier wrote:
and I know I've seen an article here on /. where someone figured out how to embed a virus in a wma file. Microsoft just said the virus writer was using the same api (of sorts) that they use for drm and no patch would be forthcoming. Only a matter of time before someone writes a virus that runs on one of these things. Put the two together, slap them all over kazaa, and anyone with a zune, within wifi distance of an infected one, is hosed.
OTOH there has to be two zunes close together for it to work, and the chance that more than two people get these, let alone two people in the same city, is pretty negligable. : )
Techarp has a great comparison between just about every major video card ever from just about every major video card maker ever. The 7900GS included. The format of the comparison (images) is terrible since you can't search through, but it is a pretty sweet chart. The comparison is more a technical one than a performance one, so take it with a grain of salt, but here are the results for a few cards.
c k____Core_Speed___Memory_Bandwidth
_ __450mhz_________42.2_GB/s
_ __400mhz_________32.0_GB/s
_ ___350mhz_________32.0_GB/s
_ __500mhz_________16.0_GB/s
Name_of_Card____Vertex_Pipelines___Textures/Clo
GeForce_7900GS________7______________20________
GeForce_7800GT________7______________20________
Geforce_6800GT_________6______________16_______
GeForce_6600GT________3______________8_________
On this site there are a lot of other important stats - memory clockspeed, pixel shader version, bus speeds & interfaces.
PS Sorry for the fugly formatting
The Kyoto protocol is about dead because of the US and China opting out. That is true. But it was crap anyhow.
The basic idea was to put a global cap on emissions, i.e. pick the quantity side of the economic chart. Thus the price has to adjust for the given quantity. This seems like a good idea, it has worked pretty well in the US over SO2 emissions. So what is the problem with Kyoto?
The first problem was the base year for emissions - 1990. This was a year where US & Chinese emissions were relatively low, but Russian emissions were relatively high. By using this as a base year the Russians would be given a huge amount of the "certificates to pollute" so to speak. Since US emissions are higher now, and Russian ones are lower, this misallocation would cause a huge shift of wealth from the US & China into Russia, for no reason other than they polluted more in 1990. This means the distribution of emissions and burdens is not even and the amount of income transfers required isn't close to feasible
This isn't the only problem. The overall level and trajectory of emissions is highly volatile. SO2 prices in the US started out reasonably, they're now something like $1000 per ton. That has become expensive enough to bar any entrants into the energy market: even the low emissions ones we are trying to encourage. Other issues include: no one agrees on the right level of emissions, the protocol is not based on any economic objective, and quantity baselines are troublesome from uncertainty.
Another issue is that picking quantity makes sense if you assume costs are linear and benefits nonlinear. This doesn't seem to be the case. If benefits are linear and costs are nonlinear, a global tax makes much more sense. There is good reason to think that marginal costs are sharply increasing, and benefits depend on the huge stock (amount of gas in air now), not the flow, so benefits are likely to be linear.
Price is a better choice than quantity in this case. For governments there is a fiscal advantage of taxing, so they are likely to enforce the limits. However, when choosing quantity, governments have far less strong incentives to enforce the resolution (they may even have negative incentives). When choosing quantity, both buyer and seller benefit from corruption. In choosing price the taxer wants to be paid. A few other assorted issues include: taxing creates no artificial scarcity, & measurement issues between rich and poor countries on quantity don't exist on price.
Choosing price isn't foolproof, we'd have require careful track of hidden subsidies (since governments could just rebate the tax to the companies and thus defeat the purpose). Another issue would be that we'd have to include existing taxes as part of the tax burden - i.e. much of Europe already has high taxes on this sort of thing, there is no need to double existing taxes. But that is tricky because it requires a careful calculation of existing taxes.
Anyhow, we do need to do something about the emissions problem. Absolutely we do. But the Kyoto protocol was a horribly flawed idea addressing a very real problem. We need to scrap this dead pseudo-treaty and do something else.
I think if we are going to do extra searches, we may as well make them as likely to turn up something, as possible. That means, no random searches (or only semi-random searches). There is little reason to believe 90 year old grannies are going to blow up planes, if they make it through the first security checkpoint, no random checks on them. The same goes for certain other groups of people (if you are afraid of terrorists getting grannies to do thier work for them, you could rotate the "out" profiles).
But profiling isn't fair. It isn't just to Arabs to check them for no reason other than race. So here is what I propose we do. Charge each passenger an extra dollar. Do profiling in our searches, or semi-random searches. Take the extra dollar/passenger (anywhere between $50 for a small plane to $300 for large ones) and give it to those we inconvenience. "I'm sorry for inconveniencing you Mr. Terry Rist, but here is $100 for compensation."
Then not only are those who were profiled not as mad (and perhaps happier), but other passengers will be happy too because - no one's time was wasted by interrogating granny, and those more likely to attack a plane have been checked twice. Everyone is safer, and freqently profiled people (such as myself) are compensated for their troubles.
Mod parent up, this is absolutely right, and has been forever. We went from Vinyl to Cassettes despite a noticeable drop in quality and obvious sound degradation after a few months of playing. Why? It was more convenient to carry a tape in your pocket than a record.
Same reason VHS won out - betamax required swapping tapes in most cases. Who cares that beta looked better? It was a pain in the neck.
I think this is the reason many people own movies. I only watch most movies once, and going to the theater (once) is cheaper than buying a VHS deck (in the 80s/90s) or a DVD player (in the 90s/00s) and the accompanying movies. Yet I still own a lot of movies. Why? It is more convenient to pick up a movie at walmart than to go to a theater, even though the theater gives a higher quality product.
Same for CDs and DVDs beating out cassettes and VHS. Luckily in this case the quality was better too so it was win/win. Anywho, enough beating a dead horse, convenience trumps quality, it always has (player piano v. musician), it is right now (tivo) and it will into the future (dvd vs. HD disc).
You know what makes me mad? When big firms seem to find it more profitable to run a PR campaign, buy a politician, or influence a debate, than actually make a better product. This isn't just Microsoft, but I hate to see corporations competing on anything other than services/products. When they run a PR campaign (different from advertising), buy a law, or weigh in on a debate--and if they are successful--they are distracting from the real competition in the marketplace over goods and services. Call it "sales diversion" or something.
I know Microsoft has a gazillion talented engineers, but I can't help but feel that if they worried more about Vista, and not about an academic/government debate (or the Mass. open doc format, or whatever else they are in the news for), we might have a workable Vista beta, or *gasp* Vista might have been closer to on time.