Ancient inscriptions from classical, and older (e.g., ancient Middle Eastern), times often contain curses against those who would deface, or in some cases alter, them.
The key is that they don't seem to prohibit copying them at all.
As soon as writers get a hold of a holodeck, an all-powerful being (Q), or time travel, you can kiss the show goodbye. It's like comedians making jokes about sex: Sure, sex jokes can be good, but all too often they just mean the comedian is running short on material, and because sex is an easy giggle, they seize on it. It becomes like a comedian's deus ex machina. With a holodeck or all-powerful being you get the same thing - almost a literal deus ex machina. And with time travel, that machine quickly reveals the writer's scientific and creative limitations, as he or she either ignores obvious paradoxes, or lamely explains them away.
I sometimes wonder whether the reason why most SciFi series's all seem to go this sorry route is that the Writer's Guild limits, consciously, the show's ability to draw in fresh ideas. SciFi and Fantasy writing is hard, and takes imagination. And you can't just stick a bunch of writers in a room and expect them (without serious prodding and mining the outside world for new ideas) to avoid burbling on about sex, holodecks, time travel, space anomalies, and all the clichés they've come to be known for.
I'm still wondering, though, when we can have space ships that don't bank and turn (like a plane in the atmosphere) or make 'noise' when they explode in the emptiness of space, and when we have a bridge with a window to the outside world that doesn't look like my neighbor's HD TV - but rather fills most or all of the room, and doesn't just point 'forward' (with other ships always approaching with an identical orientation). I understand that one has to make concessions to the realities of earth-bound production (e.g., everyone has to speak the same language, they need mostly to be humanoid, corridors on ships need to be big enough to accommodate cameras, etc.). But that shouldn't mean that all plots must be constructed around a bunch of hackneyed conventions.
If SciFi is going to draw in new people, it really needs to go where no one has gone before, kinda like Firefly started to do (see the thread on Fox SciFi, though, for why that didn't happen).
Of course, part of me knows, deep down, that the reason SciFi is often so stupid is that we ourselves are stupid. Or at least I am. I watch this stuff, after all.
Could some of the more rabid Apple fans help the rest of us understand why you tolerate being slapped around an alarmingly litigious firm?
I don't mean this as a smart-ass question. I use Apple products myself (I have a Mac on my desktop at work alongside a Linux box/Windows XP workstation).
Please help the rest of us understand.
I have a QNAP TS-209. I bought after getting tired of running Dell PowerEdge Servers (Linux/RedHat-based) for ~ten years.
It's great to go from a giant, honking, noisy Dell RAID server to something that (when idle) uses less power than most light bulbs. You're not going to get that with an old PC, either.
Oh, and hot-swappable drive enclosure is great. That alone is worth the extra $$ you pay for this unit.
I hooked up an external USB drive, though, for backups. Can't be too careful. Manually added a cron job to rsync to the USB drive. To get the most out of this unit, it helps to know your way around Unix shell. Root/admin shell is possible, but you have to enable it. Manufacturer seems to encourage hacking, which is a plus. I migrated existing files from a RedHat server, and getting the permissions 'just so' (i.e., working with Samba) was a bit of a pain. The good news, though, is that it's doable. If you're migrating from an existing Windows/Samba server, you won't have these issues.
Note the following set of reviews:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822107008&nm_mc=OTC-Froogle&cm_mmc=OTC-Froogle-_-Network+-+Storage-_-QNAP-_-22107008
Despite the above reviews, this unit has been fabulous for me, especially with the new 2.x firmware.
This is a good unit.
Richard
Cut Linus some slack.
At least here in the US, as people age they tend to settle down,
have kids, accumulate a little wealth, grow politically more
conservative and less idealistic. Probably true everywhere. A
lot has changed since Linus was a graduate student in Helsinki.
The main thing that I worry about when I read about schemes to download video directly to people's televisions is that the content providers are so concerned about undercutting retailers, networks, advertisers, etc., that the downloads end up getting priced really high. Should they cost more than a few cents, really, given that delivery is so trivial?
It's not quite a meritocracy. For example, standard test scores (SAT, ACT) are big predictors of whether you'll be admitted to a given college (though the more competitive the college the more other factors will enter in; high school GPAs are also important). But remember that test scores correlate moderately to strongly, depending on the study, with family income. The higher your test scores, in other words, the higher your family income is likely to be. Although some high scorers do indeed come from low-income families, their numbers are small, relatively speaking.
It also turns out that scores on standardized tests factor into institutional rating systems (like US News's college rankings). And although colleges complain bitterly about these rating systems, their media relations, admissions, and other departments make heavy use of ratings for marketing purposes (if they can). This only intensifies the heavy competition for the high scorers, which as noted above tend to be wealthy.
It's possible, if admissions officers are really picky and have a really large applicant pool, to try to make sure that high scoring kids aren't just high scoring because they are wealthy - i.e., because they don't have to work as much, don't need to worry generally about earthly matters, and who have parents who could nurture them and tote them around to all the right activities. But if you think about it, only a few institutions will really be able to afford to take a lot of poor kids, because, of course, the poor kids will need more financial help. And to give them financial help, you have (in essence) to take more money away from wealthy kids, who pay more. You also have to have (as noted) a big enough applicant pool to be able to find poor kids who will be able to cope academically, because (also as noted) high-scoring/well-prepared poor kids are relatively rare.
This isn't sounding quite like a meritocracy to me, although you can't look at what's going on and say that poor kids are being excluded per se. The barriers they face are just much higher than the ones the wealthy kids face.
When I think about this I become kind of sad sometimes, because I work in higher ed as a tech, and I like higher ed as a general environment (and have gotten a lot of pleasure out of being a part of it). But a lot of my educational experience actually came on the south side of Chicago, coaching a mix of kids in soccer and baseball and volunteering in the local public school - where I saw up close what happens to low-income kids. It's not fair, and it bothers me. I guess the more things change the more they stay the same.
Just yesterday one of our lead support people internally at my institution (Carleton College) commented that people are having sync problems with SP2, and noted that interest in support issues like this seems to be waning, and that less and less really interesting news seems to be coming out about Palm OS. Her impression is that there's serious trouble.
Another outfit in serious trouble was Novell. The situations aren't entirely comparable, of course, but affiliating themselves with the open-source movement seems to have turned Novell (which looked a bit moribund just a few years ago) into an interesting outfit. This move also appears to have opened up new possibilities that nobody could have foreseen.
So who knows. If Palm OS were able to run under Linux, perhaps some new possibilities would open up there as well, especially given that Linux isn't just a platform on which Palm OS could run, but also a kind of nascent competitor in the mobile device arena.
I don't think halfway measures will help much, though. And the statement cited in the original posting (the PDF file) shows some ambivalence to the whole notion of open-source software.
About the dumbest thing a person can do with fossil fuels is 'burn' them, whether in a power plant or driving to work.
When you burn them, they're effectively gone.
When they're gone, you can no longer use them to create the materials that, to a large extent, drive the production of goods in this country. Just think of it: Fertilizer, toys, drugs, etc. They are all largely based on petroleum derivatives.
Some can be recycled, which is great.
But if you just burn the petroleum, you lose it forever, and create toxic emissions to boot.
If nuclear power could help stop the petroleum 'burning' I'd be all for it. The problem is safety.
The very fact that Ballmer wants to take on Linux gives people the impression that Linux is a worthy opponent.
It's the same with with US presidential debates, where the incumbent usually tries to negotiate his or her way out of as many debates as possible. Why? Because the mere fact that a challenger shares a stage with a sitting president tends to help the challenger.
The lesson those of us who use Linux in our daily work, and who see the value in things like open source and open standards, is just to hang loose.
Ballmer is offering free publicity.
Network mounting netware filesystems natively
on
SUSE 9.2 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
SUSE 9.2 is all well and good, as another Linux distro.
But how well does it integrate with Novell's own products?
For example, can SUSE 9.2 network mount a Netware volume? Or do we have to use Novell's 'native file access' and export it using SMB (ugh)?
Also, if we can mount Netware volumes, can we do anything significant with them? E.g., can we set rights?
Is ConsoleOne actually working (with all the plug-ins we have under Windows) with SUSE 9.2?
I'd be pleased to hear that all these things were possible, but I'm inclined to doubt they are given what I've seen thus far....
All the dismissal says is that SCO didn't provide an indication of 'special' damages incurred as a result of Novell's actions. They provided only an indication of 'general' damages. They have 30 days to remedy this omission.
If SCO lawyers are worth their salt they'll be able to produce some evidence of special damages, and even if those don't hold up during a trial, the evidence will allow them to win this preliminary battle and move on.
Note that Judge Kimball spent a lot of time, though, talking about whether Novell did in fact transfer copyright. The language used in the original SCO/Novell contract is uncomfortably vague, and it's not clear exactly what was transferred and what wasn't (SCO was apparently supposed to specify by a certain date what copyrights it was assuming ownership of). Although SCO entered press releases into evidence that are supposed to tell us what everyone was thinking at the time, it's not clear from the language of the contract really what was transferred and what was intended to be transferred.
I'd hate to bet the farm on this if I were SCO.
It seems pretty tenuous.
Slashdot Mirror
Ancient inscriptions from classical, and older (e.g., ancient Middle Eastern), times often contain curses against those who would deface, or in some cases alter, them. The key is that they don't seem to prohibit copying them at all.
Jollyreaper's posting is right on target.
As soon as writers get a hold of a holodeck, an all-powerful being (Q), or time travel, you can kiss the show goodbye. It's like comedians making jokes about sex: Sure, sex jokes can be good, but all too often they just mean the comedian is running short on material, and because sex is an easy giggle, they seize on it. It becomes like a comedian's deus ex machina. With a holodeck or all-powerful being you get the same thing - almost a literal deus ex machina. And with time travel, that machine quickly reveals the writer's scientific and creative limitations, as he or she either ignores obvious paradoxes, or lamely explains them away.
I sometimes wonder whether the reason why most SciFi series's all seem to go this sorry route is that the Writer's Guild limits, consciously, the show's ability to draw in fresh ideas. SciFi and Fantasy writing is hard, and takes imagination. And you can't just stick a bunch of writers in a room and expect them (without serious prodding and mining the outside world for new ideas) to avoid burbling on about sex, holodecks, time travel, space anomalies, and all the clichés they've come to be known for.
I'm still wondering, though, when we can have space ships that don't bank and turn (like a plane in the atmosphere) or make 'noise' when they explode in the emptiness of space, and when we have a bridge with a window to the outside world that doesn't look like my neighbor's HD TV - but rather fills most or all of the room, and doesn't just point 'forward' (with other ships always approaching with an identical orientation). I understand that one has to make concessions to the realities of earth-bound production (e.g., everyone has to speak the same language, they need mostly to be humanoid, corridors on ships need to be big enough to accommodate cameras, etc.). But that shouldn't mean that all plots must be constructed around a bunch of hackneyed conventions.
If SciFi is going to draw in new people, it really needs to go where no one has gone before, kinda like Firefly started to do (see the thread on Fox SciFi, though, for why that didn't happen).
Of course, part of me knows, deep down, that the reason SciFi is often so stupid is that we ourselves are stupid. Or at least I am. I watch this stuff, after all.
Could some of the more rabid Apple fans help the rest of us understand why you tolerate being slapped around an alarmingly litigious firm? I don't mean this as a smart-ass question. I use Apple products myself (I have a Mac on my desktop at work alongside a Linux box/Windows XP workstation). Please help the rest of us understand.
I have a QNAP TS-209. I bought after getting tired of running Dell PowerEdge Servers (Linux/RedHat-based) for ~ten years. It's great to go from a giant, honking, noisy Dell RAID server to something that (when idle) uses less power than most light bulbs. You're not going to get that with an old PC, either. Oh, and hot-swappable drive enclosure is great. That alone is worth the extra $$ you pay for this unit. I hooked up an external USB drive, though, for backups. Can't be too careful. Manually added a cron job to rsync to the USB drive. To get the most out of this unit, it helps to know your way around Unix shell. Root/admin shell is possible, but you have to enable it. Manufacturer seems to encourage hacking, which is a plus. I migrated existing files from a RedHat server, and getting the permissions 'just so' (i.e., working with Samba) was a bit of a pain. The good news, though, is that it's doable. If you're migrating from an existing Windows/Samba server, you won't have these issues. Note the following set of reviews: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822107008&nm_mc=OTC-Froogle&cm_mmc=OTC-Froogle-_-Network+-+Storage-_-QNAP-_-22107008 Despite the above reviews, this unit has been fabulous for me, especially with the new 2.x firmware. This is a good unit. Richard
Cut Linus some slack. At least here in the US, as people age they tend to settle down, have kids, accumulate a little wealth, grow politically more conservative and less idealistic. Probably true everywhere. A lot has changed since Linus was a graduate student in Helsinki.
The main thing that I worry about when I read about schemes to download video directly to people's televisions is that the content providers are so concerned about undercutting retailers, networks, advertisers, etc., that the downloads end up getting priced really high. Should they cost more than a few cents, really, given that delivery is so trivial?
It's not quite a meritocracy. For example, standard test scores (SAT, ACT) are big predictors of whether you'll be admitted to a given college (though the more competitive the college the more other factors will enter in; high school GPAs are also important). But remember that test scores correlate moderately to strongly, depending on the study, with family income. The higher your test scores, in other words, the higher your family income is likely to be. Although some high scorers do indeed come from low-income families, their numbers are small, relatively speaking. It also turns out that scores on standardized tests factor into institutional rating systems (like US News's college rankings). And although colleges complain bitterly about these rating systems, their media relations, admissions, and other departments make heavy use of ratings for marketing purposes (if they can). This only intensifies the heavy competition for the high scorers, which as noted above tend to be wealthy. It's possible, if admissions officers are really picky and have a really large applicant pool, to try to make sure that high scoring kids aren't just high scoring because they are wealthy - i.e., because they don't have to work as much, don't need to worry generally about earthly matters, and who have parents who could nurture them and tote them around to all the right activities. But if you think about it, only a few institutions will really be able to afford to take a lot of poor kids, because, of course, the poor kids will need more financial help. And to give them financial help, you have (in essence) to take more money away from wealthy kids, who pay more. You also have to have (as noted) a big enough applicant pool to be able to find poor kids who will be able to cope academically, because (also as noted) high-scoring/well-prepared poor kids are relatively rare. This isn't sounding quite like a meritocracy to me, although you can't look at what's going on and say that poor kids are being excluded per se. The barriers they face are just much higher than the ones the wealthy kids face. When I think about this I become kind of sad sometimes, because I work in higher ed as a tech, and I like higher ed as a general environment (and have gotten a lot of pleasure out of being a part of it). But a lot of my educational experience actually came on the south side of Chicago, coaching a mix of kids in soccer and baseball and volunteering in the local public school - where I saw up close what happens to low-income kids. It's not fair, and it bothers me. I guess the more things change the more they stay the same.
Just yesterday one of our lead support people internally at my institution (Carleton College) commented that people are having sync problems with SP2, and noted that interest in support issues like this seems to be waning, and that less and less really interesting news seems to be coming out about Palm OS. Her impression is that there's serious trouble.
Another outfit in serious trouble was Novell. The situations aren't entirely comparable, of course, but affiliating themselves with the open-source movement seems to have turned Novell (which looked a bit moribund just a few years ago) into an interesting outfit. This move also appears to have opened up new possibilities that nobody could
have foreseen.
So who knows. If Palm OS were able to run under Linux, perhaps some new possibilities would open up there as well, especially given that Linux isn't just a platform on which Palm OS could run, but also a kind of nascent competitor in the mobile device arena.
I don't think halfway measures will help much, though. And the statement cited in the original posting (the PDF file) shows some ambivalence to the whole notion of open-source software.
We'll just have to see where this leads.
About the dumbest thing a person can do with fossil fuels is 'burn' them, whether in a power plant or driving to work.
When you burn them, they're effectively gone.
When they're gone, you can no longer use them to create the materials that, to a large extent, drive the production of goods in this country. Just think of it: Fertilizer, toys, drugs, etc. They are all largely based on petroleum derivatives.
Some can be recycled, which is great.
But if you just burn the petroleum, you lose it forever, and create toxic emissions to boot.
If nuclear power could help stop the petroleum 'burning' I'd be all for it. The problem is safety.
Can nuclear energy ever be truly safe?
The very fact that Ballmer wants to take on Linux gives people the impression that Linux is a worthy opponent.
It's the same with with US presidential debates, where the incumbent usually tries to negotiate his or her way out of as many debates as possible. Why? Because the mere fact that a challenger shares a stage with a sitting president tends to help the challenger.
The lesson those of us who use Linux in our daily work, and who see the value in things like open source and open standards, is just to hang loose.
Ballmer is offering free publicity.
SUSE 9.2 is all well and good, as another Linux distro.
But how well does it integrate with Novell's own products?
For example, can SUSE 9.2 network mount a Netware volume? Or do we have to use Novell's 'native file access' and export it using SMB (ugh)?
Also, if we can mount Netware volumes, can we do anything significant with them? E.g., can we set rights?
Is ConsoleOne actually working (with all the plug-ins we have under Windows) with SUSE 9.2?
I'd be pleased to hear that all these things were possible, but I'm inclined to doubt they are given what I've seen thus far....
All the dismissal says is that SCO didn't provide an indication of 'special' damages incurred as a result of Novell's actions. They provided only an indication of 'general' damages. They have 30 days to remedy this omission. If SCO lawyers are worth their salt they'll be able to produce some evidence of special damages, and even if those don't hold up during a trial, the evidence will allow them to win this preliminary battle and move on. Note that Judge Kimball spent a lot of time, though, talking about whether Novell did in fact transfer copyright. The language used in the original SCO/Novell contract is uncomfortably vague, and it's not clear exactly what was transferred and what wasn't (SCO was apparently supposed to specify by a certain date what copyrights it was assuming ownership of). Although SCO entered press releases into evidence that are supposed to tell us what everyone was thinking at the time, it's not clear from the language of the contract really what was transferred and what was intended to be transferred. I'd hate to bet the farm on this if I were SCO. It seems pretty tenuous.