We have one. Slashdot mentions it over and over again. It is the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It may not be a true PAC, but it beats the hell out of having nothing. And perhaps if the EFF were to recieve more funding, it would be able to start a PAC branch - something we truly need.
For those of you looking for a way to oppose laws like this one and the DMCA, do something intelligent with your tax refund - mail it to the EFF. You can do so at http://www.eff.org.
Good for Linux... A prospectus.(long)
on
HP Buys Compaq
·
· Score: 2
-- The short version Compaq + HP + Intel + Linux = Good for them, bad for AMD, Microsoft, Dell, and Sun.
Here we have the "merger" of two huge UNIX vendors whose UNIX stuff had begun floundering over the last few years. On one hand we have Compaq. Compaq has flirted with Linux here and there, but has never jumped onto the Linux bandwagon for fear of reprisals from Microsoft, which could do a good deal of damage to Compaq's desktop lines, once the highest sellers in the industry.
On the other hand we have HP. HP has been jumping all over Linux in the past two years, openly working with intel and SuSE on IA-64 Linux. HP has not been relevant in the desktop world for some time, and their NT based servers went nowhere. Faced with a company working on multiple system architectures with two aging UNIXes, both of which are losing market share to NT/2K/Solaris at an alarming rate. On top of that HP's RISC processors are also losing steam, and Compaq's failed takeover of Digital makes it unlikely that anyone will be picking up on Alpha any time soon, especially given that the good Alpha engineers are now at AMD. What is HP to do? Seems to me that HP is likely to jump in on the Intel/IBM/SuSE dealings (If HP is not already a player in that arena, which aI suspect it is.) and move the new company to Linux on IA-64 in the datacenter, and Pentium IV powered desktops running XP. It would also not surprise me to see HP and Compaq shed their worst desktop engineers that led them down the losing path, and have the remaining good ones build high-end LInux powered workstations for the Linux loving folks in Hollywood, a market currently owned by SGI, and one that Dell managed to fail in.
The downside to all this is that the new HP will likely shed AMD, which Compaq has been pushing for a while. By moving to IA-64 HP will have a fighting chance against the powerful Dell/Intel/Microsoft combo that is pushing its way into any market it can. If IA-64 on Linux can start scaling well withing the next two years, HP will also have a chance to start gunning for Sun, who is perceived by many as behind in the processor market due to their "slow" megahertz speeds, not to mention unhappiness with Sun's high prices.
Of course, given that HP's CEO is a former Lucent exec (They grabbed her in 1999.), I think there is just as much of a chance that this whole thing will turn into a huge fucking mess, with money thrown at all the wrong things. It really would not surprise me if HP is reduced to producing garbage desktops that make Compaq machines look good, and even more crappy $100 inkjet printers that drain $30 ink cartridges every few pages.
*idiotic consumer point of view*
on
Itanium Update
·
· Score: 2
I will now translate the thoughts of an average American regarding this article:
"Wow, a 64-bit processor with 6MB? I can finally have a computer more powerful than my N64! I hope it doesn't let little Billy access all of that satanic-internet-porn any faster, though...."
Bankruptcy or GPL'ed code? If it were my company, I would be choosing the former.
I mean, really, given how many other companies releasing software under the GPL have croaked, can you blame them?
It is one thing to fund the development of something that is already or making you money, or has a plainly obvious market (ie IPTables, PERL 6.), but to try and build a company on GPL'ed software is pretty much idiotic. I could never put the jobs of all my coworkers at risk by making the assumption that businesses would pay for free software enough to keep me in business, and I can't honestly oppose this decision.
The Unreal Tournament UI certainly pushed game UIs to a new level, with easy to access, well organized drop down menus. . If I had more time I would probably hack up enlightenment to make it work like that. Trbies 2 did a great job with taking the UT and Tribes interfaces and merging them in tabbed pages and pulldowns to produce one of the best, albeit somewhat complicated (Due only to all the cool features of the game.) menus anyone has ever made for anything.
EverQuest is another great example of game UI development. Their UI was damned lame at first, but over time has become fully customizable in regards to positioning, size, colors and transparency, all created from the input of hundreds of thousands of users.
What I really would like to see is a merging of the UT/Tribes style interface with EverQuest customizability, along with all of the keyboard manipulation provided in Maya, and of course, easy to design and implement themes.
If anyone wants any help designing a gui, feel free to shoot me a message...
You know what? You try booting up Linux on a Palm and playing Doom2. You can't. That's why the CE devices are so cool, it's great to show my nontechnical friends that my handheld has more power than their desktop, and runs a better OS!
Palms and Visors are cool, but just too slow to compete with the screaming-fast CE Handhelds. Between the CE machines and all of the upcoming Transmeta based "webpads" that will be coming out, Palm and Visor will eventually get creamed.
"...it sounds like a holodeck sort of environment..."
What the article describes is a head mounted display connected to a powerful 3D engine. In the long run, the same thing could be done with a nice virtual reality helmet and a Quake Mod.
The Athlon Thunderbird require that a BIOS not allow users to change the clock speed/voltage settings even if the processor. A few motherboards shipped with hardware hacks to make it work at first. Then ABIT released a BIOS that allowed clock speed/voltages settings to be changed. After that, most mobo makers added it to their newer BIOS revisions.
The truth is, AMD can "require" that people hide it all they want, but they cannot make anyone actually do so.
If AMD thinks that the BIOS won't be revealing the true speeds of the CPUs, they are on crack. I guarantee you that right after these CPUs hit the market, ABIT will release a BIOS update for all of their mobos supporting the chip. This update will show the true CPU speed, giving ABIT an edge in the overclocking market. To compete, ASUS will do the same with their BIOSs/motherboards, which have a hard time against the cheaper ABIT mobos. After that, EPoX will do it for the value oriented segment of the market.
And then it will end up a standard feature on all the AMD mobos out there....
Wow, now we all have one more reason to run Solaris on X86 machines! Hell, that means we are one step closer to coming up with a GOOD reason to use Solaris on X86, instead of just running one of the many free *NIXes instead....
"Browser anticompetitive complaints are nothing compared to what's happening with the bootloaders since the majority of people using computers will never have the know-how or courage to make an OS change."
If we can get people to give up on LILO and move to GRUB things will get better. Grub is incredibly easy to install and configure, and generally works better. Once all of the distros out there standardize on GRUB with LILO as the optional bootloader, multi OS machines will get much, much easier.
"it takes 3500 volts for a human to feel a shock, but only 200 to potentially scramble a microchip"
When will the world catch on that it is not the volts that matter, but the amps! I can hit you with a million volts at.000005 amps and you will never notice, but one hundred volts at five amps will light your ass up!
Given the weak treatment Disney gave the theatrical release of Mononoke, I can see why Miyazaki would be concerned. Disney spent a ton of money doing one of the best anime dubs ever, and then released the movie to a handful of arty theatres, most of which were located in major cites. Most of the US population never even had a chance to go see the movie.
On top of that, advertising was weak, with short commercials restricted to slimly targeted timeslots.
I almost wonder if Disney did this with Mononoke because they did not realize until AFTER buying the rights that it would be competing with Disney's own animated films, which of late have been generally poor compared to older films, and also bear a heavy semblance to anime style. Perhaps Disney is pushing Miyazaki's work to the back burner to protect the films where they get exclusive profits.
"George W. Bush essentially closed the door on the creation of new human embryonic stem cell lines by restricting the funding to 60 existing cell lines"
Bush only restricted the use of US Federal Funds in regards to stem cell research. People using private funds can still do whatever they want with stem cells, and given the lucrative market for medical techniques/products derived from such reasearch, they will do so.
"A preliminary survey of tech savvy online music enthusiasts recently conducted for the RIAA showed that nearly one out of two consumers surveyed downloaded in the past month and nearly 70 percent burned the music they downloaded"
I burn the mp3s that I download. I get them at www.npgmusicclub.com.
These mp3s are sold by Prince and the NPG, and users are given the right to burn them to CD so that we can listen to them without using an mp3
player.
Of course, I can certainly see why this would have Ms. Rosen concerned. That fat bitch knows that the big record companies are going to watch their profits melt away as other companies like Tekadence and mp3.com help artists sell their music directly to fans at reasonable prices.
I think I need to write some letters to politicians now...
Where did the guy speaking up for the FBI see the FBI's affidavit? I am assuming that if it is available for the public to see the rest of us should be able to look it over.
Yes but how many of them would use it if they had to pay enough for it for Excite to make a profit on it? Probably not many. When I said worthless, I meant worthless from the standpoint of someone who sees little value in a corporate albatross.
You know what I want? I want a third party database that will allow sysadmins to list their 24/7 telephone number along with blocks of IPs. That way, if someone is being scanned/flooded by my ip, and has paid for access to the database (Keeps idiot h4x0rz from looking up my number.) he can then call me immediatly instead of trying to track me down through whois, and I can pull the machine off-line and deal with it.
This would be much better than having the box messing with people for a few days because tracking down someone who can shut it off is so damned troublesome. I mean, face it, no matter how good a sysadmin is, at time there will be a box that for whatever reason is online and insecure. We could all benefit from such a service, and most of our companies would probably pay for it.
Anyone else agree (I know people will happily disagree and flame me for posting this at all...)?
Excite@home is not going broke from their cable internet service. They are going broke from keeping up their stupid excite.com. They spend millions of dollars each month keeping a worthless portal that loses money at an astounding rate, for no reason other than that they might be able to sell it at some point, if anyone is stupid enough to invest in a failed web site. Excite needs to immediately shut down all things related to excite.com PERMANENTLY, lay off all the staff related to it, and then raise their cable rates.
Of course, being a bastion of the new economy, they will continue with their idiotic business plan, allowing their dotcom dreams to shut down what could be a successful broadband operation.
Never, EVER organize your cubicle. When I started my first sysadmin jobs, one of the older guys gave me the following advice:
Always have a messy cube. This will make people think that you are actually BUSY, and already have too much to do, and may get them to dump new work on someone else. This leaves you more time for things like experimental kernel compiles, mp3s, pr0n, and long lunches.
Ideas for a busy looking cube include:
- Techie books left open. It is best to do this with books you actually use, so that they get moved around. Good choices include Unix in a Nutshell, The UNIX System Administrator's Handbook, and anything related to PERL.
- Coffee mugs. Don't wash old ones, get more from vendors and pile them up.
- Manila Folders. Leave them open too, as if you are actually doing something with the information they contain.
Follow this path, and offload all of your work onto PERL scripts. You will soon be free, as in beer.
"Although Verhoeven and Pendray have patented their technique and received some funding from Nucor Steel Inc., they concede the technology in its current, labor-intensive form probably is not a moneymaker"
So they figured out how to do something that was done hundreds of years ago, and were able to patent it? Isn't there blatant evidence of prior art? Is it just me, or does this further the idea that the US Patent Office is full of morons?
Slashdot Mirror
The robot dog probably doesn't fetch worth a damn, and I doubt that it does a good job licking your face when you get home from work.
We have one. Slashdot mentions it over and over again. It is the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It may not be a true PAC, but it beats the hell out of having nothing. And perhaps if the EFF were to recieve more funding, it would be able to start a PAC branch - something we truly need.
For those of you looking for a way to oppose laws like this one and the DMCA, do something intelligent with your tax refund - mail it to the EFF. You can do so at http://www.eff.org.
-- The short version Compaq + HP + Intel + Linux = Good for them, bad for AMD, Microsoft, Dell, and Sun.
Here we have the "merger" of two huge UNIX vendors whose UNIX stuff had begun floundering over the last few years. On one hand we have Compaq. Compaq has flirted with Linux here and there, but has never jumped onto the Linux bandwagon for fear of reprisals from Microsoft, which could do a good deal of damage to Compaq's desktop lines, once the highest sellers in the industry.
On the other hand we have HP. HP has been jumping all over Linux in the past two years, openly working with intel and SuSE on IA-64 Linux. HP has not been relevant in the desktop world for some time, and their NT based servers went nowhere. Faced with a company working on multiple system architectures with two aging UNIXes, both of which are losing market share to NT/2K/Solaris at an alarming rate. On top of that HP's RISC processors are also losing steam, and Compaq's failed takeover of Digital makes it unlikely that anyone will be picking up on Alpha any time soon, especially given that the good Alpha engineers are now at AMD. What is HP to do? Seems to me that HP is likely to jump in on the Intel/IBM/SuSE dealings (If HP is not already a player in that arena, which aI suspect it is.) and move the new company to Linux on IA-64 in the datacenter, and Pentium IV powered desktops running XP. It would also not surprise me to see HP and Compaq shed their worst desktop engineers that led them down the losing path, and have the remaining good ones build high-end LInux powered workstations for the Linux loving folks in Hollywood, a market currently owned by SGI, and one that Dell managed to fail in.
The downside to all this is that the new HP will likely shed AMD, which Compaq has been pushing for a while. By moving to IA-64 HP will have a fighting chance against the powerful Dell/Intel/Microsoft combo that is pushing its way into any market it can. If IA-64 on Linux can start scaling well withing the next two years, HP will also have a chance to start gunning for Sun, who is perceived by many as behind in the processor market due to their "slow" megahertz speeds, not to mention unhappiness with Sun's high prices.
Of course, given that HP's CEO is a former Lucent exec (They grabbed her in 1999.), I think there is just as much of a chance that this whole thing will turn into a huge fucking mess, with money thrown at all the wrong things. It really would not surprise me if HP is reduced to producing garbage desktops that make Compaq machines look good, and even more crappy $100 inkjet printers that drain $30 ink cartridges every few pages.
I will now translate the thoughts of an average American regarding this article:
"Wow, a 64-bit processor with 6MB? I can finally have a computer more powerful than my N64! I hope it doesn't let little Billy access all of that satanic-internet-porn any faster, though...."
Bankruptcy or GPL'ed code? If it were my company, I would be choosing the former.
I mean, really, given how many other companies releasing software under the GPL have croaked, can you blame them?
It is one thing to fund the development of something that is already or making you money, or has a plainly obvious market (ie IPTables, PERL 6.), but to try and build a company on GPL'ed software is pretty much idiotic. I could never put the jobs of all my coworkers at risk by making the assumption that businesses would pay for free software enough to keep me in business, and I can't honestly oppose this decision.
The Unreal Tournament UI certainly pushed game UIs to a new level, with easy to access, well organized drop down menus. . If I had more time I would probably hack up enlightenment to make it work like that. Trbies 2 did a great job with taking the UT and Tribes interfaces and merging them in tabbed pages and pulldowns to produce one of the best, albeit somewhat complicated (Due only to all the cool features of the game.) menus anyone has ever made for anything.
EverQuest is another great example of game UI development. Their UI was damned lame at first, but over time has become fully customizable in regards to positioning, size, colors and transparency, all created from the input of hundreds of thousands of users.
What I really would like to see is a merging of the UT/Tribes style interface with EverQuest customizability, along with all of the keyboard manipulation provided in Maya, and of course, easy to design and implement themes.
If anyone wants any help designing a gui, feel free to shoot me a message...
You know what? You try booting up Linux on a Palm and playing Doom2. You can't. That's why the CE devices are so cool, it's great to show my nontechnical friends that my handheld has more power than their desktop, and runs a better OS!
Palms and Visors are cool, but just too slow to compete with the screaming-fast CE Handhelds. Between the CE machines and all of the upcoming Transmeta based "webpads" that will be coming out, Palm and Visor will eventually get creamed.
"...it sounds like a holodeck sort of environment..."
What the article describes is a head mounted display connected to a powerful 3D engine. In the long run, the same thing could be done with a nice virtual reality helmet and a Quake Mod.
The Athlon Thunderbird require that a BIOS not allow users to change the clock speed/voltage settings even if the processor. A few motherboards shipped with hardware hacks to make it work at first. Then ABIT released a BIOS that allowed clock speed/voltages settings to be changed. After that, most mobo makers added it to their newer BIOS revisions.
The truth is, AMD can "require" that people hide it all they want, but they cannot make anyone actually do so.
If AMD thinks that the BIOS won't be revealing the true speeds of the CPUs, they are on crack. I guarantee you that right after these CPUs hit the market, ABIT will release a BIOS update for all of their mobos supporting the chip. This update will show the true CPU speed, giving ABIT an edge in the overclocking market. To compete, ASUS will do the same with their BIOSs/motherboards, which have a hard time against the cheaper ABIT mobos. After that, EPoX will do it for the value oriented segment of the market.
And then it will end up a standard feature on all the AMD mobos out there....
AMD should go for this all they way! After all, we all know how well trying to hide a chip's REAL speed rating worked for Cyrix! oh, wait....
Wow, now we all have one more reason to run Solaris on X86 machines! Hell, that means we are one step closer to coming up with a GOOD reason to use Solaris on X86, instead of just running one of the many free *NIXes instead....
"Browser anticompetitive complaints are nothing compared to what's happening with the bootloaders since the majority of people using computers will never have the know-how or courage to make an OS change."
If we can get people to give up on LILO and move to GRUB things will get better. Grub is incredibly easy to install and configure, and generally works better. Once all of the distros out there standardize on GRUB with LILO as the optional bootloader, multi OS machines will get much, much easier.
"it takes 3500 volts for a human to feel a shock, but only 200 to potentially scramble a microchip"
.000005 amps and you will never notice, but one hundred volts at five amps will light your ass up!
When will the world catch on that it is not the volts that matter, but the amps! I can hit you with a million volts at
Given the weak treatment Disney gave the theatrical release of Mononoke, I can see why Miyazaki would be concerned. Disney spent a ton of money doing one of the best anime dubs ever, and then released the movie to a handful of arty theatres, most of which were located in major cites. Most of the US population never even had a chance to go see the movie.
On top of that, advertising was weak, with short commercials restricted to slimly targeted timeslots.
I almost wonder if Disney did this with Mononoke because they did not realize until AFTER buying the rights that it would be competing with Disney's own animated films, which of late have been generally poor compared to older films, and also bear a heavy semblance to anime style. Perhaps Disney is pushing Miyazaki's work to the back burner to protect the films where they get exclusive profits.
"George W. Bush essentially closed the door on the creation of new human embryonic stem cell lines by restricting the funding to 60 existing cell lines"
Bush only restricted the use of US Federal Funds in regards to stem cell research. People using private funds can still do whatever they want with stem cells, and given the lucrative market for medical techniques/products derived from such reasearch, they will do so.
"A preliminary survey of tech savvy online music enthusiasts recently conducted for the RIAA showed that nearly one out of two consumers surveyed downloaded in the past month and nearly 70 percent burned the music they downloaded"
I burn the mp3s that I download. I get them at www.npgmusicclub.com. These mp3s are sold by Prince and the NPG, and users are given the right to burn them to CD so that we can listen to them without using an mp3 player.
Of course, I can certainly see why this would have Ms. Rosen concerned. That fat bitch knows that the big record companies are going to watch their profits melt away as other companies like Tekadence and mp3.com help artists sell their music directly to fans at reasonable prices.
I think I need to write some letters to politicians now...
Where did the guy speaking up for the FBI see the FBI's affidavit? I am assuming that if it is available for the public to see the rest of us should be able to look it over.
Yeah, after all, people cannot win suits against Napster for what Napster users do with it... oh, wait.
Get a clue. American judges are idiots when it comes to technology.
Yes but how many of them would use it if they had to pay enough for it for Excite to make a profit on it? Probably not many. When I said worthless, I meant worthless from the standpoint of someone who sees little value in a corporate albatross.
You know what I want? I want a third party database that will allow sysadmins to list their 24/7 telephone number along with blocks of IPs. That way, if someone is being scanned/flooded by my ip, and has paid for access to the database (Keeps idiot h4x0rz from looking up my number.) he can then call me immediatly instead of trying to track me down through whois, and I can pull the machine off-line and deal with it.
This would be much better than having the box messing with people for a few days because tracking down someone who can shut it off is so damned troublesome. I mean, face it, no matter how good a sysadmin is, at time there will be a box that for whatever reason is online and insecure. We could all benefit from such a service, and most of our companies would probably pay for it.
Anyone else agree (I know people will happily disagree and flame me for posting this at all...)?
Excite@home is not going broke from their cable internet service. They are going broke from keeping up their stupid excite.com. They spend millions of dollars each month keeping a worthless portal that loses money at an astounding rate, for no reason other than that they might be able to sell it at some point, if anyone is stupid enough to invest in a failed web site. Excite needs to immediately shut down all things related to excite.com PERMANENTLY, lay off all the staff related to it, and then raise their cable rates.
Of course, being a bastion of the new economy, they will continue with their idiotic business plan, allowing their dotcom dreams to shut down what could be a successful broadband operation.
Never, EVER organize your cubicle. When I started my first sysadmin jobs, one of the older guys gave me the following advice:
Always have a messy cube. This will make people think that you are actually BUSY, and already have too much to do, and may get them to dump new work on someone else. This leaves you more time for things like experimental kernel compiles, mp3s, pr0n, and long lunches.
Ideas for a busy looking cube include:
- Techie books left open. It is best to do this with books you actually use, so that they get moved around. Good choices include Unix in a Nutshell, The UNIX System Administrator's Handbook, and anything related to PERL.
- Coffee mugs. Don't wash old ones, get more from vendors and pile them up.
- Manila Folders. Leave them open too, as if you are actually doing something with the information they contain.
Follow this path, and offload all of your work onto PERL scripts. You will soon be free, as in beer.
"Although Verhoeven and Pendray have patented their technique and received some funding from Nucor Steel Inc., they concede the technology in its current, labor-intensive form probably is not a moneymaker"
So they figured out how to do something that was done hundreds of years ago, and were able to patent it? Isn't there blatant evidence of prior art? Is it just me, or does this further the idea that the US Patent Office is full of morons?