"Also, it just doesn't work to reverse things. For example, if you reverse the timeline of the expansion of the universe you would get a decelerating collapse. Inside a black hole there is an accelerating collapse"
The universe is in a state of accelerating collapse. The timeline is reversed. That's why you see it expanding.
"the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI believe that the entire Universe was in fact sneezed out of the nose of a being called the Great Green Arkleseizure"
If you're so clever answer this then. If a dropped cat always lands on its feet and dropped toast always lands butter side down, what happens if you strap a slab of toast butterside up, to the back of a cat and drop it out a window.
If that's the case, the "big bang" turns into the initial collapse; and the "dark energy" that drives expansion becomes the space-energy expansion inside the schwarzschild radius that is needed for conservation of energy
"This needs a lot more explanation. There is no expansion at the centre of a black hole, only an inevitable collapse.."
There is a collapse only the timeline is reversed so we see the universe expanding..:)
Re:Dark Energy... only if it was a big bang (Score:5, Interesting)
"You rip up ancient laws that regulate the power of the State over the citizen and propose to take more for yourselves. You politicise the intelligence service, getting your spin doctors to sell a war planned in collusion with a foreign power"
Also using fake terror reports to distract from inconvient news reports. Shame on you. It's ironic that the party that was formed to champion the people is the one that has so much to destroy democratic freedoms hard won over centuries.
from: georgew@whitehouse.gob
to: Tonyb@tendouningstreet.co.uk
Yo Blair,
Fire up a fake terror scare in the UK and then use it to justify canceling democratic rights and bringing in mandatory ID cards. Use some Islamist fantasy web site as evidence. Put out reports of 'hundreds' of potential attacks. At the same time shut down air travel and cause as much panic as possible.
"The BBC is reporting that Tony Blair's outgoing chief strategy adviser fears the internet could be fueling a crisis in the relationship between politicians and voters. 'Mr Taylor said Mr Blair's online grilling from voters --"
No it's you politicians fueling the crisis by lying to us about WMDs in Iraq, by removing peoples right to peacefull public protest, by scaring us with fake terrorist reports, by falsely claiming there is huge public support for ID cards when we all know it's your best buddy in Washington is behind it. Bush orders Tony to go to war and Tony does what he's told by the US president as all UK PMs have done since WW2.
"an IT employee.. said part of the problem.. is that the Citrix Application.. just can't handle the load.. we actually use it from inside the network.. and we're running into monumental problems in scaling the Citrix servers"
Technically speaking, how would connecting from 'inside' be any different that outside. it's just packets being moved around.
"Another issue is with the Epic software and its adaptability, according to Deal and the IT employee. They said the software was written in MUMPS (Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System) -- a health care programming language originally developed in the 1960s"
I recall someone telling me about MUMPS. You ran it off 5 ¼ floppies and accessed the data through direct access to a b-tree.
"Using Citrix is something that defies common sense. It would be like trying to use a dial up modem for thousands of users. It's just not going to work, and it's not something anyone would tell you a dial-up modem should work for"
What if anything is Citrix designed for but for large scale remote access.
This is the John Cramer from Feb 2004. In Feb 2007 you cascaded 10^12 of these units and sent a msg back to Feb 2004. By replying to that msg I will have altered your future time line and the experement in 2007 will fail and this msg will not be sent. That's why you/we don't remember receiving it in 2004. Dude, Messing with casualty is sure confusing.
ps: By the way, the answer is 42..
pps: The next Pres. is Mick Jaguar and his VP is Pee-wee Herman..
A PR exercise is all. Personally I don't want anyone remotely working MY COMPUTER. Real energy efficiency should be done in the hardware. Eliminate the harddrive and the backlight. Put a transparent surface behind the screen and use natural light to illuminate it. Use a form of lcd that don't use power when not being written to. Use a combination of solar cells and batteries to extend usage. Power usage is a function of the system clock. The lower clock speed the less power is used. Design a processer and chip set that can function with a variable rate clock. When not in use the clock cycles down to a few tens of hertz therefore using less power. A wakeup unit kicks it back into full speed when a key is pressed.
"I'm from Europe and the unspoken truth here is that the EU officials are severely corrupt"
Acutally you have it the wrong way round, it's MS and its lobbiests who are doing the corrupting. Batting on their side is also Charlie McGreevey a member of one of the most corrupt goverments in Europe. he's also behind the repeated attempts to get a US style patent system introduced into Europe.
If there was a market demand for Microsoft products on Linux/BSD they would exist
If Windows users could get Office on Linux then there wouldn't be a Microsoft as we know it, it would just be another software company. That's why you won't ever see msOffice for Linux.
was Re:I don't get it, who does this help? (Score:5, Mod troll)
"MS did endeavor to document a bunch of their interfaces. The response was that it was insufficient. MS tried to find out how it was insufficient, and was told that it was MS's responsibility to figure that out"
MS was instructed to publish the specifications of the protocols sufficent to allow third party apps interact with MS servers. MS misleading pretended to having not understood the Commission and produced some source code and API calls.
"What we're obligated to license, under the European Commission's decision, is specifications, documents that describe how those protocols work. We're not obligated to license their source code. But one thing is perfectly clear, if you want to understand these communications protocols, the source code is the ultimate documentation", Brad Smith.
"Normally speaking, the source code is not the ultimate documentation of anything, which is precisely the reason why programmers are required to provide comprehensive documentation to go along with their source code", Neelie Kroes.
"Providing MS with an EIGHT DAY deadline is just absurd"
They had since March 2004 to produce the information and were given 120 days to comply as you would be no doubt aware.
"An apparatus that includes a BIOS routine, and a method executed during a BIOS routine, that includes a stored BIOS program causing a computer to receive information, including error information"
"Methods, apparatus.. for ensuring compatibility between an operating system and a BIOS redirection component"
A method of initializing a computer system equipped with a debugging system"
"a set of BIOS resume tasks specific to that operating system type are dispatched for execution in response to a sleep mode wake event"
"A method and apparatus for implementing a BIOS-level floppy boot-sector virus prevention system"
Now this is funny, the 'protection' consists of the BIOS prompting the user.
"You get a lot of SciFi where in the furture, corporations rule everything. Is this really so far fetched? If they have more de facto power and influence than the nation states in which they reside, then what is to stop them, like the old barons before them, from simply all but forming states of their own? Maybe Richelieu's reforms will be rolled back, just in a different form"
It happened some time ago. You've basically described the present situation. Take here for instance, as Royalty lost mosts of its power to the state, the state in turn has lost most of its power to the multi-nationals. The leaders of which once a year, meet up with the various heads of gov and tell them what their policys are going to be. The push for globalization being one such example. You see in order to maximum profits it's necessary to dismantle the nation state and have a homogenous consumer market from pole to pole. Everyone watching the same movies, wearing the same bling uniform and buying the same gadgets.
There isn't any real news. Don't you realize it yet. Stories are generated and fed to the media by the PR departments of the various interests. How it works is a bunch of 'journalists' sit in a room and generate feel good stories about the establishment and negative ones about whoever we happened to be currently at war with. You see it doesn't really matter if what is reported happened, all is required is the 'facts' be spun in favour of the winners. Like when Bush recently legalised the torture of prisoners, NBC reported this as Bush banning torture.
"The article you reference makes no mention of this. The power failure was in a poorly-specified and insufficiently cooled data centre in Kent that had an unreliable failover system in place"
'Most repairs to computer services in 80 hospital trusts that were downed by a power.. "We can report the recovery of computer services in the North West and West Midlands of England is now largely complete"'
There are mentions of power cuts, repairs and failures in the north of England. I don't believe the reasons given are the real ones. I think a system wide upgrade failed and all the rest is just a smoke screen. On the day of the alleged power cut I can find no mention of other organizations affected, curious that. How does a power cut require repairs to computers. How does insufficiently cooled data centre in kent affect systems in the North of England. Did they not allow for some failure modes.
"If ever a project was screaming out for a mainframe it was this one. But in this instance it runs on a middleware layer that does not scale, on VMWare ESX boxes with 30 (yes, THIRTY) SQL 2003 servers under Windows 2003 Server"
I disagree, in each ward/department an independent stand alone unit that provides all the necessary functionality. These are connected to central nodes in each hospital that are in turn connected to all other nodes in a peer to peer relationship. The system keeps track of the patents location and automatically forwards records to the relevent node. When a patent is moved the system automatically syncronizes the records. If the central node goes down functinality can be maintained. It's not as if patents are moved about daily.
What exactly failed. What hardware/software was chosen. Who were the contractors. What kind of network topology. How does a power cut in the north of England cause a distributed data base fallover in kent. Has something on this scale ever been done previously. If as you say they force prices down then where did the $12 billion go exactly.
"Hero? Why? Because someone wrote a piece of software and decided to give it away instead of charging money for it? I guess that would make Microsoft's IE browser team heros back in the 90's. Cue the Linux fanboys please"
The someone who wrote the browser was Spyglass and was based on code licensed from the NCSA. MS first tried to get an exclusive deal with NCSA then went to Netscape and finally Spyglass. The deal was for royaltees to be paid on every copy sold. MS then proceeded to 'give' it away. Spyglass then went broke.
Free software is good, I use it all the time. It enables me to be more productive as a programmer, and it's great to learn from too.
Is 'free' only good for learning. Is there any commercial companies making money out of selling Open Source solutions. Any company who licenses a proprietary solution are effectivly giving away the company as they are tied into the never ending upgrade mill.
was Re:free software is good, but so is making money (Score:5, Not)
hi there steveo..
"I think his answer hit the nail, head on!"
"I do see how Microsoft wouldn't care about free software because it isn't on their radar screen. I don't know of much free software that is really competitive because truly free software doesn't have the support that it needs to compete with software that does have support"
How do you explain the existance of the Firebird Database project. It isn't 'free' but free to use and extend as you see fit as long as you contribute changes back to the community.
"I'd rather see ad-bloated "free" software like Google Mail than bug-ridden memory-leaking software like Thunderbird. I use Firefox, but it is still a memory leaker that competes well with IE in terms of falling apart over a few hours of work"
I would never know about the 'memory leaker' if it wasn't mentioned so ofter on slashdot. Firefox using 48,572kb on this XP box. How about KMail or Evolution.
"The Indians will want nothing to do with it. India has a history of thousands of years of being capitalists -- only recently did we really see socialism take over"
You can be a capitalist and still make money out of Open Source. Why do you erronously equate Open Source with socialism. In fact it is the exact opposite of socialism as there is no central authority unlike MS that by your logic could be compared to corporate faschism.
"The Indians aren't afraid of finding a way to make money on everything they can -- in order to better their own lives without a big expense to anyone else"
translation: Indians who use Open Source are diverting revenue from Redmond.
"if you go to countries where people don't like to work for free.. you won't see a social drive to giving away their labor"
A total distortion of Open Source. Developers use Open Source and sell solutions to clients. They contribute any changes back to the community. They both derive and get benefit from the arrangment.
was India and free don't go well together (Score:2, Distortion)
Slashdot Mirror
What bits in the Linux kernel does Larry think violates someones patent.
"Also, it just doesn't work to reverse things. For example, if you reverse the timeline of the expansion of the universe you would get a decelerating collapse. Inside a black hole there is an accelerating collapse"
The universe is in a state of accelerating collapse. The timeline is reversed. That's why you see it expanding.
"the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI believe that the entire Universe was in fact sneezed out of the nose of a being called the Great Green Arkleseizure"
If you're so clever answer this then. If a dropped cat always lands on its feet and dropped toast always lands butter side down, what happens if you strap a slab of toast butterside up, to the back of a cat and drop it out a window.
There is a collapse only the timeline is reversed so we see the universe expanding
Re:Dark Energy... only if it was a big bang (Score:5, Interesting)
"You rip up ancient laws that regulate the power of the State over the citizen and propose to take more for yourselves. You politicise the intelligence service, getting your spin doctors to sell a war planned in collusion with a foreign power"
Also using fake terror reports to distract from inconvient news reports. Shame on you. It's ironic that the party that was formed to champion the people is the one that has so much to destroy democratic freedoms hard won over centuries.
from: georgew@whitehouse.gob
to: Tonyb@tendouningstreet.co.uk
Yo Blair,
Fire up a fake terror scare in the UK and then use it to justify canceling democratic rights and bringing in mandatory ID cards. Use some Islamist fantasy web site as evidence. Put out reports of 'hundreds' of potential attacks. At the same time shut down air travel and cause as much panic as possible.
was Re:That's right - blame the voters
"The BBC is reporting that Tony Blair's outgoing chief strategy adviser fears the internet could be fueling a crisis in the relationship between politicians and voters. 'Mr Taylor said Mr Blair's online grilling from voters --"
No it's you politicians fueling the crisis by lying to us about WMDs in Iraq, by removing peoples right to peacefull public protest, by scaring us with fake terrorist reports, by falsely claiming there is huge public support for ID cards when we all know it's your best buddy in Washington is behind it. Bush orders Tony to go to war and Tony does what he's told by the US president as all UK PMs have done since WW2.
"Linux 'uses our intellectual property'"
Time to put up or shut up Mr. Ballmer. Which bits and who's OS.
"an IT employee .. said part of the problem .. is that the Citrix Application .. just can't handle the load .. we actually use it from inside the network .. and we're running into monumental problems in scaling the Citrix servers"
Technically speaking, how would connecting from 'inside' be any different that outside. it's just packets being moved around.
"Another issue is with the Epic software and its adaptability, according to Deal and the IT employee. They said the software was written in MUMPS (Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System) -- a health care programming language originally developed in the 1960s"
I recall someone telling me about MUMPS. You ran it off 5 ¼ floppies and accessed the data through direct access to a b-tree.
"Using Citrix is something that defies common sense. It would be like trying to use a dial up modem for thousands of users. It's just not going to work, and it's not something anyone would tell you a dial-up modem should work for"
What if anything is Citrix designed for but for large scale remote access.
"Why on Earth would Microsoft feel the need to offer indemnification to someone's customers in the first place?"
Threats and intimidation. Do business with us or get sued, by us!
was Re:WHY!?
This is the John Cramer from Feb 2004. In Feb 2007 you cascaded 10^12 of these units and sent a msg back to Feb 2004. By replying to that msg I will have altered your future time line and the experement in 2007 will fail and this msg will not be sent. That's why you/we don't remember receiving it in 2004. Dude, Messing with casualty is sure confusing.
..
..
ps: By the way, the answer is 42
pps: The next Pres. is Mick Jaguar and his VP is Pee-wee Herman
A PR exercise is all. Personally I don't want anyone remotely working MY COMPUTER. Real energy efficiency should be done in the hardware. Eliminate the harddrive and the backlight. Put a transparent surface behind the screen and use natural light to illuminate it. Use a form of lcd that don't use power when not being written to. Use a combination of solar cells and batteries to extend usage. Power usage is a function of the system clock. The lower clock speed the less power is used. Design a processer and chip set that can function with a variable rate clock. When not in use the clock cycles down to a few tens of hertz therefore using less power. A wakeup unit kicks it back into full speed when a key is pressed.
Possibly he doesn't want Bill Gates to remotely backup his car software..
"Did Microsoft software trap Thailand 's finance minister ?"
What a totally clueless ICT Minister.
So, who gets the power next?
The machines of course. Humanity will be reduced to the status of domesticated animals.
"I'm from Europe and the unspoken truth here is that the EU officials are severely corrupt"
Acutally you have it the wrong way round, it's MS and its lobbiests who are doing the corrupting. Batting on their side is also Charlie McGreevey a member of one of the most corrupt goverments in Europe. he's also behind the repeated attempts to get a US style patent system introduced into Europe.
was EU corruption (Score:5, lies)
"No you wouldn't .."
How do you explain commercial Open Source then?
If there was a market demand for Microsoft products on Linux/BSD they would exist
If Windows users could get Office on Linux then there wouldn't be a Microsoft as we know it, it would just be another software company. That's why you won't ever see msOffice for Linux.
was Re:I don't get it, who does this help? (Score:5, Mod troll)
"MS did endeavor to document a bunch of their interfaces. The response was that it was insufficient. MS tried to find out how it was insufficient, and was told that it was MS's responsibility to figure that out"
MS was instructed to publish the specifications of the protocols sufficent to allow third party apps interact with MS servers. MS misleading pretended to having not understood the Commission and produced some source code and API calls.
"What we're obligated to license, under the European Commission's decision, is specifications, documents that describe how those protocols work. We're not obligated to license their source code. But one thing is perfectly clear, if you want to understand these communications protocols, the source code is the ultimate documentation", Brad Smith.
"Normally speaking, the source code is not the ultimate documentation of anything, which is precisely the reason why programmers are required to provide comprehensive documentation to go along with their source code", Neelie Kroes.
"Providing MS with an EIGHT DAY deadline is just absurd"
They had since March 2004 to produce the information and were given 120 days to comply as you would be no doubt aware.
was Re:8 days isn't a lot of time to document.
"An apparatus that includes a BIOS routine, and a method executed during a BIOS routine, that includes a stored BIOS program causing a computer to receive information, including error information"
.. for ensuring compatibility between an operating system and a BIOS redirection component"
"Methods, apparatus
A method of initializing a computer system equipped with a debugging system"
"a set of BIOS resume tasks specific to that operating system type are dispatched for execution in response to a sleep mode wake event"
"A method and apparatus for implementing a BIOS-level floppy boot-sector virus prevention system"
Now this is funny, the 'protection' consists of the BIOS prompting the user.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,3911 6902,00.htmm l?tid=137&tid=185
http://slashdot.org/hardware/03/09/04/1427237.sht
"You get a lot of SciFi where in the furture, corporations rule everything. Is this really so far fetched? If they have more de facto power and influence than the nation states in which they reside, then what is to stop them, like the old barons before them, from simply all but forming states of their own? Maybe Richelieu's reforms will be rolled back, just in a different form"
It happened some time ago. You've basically described the present situation. Take here for instance, as Royalty lost mosts of its power to the state, the state in turn has lost most of its power to the multi-nationals. The leaders of which once a year, meet up with the various heads of gov and tell them what their policys are going to be. The push for globalization being one such example. You see in order to maximum profits it's necessary to dismantle the nation state and have a homogenous consumer market from pole to pole. Everyone watching the same movies, wearing the same bling uniform and buying the same gadgets.
There isn't any real news. Don't you realize it yet. Stories are generated and fed to the media by the PR departments of the various interests. How it works is a bunch of 'journalists' sit in a room and generate feel good stories about the establishment and negative ones about whoever we happened to be currently at war with. You see it doesn't really matter if what is reported happened, all is required is the 'facts' be spun in favour of the winners. Like when Bush recently legalised the torture of prisoners, NBC reported this as Bush banning torture.
"The article you reference makes no mention of this. The power failure was in a poorly-specified and insufficiently cooled data centre in Kent that had an unreliable failover system in place"
.. "We can report the recovery of computer services in the North West and West Midlands of England is now largely complete"'
'Most repairs to computer services in 80 hospital trusts that were downed by a power
There are mentions of power cuts, repairs and failures in the north of England. I don't believe the reasons given are the real ones. I think a system wide upgrade failed and all the rest is just a smoke screen. On the day of the alleged power cut I can find no mention of other organizations affected, curious that. How does a power cut require repairs to computers. How does insufficiently cooled data centre in kent affect systems in the North of England. Did they not allow for some failure modes.
"If ever a project was screaming out for a mainframe it was this one. But in this instance it runs on a middleware layer that does not scale, on VMWare ESX boxes with 30 (yes, THIRTY) SQL 2003 servers under Windows 2003 Server"
I disagree, in each ward/department an independent stand alone unit that provides all the necessary functionality. These are connected to central nodes in each hospital that are in turn connected to all other nodes in a peer to peer relationship. The system keeps track of the patents location and automatically forwards records to the relevent node. When a patent is moved the system automatically syncronizes the records. If the central node goes down functinality can be maintained. It's not as if patents are moved about daily.
"I was involved in the early stages of this"
What exactly failed. What hardware/software was chosen. Who were the contractors. What kind of network topology. How does a power cut in the north of England cause a distributed data base fallover in kent. Has something on this scale ever been done previously. If as you say they force prices down then where did the $12 billion go exactly.
was Re:Big surprise...
"Hero? Why? Because someone wrote a piece of software and decided to give it away instead of charging money for it? I guess that would make Microsoft's IE browser team heros back in the 90's. Cue the Linux fanboys please"
The someone who wrote the browser was Spyglass and was based on code licensed from the NCSA. MS first tried to get an exclusive deal with NCSA then went to Netscape and finally Spyglass. The deal was for royaltees to be paid on every copy sold. MS then proceeded to 'give' it away. Spyglass then went broke.
was Hero, why?(Score:1, revisionism)
Free software is good, I use it all the time. It enables me to be more productive as a programmer, and it's great to learn from too.
Is 'free' only good for learning. Is there any commercial companies making money out of selling Open Source solutions. Any company who licenses a proprietary solution are effectivly giving away the company as they are tied into the never ending upgrade mill.
was Re:free software is good, but so is making money (Score:5, Not)
hi there steveo ..
"I think his answer hit the nail, head on!"
.. you won't see a social drive to giving away their labor"
"I do see how Microsoft wouldn't care about free software because it isn't on their radar screen. I don't know of much free software that is really competitive because truly free software doesn't have the support that it needs to compete with software that does have support"
How do you explain the existance of the Firebird Database project. It isn't 'free' but free to use and extend as you see fit as long as you contribute changes back to the community.
"I'd rather see ad-bloated "free" software like Google Mail than bug-ridden memory-leaking software like Thunderbird. I use Firefox, but it is still a memory leaker that competes well with IE in terms of falling apart over a few hours of work"
I would never know about the 'memory leaker' if it wasn't mentioned so ofter on slashdot. Firefox using 48,572kb on this XP box. How about KMail or Evolution.
"The Indians will want nothing to do with it. India has a history of thousands of years of being capitalists -- only recently did we really see socialism take over"
You can be a capitalist and still make money out of Open Source. Why do you erronously equate Open Source with socialism. In fact it is the exact opposite of socialism as there is no central authority unlike MS that by your logic could be compared to corporate faschism.
"The Indians aren't afraid of finding a way to make money on everything they can -- in order to better their own lives without a big expense to anyone else"
translation: Indians who use Open Source are diverting revenue from Redmond.
"if you go to countries where people don't like to work for free
A total distortion of Open Source. Developers use Open Source and sell solutions to clients. They contribute any changes back to the community. They both derive and get benefit from the arrangment.
was India and free don't go well together (Score:2, Distortion)