If you thought oil well fires were spectacular, I wonder what a hydrogen well fire would look like
Very clean burning, no toxic fumes, over very quickly. In fact if the hydrogen burns a pale blue then a hydrogen well fire would not be in the least bit spectacular, there would be practically nothing to see.
Just to assuage public opinion, they'll have to drill far away from public places.
They would only have to assuage public opinion that way if some hysterical person sounded off in public claiming it would be dangerous when in fact they didn't know the first thing about what they were talking about.
Maybe because most of us aren't anally retentive and have a life to get on with? The average person doesn't log their calls to customer support noting names and exact times, they expect customer support to do that for them and then execute their orders. In reality it's trust that oils the work of commerce, relieving red tape and enabling us to lead more productive lives. I've taken items back to stores a number of times with no receipt and they have exchanged the item without question.
Much like computer security, you have to weigh up how much process you want to put in against how inconvenient it is. Time to time people will try and screw you. Like most people I live fairly free and easy, and each hiccup is greeted with a shug of the shoulder and a "c'est la vie". Life's too short. Warn your friends, and if it costs a fair amount of cash try taking them to small claims (though be prepared to write off the loss when the trader declares bankrupcy so they can spring up somewhere else under a new name without having to honour their obligations).
Once I put up a web page proving how a company who rented me a flat ripped me off. After they spend more on solicitors fees threatening me than the value they took from me I felt much better. I kept the physical proof safe and didn't post as an A/C unlike the parent post here.
I agree it's a nice original business model worth giving a try. Free software written in spare time will only get to a limited level of polish and updates will be slow. A traditional software company will focus on one area can raise a lot of capital and write a feature rich application but then the pressure is on to expand, find new bloat to put in as an excuse to keep the staff working, agressive sales needed to keep figures looking good on paper. There may well be a sustainable nich between the two.
The notion of sharing does make sense. Both home users and SMEs want something that is easy to install and does well the 95% of the tasks most people do (WP, surfing, etc). Free is nice but most of us don't mind paying a little bit extra to make our lives easier, and if the cost is 'price of development'/'number of users' then you don't get any better value than that. If this works then there is room for mini-Mandrakes to appear and polish up that last 5% (eg a MusicMandrake for music users to have an easy-install pro music software).
The club is a powerful tool they can use. Acorn Computers set up a club called "The Clan". In return you got advance info on upcoming releases, first access to beta software, Clan sweatshirts and T-shirts, a card that let you into a special area at shows. From a business point of view there was no value for money, but they effort they put into the pretend conspiracy was a lot of fun for the fans who quite happily donated the cash giving Acorn a fair amount of money.
The point about learning from the mistakes of the RIAA is a very insightful one. Despite The Prisoner appearing on telly umpteen times I still bought the 'original' box set of videos for 50ukp and have the No.6 bottle-opener (that probably cost them a few pence to make) sitting on my monitor. I think the last paragraph of the parent post is an excellent idea.
It's an interesting blur between software and service, between being a capitalist in a free software world and being an innovator in a world where shareholder is god. Life is about trying new things. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don't, but the result will always stand up as a lesson to us all.
How about files being named appname.status-version.number.tar.gz(.rpm) where status is 'alpha', 'beta', 'rc', 'stable'. On a production server box you could set auto-updaters to only update on 'stable', whereas a desktop machine you may want to stay up to date with 'rc' sources/packages.
Eg myapp.beta-0.21 The enthusuastic download myapp.rc-1.0 Most regular users download myapp.rc-1.6 Regular users update myapp.stable-1.6 Production servers update myapp.beta-2.0 The enthusiastic forge ahead
This would be simple enough for even the home-made Perl updater to filter on.
I agree that searching for files under Windows is so slow that I find rapid clicking around in folders yields a better average success time. I have to admit that I cannot countenance using a *nix box without locate. Especially when piped through to grep. Want to find the executable for application foobar? locate foobar | grep bin. Result comes back after a few milliseconds. Locate actually builds a database, usually rebuilt 4am each morning by cron, which is the reason it is so fast. If you've just installed a package and need to find where it has just put something then type "locate -u" to update db (though my sys admin friend tells me off for doing this as there is apparently a better way, my way works fine though) and then use locate as usual.
If you feed them no seed at all if you boot the computer and ask for a list of numbers, it will be the same list everytime you reboot.
I agree with the point you are trying to get across, though in practice if you feed no seed then most computers will use the real-time clock as the seed hence you won't get the same series each time (and it's pretty unlikely you will run the program the same millisecond after reboot).
The UK has already done a consultation and rejected software patents. A couple of weeks ago the EuroLinux Alliance won in Europe and the new EU Directive now also rejects software patents, meaning every European country will have to by law. I would love to show you all the fascinating sources but the Slashdot rejection box refuses to show you the body of text you submitted:-(
Phillip.
Camera as disappointing as expected
on
New Clie Handhelds
·
· Score: 3, Informative
As with the original Slashdot announcement of exactly the same story, it's a shame to see the camera with a poor 320x240 resolution. Even the tiny Nokia 7650 phone can manage 640x480. Huge disappointment in something I would otherwise consider as a purchase.
How old is this submission? The conference 'next' month in Zurich was March 21-22 2002 (ie it finished a week ago). It sounds like something I would like to have attended. Thanks Slashdot for the usual timely news:-(
Eh? I just click on a.pdf file and can view it fine. Under Mandrake 8.1 I can choose between 2 or 3 PDF viewers. You can play Counterstrike under Linux, which is the only game I play these days. Not sure about obscure hardware, I tend to buy off-the-shelf stuff, but I've found tech support to be really good if you are prepared to subscribe to the mailing lists.
There is nothing these days that Linux doesn't do better for me than Win2k, and I use my Linux box almost exclusively. Especially as Galeon is better than IE (and IE6 seems to be buggy, wish I'd stayed with IE5). I'll probably get the Crossover plugin in case I ever need to view a Word document. There will be plenty of people locked into Windows who are forced to use niche Win-only software, but as a software developer who also wants to play games and watch movies Linux fulfills all my needs.
The plug-in would reject mail that did not have a valid e-stamp. Therefore it would not matter what mail client the spammer used.
Heck, to make money, the spammers would probably send out tons of invalid mail just so that they can extract the toll from the sender.
You have to attach the e-stamp to the email you are sending. You don't have to pay for bounce messages.
Spammers as a rule don't use the network legitimately, they exploit the network to its fullest technical extent that they can get away with over the 15 minute period before the ISP roasts their account.
And if you bounced emails that did not have valid e-stamps then you would never receive any of these illegitimate emails.
This is an idea I had a few months ago: each time you send an email to someone you have to pay them 10p (or 1/6$). Hence it becomes expensive to mass-email. Casual spam-merchants will be put out of business. When you receive spam at least you will be automatically recompensed for consuming your time and resources. If two friends or colleagues regularly email each other then they payments cancel each other out and no money is owed. They can be transferable so parents can always dish out e-stamps to their kids to let them email home for free. Write a plug-in for Eudora/Outlook and you can reach nearly all email clients with the new system. Any flaws with this system?
There is a big conspiracy out there. Go into any DVD store or rental and see how many have soundtracks or even *subtitles* in French. I went into a few to find a film for my French girlfriend and I to watch and came out with ZERO. Plenty of less widespread language such as Finnish, but nothing for the 10th most spoken language in the world. Now I know all these films are dubbed for French cinema. It would be great if the dubbed tracks could be released so that we can watch films in many different languages.
Why can't the Open Office crew abstract the file import/export into an independant library? I personally prefer AbiWord, and I'm sure many others have their own WP preferences. If all could share a common library then we could choose between WPs without fear of losing all our work to date. I would love to be able to read and edit Word files in AbiWord. Data legacy is the killer, and it's why M$ has the world pretty much under its thumb. I know others have already called for a unified Open WP format but really nothing seems to have been done. Why is this?
All this talk of latency and bandwidth is assuming the distributed computing is across a WAN. This is not necessarily the case. Imagine if the PS3 looks like the PS2 but is "stackable"? Want to upgrade your PS3? Just buy another and stack it on top of your current ones.
As for the real-time arguments, a lot of pre-rendering can be done before it gets to the point of being displayed. The renderer could even learn some lessons from the micro-processor world with super-scalar architectures and branch prediction.
Finally, the old "how much power do you really need" and "what's the point if I just have a standard tv/monitor" arguments: imagine how much power rendering an interactive movie with life-like characters real-time would take. It's WAY beyond anything we can do in the home today.
Wasn't the original intent of TAO to create an OS that ran in a distributed hetrogenous(=running on any mixture of processors) environment? This is now being used as the basis of the new Amiga OS, and by various mobile phone companies as it allows them to use any chip (Motorola, ARM, etc) without having to re-port their software (with the plus of having a very compact JVM on top of it). Did they continue the multi-processing aspect of their OS or was it lost over the past few years in 'refocussing'? If Sony do go the Linux route and pour a lot of money into creating a parallel processing set of libraries, it will be amusingly ironic to then use them to DiVX one of their DVDs ultra-fast...
The Outreach Project Tool is superb. Easy to install, easy to use, and has a very slick professional feel. It wouldn't look out of place in any top corporate environment and I consider it to be a shining model that Open Source software standards should aim for. By "dependant on LAMP" he means "Linux Apache MySQL and PHP".
You're just jealous that someone using ColdFusion can do something in half the time it would take using PHP.
In my opinion, someone that knows his language well and has developed a decent library will do things faster no matter what the language.
Seriously, because it's "closed source" it's bad?
I never said it was bad, it's just not as applicable to the majority of the readers.
A good analogy would be Apple. Yes, Macs cost money, and OS X is not open source. But a Mac with OS X is far more elegant and easier to work with than a Windows PC.
Not a good analogy. You are comparing one closed source system that costs money with another.
[snip sales pitch for Cold Fusion]
Perhaps you're just scared that someone without a CS degree could take your job using ColdFusion?
Someone without a CS degree will never be in demand as someone with one. There are many basic algorithms that apply to any language you choose. Where businesses use self-taught programmers, we tend to get paid even more to clean up afterwards.
So instead of using a proven advanced version control system (CVS) with a wide choice of clients spread across many platforms, you used Visual SourceSafe (which screws up badly, I've used it)? Who said that "when all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail"?
Slashdot has alread covered this here, and here. How on earth this is news for nerds I don't know, it's 1st year Software Engineering material (you mean you didn't ever study the subject? then why should we do your homework?). Insult to injury is that it's proprietry ColdFusion, not even a PHP project.
How this gets posted over the EuroLinux Alliance winning in Europe and defeating software patents, I'll never know (sure, mod me down offtopic).
Two things have given me the push to nuke Win2k and install 8.2 when it comes out. First is Crossover plugin which lets me read Word documents and run Windows Media Player. The second is my friend has installed Counter-Strike directly onto ext2 and has it running full speed under WINE. Here is how it is done.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you checked out Ming which allows PHP to generate custom Flash movies on the fly?
Phillip.
If you thought oil well fires were spectacular, I wonder what a hydrogen well fire would look like
Very clean burning, no toxic fumes, over very quickly. In fact if the hydrogen burns a pale blue then a hydrogen well fire would not be in the least bit spectacular, there would be practically nothing to see.
Just to assuage public opinion, they'll have to drill far away from public places.
They would only have to assuage public opinion that way if some hysterical person sounded off in public claiming it would be dangerous when in fact they didn't know the first thing about what they were talking about.
Oh.
Phillip.
Maybe because most of us aren't anally retentive and have a life to get on with? The average person doesn't log their calls to customer support noting names and exact times, they expect customer support to do that for them and then execute their orders. In reality it's trust that oils the work of commerce, relieving red tape and enabling us to lead more productive lives. I've taken items back to stores a number of times with no receipt and they have exchanged the item without question.
Much like computer security, you have to weigh up how much process you want to put in against how inconvenient it is. Time to time people will try and screw you. Like most people I live fairly free and easy, and each hiccup is greeted with a shug of the shoulder and a "c'est la vie". Life's too short. Warn your friends, and if it costs a fair amount of cash try taking them to small claims (though be prepared to write off the loss when the trader declares bankrupcy so they can spring up somewhere else under a new name without having to honour their obligations).
Once I put up a web page proving how a company who rented me a flat ripped me off. After they spend more on solicitors fees threatening me than the value they took from me I felt much better. I kept the physical proof safe and didn't post as an A/C unlike the parent post here.
Phillip.
I agree it's a nice original business model worth giving a try. Free software written in spare time will only get to a limited level of polish and updates will be slow. A traditional software company will focus on one area can raise a lot of capital and write a feature rich application but then the pressure is on to expand, find new bloat to put in as an excuse to keep the staff working, agressive sales needed to keep figures looking good on paper. There may well be a sustainable nich between the two.
The notion of sharing does make sense. Both home users and SMEs want something that is easy to install and does well the 95% of the tasks most people do (WP, surfing, etc). Free is nice but most of us don't mind paying a little bit extra to make our lives easier, and if the cost is 'price of development'/'number of users' then you don't get any better value than that. If this works then there is room for mini-Mandrakes to appear and polish up that last 5% (eg a MusicMandrake for music users to have an easy-install pro music software).
The club is a powerful tool they can use. Acorn Computers set up a club called "The Clan". In return you got advance info on upcoming releases, first access to beta software, Clan sweatshirts and T-shirts, a card that let you into a special area at shows. From a business point of view there was no value for money, but they effort they put into the pretend conspiracy was a lot of fun for the fans who quite happily donated the cash giving Acorn a fair amount of money.
The point about learning from the mistakes of the RIAA is a very insightful one. Despite The Prisoner appearing on telly umpteen times I still bought the 'original' box set of videos for 50ukp and have the No.6 bottle-opener (that probably cost them a few pence to make) sitting on my monitor. I think the last paragraph of the parent post is an excellent idea.
It's an interesting blur between software and service, between being a capitalist in a free software world and being an innovator in a world where shareholder is god. Life is about trying new things. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don't, but the result will always stand up as a lesson to us all.
Phillip.
How about files being named appname.status-version.number.tar.gz(.rpm) where status is 'alpha', 'beta', 'rc', 'stable'. On a production server box you could set auto-updaters to only update on 'stable', whereas a desktop machine you may want to stay up to date with 'rc' sources/packages.
Eg
myapp.beta-0.21
The enthusuastic download
myapp.rc-1.0
Most regular users download
myapp.rc-1.6
Regular users update
myapp.stable-1.6
Production servers update
myapp.beta-2.0
The enthusiastic forge ahead
This would be simple enough for even the home-made Perl updater to filter on.
Phillip.
Does BBSpot secretly slip in a story that's true on April 1st?
Phillip.
I agree that searching for files under Windows is so slow that I find rapid clicking around in folders yields a better average success time. I have to admit that I cannot countenance using a *nix box without locate. Especially when piped through to grep. Want to find the executable for application foobar? locate foobar | grep bin. Result comes back after a few milliseconds. Locate actually builds a database, usually rebuilt 4am each morning by cron, which is the reason it is so fast. If you've just installed a package and need to find where it has just put something then type "locate -u" to update db (though my sys admin friend tells me off for doing this as there is apparently a better way, my way works fine though) and then use locate as usual.
Phillip.
If you feed them no seed at all if you boot the computer and ask for a list of numbers, it will be the same list everytime you reboot.
I agree with the point you are trying to get across, though in practice if you feed no seed then most computers will use the real-time clock as the seed hence you won't get the same series each time (and it's pretty unlikely you will run the program the same millisecond after reboot).
Phillip.
The UK has already done a consultation and rejected software patents. A couple of weeks ago the EuroLinux Alliance won in Europe and the new EU Directive now also rejects software patents, meaning every European country will have to by law. I would love to show you all the fascinating sources but the Slashdot rejection box refuses to show you the body of text you submitted :-(
Phillip.
As with the original Slashdot announcement of exactly the same story, it's a shame to see the camera with a poor 320x240 resolution. Even the tiny Nokia 7650 phone can manage 640x480. Huge disappointment in something I would otherwise consider as a purchase.
Phillip.
How old is this submission? The conference 'next' month in Zurich was March 21-22 2002 (ie it finished a week ago). It sounds like something I would like to have attended. Thanks Slashdot for the usual timely news :-(
Phillip.
Eh? I just click on a .pdf file and can view it fine. Under Mandrake 8.1 I can choose between 2 or 3 PDF viewers. You can play Counterstrike under Linux, which is the only game I play these days. Not sure about obscure hardware, I tend to buy off-the-shelf stuff, but I've found tech support to be really good if you are prepared to subscribe to the mailing lists.
There is nothing these days that Linux doesn't do better for me than Win2k, and I use my Linux box almost exclusively. Especially as Galeon is better than IE (and IE6 seems to be buggy, wish I'd stayed with IE5). I'll probably get the Crossover plugin in case I ever need to view a Word document. There will be plenty of people locked into Windows who are forced to use niche Win-only software, but as a software developer who also wants to play games and watch movies Linux fulfills all my needs.
Phillip.
Spammers don't use Eudora, for starters.
The plug-in would reject mail that did not have a valid e-stamp. Therefore it would not matter what mail client the spammer used.
Heck, to make money, the spammers would probably send out tons of invalid mail just so that they can extract the toll from the sender.
You have to attach the e-stamp to the email you are sending. You don't have to pay for bounce messages.
Spammers as a rule don't use the network legitimately, they exploit the network to its fullest technical extent that they can get away with over the 15 minute period before the ISP roasts their account.
And if you bounced emails that did not have valid e-stamps then you would never receive any of these illegitimate emails.
Phillip.
This is an idea I had a few months ago: each time you send an email to someone you have to pay them 10p (or 1/6$). Hence it becomes expensive to mass-email. Casual spam-merchants will be put out of business. When you receive spam at least you will be automatically recompensed for consuming your time and resources. If two friends or colleagues regularly email each other then they payments cancel each other out and no money is owed. They can be transferable so parents can always dish out e-stamps to their kids to let them email home for free. Write a plug-in for Eudora/Outlook and you can reach nearly all email clients with the new system. Any flaws with this system?
Phillip.
There is a big conspiracy out there. Go into any DVD store or rental and see how many have soundtracks or even *subtitles* in French. I went into a few to find a film for my French girlfriend and I to watch and came out with ZERO. Plenty of less widespread language such as Finnish, but nothing for the 10th most spoken language in the world. Now I know all these films are dubbed for French cinema. It would be great if the dubbed tracks could be released so that we can watch films in many different languages.
Phillip.
Why can't the Open Office crew abstract the file import/export into an independant library? I personally prefer AbiWord, and I'm sure many others have their own WP preferences. If all could share a common library then we could choose between WPs without fear of losing all our work to date. I would love to be able to read and edit Word files in AbiWord. Data legacy is the killer, and it's why M$ has the world pretty much under its thumb. I know others have already called for a unified Open WP format but really nothing seems to have been done. Why is this?
Phillip.
All this talk of latency and bandwidth is assuming the distributed computing is across a WAN. This is not necessarily the case. Imagine if the PS3 looks like the PS2 but is "stackable"? Want to upgrade your PS3? Just buy another and stack it on top of your current ones.
As for the real-time arguments, a lot of pre-rendering can be done before it gets to the point of being displayed. The renderer could even learn some lessons from the micro-processor world with super-scalar architectures and branch prediction.
Finally, the old "how much power do you really need" and "what's the point if I just have a standard tv/monitor" arguments: imagine how much power rendering an interactive movie with life-like characters real-time would take. It's WAY beyond anything we can do in the home today.
Phillip.
Wasn't the original intent of TAO to create an OS that ran in a distributed hetrogenous(=running on any mixture of processors) environment? This is now being used as the basis of the new Amiga OS, and by various mobile phone companies as it allows them to use any chip (Motorola, ARM, etc) without having to re-port their software (with the plus of having a very compact JVM on top of it). Did they continue the multi-processing aspect of their OS or was it lost over the past few years in 'refocussing'? If Sony do go the Linux route and pour a lot of money into creating a parallel processing set of libraries, it will be amusingly ironic to then use them to DiVX one of their DVDs ultra-fast...
Phillip.
They have some very dry coverage here now, though it certainly isn't up to their normally opinionated standards. Accurate and informative though.
Phillip.
The Outreach Project Tool is superb. Easy to install, easy to use, and has a very slick professional feel. It wouldn't look out of place in any top corporate environment and I consider it to be a shining model that Open Source software standards should aim for. By "dependant on LAMP" he means "Linux Apache MySQL and PHP".
Phillip.
You're just jealous that someone using ColdFusion can do something in half the time it would take using PHP.
In my opinion, someone that knows his language well and has developed a decent library will do things faster no matter what the language.
Seriously, because it's "closed source" it's bad?
I never said it was bad, it's just not as applicable to the majority of the readers.
A good analogy would be Apple. Yes, Macs cost money, and OS X is not open source. But a Mac with OS X is far more elegant and easier to work with than a Windows PC.
Not a good analogy. You are comparing one closed source system that costs money with another.
[snip sales pitch for Cold Fusion]
Perhaps you're just scared that someone without a CS degree could take your job using ColdFusion?
Someone without a CS degree will never be in demand as someone with one. There are many basic algorithms that apply to any language you choose. Where businesses use self-taught programmers, we tend to get paid even more to clean up afterwards.
Phillip.
So instead of using a proven advanced version control system (CVS) with a wide choice of clients spread across many platforms, you used Visual SourceSafe (which screws up badly, I've used it)? Who said that "when all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail"?
Phillip.
Slashdot has alread covered this here, and here. How on earth this is news for nerds I don't know, it's 1st year Software Engineering material (you mean you didn't ever study the subject? then why should we do your homework?). Insult to injury is that it's proprietry ColdFusion, not even a PHP project.
How this gets posted over the EuroLinux Alliance winning in Europe and defeating software patents, I'll never know (sure, mod me down offtopic).
Phillip.
Two things have given me the push to nuke Win2k and install 8.2 when it comes out. First is Crossover plugin which lets me read Word documents and run Windows Media Player. The second is my friend has installed Counter-Strike directly onto ext2 and has it running full speed under WINE. Here is how it is done.
Phillip.
Subject says it all. Natwest have always been the most inferior of UK banks, with minimal primitive services. I also recommend changing banks.
Phillip.