ICQ is still pretty big and afaict it runs on the same servers as AIM which is also rather big. I rather doubt they will even notice/.
for all the jokes on/. the only sites that tend get/.ed are those that come into the following categories 1: those with big downloads 2: those on home connections 3: those with dynamic content that doesn't have caching mechanisms in place to deal with lots of hits on the same page.
cross shredding (cutting in both directions rather than just along the length) makes it harder to reassemble but probablly not impossible. i dunno if theese documents were just plain shredded or cross shredded.
if you really want paper destroyed your best options are probablly burning and pulping.
another thing you can do is spread the shredded material out, if some goes in your bin at home, some in the local tip and some in your bin at the office then its going to be much harder for one person to get all the material
It's doomed to fail like the Mac Cube did. while the cube didn't do too well thats understandable it was apples first attempt at small form factor (and indeed one of the first small form factor desktops arround). Its main downfall was that it was overpriced.
the similar but cheaper, smaller and more powerfull mini otoh has been a huge sucesss
i can see something similar happening with the iphone, the first generation probablly won't be all that popular but watch out for the second gen.
from the results google analytics give on our site, java is there for 99% of the visitor it would be nice to have some more specifics, which versions of java do you see?
for a long time you could virtually rely on the presense of a JVM but in many cases it would be the horriblly out of date MSJVM (which MS is no longer allowed to distribute but third partys can legally distribute it with thier j++ made apps and its easilly found on the net given the filename). Firefox seems to find a reasonable download site for java without too much trouble but afaict IE doesn't at least not without some serious prompting.
also do your users have anything in common that would mean they have java installed?
the cheapest way is using a Syncing controller and you feed your power generated back to the Grid during the day running your meter backwards and giving the utility your extra wattage to make up for heavy use.
The grid is not a battery! All that a net metering system that doesn't discriminate the value of units based on the time of day will do is move the burden of power at the wrong time onto someone who isn't being paid to handle it.
the utilties have mostly tollerated this so far because there isn't enough of it for them to really notice but if using the grid as a battery were to become the norm then they'd be in real shit.
afaict the better imagary on google earth is arial photography not sat anyway.
it may simply be that they replaced older imagary with newer but lower res stuff or a license agreement expired or that they are keeping the best stuff for those who pay for the higher editions of google earth.
Does it really cost more to provide energy at certain hours than others? sort of
the big coal and nuke plants plants have a low running cost per unit but have high upfront costs and/or aren't good at ramping up and down (this is particularlly true of nuclear) so they get run at full or nearly full power 24/7.
most renewables generate when nature lets them. If your lucky thats at the same time the demand peaks and thats great. If not then the renewables become even worse than the coal and nuke plants above.
something has to cover the peaks in demand (since customers demand electricity will be availible when they want it) there are a few options for this, all are either in limited supply or result in a higher cost per unit than for base load (large coal and nuke plants that run 24/7).
dam based hydro: This one is very effective (generally with hydro you get a limited supply of water but a lot of flexibility in when you spend that supply) and not too expensive but there are a limited number of sites that are both techincally and polictically (resistance effects of flooding land and disrupting the river) viable and most such sites in the west have already been developed.
pumped storage: essentially a variant of the above but you pump the water back up when power is cheap. The downside is the cost per unit is high as you have to pay for the power used to pump the water up (which is more than the power generated) as well as all the other costs of running a hydro plant AND a pumping station.
battery storage: cost of the batteries is a killer, loss is a problem too.
fossil fuel (often natural gas) generation: cost per unit is higher than for base load both because they tend to use more expensive fuel than the base load plants and because assets are sitting idle.
afaict they've released a mostly free but still with some propietry bits archive. What isn't too clear yet is how crippled the result will be when you rip those propietry bits out (e.g. how much dependency is there on java2d from stuff like swing nowadays? my guess is quite a bit) or how much work it will be to fix it up.
so yes we *ARE* getting closer and the recent release is a major step forward. Now sun and the open java comminity need to coordinate to reimplement the encumbered parts and possiblly integrate those reimplementations into the standard binary java releases.
The time when i will consider java free is when i see a version that is compatible with suns existing implementations (which are the de-facto standard) to the point of being able to run most existing java applications (a good criteria would be if going from closed java to open java was no more painfull than going to the next release of closed java) in the main archives of the linux distros who care about freedom.
but unless you used expert mode to install or manually edited sources.list after install that will just be greeted by a package not found error.
back in the woody days whether to use the non-free repositry was a question in the default install but they made it only show up in expert (possiblly at medium priority as well but its even trickier to start the install at medium than in expert mode) in the name of streamlining with the new debian installer for sarge (and it remains this way in etch).
#1 language by any measure. bullshit there are plenty of measurements by which it loses. For example if you count in terms of the total number of processors running stuff written in a language C and C++ would probablly win by far.
java applets have almost completely lost the in browser apps market to flash and ajax (a posh name for javascript/dom based coding that uses the network)
java applications never really took of in either the commercial or opensource desktop software markets (there are notable exceptions such as azerus and eclipse though neither of those is pure java in the sense of being able to run on any system that implements the standard java libraries. Both use a 3rd party windowing toolkit that uses custom native code).
java does do well in some areas such as internal buisness apps (where development cost is considered more important than being nice to use as the users get no say in the matter), complex server side stuff (where startup and jit times can be amortised over a lot of users and the protection of the system from mediocre programmers is a big plus) and smartphones (where the phone manufacturers won't let you use anything else)
Some companies are still to be trusted, in some regards:) companies have a number of forces pulling on them. When a company is on the way out and the shareholders realise this then i doubt they will decide giving away assets like this is a good idea.
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/08/151 257/ Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
It isn't a fallacy. In a perfectly competitive market, the price will move towards the marginal cost of production. This marginal cost of production includes "normal profits" that investors require as a return on their money to compensate them for the risk they are taking. that holds if the market is served by a number of competitors producing product that the customers consider equivilant, that the customers are well informed and that the competitors aren't collouding.
in the case of the music industry the products are not equivilent. If you want to by a copy of a particular song legally that copy must have been made or authorised to be made by the copyright holder. There is also almost certainly some level of collousion between the record labels (isn't that why we have the riaa in the first place?)
i'm sure the date was originally "first quarter 2007" then became "first half 2007" and by the looks of your quote they've changed it again to just "2007".
I tend to consider sun to be a company on the way out or at least going through major uncomfortable change (the combination of the dotcom bust and the rise of linux has done huge damage to thier tradtional unix buisness). Companies in that position are imo not very trustworthy.
Java is going to be free software they've been saying that for years and have made some token releases (javac has very little value afaict as the java language is not that complex and most optimisation is done later, hotspot undoubtablly has some good tech in but its not much use without the class libraries to go with it) but until we actually see them do it i remain skeptical.
Well, since her van was found near Reiser's place, driving out of country would require either borrowing someone else's car or renting one or stealing one.
Not to mention, if she paid for everything in cash, there'd be a bank withdrawal at some point plenty of ways to get cash without doing that varying from earning it cash in hand through stealing or through setting asside an ammount from each bank withdrawl as cash over a long period.
If you really wanted to dissapear without a trace and get to friends in another country i doubt it would be that difficult provided you planned in advance.
paying with a card owned by a friend in another country or taken out under a false name would be another option.
iirc one of the microsoft volume licenses (select i think) actually explicitly gives you a grace period between installing software and having to get licenses for it!
if you make copys that you are not licensed to make and you can't justify them under fair use (unlikely in this situation) you are infringing copyright in most of the world there are both civial and criminal penalties that can be brought though the criminal ones tend to have some minimum level of infringement and don't tend to be used as much (in lots of places only the government can bring criminal charges and unless you are blatently selling pirate software they are unlikely to do so).
but attempts to hold you liable for damages and/or foist the blame on you thereby destorying your reputation are very likely as part of a coverup.
do you have any evidence that people are copying disks encryption at all?
For DVD that would have required an dual layer burner capable of burning authoring blanks with arbitary CSS keys. Not saying its impossible but certainly far harder than using a decrypter and a reencoder and then using a commodity burner to burn it to a commodity blank.
I would have thought they'd have done something similar with blue ray/hd-dvd.
sun GPL'd some stuff. Most notablly hotspot and javac and promised to release the rest of the JDK (except for some minor components they don't own the legal rights to release) early this year (its not happened yet though afaict).
ultimately the code sun have released is of very little use to the foss community until/unless they put the class libraries under a suitable license (GPL with an exception to allow use with propietry apps known as the classpath exception being the one they apparently plan to use) as well.
As it stands now you can get the java source, port it and probablly release patches but afaict if you want to release the resulting source as one unit or you want to release binaries you will most likely need a pay for license from sun.
I'd absolutely love to make a mod for a racing game of my neighborhood, the Bay Area. If hundreds of people uploaded photos of their houses and nearby buildings, that would be a start for modeling the environment. Then people could speed through the streets safely, without actually endangering anyone or breaking the law. btw do you know of any decent racing games that are easy to customise?
sounds reasonable but make sure you have two drives at least one of which is offsite at all times and that you make new backups and swap the drives regularlly.
i bet most brewries produce quite a bit stuff that contains sugar starch and alcohol plus some other crap that is not usable for drinking. Batches that went wrong, stuff from near the beggining/end of a batch that is too contaminated (i belive this applies especially to distillation where you have to chuck the early product because it has a high methanol content) soloutions that have been heated as an alcohol vapour source for fractional distillation and no longer contain enough alcohol to be used for that purpose.
In the case of DVD i belive you need a special burner software and blanks to do a bit for bit copy with CSS included.
Whereas with the encryption cracked you can burn them on a dual layer consumer blank. Add in a touch of recompression or removal of extras and you can burn them on a dirt cheap single layer consumer blank.
Thats a big difference from a pirates point of view.
Slashdot Mirror
not sure which of those two had the spoon
abra doesn't have a spoon, kadabra has one spoon and alakazam has two spoons.
ICQ is still pretty big and afaict it runs on the same servers as AIM which is also rather big. I rather doubt they will even notice /.
/. the only sites that tend get /.ed are those that come into the following categories
for all the jokes on
1: those with big downloads
2: those on home connections
3: those with dynamic content that doesn't have caching mechanisms in place to deal with lots of hits on the same page.
cross shredding (cutting in both directions rather than just along the length) makes it harder to reassemble but probablly not impossible. i dunno if theese documents were just plain shredded or cross shredded.
if you really want paper destroyed your best options are probablly burning and pulping.
another thing you can do is spread the shredded material out, if some goes in your bin at home, some in the local tip and some in your bin at the office then its going to be much harder for one person to get all the material
It's doomed to fail like the Mac Cube did.
while the cube didn't do too well thats understandable it was apples first attempt at small form factor (and indeed one of the first small form factor desktops arround). Its main downfall was that it was overpriced.
the similar but cheaper, smaller and more powerfull mini otoh has been a huge sucesss
i can see something similar happening with the iphone, the first generation probablly won't be all that popular but watch out for the second gen.
from the results google analytics give on our site, java is there for 99% of the visitor
it would be nice to have some more specifics, which versions of java do you see?
for a long time you could virtually rely on the presense of a JVM but in many cases it would be the horriblly out of date MSJVM (which MS is no longer allowed to distribute but third partys can legally distribute it with thier j++ made apps and its easilly found on the net given the filename). Firefox seems to find a reasonable download site for java without too much trouble but afaict IE doesn't at least not without some serious prompting.
also do your users have anything in common that would mean they have java installed?
the cheapest way is using a Syncing controller and you feed your power generated back to the Grid during the day running your meter backwards and giving the utility your extra wattage to make up for heavy use.
The grid is not a battery! All that a net metering system that doesn't discriminate the value of units based on the time of day will do is move the burden of power at the wrong time onto someone who isn't being paid to handle it.
the utilties have mostly tollerated this so far because there isn't enough of it for them to really notice but if using the grid as a battery were to become the norm then they'd be in real shit.
afaict the better imagary on google earth is arial photography not sat anyway.
it may simply be that they replaced older imagary with newer but lower res stuff or a license agreement expired or that they are keeping the best stuff for those who pay for the higher editions of google earth.
Does it really cost more to provide energy at certain hours than others?
sort of
the big coal and nuke plants plants have a low running cost per unit but have high upfront costs and/or aren't good at ramping up and down (this is particularlly true of nuclear) so they get run at full or nearly full power 24/7.
most renewables generate when nature lets them. If your lucky thats at the same time the demand peaks and thats great. If not then the renewables become even worse than the coal and nuke plants above.
something has to cover the peaks in demand (since customers demand electricity will be availible when they want it) there are a few options for this, all are either in limited supply or result in a higher cost per unit than for base load (large coal and nuke plants that run 24/7).
dam based hydro: This one is very effective (generally with hydro you get a limited supply of water but a lot of flexibility in when you spend that supply) and not too expensive but there are a limited number of sites that are both techincally and polictically (resistance effects of flooding land and disrupting the river) viable and most such sites in the west have already been developed.
pumped storage: essentially a variant of the above but you pump the water back up when power is cheap. The downside is the cost per unit is high as you have to pay for the power used to pump the water up (which is more than the power generated) as well as all the other costs of running a hydro plant AND a pumping station.
battery storage: cost of the batteries is a killer, loss is a problem too.
fossil fuel (often natural gas) generation: cost per unit is higher than for base load both because they tend to use more expensive fuel than the base load plants and because assets are sitting idle.
sorry when i said commercial software i meant software where copies are sold to users.
i don't dispute that java is very common in the custom internal apps which users will be forced to use market
afaict they've released a mostly free but still with some propietry bits archive. What isn't too clear yet is how crippled the result will be when you rip those propietry bits out (e.g. how much dependency is there on java2d from stuff like swing nowadays? my guess is quite a bit) or how much work it will be to fix it up.
so yes we *ARE* getting closer and the recent release is a major step forward. Now sun and the open java comminity need to coordinate to reimplement the encumbered parts and possiblly integrate those reimplementations into the standard binary java releases.
The time when i will consider java free is when i see a version that is compatible with suns existing implementations (which are the de-facto standard) to the point of being able to run most existing java applications (a good criteria would be if going from closed java to open java was no more painfull than going to the next release of closed java) in the main archives of the linux distros who care about freedom.
but unless you used expert mode to install or manually edited sources.list after install that will just be greeted by a package not found error.
back in the woody days whether to use the non-free repositry was a question in the default install but they made it only show up in expert (possiblly at medium priority as well but its even trickier to start the install at medium than in expert mode) in the name of streamlining with the new debian installer for sarge (and it remains this way in etch).
#1 language by any measure.
bullshit there are plenty of measurements by which it loses. For example if you count in terms of the total number of processors running stuff written in a language C and C++ would probablly win by far.
java applets have almost completely lost the in browser apps market to flash and ajax (a posh name for javascript/dom based coding that uses the network)
java applications never really took of in either the commercial or opensource desktop software markets (there are notable exceptions such as azerus and eclipse though neither of those is pure java in the sense of being able to run on any system that implements the standard java libraries. Both use a 3rd party windowing toolkit that uses custom native code).
java does do well in some areas such as internal buisness apps (where development cost is considered more important than being nice to use as the users get no say in the matter), complex server side stuff (where startup and jit times can be amortised over a lot of users and the protection of the system from mediocre programmers is a big plus) and smartphones (where the phone manufacturers won't let you use anything else)
Some companies are still to be trusted, in some regards :)
1 257/
a cd509b1f821b198/index.html . It seems like they may have finally gone through with it after all (though the openjdk site doesn't seem to reflect this yet).
companies have a number of forces pulling on them. When a company is on the way out and the shareholders realise this then i doubt they will decide giving away assets like this is a good idea.
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/08/15
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
but checking mirrordot (which i belive is fed via a subscriber account) we get http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/387f24a4c912a841
It isn't a fallacy. In a perfectly competitive market, the price will move towards the marginal cost of production. This marginal cost of production includes "normal profits" that investors require as a return on their money to compensate them for the risk they are taking.
that holds if the market is served by a number of competitors producing product that the customers consider equivilant, that the customers are well informed and that the competitors aren't collouding.
in the case of the music industry the products are not equivilent. If you want to by a copy of a particular song legally that copy must have been made or authorised to be made by the copyright holder. There is also almost certainly some level of collousion between the record labels (isn't that why we have the riaa in the first place?)
i'm sure the date was originally "first quarter 2007" then became "first half 2007" and by the looks of your quote they've changed it again to just "2007".
I tend to consider sun to be a company on the way out or at least going through major uncomfortable change (the combination of the dotcom bust and the rise of linux has done huge damage to thier tradtional unix buisness). Companies in that position are imo not very trustworthy.
Java is going to be free software
they've been saying that for years and have made some token releases (javac has very little value afaict as the java language is not that complex and most optimisation is done later, hotspot undoubtablly has some good tech in but its not much use without the class libraries to go with it) but until we actually see them do it i remain skeptical.
Well, since her van was found near Reiser's place, driving out of country would require either borrowing someone else's car or renting one
or stealing one.
Not to mention, if she paid for everything in cash, there'd be a bank withdrawal at some point
plenty of ways to get cash without doing that varying from earning it cash in hand through stealing or through setting asside an ammount from each bank withdrawl as cash over a long period.
If you really wanted to dissapear without a trace and get to friends in another country i doubt it would be that difficult provided you planned in advance.
paying with a card owned by a friend in another country or taken out under a false name would be another option.
iirc one of the microsoft volume licenses (select i think) actually explicitly gives you a grace period between installing software and having to get licenses for it!
if you make copys that you are not licensed to make and you can't justify them under fair use (unlikely in this situation) you are infringing copyright in most of the world there are both civial and criminal penalties that can be brought though the criminal ones tend to have some minimum level of infringement and don't tend to be used as much (in lots of places only the government can bring criminal charges and unless you are blatently selling pirate software they are unlikely to do so).
but attempts to hold you liable for damages and/or foist the blame on you thereby destorying your reputation are very likely as part of a coverup.
do you have any evidence that people are copying disks encryption at all?
For DVD that would have required an dual layer burner capable of burning authoring blanks with arbitary CSS keys. Not saying its impossible but certainly far harder than using a decrypter and a reencoder and then using a commodity burner to burn it to a commodity blank.
I would have thought they'd have done something similar with blue ray/hd-dvd.
sun GPL'd some stuff. Most notablly hotspot and javac and promised to release the rest of the JDK (except for some minor components they don't own the legal rights to release) early this year (its not happened yet though afaict).
ultimately the code sun have released is of very little use to the foss community until/unless they put the class libraries under a suitable license (GPL with an exception to allow use with propietry apps known as the classpath exception being the one they apparently plan to use) as well.
As it stands now you can get the java source, port it and probablly release patches but afaict if you want to release the resulting source as one unit or you want to release binaries you will most likely need a pay for license from sun.
I'd absolutely love to make a mod for a racing game of my neighborhood, the Bay Area. If hundreds of people uploaded photos of their houses and nearby buildings, that would be a start for modeling the environment. Then people could speed through the streets safely, without actually endangering anyone or breaking the law.
btw do you know of any decent racing games that are easy to customise?
sounds reasonable but make sure you have two drives at least one of which is offsite at all times and that you make new backups and swap the drives regularlly.
i bet most brewries produce quite a bit stuff that contains sugar starch and alcohol plus some other crap that is not usable for drinking. Batches that went wrong, stuff from near the beggining/end of a batch that is too contaminated (i belive this applies especially to distillation where you have to chuck the early product because it has a high methanol content) soloutions that have been heated as an alcohol vapour source for fractional distillation and no longer contain enough alcohol to be used for that purpose.
In the case of DVD i belive you need a special burner software and blanks to do a bit for bit copy with CSS included.
Whereas with the encryption cracked you can burn them on a dual layer consumer blank. Add in a touch of recompression or removal of extras and you can burn them on a dirt cheap single layer consumer blank.
Thats a big difference from a pirates point of view.