As I said, I am not really sure exactly why, given that these should be relative durable mechanisms for handling frequency usage. I'm just stating a) what I observed with my 2.4GHz hardware, which was admittedly a while back and was a phone and an old Proxim Symphony WLAN rather than Bluetooth+802.11b, and b) the anecdotes I have read on/., which are admittedly not scientific in nature.
I would love to read some real results of testing the two together and seeing if there are problems in certain configurations or if there are universal problems, or if my fears are unwarranted. But I do think that points a and b above provide enough justification to ask the question: do Bluetooth and 802.11b play nice with each other or not, and if not how can we make them play nice?
This article rehashes what we already know - the purposes of Bluetooth and 802.11b are fundamentally different - Bluetooth supports what he calls a WPAN (Wireless Personal Area Network) and 802.11b is for WLANs.
This article does not address the _real_ issue that I have heard quite a few people bring up - that the intentions of the technologies and their use cases are orthogonal, but they use the same chunk of bandwidth and the nature of their frequency usage does not play nicely with each other.
I don't know the exact details, but I've used older FHSS and DSSS WLAN technologies as well as 802.11b hardware and I believe it has something to do with the fact that one of Bluetooth or 802.11b is direct-signal and one is frequency-hopping and they therefore tend to obliterate each others signals intermittently. I can't personally testify to this, as I only have experience with 802.11b, but I will tell you that with a 2.4GHz portable phone that my mother bought and the old Proxim Symphony (FHSS if I remember correctly), the interference was a real problem in a practical situation. The 2.4GHz phone could not be used while sitting at the computer desk where the Symphony antenna lived, or the computer would lose connectivity. I finally ditched the wireless network in that apartment and moved to HPNA 2.0, a fabulous solution if your physical configuration doesn't allow good 2.4GHz transmission.
So yes, we would all love to have both Bluetooth and 802.11b work together in perfect harmony and we accept that they don't really compete, and there have been several/. articles with many postings to that effect. The real question is how do we make a technical solution to get the two standards to play nice with each other, if indeed the problems are as significant as I imagine they will be (based on anecdotal reports from others and based on my personal experience with 2.4GHz technology).
Bullshit. They made a system that prevented me from playing DVDs on my Linux box. They can go fuck themselves (disclaimer: I distributed all sorts of CSS related source and binaries while a student at Harvard and had action taken against me by the administration there after the cocksuckers at the MPAA sent some scare letters).
If they want to take my CSS decoding away from me, they can pry it from my cold dead hands. Furthermore, if anybody tries to enforce that piece of shit called the DMCA against me in any other way, they'd better be packing heat, because I will tell them where to stick their unconstitutional piece of shit law as I sue them back to the silent movie era.
The drivers should go in the kernel for several reasons. First of all, though you make a good point about stability, methinks it's not consistently applied. Sound card drivers, mouse drivers, USB drivers, IDE/SCSI drivers - these all use the modular/monolithic kernel driver mechanism provided by Linux to interface to the hardware layer of your pee-cee. Why should the video card be different? And why should incorporating video card drivers into the kernel module mechanism destabilize the kernel any more than IDE drivers, sound card drivers, etc.?
I will admit that there is some complexity to video card drivers, in that there are both 2D and 3D drivers/APIs for many cards. But I don't think all graphics should be pushed into user-land. The fact is that with modern boxen this is an integral function of the system.
Note that I would still not like my box to hard crash when XFree goes down like a 2 dollar whore, if at all possible - but if the interface is well designed, I don't see why a crash in user land (X window system) would pull down the driver in kernel land.
As for sufficient justification - no matter what you here from the crusty old *nix gurus floating around here about how modern X implementations are really great, the fact is that XFree86 still sucks, though in version 4 it sucks somewhat less than it used to. 2D rendering is still slow (relative to what I expect from Win2k - not terribly slow with a fast box, but slower than it should be), configuration is still complicated and the X extensions like Xrender are just NOT well integrated into the framework - if you don't understand what I'm talking about look at how many different places font settings are stored on your box if you have Xft enabled and anti-aliased font rendering under KDE.
The fundamenal problem is that as long as there are less than PIII/Athlon/GeForce boxen around, people will want to get around X because it's too slow, and projects like Linux FB and DirectFB will flourish. If we could just unify the Linux video card driver work into one place (kernel modules) and make XFree a cleaner system that works on top of it, I think the world would be a better place.
Would somebody mod this post up? I can't understand for the life of me how somebody posting such an obvious troll as the original post could possibly have gotten modded up. Moderators might do with actually following the links in the future to discover when somebody is either trolling or just downright insane.
That being said, there are potentially legitimate calendars that we ought not to fully ignore that are not the Gregorian. But there are more legitimate ways of pointing that out.
You are technically correct that WTS and X are very similar in capabilities. The major difference is that WTS relies on the client to render the UI widgets and is thus MUCH less chatty than the X protocol (I assume it's less bandwidth intensive, but I know for a fact there's less latency). I encourage you to give it a try sometime.
I am NOT a MicroSerf, and I don't like a lot of Windows cruft nor am I terribly fond of trusting Microsoft for pretty much anything. But we could learn something from their approach - it works better BECAUSE they have a standardized widget toolkit. As another poster suggested, X is a good fallback option, but where possible all the rendering of widgets should be done on the client side for GTK/QT/whatever apps, assuming the libraries are there.
Furthermore, I am unwilling to accept, as are most users, that we should bend over and take the performance hit on local operations (80-90% of the time for non-server machines) for the 10-20% of the time we want to run something remotely. No, I don't want to give up the capability to run remotely, but I don't like the X performance hit for it (though some here seem to claim X performance problems are due to bad drivers - who knows?).
Huh? I don't understand the context in which you are discussing these. I've been the CTO of a small software company for 2 years+ now, and I have had occasion to _use_ Open Source software in deployments and internal projects for our company. For your points:
Missed Deadlines. Open Source projects are being run by volunteers. If you want them to abide by deadlines, perhaps your company ought to be helping them meet the deadlines yourselves, since you are planning on making money off of their work. Or get together with other companies using the code and throw in some money each to support 1 or 2 developers in full time work on the project. In other words, don't bitch about somebody else missing _YOUR_ deadline, we don't want to hear about it. This is more of a comment on poor, underfunded, understaffed projects with no project management than on anything to do with openness versus closedness of code.
Lack of Support. I don't see what this has to do with Open Source. There are plenty of companies offering support contracts for major Open Source products, like Linux, MySQL, the fabulous JBoss server, etc. If you are talking about smaller, less widely used or commercially viable products, then your support is generally "limited" to message boards, forums and email lists. Note that I have found the JBoss support to be an order of magnitude better than what my company got from commercial vendors that we were shelling 30-40 thousand dollars a year to. Might as well just hire somebody in house to learn the JBoss code and support it for us if we're incurring those kind of expenses. And we basically have that in the form of a JBoss guru who knows the codebase and one or two guys who track all the discussion board postings.
Development of Commercial Features. Again, the people running an Open Source project are representing their own interests, not yours. If your interests and theirs don't coincide, you should consider writing your own code, getting your company to sponsor modifications or feature enhancements. My company has contributed features to 2 or 3 Open Source projects that likely nobody else _cared_ about. We probably invested a few man-weeks of time in figuring out the source code and adding those features, but we didn't have to sit through 20 hours of vendor meetings, wait 6 months for new major version releases, and got things done on OUR schedule which was compatible with our OWN release deadlines.
If this sounds like too much work and you prefer to have people hand-hold you through the process, then I recommend continuing to avoid commercial software. If you realize that sometimes commercial software is worthwhile and sometimes Open Source software can fill a need better than commercial software and in particular if you NEED the flexibility of having something you can modify and tweek to suit your needs, then I recommend considering Open Source alternatives for certain types of projects - no, I am not saying you should install Linux Mandrake and OpenOffice on every desktop at this point in time, but there is a lot of small work out there that is Open Source (i.e. projects that would not be really commercially viable to sell as a standalone product, but will save you a crapload of development time if you can utilize them) and some excellent major projects (ex. Linux kernel, GNU utils, JBoss app server - yes, I'm partial to this example, Apache web server, Apache org XML tools etc. etc.). They aren't all pure Bazaar-model and not everything has sufficient widespread user interest to merit the Linux development model (everybody needs an OS, not everybody needs a J2EE app server, and very very few people need X nifty perl tool to sed grep and whatever particular text files), but they do offer answers to your questions that _for each particular type of product_ are sometimes substantially better than the matching commercial alternatives.
Your point is irrelevant to the facts. The fact is that a digitally signed document is equivalent to one delivered via physical mail and returned signed. You give an example where the relevant issue is proving that a document was received (i.e. delivered by registered mail). I do not know that this level of delivery service has a legally recognized electronic equivalent, but email appears to be recognizable as a legal equivalent to mail delivery in Canada, as it can be used in the same way mail is with supporting technologies. Contracts that require "notification in writing" and delivery to physical addresses may not yet be fulfillable by email delivery, but that's a point of contract law, not of the government giving legal status to mail itself.
That's just not true. The API is licensed from Sun under the Sun Binary Code License (or something like that) which allows you to download the Interface jars and the Javadoc for them and to redistribute them as part of a packaged whole. You can redistribute them with code you have under your own license - such as BSD or LGPL. The combination of two licenses in a single product is weird - what happens if Sun decides to revoke the license you have to redistribute the API classes? Well, then you'd have to go to a two-part distribution process - part 1, download the API jars, part 2, download the Open Source project. This would be annoying, but not fatal. The fact is that just looking at the Sun API itself in no way pollutes you from being able to write an implementation of that API. So the concept of "clean-rooming" it is irrelevant, frankly. Just don't look at anything that's SCSLed, like some of their implementations of their APIs.
Plus, Mythical Man Month makes a strong case that systems complexity increases with the cube of the number of developers. This makes open source more susceptible to systems complexity issues due to the large number of people interacting with it. Just some ideas... Anyone disagree with my presumptions?
How many Open Source projects really have that many people working on them? Most of the projects I see out there have relatively small core teams of people writing code for them, and a lot of users and people who casually submit patches/bug reports, maybe work on related or derivative projects that communicate with the original project through a fixed interface.
By keeping projects modest in scope and layering projects, you get the same sort of effect you get in a commercial environment by organizing teams and getting a contract between those teams. There are some projects that are large and complicated and hard to grok and have lots of people hacking on them, but they are few and far between - the Linux kernel comes to mind as the best example of the pure Bazaar model.
On #8, that is true in the US, but not necessarily elsewhere - in Canada, for example, the courts have established the equivalence of digital signatures on email to physical signatures (I know the team that made the Candian Post Office's web delivery system).
Read this: mission statement. It's pretty clearly a big trollfest/flamefest site. Which makes it in a way a parody of/. etc. I mean, these absurdly pro-MS articles, etc. are all posted on a site that is running on Scoop which is Open Source, Unix-based news/board software.
So I don't know if I'd say it's satire or what the fuck it is. But it clearly at least acknowledges how ridiculous it is.
I hear a lot of people with the same complaint - we all have these wonderful (admittedly a bit dated, but still really slick) console systems that we like to use for gaming sometimes, but we could put to all sorts of cool uses if we had a BBA. Unfortunately they are going for 130-150 dollars on eBay now, which is outrageous, and are pretty much unavailable elsewhere.
Yes, there are some hacks, like the modem-to-modem hack to connect your DC through your computer, but that doesn't work if you don't have a modem in the same room as your TV (my computer is at least 100-150 feet from my TV and DC).
But a decent hack to ethernet enable my DC would make me a happy man. Supposedly bITmASTER's site had an ISA bridge for the expansion port, which you could connect an ethernet card to (though it wouldn't be compatible with games, you could at least use it with NetBSD/Linux for DC). If it was actually compatible with the BBA it would be even better. But bITmASTER's site is now missing in action and I can't find schematics or any info anywhere.
I'd spend 100 bucks on parts because this would be a great hack. Too bad I'm not enough of a hardware hacker/EE guru to do this - I'm just a CS grad who can use a soldering iron and maybe a logic probe. But if anyone out there has any bright ideas, I'm more than glad to help in any way possible.
I see a lot of posts defending the brave upstanding advertisers who have to pay the bills.
Let's get something straight - I think everyone agrees with that sentiment. Some people seem to feel for moral reasons that the web should not subsist on advertising alone because it is an inherently offensive mix, the freedom of the information frontier and the crassest sort of commercialization ever.
Part of the problem is that those upholding the advertiser's point of view keep saying things like "they have a right to do it" and "if you didn't block it, we wouldn't have this problem. Stop blocking ads now!". The reality is that the only reason blocking has become even slightly common is because the ads have gotten SO much more incredibly intrusive and offensive with the obnoxious javascript toys at the disposal of the advertisers.
And why have the advertisers gotten so obnoxious? Why the move to pop-under, pop-over, run-around-my-fucking-page-chasing-my-cursor sorts of annoying ads? Because there is some sort of myth that people are supposed to click-through on ads and if we annoy the living shit out of them, they will click through. I'm sorry, clicking on ads just is terribly unlikely to ever happen and is not a meaningful metric of anything. People don't WANT to interrupt their precious time relaxing and browsing the web for information, news, pr0n or whatever to read your ad shit. Now if you were nice, showed me a banner ad and let me click to queue something up in my bookmarks or some client side info-base, I might want to come back to it later, maybe. But you should be fucking happy that I even saw your ad, glimpsed your logo and have cognizance that you exist.
As soon as your ad association in my mind goes from "oh that looks neat" to "fucking assholes make me click all over the place" I guarantee you I'm gonna go looking for blocking software and I'm sure as hell not going to have positive associations with your product (apparently these advertisers don't care and they just want any association at all). But I guarantee I will never buy anything from X10 or anybody who gives me a pop-under. Furthermore I consider it outside of my contract of usage for a site that they can force me to waste my time chasing click-unders. Give me banner ads, fine, if they are too big and take up more of my screen than the content I won't read your site, IN THE SAME WAY I'D TOSS A PAPER PUBLICATION THAT DID THE SAME. But don't abuse javascript to wreak havoc on my browser or browsing experience or I will be forced to take defensive technological measures against your hostile advertising. I'd rather not have access to your site than feel like nothing other than a click-through prostitute.
There's a reason TV has something like 4 minutes of advertising every 30 minutes - if they had any more people would shut off their fucking TVs and cancel their cable subscriptions.
If you see my other post, I assumed it was obvious that everybody knew about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and that those were ill-placed civilian targets. Agent Orange - used in Vietnam, but was it used against "civilian" targets? Damned if I know how you tell the difference or can meaningfully answer that question. It was used as a deforestation agent to root out enemy guerilla positions. Not going to deny civilians may have died from it, obviously, but I don't think it was used as a weapon against them.
Depleted Uranium is not a radiological or toxic _weapon_ - that's a farcical argument. It's a weapon, and it can be toxic, but it is an armor piercing projectile weapon. It's used in anti-tank rounds, but not with the primary intention of killing civilians, and it's definitely not used in anti-personnel rounds fired at civilian targets. It may be toxic and it is clearly radiologically active, but there are far more effective "toxic weapons" out there if we wanted to use them on civilian targets. As you pointed out clearly, they seem possibly as likely to hurt our own soldiers from long term incidental effects as it is to hurt civilians in war-torn areas.
Hm! How about Kosovo? Or Serbia? Or Iraq? What about the US involvement in Kenya or Afghanistan... or in Vietnam, Colombia, El Salvador, Somalia, or Haiti...? Let's of course not forget Japan.
We used nuclear and "toxic" (i.e. chemical) weapons? Funny, I never heard about that. We used conventional weapons, which I do not dispute and never did. You misunderstood my post and didn't read carefully the post I was responding to.
Your country was not attacked because it is a "beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world" but precisely because your country is seen to be the root of despair and suffering throughout the world--a cause of war and poverty for millions of people internationally.
That's your problem if you believe that. It's false, but I can't prove it any more than you or anyone else can. Give me a specific, credible set of facts to back up that claim, and I can give you a far more credible argument to the contrary.
Furthermore, American involvement in Colombia can certainly be considered "terrorist" activity--unless you're about a rather acrobatic leap in logic.
Oh, you mean we blow up civilians in Colombia? No, wait, actually we blow up men armed with AK-47s guarding drug shipments and cocaine plantations and the armed rebels paid off by drug producers to guard their interests. I am no more a fan of the War On Some Drugs than anybody, but that's not a credible comparison.
That was neither a nuclear nor chemical weapon we used. It was just a conventional warhead on a cruise missile.
Furthermore, that's not even a civilian target, it was a part of Al Qaeda, and a place they manufactured chemicals for use in chemical weapons. Furthermore, it was a precision strike, designed to minimize incidental civilian casualties. So shut the fuck up until you have a clue.
Read my post again. I said we've only used nuclear weapons once against civilian targets (Fat Man and Little Boy in Japan in 1945). Never used "toxic" weapons against explicitly civilian targets, though I'm sure there were civilians killed by some pretty brutal weapons in Vietnam (a fairly indefensible, brutal, awful incursion in the name of fighting communism, which was an indefensible, brutal awful set of regimes parading around under the veil of leftist ideology).
As for the rest of your post, I mostly agree - it's really hard to tell the difference, and civilian casualties are inevitable in any large scale military action (i.e. other than pinpoint special ops actions) - but are different from explicitly attacking civilian targets (Hiroshima, Nagasaki, which though they probably saved hundreds of thousands of American soldier's lives meet that criteria).
Then again, look at Dresden and London - the Germans and British/Allied forces firebombed each other to hell. The Germans legitimized the use of civilian targets in warfare, and this is why I say they were evil and deserved everything they got and more. Likewise for bin Laden and Al Qaeda - if you are willing to legitimize attacks on civilian targets, you are changing the rules of engagement.
If the local authorities of said town threatened the US with jihad and told the government that blood would rain down on us, then actually, yes, there would be a lot of public support for dropping bombs on the towns of suspects.
The reality is that the people and the government they allow to rule them (the Taliban) deserve what they get, the same way the Iraqis do. Those who allow dictatorship to be thrust on them will get bombed back to the Ston... oh wait, they're already in it. Well, they'll just get dead.
1) The US is the largest producer and exporter of sophisticated manufactured goods on the planet, not just guns.
2) When was the last time we used them on a civilian target? It's only happened once, and the vast majority of us would say we never want it to happen again. Terrorists on the other hand don't feel that way towards our civilians.
3) See point 1. This is a silly straw man.
4) See point 1 again.
The fact that companies in the US manufacture and export lots of stuff does not in any way legitimize terrorist attacks against our civilians. Colombian organizations produce and manufacture lots of cocaine that has resulted in lots of deaths around the world. I don't use that to legitimize killing civilians in that country either.
Eurotrolling has become absurdly common on Slashdot and its entirely uninteresting. Whiny leftist eurotrash drivel spewed all over the place does not make it any more correct. Come up with some real arguments next time.
I am sick to hell of hearing whiny overly liberal people bitch about our foreign policy. Al Qaeda hates us because we had troops in Saudi Arabia for the Gulf War in '91. We sent in troops there along with other nations because Iraq was bent on conquest in the area which threatened to fuck oil prices and therefore the western economy. Lots of other people agreed with the US that this was a good idea. Osama bin Laden and some other loonies decided that foreign troops on Arab soil is an affront to Islam, regardless of the fact that Saddam Hussein was slaughtering and oppressing plenty of Muslims in his own country and then in neighboring Kuwait.
If by "foreign policy" you mean supporting Israel, I suggest you shut the fuck up. The US needs Israel and the Israel needs the US. And Israel has more right to exist than most of the countries around it, and is no more artificial. It is a tiny nation, relatively poor in natural resources and people whining about how it was "imposed" by the US don't have the foggiest clue about the mess that happened leading up to and during the founding of the state of Israel. All the boundaries and borders in the region were pretty much imposed, the fact is the Jews have a right to a homeland there just as Muslim Arabs do, and the US is relatively neutral on the issue of resolving a border and division of control that will eventually please the Palestinian Arabs and the Israelis.
The antisemitic sentiment rampant in Europe is often masked as whiny liberalism these days by a bunch of spiteful jealous communists who like to complain about US foreign policy. The fact is the Europeans sucked as stewards of the world. At least we don't try to conquer and occupy any foreign nations unless they are committing genocide or attacking our interests. We just let them buy shit from our companies and give them job opportunities. If you don't like our western way of life, that's fine, don't buy our shit and shut the fuck up, because frankly, I'm sick of listening to your collective third world and whiny European bitching.
Open the standard, show us how to roll a Hailstorm server, tell us how to set up alternative Hailstorm compatible networks, come up with a process for joining the official Hailstorm network, show us how we control where our information goes.
Microsoft is just realizing that nobody will play with their new toys if their toys take away rights that we consider sacred. They have backed out of really bad ideas in the past when enough industry and pundit criticism was leveled against them. If they will again this time, that would be great, but content-free proclamations are meaningless. I trust these guys as far as I could throw a hundreds-of-billions-of-dollar-cap company.
1) Most of the Jews were thrown out or left during Roman occupation of the region. At least that's my understanding of it. Who were the people who stayed and converted to Islam and are now known as the Palestinians? I believe that they were mostly Hellenized/Christianized residents of the region. They were probably descended from Jews if you go back far enough (they claim ancestry from the Canaanites/Philistines, but those people were largely assimilated into the Jewish population during the era of the Jewish kingdoms).
There have been small numbers of Jews continuously living in the land that was known as Palestine, though they were far outnumbered by the Arab Palestinians during the Ottoman and then British occupation of the area. They peacefully coexisted with the Arab population for the most part.
Zionism as a movement for a Jewish homeland in the modern world geoscape has its roots in the early 19th century. By 1914 there were many tens of thousands of Jews who had immigrated to Palestine and made their home there again in response to antisemitism and growing troubles in Europe.
In 1928-29 or thereabouts serious hostilities broke out when Arab mobs attacked and killed large numbers of Jewish residents. This was caused primarily by fears over the Zionist movement. But the hostilities were not initiated by Jews. Jews did organize for self defense when it became clear the British did not particularly care enough to defend them.
After WWII, Israel was established as a state in the old British Mandate, and the adjacent Arab states spilled blood trying to prevent it. That probably didn't help things. Did they just want the territory for themselves? Was it out of religious or nationalistic sympathy for the Arab Palestinians? I don't really know. I wish I could make more sense out of the roots of this conflict myself.
If you have any other thoughts or insights I'd love to hear them.
Not quite. Since the Hawking radiation temperature of a 1 Solar Mass blackhole would be many, many orders of magnitude higher than the background radiation temperature of the universe (2.4 Kelvin), it would absorb far faster than it was emitting. It would have to be a really small black hole for Hawking radiation to dominate over absorption processes.
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I would love to read some real results of testing the two together and seeing if there are problems in certain configurations or if there are universal problems, or if my fears are unwarranted. But I do think that points a and b above provide enough justification to ask the question: do Bluetooth and 802.11b play nice with each other or not, and if not how can we make them play nice?
This article does not address the _real_ issue that I have heard quite a few people bring up - that the intentions of the technologies and their use cases are orthogonal, but they use the same chunk of bandwidth and the nature of their frequency usage does not play nicely with each other.
I don't know the exact details, but I've used older FHSS and DSSS WLAN technologies as well as 802.11b hardware and I believe it has something to do with the fact that one of Bluetooth or 802.11b is direct-signal and one is frequency-hopping and they therefore tend to obliterate each others signals intermittently. I can't personally testify to this, as I only have experience with 802.11b, but I will tell you that with a 2.4GHz portable phone that my mother bought and the old Proxim Symphony (FHSS if I remember correctly), the interference was a real problem in a practical situation. The 2.4GHz phone could not be used while sitting at the computer desk where the Symphony antenna lived, or the computer would lose connectivity. I finally ditched the wireless network in that apartment and moved to HPNA 2.0, a fabulous solution if your physical configuration doesn't allow good 2.4GHz transmission.
So yes, we would all love to have both Bluetooth and 802.11b work together in perfect harmony and we accept that they don't really compete, and there have been several
If they want to take my CSS decoding away from me, they can pry it from my cold dead hands. Furthermore, if anybody tries to enforce that piece of shit called the DMCA against me in any other way, they'd better be packing heat, because I will tell them where to stick their unconstitutional piece of shit law as I sue them back to the silent movie era.
I will admit that there is some complexity to video card drivers, in that there are both 2D and 3D drivers/APIs for many cards. But I don't think all graphics should be pushed into user-land. The fact is that with modern boxen this is an integral function of the system.
Note that I would still not like my box to hard crash when XFree goes down like a 2 dollar whore, if at all possible - but if the interface is well designed, I don't see why a crash in user land (X window system) would pull down the driver in kernel land.
As for sufficient justification - no matter what you here from the crusty old *nix gurus floating around here about how modern X implementations are really great, the fact is that XFree86 still sucks, though in version 4 it sucks somewhat less than it used to. 2D rendering is still slow (relative to what I expect from Win2k - not terribly slow with a fast box, but slower than it should be), configuration is still complicated and the X extensions like Xrender are just NOT well integrated into the framework - if you don't understand what I'm talking about look at how many different places font settings are stored on your box if you have Xft enabled and anti-aliased font rendering under KDE.
The fundamenal problem is that as long as there are less than PIII/Athlon/GeForce boxen around, people will want to get around X because it's too slow, and projects like Linux FB and DirectFB will flourish. If we could just unify the Linux video card driver work into one place (kernel modules) and make XFree a cleaner system that works on top of it, I think the world would be a better place.
That being said, there are potentially legitimate calendars that we ought not to fully ignore that are not the Gregorian. But there are more legitimate ways of pointing that out.
I am NOT a MicroSerf, and I don't like a lot of Windows cruft nor am I terribly fond of trusting Microsoft for pretty much anything. But we could learn something from their approach - it works better BECAUSE they have a standardized widget toolkit. As another poster suggested, X is a good fallback option, but where possible all the rendering of widgets should be done on the client side for GTK/QT/whatever apps, assuming the libraries are there.
Furthermore, I am unwilling to accept, as are most users, that we should bend over and take the performance hit on local operations (80-90% of the time for non-server machines) for the 10-20% of the time we want to run something remotely. No, I don't want to give up the capability to run remotely, but I don't like the X performance hit for it (though some here seem to claim X performance problems are due to bad drivers - who knows?).
If this sounds like too much work and you prefer to have people hand-hold you through the process, then I recommend continuing to avoid commercial software. If you realize that sometimes commercial software is worthwhile and sometimes Open Source software can fill a need better than commercial software and in particular if you NEED the flexibility of having something you can modify and tweek to suit your needs, then I recommend considering Open Source alternatives for certain types of projects - no, I am not saying you should install Linux Mandrake and OpenOffice on every desktop at this point in time, but there is a lot of small work out there that is Open Source (i.e. projects that would not be really commercially viable to sell as a standalone product, but will save you a crapload of development time if you can utilize them) and some excellent major projects (ex. Linux kernel, GNU utils, JBoss app server - yes, I'm partial to this example, Apache web server, Apache org XML tools etc. etc.). They aren't all pure Bazaar-model and not everything has sufficient widespread user interest to merit the Linux development model (everybody needs an OS, not everybody needs a J2EE app server, and very very few people need X nifty perl tool to sed grep and whatever particular text files), but they do offer answers to your questions that _for each particular type of product_ are sometimes substantially better than the matching commercial alternatives.
Your point is irrelevant to the facts. The fact is that a digitally signed document is equivalent to one delivered via physical mail and returned signed. You give an example where the relevant issue is proving that a document was received (i.e. delivered by registered mail). I do not know that this level of delivery service has a legally recognized electronic equivalent, but email appears to be recognizable as a legal equivalent to mail delivery in Canada, as it can be used in the same way mail is with supporting technologies. Contracts that require "notification in writing" and delivery to physical addresses may not yet be fulfillable by email delivery, but that's a point of contract law, not of the government giving legal status to mail itself.
That's just not true. The API is licensed from Sun under the Sun Binary Code License (or something like that) which allows you to download the Interface jars and the Javadoc for them and to redistribute them as part of a packaged whole. You can redistribute them with code you have under your own license - such as BSD or LGPL. The combination of two licenses in a single product is weird - what happens if Sun decides to revoke the license you have to redistribute the API classes? Well, then you'd have to go to a two-part distribution process - part 1, download the API jars, part 2, download the Open Source project. This would be annoying, but not fatal. The fact is that just looking at the Sun API itself in no way pollutes you from being able to write an implementation of that API. So the concept of "clean-rooming" it is irrelevant, frankly. Just don't look at anything that's SCSLed, like some of their implementations of their APIs.
How many Open Source projects really have that many people working on them? Most of the projects I see out there have relatively small core teams of people writing code for them, and a lot of users and people who casually submit patches/bug reports, maybe work on related or derivative projects that communicate with the original project through a fixed interface.
By keeping projects modest in scope and layering projects, you get the same sort of effect you get in a commercial environment by organizing teams and getting a contract between those teams. There are some projects that are large and complicated and hard to grok and have lots of people hacking on them, but they are few and far between - the Linux kernel comes to mind as the best example of the pure Bazaar model.
On #8, that is true in the US, but not necessarily elsewhere - in Canada, for example, the courts have established the equivalence of digital signatures on email to physical signatures (I know the team that made the Candian Post Office's web delivery system).
So I don't know if I'd say it's satire or what the fuck it is. But it clearly at least acknowledges how ridiculous it is.
Yes, there are some hacks, like the modem-to-modem hack to connect your DC through your computer, but that doesn't work if you don't have a modem in the same room as your TV (my computer is at least 100-150 feet from my TV and DC).
But a decent hack to ethernet enable my DC would make me a happy man. Supposedly bITmASTER's site had an ISA bridge for the expansion port, which you could connect an ethernet card to (though it wouldn't be compatible with games, you could at least use it with NetBSD/Linux for DC). If it was actually compatible with the BBA it would be even better. But bITmASTER's site is now missing in action and I can't find schematics or any info anywhere.
I'd spend 100 bucks on parts because this would be a great hack. Too bad I'm not enough of a hardware hacker/EE guru to do this - I'm just a CS grad who can use a soldering iron and maybe a logic probe. But if anyone out there has any bright ideas, I'm more than glad to help in any way possible.
Let's get something straight - I think everyone agrees with that sentiment. Some people seem to feel for moral reasons that the web should not subsist on advertising alone because it is an inherently offensive mix, the freedom of the information frontier and the crassest sort of commercialization ever.
Part of the problem is that those upholding the advertiser's point of view keep saying things like "they have a right to do it" and "if you didn't block it, we wouldn't have this problem. Stop blocking ads now!". The reality is that the only reason blocking has become even slightly common is because the ads have gotten SO much more incredibly intrusive and offensive with the obnoxious javascript toys at the disposal of the advertisers.
And why have the advertisers gotten so obnoxious? Why the move to pop-under, pop-over, run-around-my-fucking-page-chasing-my-cursor sorts of annoying ads? Because there is some sort of myth that people are supposed to click-through on ads and if we annoy the living shit out of them, they will click through. I'm sorry, clicking on ads just is terribly unlikely to ever happen and is not a meaningful metric of anything. People don't WANT to interrupt their precious time relaxing and browsing the web for information, news, pr0n or whatever to read your ad shit. Now if you were nice, showed me a banner ad and let me click to queue something up in my bookmarks or some client side info-base, I might want to come back to it later, maybe. But you should be fucking happy that I even saw your ad, glimpsed your logo and have cognizance that you exist.
As soon as your ad association in my mind goes from "oh that looks neat" to "fucking assholes make me click all over the place" I guarantee you I'm gonna go looking for blocking software and I'm sure as hell not going to have positive associations with your product (apparently these advertisers don't care and they just want any association at all). But I guarantee I will never buy anything from X10 or anybody who gives me a pop-under. Furthermore I consider it outside of my contract of usage for a site that they can force me to waste my time chasing click-unders. Give me banner ads, fine, if they are too big and take up more of my screen than the content I won't read your site, IN THE SAME WAY I'D TOSS A PAPER PUBLICATION THAT DID THE SAME. But don't abuse javascript to wreak havoc on my browser or browsing experience or I will be forced to take defensive technological measures against your hostile advertising. I'd rather not have access to your site than feel like nothing other than a click-through prostitute.
There's a reason TV has something like 4 minutes of advertising every 30 minutes - if they had any more people would shut off their fucking TVs and cancel their cable subscriptions.
Depleted Uranium is not a radiological or toxic _weapon_ - that's a farcical argument. It's a weapon, and it can be toxic, but it is an armor piercing projectile weapon. It's used in anti-tank rounds, but not with the primary intention of killing civilians, and it's definitely not used in anti-personnel rounds fired at civilian targets. It may be toxic and it is clearly radiologically active, but there are far more effective "toxic weapons" out there if we wanted to use them on civilian targets. As you pointed out clearly, they seem possibly as likely to hurt our own soldiers from long term incidental effects as it is to hurt civilians in war-torn areas.
Hm! How about Kosovo? Or Serbia? Or Iraq? What about the US involvement in Kenya or Afghanistan... or in Vietnam, Colombia, El Salvador, Somalia, or Haiti...? Let's of course not forget Japan.
We used nuclear and "toxic" (i.e. chemical) weapons? Funny, I never heard about that. We used conventional weapons, which I do not dispute and never did. You misunderstood my post and didn't read carefully the post I was responding to.
Your country was not attacked because it is a "beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world" but precisely because your country is seen to be the root of despair and suffering throughout the world--a cause of war and poverty for millions of people internationally.
That's your problem if you believe that. It's false, but I can't prove it any more than you or anyone else can. Give me a specific, credible set of facts to back up that claim, and I can give you a far more credible argument to the contrary.
Furthermore, American involvement in Colombia can certainly be considered "terrorist" activity--unless you're about a rather acrobatic leap in logic.
Oh, you mean we blow up civilians in Colombia? No, wait, actually we blow up men armed with AK-47s guarding drug shipments and cocaine plantations and the armed rebels paid off by drug producers to guard their interests. I am no more a fan of the War On Some Drugs than anybody, but that's not a credible comparison.
Furthermore, that's not even a civilian target, it was a part of Al Qaeda, and a place they manufactured chemicals for use in chemical weapons. Furthermore, it was a precision strike, designed to minimize incidental civilian casualties. So shut the fuck up until you have a clue.
As for the rest of your post, I mostly agree - it's really hard to tell the difference, and civilian casualties are inevitable in any large scale military action (i.e. other than pinpoint special ops actions) - but are different from explicitly attacking civilian targets (Hiroshima, Nagasaki, which though they probably saved hundreds of thousands of American soldier's lives meet that criteria).
Then again, look at Dresden and London - the Germans and British/Allied forces firebombed each other to hell. The Germans legitimized the use of civilian targets in warfare, and this is why I say they were evil and deserved everything they got and more. Likewise for bin Laden and Al Qaeda - if you are willing to legitimize attacks on civilian targets, you are changing the rules of engagement.
The reality is that the people and the government they allow to rule them (the Taliban) deserve what they get, the same way the Iraqis do. Those who allow dictatorship to be thrust on them will get bombed back to the Ston... oh wait, they're already in it. Well, they'll just get dead.
2) When was the last time we used them on a civilian target? It's only happened once, and the vast majority of us would say we never want it to happen again. Terrorists on the other hand don't feel that way towards our civilians.
3) See point 1. This is a silly straw man.
4) See point 1 again.
The fact that companies in the US manufacture and export lots of stuff does not in any way legitimize terrorist attacks against our civilians. Colombian organizations produce and manufacture lots of cocaine that has resulted in lots of deaths around the world. I don't use that to legitimize killing civilians in that country either.
Eurotrolling has become absurdly common on Slashdot and its entirely uninteresting. Whiny leftist eurotrash drivel spewed all over the place does not make it any more correct. Come up with some real arguments next time.
If by "foreign policy" you mean supporting Israel, I suggest you shut the fuck up. The US needs Israel and the Israel needs the US. And Israel has more right to exist than most of the countries around it, and is no more artificial. It is a tiny nation, relatively poor in natural resources and people whining about how it was "imposed" by the US don't have the foggiest clue about the mess that happened leading up to and during the founding of the state of Israel. All the boundaries and borders in the region were pretty much imposed, the fact is the Jews have a right to a homeland there just as Muslim Arabs do, and the US is relatively neutral on the issue of resolving a border and division of control that will eventually please the Palestinian Arabs and the Israelis.
The antisemitic sentiment rampant in Europe is often masked as whiny liberalism these days by a bunch of spiteful jealous communists who like to complain about US foreign policy. The fact is the Europeans sucked as stewards of the world. At least we don't try to conquer and occupy any foreign nations unless they are committing genocide or attacking our interests. We just let them buy shit from our companies and give them job opportunities. If you don't like our western way of life, that's fine, don't buy our shit and shut the fuck up, because frankly, I'm sick of listening to your collective third world and whiny European bitching.
Microsoft is just realizing that nobody will play with their new toys if their toys take away rights that we consider sacred. They have backed out of really bad ideas in the past when enough industry and pundit criticism was leveled against them. If they will again this time, that would be great, but content-free proclamations are meaningless. I trust these guys as far as I could throw a hundreds-of-billions-of-dollar-cap company.
Yowsers, sorry you are right. I meant lower, which is obvious from the context of the rest of the sentence. :) Thanks for catching that.
1) Most of the Jews were thrown out or left during Roman occupation of the region. At least that's my understanding of it. Who were the people who stayed and converted to Islam and are now known as the Palestinians? I believe that they were mostly Hellenized/Christianized residents of the region. They were probably descended from Jews if you go back far enough (they claim ancestry from the Canaanites/Philistines, but those people were largely assimilated into the Jewish population during the era of the Jewish kingdoms).
There have been small numbers of Jews continuously living in the land that was known as Palestine, though they were far outnumbered by the Arab Palestinians during the Ottoman and then British occupation of the area. They peacefully coexisted with the Arab population for the most part.
Zionism as a movement for a Jewish homeland in the modern world geoscape has its roots in the early 19th century. By 1914 there were many tens of thousands of Jews who had immigrated to Palestine and made their home there again in response to antisemitism and growing troubles in Europe.
In 1928-29 or thereabouts serious hostilities broke out when Arab mobs attacked and killed large numbers of Jewish residents. This was caused primarily by fears over the Zionist movement. But the hostilities were not initiated by Jews. Jews did organize for self defense when it became clear the British did not particularly care enough to defend them.
After WWII, Israel was established as a state in the old British Mandate, and the adjacent Arab states spilled blood trying to prevent it. That probably didn't help things. Did they just want the territory for themselves? Was it out of religious or nationalistic sympathy for the Arab Palestinians? I don't really know. I wish I could make more sense out of the roots of this conflict myself.
If you have any other thoughts or insights I'd love to hear them.
Not quite. Since the Hawking radiation temperature of a 1 Solar Mass blackhole would be many, many orders of magnitude higher than the background radiation temperature of the universe (2.4 Kelvin), it would absorb far faster than it was emitting. It would have to be a really small black hole for Hawking radiation to dominate over absorption processes.