What else you ask?
Uhhh, I just thought of an important one. What about "how to make money?"
On this point, I think the example of Zope is illustrative. Investor Hadar Pedhazur was willing to pony up venture capital to fund Zope Corporation, on the condition that they open-source Zope. I'm not really a Zope fan, but the idea of an investor requiring a company to open-source their principal asset struck me as a hard-dollar vote for the value of OSS.
Dunno man, maybe I'm too optimistic, but even though the aim is to promote those things, I'd *hope* that a University of all places would have a more balanced teaching approach.
Geez, man, you're absolutely right. When, oh when, will some brave community college in the USA like "North Lake College in Irving, TX" exhibit a balanced teaching approach by offering a whole-semester course on MS Windows or MS Office?
The "normal" GPL allows the user to select eg. GPL version 2 *or at his option a later version*. That is really a recipe for disaster.
Let's look at the relevant passage of GPL2 in full -- I agree that this new license sounds nasty, but I don't think it's a disaster:
Each version is given a distinguishing version number. If the Program specifies a version number of this License which applies to it and "any later version", you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that version or of any later version published by the Free Software Foundation. If the Program does not specify a version number of this License, you may choose any version ever published by the Free Software Foundation.
Ok, I parse this to mean: Programmer A releases Plotz 1.0 under GPL2 'or any later version'. Programmer B then has the right at any point in the future to use the source of Plotz 1.0 according to GPL2 (or GPL3, or GPL4, when they are released) to determine his rights. It does not mean that once GPL3 comes out, the work is no longer available under GPL2. It is not legally possible to release software in 2005 under a license that doesn't yet exist in 2005.
The real worry will be when software is released under GPL3 'or any later version', because then you can't avoid the nasty provision. If Programmer A releases Plotz 2.0 in 2007 using GPL3, Programmer B would have his choice of using the Plotz 2.0 source under GPL3, or the Plotz 1.0 source still under GPL2. As Stallman has reminded us so many times, once something is released under a GPL license, none of those rights can be taken away.
My apologies... I googled "Synfuels Scam" and the article you linked to was #5 or so. Strangely, it is linked to by IP rather than domain name. (So Google is covering up for Freepers?)
My comment about copyright infringement still stands, though. Not that you had anything to do with it, I was just tweaking them.
As long as they refuse to support other formats than their own proprietary formats, MS will be easily identified as the bad guy. Not only geeks realise and understand this.
I love OpenOffice, but you strike me as optimistic about non-geek comprehension levels. Some understand, the majority don't. They let file-type associations do the thinking for them, and any conversion problems just create a call to the helpdesk. Most aren't even aware of the concept of file formats, let alone proprietary ones -- they perceive the difference between.doc and.txt as a formatting issue.
For that matter, I didn't realize until a few weeks ago that RTF wasn't an open format. (OK, revoke my geek license). I was inspired by some stallmanic comments somewhere to track it down, and guess what, it's
defined by Microsoft. The link is the definition of "RTF 1.8" which is the standard for Office 2003.(You have to download an.exe which 'installs' a word document, fortunately readable by Word2000):
However, earlier versions of Word do not necessarily support all the RTF commands noted in this specification. [...]
RTF version 1.7 included many new control words introduced specifically for Microsoft Word for Windows 95 version 7.0, Microsoft Word 97 for Windows, Microsoft Word 98 for the Macintosh, Microsoft Word 2000 for Windows, and Microsoft Word 2002 for Windows, as well as other Microsoft products. Version 1.8 includes new command extensions specifically for use with new features available in Microsoft Word 2003.
So MS can redefine RTF at will -- it's their spec -- and even older versions of Office can't necessarily read RTF docs created in Office2003. Yuck.
Go, Massachusetts!
Here's an article about Synfuels called The Great Energy Scam...
Oh no, it can't be! A reputable online publication like the Free Republic, noble bastion of 'Rights for Corporations, not Individuals', reprinting Time Inc.'s copyrighted material without permission? I have already alerted Time to this unconscionable infringement of their rights.
Nice try replacing 'freerepublic.com' with their IP address so people wouldn't see what the link was to, btw. Evidently you have some sense of shame about linking to them, at least.
To clear up what "claiming the principle" means a bit -- the term 'begging the question' has to do with public debates, where a particular issue ( the 'question' or 'resolution' ) was debated before an audience. When the speaker who was arguing in favor of the resolution employed anything that looked like circular reasoning (e.g., 'men should be paid more than women because they're worth more') , he was said to be 'begging the question', i.e., asking the audience to concede the very point he was supposed to be justifying. The linked-to explanation makes rather a muddle of it, especially when they try to translate it as 'avoiding the question'.
Ok, I apologize -- I must have screwed something up. I see two posts already saying - no problems with a Knoppix CD. I didn't take notes on what seemed off with mine (we don't need no steenking documentation), since I'd already told myself that I could start over with the Gentoo boot CD.
Next time, I'll do it from Knoppix, and now that I've been through it once, it should go more smoothly next time. Thanks for the encouragement!
Did you actually succeed at installing Gentoo from a Knoppix boot, or are you just going by what's on the website?
I just got Gentoo running a few weeks ago, and am very happy with it -- but I had to abandon the Knoppix-based install, and switch to the stage 3 GT ISO, because the Knoppix-based install instructions got me very confused. Things that were happening on my disk didn't seem to match up to locations/filenames in the docs...
Your accountant should give you useful information about depreciation on hardware (HW can be depreciated, SW cannot). Standard is 3 years.
So, one way to figure out your baseline is to split your budget into per-employee and 'datacenter' sections.
In the per-employee section, figure out what the standard config is (HW and SW), and price out a new HW config for one employee. Your annual HW budget for the employee section should be 1/3 of that figure X { #of employees } plus 15% contingency. SW would be your license renewal fees, plus any planned new purchases. Don't forget to budget for new employees; check with mgmt for planned growth rate.
Same for your data center -- plan on replacing all HW every 3 years, and your budget should be 1/3 of that. As other posters advised, your first budget is an excellent place to add in backup/redundancy HW you've been wanting.
I saw that too -- then I realized I had Javascript blocker on. Once I temporarily allowed JS on the page, I saw more of the layout. Not that it's anything to write home about, and http://sandbox.msn.com/ says it's been accessible since June 3...
>> Organic compounds are broken down into carbon dioxide and water, while the nitrogen oxides yield nitrate salts.
> Carbon dioxide and water are easy enough to take care of. Not sure what to do with the nitrate salts. Fertilizer?
Ok, let me get this straight. We've now got a process that allows you to paint an urban building with a substance that automatically transforms the ambient pollution into nitrate fertilizer?
Congratulations, you're only a step or two away from creating the world's first self-exploding skyscraper!
A-Squared, MS Anti Spyware, and AVG nailed that combo for me, but it was frustrating as hell.
Question here -it seems that most/. people use and/or recommend AVG. I stumbled upon AntiVir PE Classic ( http://www.free-av.com/ ) a long time ago, and have been pretty happy with it.
Is there any particular reason why AVG is the/. market leader, or is it just the best known? Can anybody compare/contrast AVG and AntiVir?
Thanks...
I picked up a handfull of cartoons for my grandson and a handful of old B movies for myself at the local grocery store for a $1 each.
Absolutely! Target has been a godsend for finding entertainment for toddlers. I've gotten 2 DVDs that collected full-color Superman shorts from the 40s, they can't stop watching them. Also the original Gumby shows, which they keep requesting to see, and the older Felix the Cat shorts.
Some claim that comets are made of antimatter. If so the Tempel 1 collision should be a whopper.
Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashing into Jupiter should have settled that already, no? Of course the site you reference claims that it was an 'antimatter comet' too, but they don't discuss the missing radiation profile...
Maxwell's equations were not refined by special relativity. They remain exactly the same. The structure of spacetime was made consistent with these equations.
Reeeally? That must have been a hell of an engineering job. Who got the gig, KBR?
Ok, which is it? Are celebrities boring the public or fascinating the public with their poorly-informed opinion? It can't be both. People are endlessly fascinated with celebrities...
Hmm... I think we agree on just about everything, but we're talking about different things. To answer you, celebrities are definitely fascinating the public, but not with their opinions. They're fascinating the public with their identities, and the politics is just another fashion accessory for them. Coming up with a political opinion should (ideally) be the result of some brain-work, not just copying it from a celebrity like Jennifer Anniston's haircut.
I'm with you on the need for political speech being the most protected of all, and I'm trying to express my idea without coming off as elitist. I guess I'm trying to say that people should come to their own opinions, well-informed or not, using some algorithm other than "it's a good idea because John Travolta/Charlton Heston supports it". When somebody is given airtime because they're an actor or musician, I'd expect them to talk about their area of expertise - acting or music. If they want to talk politics, there are fora for that where non-experts can express their opinions, like we're doing now. This works both ways -- a while back I made a donation to see Bill Clinton at a political benefit; I would have been royally pissed if all he did there was play the saxophone.
To put it another way, my gripe has to do with the sociology of popular opinion. The reason I would say 'shut up and sing' is, when I pay for a ticket, I want to consume entertainment, not be held hostage to a lecture. If the political opinions of entertainers are so brilliant, they should be able to stand on their own in the marketplace of ideas, not be piggybacked on their 'entertainment'. So -- I had no idea Parker/Stone were righties, but it doesn't bother me that their film is an essay on foreign policy -- at least they packaged it as a separable product that the public can vote for or reject with its dollars. (Same goes for Fahrenheit 911, The Company, etc.). What pisses me off is stuff like Dylan's "Hurricane", which is basically just a newspaper editorial set to a catchy tune that he then sells, or the idiots who air their opinions at the Oscars. Thanks for reading...
Celebrities are being targetted for their political opinions, not for their lack of public decorum.
They're being 'targeted' ? (As Liddy would say, "Head shots! Head shots!) But seriously, it's not the specific opinions that bother me, it's the fact that they seem to think we would care at all. So somebody's acted in a few movies -- who came to the conclusion that their muddled ideas are worth 20 minutes of national airtime?
Some people are so narrow-minded that they can't believe that someone could have a liberal viewpoint without imagining that some secretive cabal...
If you don't think that Hollywood PR handlers often advise their clients to get themselves some gravitas by speaking out on a political or social issue, you're pretty naive about PR work. I wouldn't call it a cabal, but it's astroturf all the same. I'm even sick of celebrities speaking out on political issues when I agree with them.
Some stars -- Michael J. Fox and Christopher Reeve for example -- would speak out about issues that directly affect them - and more power to them. But for every one of them, there are a hundred 'celebrities' who can't get enough press coverage to satisfy them for their creative work, so they suddenly discover that they're passionate about some political issue , and bore us to death with it. And the public is complicit, because they somehow think that that the poorly-informed opinion of a celebrity is worth more attention than a better-informed 'nobody'. (How many total days has Sting spent in the rain forest, anyway?)
Then there are the various musicians who mistake their strong political feelings for 'having something to say' as an artistic statement, and turn out unlistenable rubbish. ( e.g. most 'protest songs' or a lot of the Reagan-bashing punk of the 80s, and I say that as a Dem and a punk fan). On the other hand, songs like the Who's "Won't get fooled again" get their power precisely because they've abstracted away any details of time and place, and gotten to the truth underneath. If more artists took the time to do that sort of work, rather than setting a political harangue to music, the radio dial would be better off.
Slashdot Mirror
What else you ask?
Uhhh, I just thought of an important one. What about "how to make money?"
On this point, I think the example of Zope is illustrative. Investor Hadar Pedhazur was willing to pony up venture capital to fund Zope Corporation, on the condition that they open-source Zope. I'm not really a Zope fan, but the idea of an investor requiring a company to open-source their principal asset struck me as a hard-dollar vote for the value of OSS.
See this for refs:
http://www.faqs.org/docs/ZopeBook/IntroducingZope
More detail:
http://washington.bizjournals.com/washington/stor
Dunno man, maybe I'm too optimistic, but even though the aim is to promote those things, I'd *hope* that a University of all places would have a more balanced teaching approach.
Geez, man, you're absolutely right. When, oh when, will some brave community college in the USA like "North Lake College in Irving, TX" exhibit a balanced teaching approach by offering a whole-semester course on MS Windows or MS Office?
We can only dream
http://www.northlakecollege.edu/academics/bit/MSc
http://www.northlakecollege.edu/academics/BIT/MOS
The real worry will be when software is released under GPL3 'or any later version', because then you can't avoid the nasty provision. If Programmer A releases Plotz 2.0 in 2007 using GPL3, Programmer B would have his choice of using the Plotz 2.0 source under GPL3, or the Plotz 1.0 source still under GPL2. As Stallman has reminded us so many times, once something is released under a GPL license, none of those rights can be taken away.
and earlier, by Schneier:
"If you think technology will solve your security problems, either you don't understand the technology, or you don't understand the problems."
My apologies ... I googled "Synfuels Scam" and the article you linked to was #5 or so. Strangely, it is linked to by IP rather than domain name. (So Google is covering up for Freepers?)
My comment about copyright infringement still stands, though. Not that you had anything to do with it, I was just tweaking them.
For that matter, I didn't realize until a few weeks ago that RTF wasn't an open format. (OK, revoke my geek license). I was inspired by some stallmanic comments somewhere to track it down, and guess what, it's defined by Microsoft. The link is the definition of "RTF 1.8" which is the standard for Office 2003.(You have to download an
Here's an article about Synfuels called The Great Energy Scam...
Oh no, it can't be! A reputable online publication like the Free Republic, noble bastion of 'Rights for Corporations, not Individuals', reprinting Time Inc.'s copyrighted material without permission? I have already alerted Time to this unconscionable infringement of their rights.
Nice try replacing 'freerepublic.com' with their IP address so people wouldn't see what the link was to, btw. Evidently you have some sense of shame about linking to them, at least.
There is a Chinese company that already has mineral rights in Colorado[...] Since we will be buying Colorado-extracted oil from the Chinese
Huh? Look at the article you link to:
"The rigs would drill oil and natural gas wells for American energy companies"
They are chinese drilling-services companies looking for contracts here - no mineral rights attached. Read the crap you link to before you post it.
To clear up what "claiming the principle" means a bit -- the term 'begging the question' has to do with public debates, where a particular issue ( the 'question' or 'resolution' ) was debated before an audience. When the speaker who was arguing in favor of the resolution employed anything that looked like circular reasoning (e.g., 'men should be paid more than women because they're worth more') , he was said to be 'begging the question', i.e., asking the audience to concede the very point he was supposed to be justifying. The linked-to explanation makes rather a muddle of it, especially when they try to translate it as 'avoiding the question'.
Ok, I apologize -- I must have screwed something up. I see two posts already saying - no problems with a Knoppix CD. I didn't take notes on what seemed off with mine (we don't need no steenking documentation), since I'd already told myself that I could start over with the Gentoo boot CD.
Next time, I'll do it from Knoppix, and now that I've been through it once, it should go more smoothly next time. Thanks for the encouragement!
Did you actually succeed at installing Gentoo from a Knoppix boot, or are you just going by what's on the website?
I just got Gentoo running a few weeks ago, and am very happy with it -- but I had to abandon the Knoppix-based install, and switch to the stage 3 GT ISO, because the Knoppix-based install instructions got me very confused. Things that were happening on my disk didn't seem to match up to locations/filenames in the docs...
Your accountant should give you useful information about depreciation on hardware (HW can be depreciated, SW cannot). Standard is 3 years. So, one way to figure out your baseline is to split your budget into per-employee and 'datacenter' sections. In the per-employee section, figure out what the standard config is (HW and SW), and price out a new HW config for one employee. Your annual HW budget for the employee section should be 1/3 of that figure X { #of employees } plus 15% contingency. SW would be your license renewal fees, plus any planned new purchases. Don't forget to budget for new employees; check with mgmt for planned growth rate.
Same for your data center -- plan on replacing all HW every 3 years, and your budget should be 1/3 of that. As other posters advised, your first budget is an excellent place to add in backup/redundancy HW you've been wanting.
I saw that too -- then I realized I had Javascript blocker on. Once I temporarily allowed JS on the page, I saw more of the layout. Not that it's anything to write home about, and http://sandbox.msn.com/ says it's been accessible since June 3...
>> Organic compounds are broken down into carbon dioxide and water, while the nitrogen oxides yield nitrate salts.
> Carbon dioxide and water are easy enough to take care of. Not sure what to do with the nitrate salts. Fertilizer?
Ok, let me get this straight. We've now got a process that allows you to paint an urban building with a substance that automatically transforms the ambient pollution into nitrate fertilizer?
Congratulations, you're only a step or two away from creating the world's first self-exploding skyscraper!
IIRC one of Microsoft's strategies against Lotus in the early 90s was ... "Windows [3.1] ain't done 'till Lotus don't run".
Just as Intel tweaks its compilers to shoot down AMD, MS was tweaking Windows code to negatively impact Lotus 123's performance.
Is there any particular reason why AVG is the
Ad-Aware and other anti-spyware/adware software have recently (and quietly) removed WhenU software from their listings. Beware.
w henu-is-back-in-ad-awares-definitions-that-is/
I checked this out, since I'm a happy Ad-Aware user -- it looks like more recently, they've put WhenU back in:
http://netrn.net/spywareblog/archives/2005/03/09/
Do advertisers really give a crap about reaching poor people? I mean, the poor...the thing is, they have no money.
Very little, perhaps, but not 'no' money. They do need to be reminded to purchase lottery tickets occasionally. Those dollars add up!
If you're on a lo-carb diet, leave the hi-carb linguistics to others.
I'm with you on the need for political speech being the most protected of all, and I'm trying to express my idea without coming off as elitist. I guess I'm trying to say that people should come to their own opinions, well-informed or not, using some algorithm other than "it's a good idea because John Travolta/Charlton Heston supports it". When somebody is given airtime because they're an actor or musician, I'd expect them to talk about their area of expertise - acting or music. If they want to talk politics, there are fora for that where non-experts can express their opinions, like we're doing now. This works both ways -- a while back I made a donation to see Bill Clinton at a political benefit; I would have been royally pissed if all he did there was play the saxophone.
To put it another way, my gripe has to do with the sociology of popular opinion. The reason I would say 'shut up and sing' is, when I pay for a ticket, I want to consume entertainment, not be held hostage to a lecture. If the political opinions of entertainers are so brilliant, they should be able to stand on their own in the marketplace of ideas, not be piggybacked on their 'entertainment'. So -- I had no idea Parker/Stone were righties, but it doesn't bother me that their film is an essay on foreign policy -- at least they packaged it as a separable product that the public can vote for or reject with its dollars. (Same goes for Fahrenheit 911, The Company, etc.). What pisses me off is stuff like Dylan's "Hurricane", which is basically just a newspaper editorial set to a catchy tune that he then sells, or the idiots who air their opinions at the Oscars. Thanks for reading
Some stars -- Michael J. Fox and Christopher Reeve for example -- would speak out about issues that directly affect them - and more power to them. But for every one of them, there are a hundred 'celebrities' who can't get enough press coverage to satisfy them for their creative work, so they suddenly discover that they're passionate about some political issue , and bore us to death with it. And the public is complicit, because they somehow think that that the poorly-informed opinion of a celebrity is worth more attention than a better-informed 'nobody'. (How many total days has Sting spent in the rain forest, anyway?)
Then there are the various musicians who mistake their strong political feelings for 'having something to say' as an artistic statement, and turn out unlistenable rubbish. ( e.g. most 'protest songs' or a lot of the Reagan-bashing punk of the 80s, and I say that as a Dem and a punk fan). On the other hand, songs like the Who's "Won't get fooled again" get their power precisely because they've abstracted away any details of time and place, and gotten to the truth underneath. If more artists took the time to do that sort of work, rather than setting a political harangue to music, the radio dial would be better off.