chill out... 'grey goo' refers to the threat self-replicating nano-technology; the threat being that it could suck up resources without limit as it replicates. All we're talking about here is nanotubes, little submicroscopic pipes of carbon filled with copper. They can't replicate or do much of anything except stick to a wall. Health risks of 'nano-particles' (whatever those are) are much the same as any fine dust (and likely to be less severe than asbestos). Carbon nano-particles are also known as coal dust, but we're much less likely to be exposed to dangerous quantities of nanoparticles than miners are to coal dust (since there's no reason to spray it around indiscriminately). In this case the whole thing's moot because the nano stuff is in the paint, not floating free in the air.
Re:Will they treat USB/1394 disks like fixed?
on
Why Vista Won't Suck
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· Score: 1
Yep, but once you emerge masked packages, you have to be careful with emerge --update world, otherwise you'll revert to the last stable version. You have to include the --upgradeonly option on all your emerges, even though it's marked 'deprecated'. This is the one feature in Gentoo that disappoints me -- it should be able to figure out that you've chosen to install a pre-stable package, and not auto-revert you.
There's a package called 'porthole' which serves as a useful GUI frontend for portage. Just run it as root, and your emerges will be much easier. It doesn't do everything (i.e., in order to do an 'emerge --resume --skipfirst' ) you have to choose 'Run Custom Command' from the menubar... BUT it's a lifesaver when you're compiling packages with lots of USE flags (mplayer, anyone?). Rather than having to memorize or note down all your options, it presents you with a dropdown list of all the available versions, and checkboxes for all the appropriate USE flags and package.masks for that package. It doesn't hide anything from you, but it does take away the tedium. Check it out!
Oh yeah, I was chatting with my car mechanic the other day and he was all miffed about the familiar tone his GUI installer was taking with him, too.
Sheesh. Much as I love Gentoo, you have to admit that people who don't self-identify as nerds don't even know it exists. Unless they have some sort of tech-company investing interest, they barely know Linux exists.
MS cant really shut out even one of the major PC distributors, simply because people will buy Dells or HP's regardless what os is on them.
You clearly, clearly, don't know what you're talking about. Ask Walmart how many Linspire computers they have to accept as returns from people who didn't realise that 'computer' 'Windows'.
If Korea really cares that much, why dont they just switch their government software to an alternative.
Why, that's an excellent idea! You should contact the Korean government immed-- Whoops, it looks like somebody beat you to it.
I'm not a buisness expert, but can't you uninstall anything the hell you want from windows ('cept IE, admittedly) and make an image from that disk, and image it to 50,000+ PC's you sell? Also, can you put firefox on that 1st pc, and make it the default before you make the image? They do it with Symantec/Norton Security Suite all the time. And, can't Dell write a program to present the user with choices of defaults to use?
Sure you can do all that... technically. The question is, can you do so legally? Dell gets MS Windows images to install at a hefty discount (approx $10 per install, IIRC). To get that rate, they accept all sorts of limitations on the image they use on the machines they sell. (see my reply on another branch of this thread for details). The difference with Symantec/NSS is that MS doesn't (yet) offer a free competitor to those. You can bet that once they decide to drive Symantec out of business, they'll try to introduce similar restrictive clauses to promote MS's Ban-Non-Microsoft-Spyware-but-our-Gator-is-OK product.
How much other stuff does OS X stuff in to an operating system? Safari. iChat, iTunes, iWeb, f**king DVD authoring. MS doesn't include half that stuff, and the Mac folks see iLife as a feature. You have to feel sorry for Microsoft.
WTF?? Apple is one company that sells a combined software-and-hardware product. You can bet that internally, the platform group is making detailed demands on the software group, and those demands get listened to. ( read The Graphing Calculator Story for a hilarious example. ) The comparison with the Dell-Microsoft situation, where one company is trying to restrict the choice of the other, is completely off-point. It's not about what's the 'right' number of apps to have inextricably embedded into the OS -- it's about freedom of choice. That's why us geeks love Linux -- you don't like what Major distro does? Then just walk down the virtual street and choose another, or even roll your own.
I haven't RTFA, but how is MS penalising computer makers for including 3rd party IM programs, media players, etc?
Here ya go, the juicy details of Real's suit from 2003. From this link:
Other charges allege that Microsoft used contractual restrictions and financial incentives to "force PC makers to accept Windows PC operating systems with the bundled Windows Media Player and to restrict the ability of PC makers to preinstall or promote competing digital media players."
According to the suit, PC makers told Real that their contracts with Microsoft kept them from removing or changing the status of a Windows Media Player; promoting RealOne subscription services during the first run of a new PC; and providing a desktop icon for Real Networks. "Microsoft's agreements with PC makers are exclusionary and anticompetitive," the suit concludes.
If boxmakers have 'financial incentives' to keep WMP and not install others, they are paying a penalty if they do so anyway and forego the incentives.
Right, because if there's one thing that MS does really well, is build good hardware. If they want to do that, fine, that's called a free market.
Your first sentence describes what they're already doing, and is what all the bundling lawsuits are about. As for licensing, it's a pretty incestuous relationship, but ultimately Microsoft needs the boxmakers more than the boxmakers need Microsoft. The volume licenses MS sells to the boxmakers are a goldmine for the company that they wouldn't want to mess with. So Dell et al. could just decline the "Dell Windows" licensing fee, still buy the MS volume licenses, and refer to systems sold with 'a well-known operating system that runs the majority of today's applications', and most consumers wouldn't even notice that it didn't say Windows. For corporate customers, the Dell sales rep tells you what version OS you're getting over the phone. Next?
Exactly, which is why Dell, HP, Lenovo, or whoever should be able to choose which browser, IM player, and media player they install on the complete systems they sell, and not be forced by the OS/kernel maker to include one and pay a penalty even if they don't want it.
Microsoft doesn't sell computers, it sells operating systems and application software. Computer makers should be able to choose which components, if any, they want to buy from Microsoft.
Hmm, maybe they wanted an author with better street-cred on the subject?
Joke, joke... thanks for sharing. I'm never going to whine about having a submission rejected again... even to myself. Thanks for all the good work, keep up the fight, etc., etc.
He went $40G in debt founding one of the most popular Linux distros in the world and ended up having to work at... Microsoft to make ends meet [...] and I am the only person to think this is amusing?
Yeah, they even made a movie about it, it was so funny... starring Marlene Dietrich and Emil Jannings, yet.
Not to mention the fact that if we had robots that were well-programmed enough to be able to raise zygotes into intelligent, sane human beings that could function effectively as explorers (assuming here the goal is exploration rather than brute-force colonization), wouldn't the robots also be intelligent enough to function as explorers themselves, thus obviating all the ethical quibbles about zygo-nauts ?
Drool... Somebody tell the Raskin Center about this -- there's finally a screen that will make Archy work. If only they dropped the 'infinite undo' requirement, they might actually manage to use this screen to release something more than a CLI proof-of-concept plus a flash demo.
Here's how to solve the problem at George Mason and other universities: Sic Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter on them for refusing to allow 'alternative viewpoints' in America's universities. If it works for politics, it will work for OSs...
Fair enough, and well noted, but if the [student] reporter said in her own voice that 'this bolsters...', even without the 'think', that would be a reasonable use of inference by a reporter. If, on the other hand, the scientists said 'we think this conclusively proves...' I'd still think they were overreaching their evidence.
Thanks for the detailed response. As for 'not being sure what side [I'm] on', it's one of those history/philosophy of science gags; you're supposed to be paradigm neutral. I understand the mechanism and math of punctuated equilibrium pretty well; I thought that in the last 20 years or so it's become the generally-accepted view. As I noted in another post:
Most users of the term 'Natural Selection' use it to refer to classic, gradualist, longer-and-longer-necked-giraffes, selection; in other words, Darwin's theory as stated by him. If you understand it to mean everything that includes 'differential survival to reproduce', that includes everything except Intelligent Design.
To add a bit, Darwin called his theory NS, so NS (according to my understanding of the contemporary usage) is just that gradualist theory, not any and all versions exhibiting selective pressure such as PE. This is why the ID people get all excited when people say that PE 'competes' with NS as an explanation of evolution. Of course, Schwartz' work is needlessly inflammatory no matter what labels you use...
Most users of the term 'Natural Selection' use it to refer to classic, gradualist, longer-and-longer-necked-giraffes, selection; in other words, Darwin's theory as stated by him. If you understand it to mean everything that includes 'differential survival to reproduce', that includes everything except Intelligent Design. Chill out, AC dude...
"Darwinism's presence in science is so overwhelming," Schwartz said. "For the longest time, there was no room for alternative thinking among the scientific community."
Point one, he's feeding her the extremism, she isn't including it herself. Second, his second line is complete and utter bs. As others have noted, this warm-over of punctuated equilibria is a challenge to Natural Selection as the mechanism of evolution, not to evolution itself. Doing science is always about challenging the previous order -- it's only the stuff that's new and different that even gets published.
But why is he doing this? Here's a clue:
Jeffrey Schwartz -- a Pitt professor in the department of anthropology and the department of history and philosophy of science...
Hmm, interesting fields he's in. Just like Steve Fuller did in the Dover ID trial, some people in philosophy of science have a vested interest in creating the appearance of warring camps of ideas rather than evidence-based epistemology. To paraphrase them, 'science is about persuading people, not proving ideas'.
One more thing,Schwartz has been pushing this idea for 6 years, it's not new news even for him:
Now what doesn't amke sense to me is that they say "yes, it has been this warm (and warmer) before.... BUT this somehow proves that it's human activity making it warm this time."
Huh? Where in TFA do they say that it's been that warm (and warmer) before? They say:
the 20th century has been the most widespread and longest period of unusual climate experienced at any time during at least the past 1,200 years
Note well the 'at least', meaning they only looked at tree rings going back that far; it doesn't show that anything was necessarily warmer (or colder). This study has no info on pre-800AD.
Now let's look at the other hot-button sentence:
The researchers think their work bolsters the case that global warming due to human activity has created a change in climate unlike anything seen in more than a millennium.
The key word here is 'bolsters', not 'makes' the case. How could it bolster? Because we know CO2 is going up, and climate models show CO2 leads to heating.
Also note that there are two things to prove -- first, is global warming occurring (whatever the cause), and second, what caused it? This study makes a strong case for proving the first. The fact that the tree-ring data agrees with the CO2 models must be explained somehow -- it could be a coincidence, it could be there are errors with the models or with the tree-ring study, or it could be CO2 heating. I'd accept your criticism if they said 'conclusively proves', but 'bolsters' is acceptable.
Slashdot Mirror
chill out ... 'grey goo' refers to the threat self-replicating nano-technology; the threat being that it could suck up resources without limit as it replicates. All we're talking about here is nanotubes, little submicroscopic pipes of carbon filled with copper. They can't replicate or do much of anything except stick to a wall. Health risks of 'nano-particles' (whatever those are) are much the same as any fine dust (and likely to be less severe than asbestos). Carbon nano-particles are also known as coal dust, but we're much less likely to be exposed to dangerous quantities of nanoparticles than miners are to coal dust (since there's no reason to spray it around indiscriminately). In this case the whole thing's moot because the nano stuff is in the paint, not floating free in the air.
Start wetting:
i d=7 - ubuntu-to-external-usb.html 1 0/utility_to_make_usb_flash_driv.html
... then, you're probably SOL.
http://www.bootdisk.info/articles.php?action=cat&
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/liveusb.xml
http://frontier05.blogspot.com/2006/01/installing
http://www.oreillynet.com/digitalmedia/blog/2004/
http://rz-obrian.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de/knoppix-usb/
And, you can even buy a pre-loaded, live-USB stick:
http://damnsmalllinux.org/usb.html
These are all bootable OSs on removable drives... or did you mean bootable *Microsoft* OSs on removable drives?
Yep, but once you emerge masked packages, you have to be careful with emerge --update world, otherwise you'll revert to the last stable version. You have to include the --upgradeonly option on all your emerges, even though it's marked 'deprecated'. This is the one feature in Gentoo that disappoints me -- it should be able to figure out that you've chosen to install a pre-stable package, and not auto-revert you.
There's a package called 'porthole' which serves as a useful GUI frontend for portage. Just run it as root, and your emerges will be much easier. It doesn't do everything (i.e., in order to do an 'emerge --resume --skipfirst' ) you have to choose 'Run Custom Command' from the menubar... BUT it's a lifesaver when you're compiling packages with lots of USE flags (mplayer, anyone?). Rather than having to memorize or note down all your options, it presents you with a dropdown list of all the available versions, and checkboxes for all the appropriate USE flags and package.masks for that package. It doesn't hide anything from you, but it does take away the tedium. Check it out!
Richard Sexton? Is that you? I owe you a drink...
Oh yeah, I was chatting with my car mechanic the other day and he was all miffed about the familiar tone his GUI installer was taking with him, too.
Sheesh. Much as I love Gentoo, you have to admit that people who don't self-identify as nerds don't even know it exists. Unless they have some sort of tech-company investing interest, they barely know Linux exists.
Just as long as none of the versions have any of those scary raw sockets.
Gadzooks! You mean they haven't already done so?
As for illusions of grandure, dont wurry, frum now on we wont misteak it for a place whear peepul lurn ennything.
If boxmakers have 'financial incentives' to keep WMP and not install others, they are paying a penalty if they do so anyway and forego the incentives.
Right, because if there's one thing that MS does really well, is build good hardware. If they want to do that, fine, that's called a free market.
Your first sentence describes what they're already doing, and is what all the bundling lawsuits are about. As for licensing, it's a pretty incestuous relationship, but ultimately Microsoft needs the boxmakers more than the boxmakers need Microsoft. The volume licenses MS sells to the boxmakers are a goldmine for the company that they wouldn't want to mess with. So Dell et al. could just decline the "Dell Windows" licensing fee, still buy the MS volume licenses, and refer to systems sold with 'a well-known operating system that runs the majority of today's applications', and most consumers wouldn't even notice that it didn't say Windows. For corporate customers, the Dell sales rep tells you what version OS you're getting over the phone. Next?
Exactly, which is why Dell, HP, Lenovo, or whoever should be able to choose which browser, IM player, and media player they install on the complete systems they sell, and not be forced by the OS/kernel maker to include one and pay a penalty even if they don't want it.
Microsoft doesn't sell computers, it sells operating systems and application software. Computer makers should be able to choose which components, if any, they want to buy from Microsoft.
Hmm, maybe they wanted an author with better street-cred on the subject?
... even to myself. Thanks for all the good work, keep up the fight, etc., etc.
Joke, joke... thanks for sharing. I'm never going to whine about having a submission rejected again
Finally a story that BeatlesBeatles should have submitted, and he's nowhere to be seen.
Not to mention the fact that if we had robots that were well-programmed enough to be able to raise zygotes into intelligent, sane human beings that could function effectively as explorers (assuming here the goal is exploration rather than brute-force colonization), wouldn't the robots also be intelligent enough to function as explorers themselves, thus obviating all the ethical quibbles about zygo-nauts ?
Drool... Somebody tell the Raskin Center about this -- there's finally a screen that will make Archy work. If only they dropped the 'infinite undo' requirement, they might actually manage to use this screen to release something more than a CLI proof-of-concept plus a flash demo.
Here's how to solve the problem at George Mason and other universities: Sic Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter on them for refusing to allow 'alternative viewpoints' in America's universities. If it works for politics, it will work for OSs...
Fair enough, and well noted, but if the [student] reporter said in her own voice that 'this bolsters...', even without the 'think', that would be a reasonable use of inference by a reporter. If, on the other hand, the scientists said 'we think this conclusively proves ...' I'd still think they were overreaching their evidence.
Most users of the term 'Natural Selection' use it to refer to classic, gradualist, longer-and-longer-necked-giraffes, selection; in other words, Darwin's theory as stated by him. If you understand it to mean everything that includes 'differential survival to reproduce', that includes everything except Intelligent Design. Chill out, AC dude...
But why is he doing this? Here's a clue: Hmm, interesting fields he's in. Just like Steve Fuller did in the Dover ID trial, some people in philosophy of science have a vested interest in creating the appearance of warring camps of ideas rather than evidence-based epistemology. To paraphrase them, 'science is about persuading people, not proving ideas'.
One more thing,Schwartz has been pushing this idea for 6 years, it's not new news even for him:
Book Review published in 7/2000
Now let's look at the other hot-button sentence: The key word here is 'bolsters', not 'makes' the case. How could it bolster? Because we know CO2 is going up, and climate models show CO2 leads to heating. Also note that there are two things to prove -- first, is global warming occurring (whatever the cause), and second, what caused it? This study makes a strong case for proving the first. The fact that the tree-ring data agrees with the CO2 models must be explained somehow -- it could be a coincidence, it could be there are errors with the models or with the tree-ring study, or it could be CO2 heating. I'd accept your criticism if they said 'conclusively proves', but 'bolsters' is acceptable.