So after reading a bit of his "opinion" piece (written way more formally than any opinion piece I've read), it seems that without reading the full extent of ACTA he is dead set against it. Any aspect he has heard of (most likely through Doctorow or Geist) he makes a case for it being a violation of privacy. Without even reading all of it, he knows it's illegal. His title sounds like he should have been invited to these proceedings but I think I can decipher why he wasn't invited...
I agree with him but it sounds like he would be opposed to anything they could dream up. And maybe that's the way it should be... maybe privacy and international IP/copyright enforcement are inseparable. Not being an expert, I cannot say. I am fairly certain, however, that each country has to pass this into law once the countries agree on a basis. I will say that my representative and senators had better damn well represent the majority of the population and I hope that majority is with me on this. What the EDPS should do is continue to demand transparency but also get the citizens and all the members of the EU to promise not to pass this into legislation without transparency right now.
Guess someone in the patents-cubicle zoned out and forgot to follow up on his email properly..
"Oh those patents, yes, they're sent off..."
"What are those patentnumbers, we need them for printing.."
*searches inbox on 'patent issue'* "Here's a list, let me put it in excel for you.."
"kthx!!"
I have no expertise even remotely in this area but, as the submitter, I looked up all the patents mentioned in the claim. A lot of them seem to do with specifics about the controllers like the drum set, guitar or even the mixing board for DJ Hero. But basically each seems to cover many aspects of how these input systems allow the user to 'learn' and how the played track is replayed over the recorded audio. Take 5739457 for instance, it seems to focus entirely on the electronic drum sets of Guitar Hero. I think what happened here was that the patent markings were put on every single dust jacket for several Guitar Hero products -- regardless of whether or not they came with the hardware to play the game. So you go pick up your stand alone disc of Guitar Hero and there's no plastic drum with it because you bought just the disc or maybe the guitar-only distribution. That was about as far as I could see them going with these claims. That the person buying that may be confused that the product they bought is covering patents that promise something grander than what they bought.
A really interesting implication for anyone that makes hardware. What if all XBox packs had the same generic patent markings and the arcade came with patent markings for the headset and wireless attachment (not included in arcade)?
Should this sort of thing be prosecutable? Should Acitivision really get any sort of judgment against them for this level of carelessness?
TFA fails to state whether they used existing memory types or if they intend to use a custom piece of hardware on board.
My guess would be custom though not completely different from everyday stuff. I was familiar with "metastability" from my college courses where it was mentioned as a classic problem in electronics. I suppose there could be a way to harvest this data from hardware before it gets corrected. I never thought of this before but if you had a long length of optical fiber cable (longer than what it's rated for use) then you could send messages through that and collect them on the other end. I mean, we implement parity to remove these random flips of bits through transmission, couldn't we also use this to increase randomness of random numbers? I think I've read of the network guys fighting metastability so their incorrectly implemented hardware could probably be exploited as sources of random bits.
There were a few people that smart at Pixar when I worked there, but there seem to be tons of them in the Open Source world.
Believe it or not, your two categories are not mutually exclusive. I discover more and more that the brilliant people I am paid to work with have made improvements to open source projects. Both through work and in their free time.
I think something the open source community could use is an adjustment of this attitude that you're either gainfully employed or working for free... when I can attest that both are possible at once. Just be mindful of what you signed when you were hired by your employer. Some companies have terrible "everything you do even outside of work is ours" clauses. Wish the employers would realize that it's a benefit for you to experience contributing and learning from open source.
Not a lawyer but found resources (site is cosmetically terrible but information rich) on some case histories in this sort of thing.
Probably the closest case to that is Morse v. Frederick in which students stood just off school property with a banner reading "BONG HiTS 4 JESUS." Basically what it seems to come down to is that you have some first amendment rights as a minor in school unless your message contradicts stated school goals or hinders the learning process.
So the banner contradicted their anti-drug agenda and therefore it was ruled as okay to suspend them for the act. Similarly I guess a judge could interpret undermining a teacher's status as an authority figure to be an inhibition of the learning process in the facebook page. I don't agree with that ruling but this didn't seem to be addressed in the lengthy opinion piece presented above.
In high school some kids circulated a 'zine that was laden with four letter words and was distributed via a student's access to his mom's work's photocopying machine during after hours. We were aware that some of them had been confiscated and you got detention for profanity but since we never really attacked teachers, it never resulted in suspension or worse. During the 'vest craze' of the late nineties, I fashioned a vest out of duct tape and made "Old Navy Sucks, GAP Blows" out of duct tape letters on it. And I was allowed to wear it throughout the whole school day claiming it was a political message if anyone gave me grief. I actually recall being pretty disappointed at the lack of attention I was given for it. The school had some rule about profanity so if you wore a shirt with profanity you had to turn it inside out. I guess 'sucks/blows' wasn't foul enough.
Long story short: as a minor you have some free speech rights in school but not all of them. Any that violate the reason you're in school are restricted. Any that undermine the stated goals of your institution are restricted. I think it's sad that this gets escalated so much... was the teacher really that insecure of themselves that they thought the Facebook group hurt them?
Whatever was going on in Utah needs to be looked at though. That story was downright disturbing. "Curbing the straight edge movement" was one of their school's stated goals?! Vegan statements were construed as 'straight edge'?! I must have missed something about the dangers of the straight edge movement and veganism because that smells like complete administrative bullshit from where I'm standing.
Well, there's a Chinese distribution that I believe is made to look like whatever Windows look and feel you want right out of the box. I'm pretty sure it supports English so don't let the Chinese characters scare you away.
Of course, these pale in comparison to the standard Ubuntu as far as support goes. Screw the Windows look and feel, that'd be my recommendation. Depending on how much time you want to sink into customizing this for them, there are tutorials for making Linux look like Windows 7.
Hope this helps. I also hope they don't need this distribution to do more than surf the web, get pictures off their camera and create documents... hate to see them pick up a game or some funky peripheral/hardware that don't have drivers in Linux and then keep bugging you about why their GenCorp Brand Wal-Mart purchased Mickey Mouse USB LED Display toy doesn't have software to make it light up on their desk.
Certainly one way to look at it. Here's a spectrum of possible headlines:
Nintendo Promises Investors That Sales Will Be Protected
Nintendo Goes on Offensive to Protect Bread and Butter
Nintendo Values Low Percentage of Sales Over Homebrew
Nintendo Sets Legal Precedent, Proceeds to Push the Envelope with More Prosecutions
Nintendo On the Hunt For More Scalps
After Realizing Its Bloodlust Has Not Yet Been Satiated, Nintendo Creaks Open Its Coffin to Aim Its Legion of Lawyers on More Third Party Companies Just Looking to Make a Buck by Helping Hobbyists Only to Be Raped by Nintendo in Front of Their Own Children By Way of the Twisted "Justice" System the World Has Come to Embrace
So, congratulations, you had one final step to go before I would have considered your headline over the top or 'spin.'
Of course successful people think that failure is good for you: they stopped doing it.
No, successful people and companies keep failing. They just hide it. Look at Google. I've heard they give their employees a fifth of their time to work on their own project that doesn't have to have a customer. So, if that's true, you have to think of how many thousand projects are going on inside Google that never see the light of day. A few of them make it out but it's definitely the shotgun approach to success. Fire enough bullets at once and one of them is bound to hit your target...
Successful people keep failing but they use their resources to expand and diversify what they are doing so that they can prune it down to look like their succeeding more often than not. Some companies just outright suck at it and will push a failure all the way to launch.
Thinking that successful people stop failing is a dangerous assumption. You don't get to the top and from that point on never suffer a setback or have to kill a project early because it's not working out. Knowing when to do that is what makes those successful people successful. Wales says it should be early and often.
This is a really old mantra in the business world that I was indoctrinated with when I partook in R&D for a Fortune 500 company.
Oh, and everyone's got their own version of it. I've heard people correct me when I said "Fail Early, Fail Often" and they say that the order matters. But you'll hear three concepts in these phrases:
Fail frequently. This can also be said "fail often" and simply means "accept a lot of failures."
Fail early. Don't invest a lot of time into what you're failing at and just accept the failure and move on. Just as long as you don't get hung up failing all the time (like Wales said). Also have heard it said as "fail fast."
Fail cheap. This might be derived from 'fail early' as time is money. But this is the third optional part you'll hear from investors and businessmen.
So the ultimate incarnation I've heard of this is "Fail often, fail fast, fail cheap."
Now for the warning: if you take this too much to heart, you see people axing everything. And from the technical point of view, it sucks. And is demoralizing. Another thing is you get really really sick of hearing it and just being the silver bullet response to "why can't I do X?"
Is this some sort of trap? Are... are you sure you're a Slashdot user? I would rather confuse Mohammad with Jesus in an internationally distributed newspaper attributed to my real name than confuse Linux with FreeBSD on Slashdot under a pseudonym.
Yep, I'm an idiot. I mean FreeBSD. It was the first "live disc" that I ever experimented with.
Shall I assume the fetal position now or should my strategy be to hope that one of the first blows is directly to my skull resulting in my immediate unconsciousness?
Dragonfly? Well, guess the FreeBSD fork by Matt Dillon (not the actor) that was named Dragonfly will now have to be referred to as Dragonfly BSD to avoid confusion. That was one of the first live Linux distributions I played around with and what comes to mind when I hear the name "Dragonfly" in software.
It boggles my mind why people pick project names that are not more original. You're basically shooting yourself in the foot as far as domain registration, marketability and search rankings are concerned.
Opera was originally a Norwegian company, right? They should have went with the Norwegian word for Dragonfly: "Øyenstikker." Which literally means "Eye Poker." Well, okay, maybe not...
Unless Google has added really cool special effects.
The most notable bell/whistle (aside from smoove integration with GMail) is Aardvark. I posted about my experiences with it a couple days ago and have since answered more questions. My interactions with the people have been surprisingly pleasant and positive... and surprisingly helpful! My interactions with the chat bot (aardvark-g201) have been frustrating at best. AI is in a sorry state if this is what they have to offer me. It's basically like trying to interact with a chat bot that offers you shell-like controls ('more', 'try', 'pass', etc). And you're supposed to achieve conversational results from those controls!
I will say that I don't know what I'm getting out of it other than allowing Google to know more about me and helping people. It doesn't offer much more than Yahoo Answers or Wikianswers. I get a lot of auto "thanks!" replies on Aardvark and will more than likely eventually gravitate back to Wikipedia where my time invested disseminating knowledge probably goes a little further in the grand scheme of things.
That said, Buzz has a long ways to go before it even approaches Facebook or puts a dent in Twitter. Any integration to/from Facebook will have to be entirely Google's effort.
Well, to be fair, that wasn't Microsoft, it was Bill Gates. Yes, he built his money from Microsoft but we need to wait and see what Larry and Sergey do with their cash when they hit Gates' age.
The impact of the Gates' money is immediate, but in the long run a well-funded knowledge base is much more effective at raising the standard of living worldwide.
Now you've gone and done it. Now you've put me in the very awkward position of defending William Gates. Recently the foundation committed $10 billion to Malaria Research and Development. Not distribution and deployment but R&D. Technically this has no immediate effect but instead contributes to our "well-funded knowledge base" of vaccine development. It's entirely probable that the first world will benefit from $10 billion being dumped into any medical R&D. I'm not even going to get into the number of zeros that ten billion has compared to two million but I trust you to be able to discern between the significance.
I got my own problem with the Gates Foundation... like who gets the money, where the money is spent and how American companies keep building their infrastructure off of it when you should probably be dumping it into the countries that you pledged to help.
Is there anything they [Google] can't fail at?
The summary lists Knol. Recently I watched Wave flounder. You're being disingenuous to claim that all Google touches is gold. Their advertising revenues support a lot of their endeavors similar to how Microsoft operating system stranglehold allowed them to elbow their way into hardware and gaming. Impressive? Yes. King Midas? No. Infallible? No.
Someone on Google saw some new Internet service and said "I wish I had $0.01 for each typo the teens make."
Someone else said "You know, that's a really, really good idea. Let's do it."
That's not Google though, that's the people who registered the typo domains that are proactively making this happen. Google's ad service just might be what they use to recoup their registration/squatting fees. Google's not actively registering these sites and putting up ads to get money off of typos, rather someone else is doing that shady practice and sharing the profits with Google. Since Google makes their AdWords product easy to use and profit off of, they most likely use them and Google never realizes it until:
A Google spokesperson pointed out that the company will remove ads from typo domains if the owner of a site with a trademarked name makes a complaint, but declined to discuss the research in more detail.
Hate to sound like a fanboy on this one but Google's profits are from just offering an ad service. That's about as far as their evil goes here, they're even willing to kill those profits if the legit domain complains to them about the typo squatter.
Barth acknowledged that XPnet's data couldn't determine whether the memory usage was by the operating system itself, or an increased number of applications.
So yeah, it doesn't seem like the author really knows what's going on...
While that's true, one would probably make the assumption that it is normalized in XP vs Windows 7 since they have no way of tracking it. What I mean is that you would assume the Windows 7 user runs the same number of programs as the XP user.
I actually followed the blog link in the story and while they can't pin it on application or OS, they can say that the disk I/O is backlogged on 36% of XP machines sampled, 83% of Vista machines sampled and 85% of Windows 7 machines sampled.
While they don't know anything about the applications being run, this backlog is probably how they determined that processes were being forced to resort to virtual memory running on the disk. Is there a better explanation for those numbers?
The new memory models in recent OS's try to utilize all the available RAM (as they should) to speed up things otherwise. It makes a lot of sense to cache things from hard-drive in low-peak usage points, and in such such way that it doesn't interfere with other perfomance. When the things that are most often used are already cached in RAM, their loading works a lot faster. This doesn't include only files, icons or such, but everything the OS could use or do that takes time.
If theres a sudden need for more RAM, the cached data can be "dropped" in no time. It doesn't matter if it averages at 25% or 95%, just that the perfomance overally is better when you utilize all the resources you can to speed up things in general.
Assuming your claims of how Windows 7 is implemented are true, then the claims from the person who actually collected all the empirical evidence must be false:
resulting in slow-downs as the systems were forced to increasingly turn to disk-based virtual memory to handle tasks.
If the memory was freed up dynamically as needed then no processes would ever be forced to resort to disk-based virtual memory. So either you work at Microsoft and are assuring us that the implementation protects against this or you're speculating against someone who has claimed to gathered a large enough to make such accusations.
No offense but I'm going to side with the guy who appears to make his living testing these sorts of things... the guy who is offering me numbers.
If these claims are true, isn't it possible that this could be seen to the user as a source for the battery life problems? I suppose that disk-based virtual memory would incur a little more read/write on your hard disk as well... possibly decreasing the mean time to failure for Windows 7 users.
Kudos photoshop. You know that you've done well with a piece of software when it turns into a verb.
It's more than a verb, for some people it's a tradition and art form*. Had there been no Photoshop, something would have probably filled the void but it's definitely one of the (expensive) standards around.
*Yeah, I know you see a link to Something Awful and are thinking "not gonna click that!" but it's just the Photoshop Phriday main page, a site like the Onion that briefly brightens my week.
That one is obvious, and in the article. The carbon dioxide reduction policies are a economic threat to Utah. They produce the coal for the power plants that the carbon dioxide reduction policies are trying to eliminate.
Nothing much to see here, just a legislature passing a "Don't take our juuurbs!" statement.
Yeah, I didn't quite understand that. What I read in the article:
But it does offer a view of state politicians' concerns in Utah which is a major oil and coal producing state.
Unless it's changed drastically since 2008, Utah is very low in the rankings with 18 working coal mines providing about two thousand jobs. Compare this to 600 working mines in Kentucky, 438 in West Virginia and 361 in Pennsylvania. Wouldn't these states be passing this resolution first and foremost if that was the sole motivating factor of state governments? In oil production, Utah is 13th. I'm not sure what 'major' constituted to the Guardian but apparently they know something about Utah that I don't. Does it traffic coal and oil? Process and refine it from other states? I'm not aware of these industries in the state if they exist.
2/Having to store waste for over 100000 years is not what someone with any common sense would call 'green'.
Well, a report from CNN covers something Bill Gates promoted at TED about a new technology that essentially 'recycles' used uranium. The new strategy basically creates 'hyper-fast nuclear reactions able to eat away at the dangerous nuclear waste.'
If what they say is true, it looks promising:
The Uranium isotope that's food for the new nuclear reactors doesn't have to be enriched, which means it's less likely to be used in atomic weapons.
The fission reaction in the new process burns through the nuclear waste slowly, which makes the process safer. One supply of spent uranium could burn for 60 years.
The process creates a large amount of energy from relatively small amounts of uranium, which is important as global supplies run short.
The process generates uranium that can be burned again to create "effectively an infinite fuel supply."
Sounds promising, let's see what preliminary trials bring. I'm excited to have a local 'energy portfolio' of many options such as hydro electric, wind, solar and even advanced nuclear energy.
Um...whether you think global warming is bullshit or not, why would you want to halt carbon dioxide reduction policies? I mean, modify them, sure...but why completely halt them? Global warming being real or not, there is no denying that we as a species pump way too much crap into our atmosphere. Regardless of how much this affects our planet, you can't honestly tell me that it's a GOOD thing...
According to the resolution itself (I don't agree with this in anyway) they seem to place all the blame of climate change on Chlorofluorocarbons and are convinced that CO2 has historically been naturally present and part of the circle of life and therefore it's not so bad:
WHEREAS, there is a statistically more direct correlation between twentieth century temperature rise and Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in the atmosphere than CO2; WHEREAS, outlawed and largely phased out by 1978, in the year 2000 CFC's began to decline at approximately the same time as global temperatures began to decline;
So your proposition in a reduction of CO2 is irrelevant because they find that CFCs are sole contributing factor (seemingly ignoring 'green house gas' family of pollutants).
They didn't claim CO2 is a "GOOD thing" as you put it but they say it's nothing to scale back our economy for. To reiterate, I don't agree with this, I'm just telling you of one of the routes they came to the conclusion that CO2 reduction programs should be abolished.
WHEREAS, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a blend of government officials and scientists, does no independent climate research but relies on global climate researchers;
What do you propose to collect independent data from 1950 to 2010? Time travel? Of course you have to rely on global climate researchers.
I more than understand their concerns with cap and trade but some of these premise statements are a bit off track:
WHEREAS, the recently completed Copenhagen climate change summit resulted in little agreement, especially among growing CO2-emitting nations like China and India, and calls on the United States to pay billions of dollars to developing countries to reduce CO2 emissions at a time when the United States' national debt will exceed $12 trillion;
So what the state of Utah is saying is that since no one else is taking this seriously, we shouldn't have to? I agree that it will hurt us economically and competitively with other nations but you have to look at what scientific evidence we have before you mire this in those sorts of things.
WHEREAS, according to the World Health Organization, 1.6 billion people do not have adequate food and clean water; and WHEREAS, global governance related to global warming and reduction of CO2 would ultimately lock billions of human beings into long-term poverty:
Funny that absent from their "concerns" of foreign citizens is the statement that "increasing temperatures will increase drought and famine in equatorial developing nations resulting in starvation and displacement." Third world peoples will be the first to feel the effects of climate change while people like me in the United States will hear about this on the news. We have the resources and means to deal with the beginnings of it, they don't. Their governments will have bigger problems than debt and slowed economic development.
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the Legislature of the state of Utah urges the United States Environmental Protection Agency to immediately halt its carbon dioxide reduction policies and programs and withdraw its "Endangerment Finding" and related regulations until a full and independent investigation of H. [ the ].H climate data H. [ conspiracy ].H and global warming science can be substantiated.
A "full and independent investigation" is exactly what the EPA tried to do. Problem is that everyone is on the planet. Good luck finding sentient beings to do an 'independent investigation' of our planet. Anyone else has a stake in this one way or the other because they live here.
Slashdot Mirror
So after reading a bit of his "opinion" piece (written way more formally than any opinion piece I've read), it seems that without reading the full extent of ACTA he is dead set against it. Any aspect he has heard of (most likely through Doctorow or Geist) he makes a case for it being a violation of privacy. Without even reading all of it, he knows it's illegal. His title sounds like he should have been invited to these proceedings but I think I can decipher why he wasn't invited ...
... maybe privacy and international IP/copyright enforcement are inseparable. Not being an expert, I cannot say. I am fairly certain, however, that each country has to pass this into law once the countries agree on a basis. I will say that my representative and senators had better damn well represent the majority of the population and I hope that majority is with me on this. What the EDPS should do is continue to demand transparency but also get the citizens and all the members of the EU to promise not to pass this into legislation without transparency right now.
I agree with him but it sounds like he would be opposed to anything they could dream up. And maybe that's the way it should be
Guess someone in the patents-cubicle zoned out and forgot to follow up on his email properly..
"Oh those patents, yes, they're sent off..." "What are those patentnumbers, we need them for printing.." *searches inbox on 'patent issue'* "Here's a list, let me put it in excel for you.." "kthx!!"
I have no expertise even remotely in this area but, as the submitter, I looked up all the patents mentioned in the claim. A lot of them seem to do with specifics about the controllers like the drum set, guitar or even the mixing board for DJ Hero. But basically each seems to cover many aspects of how these input systems allow the user to 'learn' and how the played track is replayed over the recorded audio. Take 5739457 for instance, it seems to focus entirely on the electronic drum sets of Guitar Hero. I think what happened here was that the patent markings were put on every single dust jacket for several Guitar Hero products -- regardless of whether or not they came with the hardware to play the game. So you go pick up your stand alone disc of Guitar Hero and there's no plastic drum with it because you bought just the disc or maybe the guitar-only distribution. That was about as far as I could see them going with these claims. That the person buying that may be confused that the product they bought is covering patents that promise something grander than what they bought.
A really interesting implication for anyone that makes hardware. What if all XBox packs had the same generic patent markings and the arcade came with patent markings for the headset and wireless attachment (not included in arcade)?
Should this sort of thing be prosecutable? Should Acitivision really get any sort of judgment against them for this level of carelessness?
TFA fails to state whether they used existing memory types or if they intend to use a custom piece of hardware on board.
My guess would be custom though not completely different from everyday stuff. I was familiar with "metastability" from my college courses where it was mentioned as a classic problem in electronics. I suppose there could be a way to harvest this data from hardware before it gets corrected. I never thought of this before but if you had a long length of optical fiber cable (longer than what it's rated for use) then you could send messages through that and collect them on the other end. I mean, we implement parity to remove these random flips of bits through transmission, couldn't we also use this to increase randomness of random numbers? I think I've read of the network guys fighting metastability so their incorrectly implemented hardware could probably be exploited as sources of random bits.
There were a few people that smart at Pixar when I worked there, but there seem to be tons of them in the Open Source world.
Believe it or not, your two categories are not mutually exclusive. I discover more and more that the brilliant people I am paid to work with have made improvements to open source projects. Both through work and in their free time.
... when I can attest that both are possible at once. Just be mindful of what you signed when you were hired by your employer. Some companies have terrible "everything you do even outside of work is ours" clauses. Wish the employers would realize that it's a benefit for you to experience contributing and learning from open source.
I think something the open source community could use is an adjustment of this attitude that you're either gainfully employed or working for free
Not a lawyer but found resources (site is cosmetically terrible but information rich) on some case histories in this sort of thing.
... was the teacher really that insecure of themselves that they thought the Facebook group hurt them?
Probably the closest case to that is Morse v. Frederick in which students stood just off school property with a banner reading "BONG HiTS 4 JESUS." Basically what it seems to come down to is that you have some first amendment rights as a minor in school unless your message contradicts stated school goals or hinders the learning process.
So the banner contradicted their anti-drug agenda and therefore it was ruled as okay to suspend them for the act. Similarly I guess a judge could interpret undermining a teacher's status as an authority figure to be an inhibition of the learning process in the facebook page. I don't agree with that ruling but this didn't seem to be addressed in the lengthy opinion piece presented above.
A classic case of a message not hindering the learning process was Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District in which black armbands were worn to protest the Vietnam war.
In high school some kids circulated a 'zine that was laden with four letter words and was distributed via a student's access to his mom's work's photocopying machine during after hours. We were aware that some of them had been confiscated and you got detention for profanity but since we never really attacked teachers, it never resulted in suspension or worse. During the 'vest craze' of the late nineties, I fashioned a vest out of duct tape and made "Old Navy Sucks, GAP Blows" out of duct tape letters on it. And I was allowed to wear it throughout the whole school day claiming it was a political message if anyone gave me grief. I actually recall being pretty disappointed at the lack of attention I was given for it. The school had some rule about profanity so if you wore a shirt with profanity you had to turn it inside out. I guess 'sucks/blows' wasn't foul enough.
Long story short: as a minor you have some free speech rights in school but not all of them. Any that violate the reason you're in school are restricted. Any that undermine the stated goals of your institution are restricted. I think it's sad that this gets escalated so much
Whatever was going on in Utah needs to be looked at though. That story was downright disturbing. "Curbing the straight edge movement" was one of their school's stated goals?! Vegan statements were construed as 'straight edge'?! I must have missed something about the dangers of the straight edge movement and veganism because that smells like complete administrative bullshit from where I'm standing.
Well, there's a Chinese distribution that I believe is made to look like whatever Windows look and feel you want right out of the box. I'm pretty sure it supports English so don't let the Chinese characters scare you away.
... hate to see them pick up a game or some funky peripheral/hardware that don't have drivers in Linux and then keep bugging you about why their GenCorp Brand Wal-Mart purchased Mickey Mouse USB LED Display toy doesn't have software to make it light up on their desk.
Vixta does a good job of looking like Vista.
Of course, these pale in comparison to the standard Ubuntu as far as support goes. Screw the Windows look and feel, that'd be my recommendation. Depending on how much time you want to sink into customizing this for them, there are tutorials for making Linux look like Windows 7.
Hope this helps. I also hope they don't need this distribution to do more than surf the web, get pictures off their camera and create documents
Nintendo On the Hunt For More Scalps
Certainly one way to look at it. Here's a spectrum of possible headlines:
So, congratulations, you had one final step to go before I would have considered your headline over the top or 'spin.'
Of course successful people think that failure is good for you: they stopped doing it.
No, successful people and companies keep failing. They just hide it. Look at Google. I've heard they give their employees a fifth of their time to work on their own project that doesn't have to have a customer. So, if that's true, you have to think of how many thousand projects are going on inside Google that never see the light of day. A few of them make it out but it's definitely the shotgun approach to success. Fire enough bullets at once and one of them is bound to hit your target ...
Successful people keep failing but they use their resources to expand and diversify what they are doing so that they can prune it down to look like their succeeding more often than not. Some companies just outright suck at it and will push a failure all the way to launch.
Thinking that successful people stop failing is a dangerous assumption. You don't get to the top and from that point on never suffer a setback or have to kill a project early because it's not working out. Knowing when to do that is what makes those successful people successful. Wales says it should be early and often.
Oh, and everyone's got their own version of it. I've heard people correct me when I said "Fail Early, Fail Often" and they say that the order matters. But you'll hear three concepts in these phrases:
So the ultimate incarnation I've heard of this is "Fail often, fail fast, fail cheap."
Now for the warning: if you take this too much to heart, you see people axing everything. And from the technical point of view, it sucks. And is demoralizing. Another thing is you get really really sick of hearing it and just being the silver bullet response to "why can't I do X?"
That's OK ...
*pauses from apologetically grovelling*
... are you sure you're a Slashdot user? I would rather confuse Mohammad with Jesus in an internationally distributed newspaper attributed to my real name than confuse Linux with FreeBSD on Slashdot under a pseudonym.
Is this some sort of trap? Are
A Linux distribution typically involves Linux.
Yep, I'm an idiot. I mean FreeBSD. It was the first "live disc" that I ever experimented with.
Shall I assume the fetal position now or should my strategy be to hope that one of the first blows is directly to my skull resulting in my immediate unconsciousness?
Dragonfly? Well, guess the FreeBSD fork by Matt Dillon (not the actor) that was named Dragonfly will now have to be referred to as Dragonfly BSD to avoid confusion. That was one of the first live Linux distributions I played around with and what comes to mind when I hear the name "Dragonfly" in software.
...
It boggles my mind why people pick project names that are not more original. You're basically shooting yourself in the foot as far as domain registration, marketability and search rankings are concerned.
Opera was originally a Norwegian company, right? They should have went with the Norwegian word for Dragonfly: "Øyenstikker." Which literally means "Eye Poker." Well, okay, maybe not
Unless Google has added really cool special effects.
The most notable bell/whistle (aside from smoove integration with GMail) is Aardvark. I posted about my experiences with it a couple days ago and have since answered more questions. My interactions with the people have been surprisingly pleasant and positive ... and surprisingly helpful! My interactions with the chat bot (aardvark-g201) have been frustrating at best. AI is in a sorry state if this is what they have to offer me. It's basically like trying to interact with a chat bot that offers you shell-like controls ('more', 'try', 'pass', etc). And you're supposed to achieve conversational results from those controls!
I will say that I don't know what I'm getting out of it other than allowing Google to know more about me and helping people. It doesn't offer much more than Yahoo Answers or Wikianswers. I get a lot of auto "thanks!" replies on Aardvark and will more than likely eventually gravitate back to Wikipedia where my time invested disseminating knowledge probably goes a little further in the grand scheme of things.
That said, Buzz has a long ways to go before it even approaches Facebook or puts a dent in Twitter. Any integration to/from Facebook will have to be entirely Google's effort.
Again, Google upstages Microsoft.
Well, to be fair, that wasn't Microsoft, it was Bill Gates. Yes, he built his money from Microsoft but we need to wait and see what Larry and Sergey do with their cash when they hit Gates' age.
The impact of the Gates' money is immediate, but in the long run a well-funded knowledge base is much more effective at raising the standard of living worldwide.
Now you've gone and done it. Now you've put me in the very awkward position of defending William Gates. Recently the foundation committed $10 billion to Malaria Research and Development . Not distribution and deployment but R&D. Technically this has no immediate effect but instead contributes to our "well-funded knowledge base" of vaccine development. It's entirely probable that the first world will benefit from $10 billion being dumped into any medical R&D. I'm not even going to get into the number of zeros that ten billion has compared to two million but I trust you to be able to discern between the significance.
... like who gets the money, where the money is spent and how American companies keep building their infrastructure off of it when you should probably be dumping it into the countries that you pledged to help.
I got my own problem with the Gates Foundation
Is there anything they [Google] can't fail at?
The summary lists Knol. Recently I watched Wave flounder. You're being disingenuous to claim that all Google touches is gold. Their advertising revenues support a lot of their endeavors similar to how Microsoft operating system stranglehold allowed them to elbow their way into hardware and gaming. Impressive? Yes. King Midas? No. Infallible? No.
Someone on Google saw some new Internet service and said "I wish I had $0.01 for each typo the teens make." Someone else said "You know, that's a really, really good idea. Let's do it."
That's not Google though, that's the people who registered the typo domains that are proactively making this happen. Google's ad service just might be what they use to recoup their registration/squatting fees. Google's not actively registering these sites and putting up ads to get money off of typos, rather someone else is doing that shady practice and sharing the profits with Google. Since Google makes their AdWords product easy to use and profit off of, they most likely use them and Google never realizes it until:
A Google spokesperson pointed out that the company will remove ads from typo domains if the owner of a site with a trademarked name makes a complaint, but declined to discuss the research in more detail.
Hate to sound like a fanboy on this one but Google's profits are from just offering an ad service. That's about as far as their evil goes here, they're even willing to kill those profits if the legit domain complains to them about the typo squatter.
Barth acknowledged that XPnet's data couldn't determine whether the memory usage was by the operating system itself, or an increased number of applications. So yeah, it doesn't seem like the author really knows what's going on...
While that's true, one would probably make the assumption that it is normalized in XP vs Windows 7 since they have no way of tracking it. What I mean is that you would assume the Windows 7 user runs the same number of programs as the XP user.
I actually followed the blog link in the story and while they can't pin it on application or OS, they can say that the disk I/O is backlogged on 36% of XP machines sampled, 83% of Vista machines sampled and 85% of Windows 7 machines sampled.
While they don't know anything about the applications being run, this backlog is probably how they determined that processes were being forced to resort to virtual memory running on the disk. Is there a better explanation for those numbers?
The new memory models in recent OS's try to utilize all the available RAM (as they should) to speed up things otherwise. It makes a lot of sense to cache things from hard-drive in low-peak usage points, and in such such way that it doesn't interfere with other perfomance. When the things that are most often used are already cached in RAM, their loading works a lot faster. This doesn't include only files, icons or such, but everything the OS could use or do that takes time.
If theres a sudden need for more RAM, the cached data can be "dropped" in no time. It doesn't matter if it averages at 25% or 95%, just that the perfomance overally is better when you utilize all the resources you can to speed up things in general.
Assuming your claims of how Windows 7 is implemented are true, then the claims from the person who actually collected all the empirical evidence must be false:
resulting in slow-downs as the systems were forced to increasingly turn to disk-based virtual memory to handle tasks.
If the memory was freed up dynamically as needed then no processes would ever be forced to resort to disk-based virtual memory. So either you work at Microsoft and are assuring us that the implementation protects against this or you're speculating against someone who has claimed to gathered a large enough to make such accusations.
... the guy who is offering me numbers.
No offense but I'm going to side with the guy who appears to make his living testing these sorts of things
If these claims are true, isn't it possible that this could be seen to the user as a source for the battery life problems? I suppose that disk-based virtual memory would incur a little more read/write on your hard disk as well ... possibly decreasing the mean time to failure for Windows 7 users.
Kudos photoshop. You know that you've done well with a piece of software when it turns into a verb.
It's more than a verb, for some people it's a tradition and art form*. Had there been no Photoshop, something would have probably filled the void but it's definitely one of the (expensive) standards around.
*Yeah, I know you see a link to Something Awful and are thinking "not gonna click that!" but it's just the Photoshop Phriday main page, a site like the Onion that briefly brightens my week.
If those are the examples, it's a crap book. Spaceships are considered lame as animation work. They're very easy to do ...
Would you say they're an excellent exercise for beginners or intermediates who are trying to learn how to use a new tool?
Some of us aren't depending on the book to get us hired at Pixar Studios tomorrow morning.
That would require that the U.S. take the world lead in internet development. It's completely unrealistic to expect something so unprecedented.
Clearly a humorous post but according to some metrics (The Connectivity Scorecard) the United States just lost the telecommunications lead to Sweden as they quietly eke past us.
That one is obvious, and in the article. The carbon dioxide reduction policies are a economic threat to Utah. They produce the coal for the power plants that the carbon dioxide reduction policies are trying to eliminate.
Nothing much to see here, just a legislature passing a "Don't take our juuurbs!" statement.
Yeah, I didn't quite understand that. What I read in the article:
But it does offer a view of state politicians' concerns in Utah which is a major oil and coal producing state.
Unless it's changed drastically since 2008, Utah is very low in the rankings with 18 working coal mines providing about two thousand jobs. Compare this to 600 working mines in Kentucky, 438 in West Virginia and 361 in Pennsylvania. Wouldn't these states be passing this resolution first and foremost if that was the sole motivating factor of state governments? In oil production, Utah is 13th. I'm not sure what 'major' constituted to the Guardian but apparently they know something about Utah that I don't. Does it traffic coal and oil? Process and refine it from other states? I'm not aware of these industries in the state if they exist.
2/Having to store waste for over 100000 years is not what someone with any common sense would call 'green'.
Well, a report from CNN covers something Bill Gates promoted at TED about a new technology that essentially 'recycles' used uranium. The new strategy basically creates 'hyper-fast nuclear reactions able to eat away at the dangerous nuclear waste.'
If what they say is true, it looks promising:
The Uranium isotope that's food for the new nuclear reactors doesn't have to be enriched, which means it's less likely to be used in atomic weapons.
The fission reaction in the new process burns through the nuclear waste slowly, which makes the process safer. One supply of spent uranium could burn for 60 years.
The process creates a large amount of energy from relatively small amounts of uranium, which is important as global supplies run short.
The process generates uranium that can be burned again to create "effectively an infinite fuel supply."
Sounds promising, let's see what preliminary trials bring. I'm excited to have a local 'energy portfolio' of many options such as hydro electric, wind, solar and even advanced nuclear energy.
Um...whether you think global warming is bullshit or not, why would you want to halt carbon dioxide reduction policies? I mean, modify them, sure...but why completely halt them? Global warming being real or not, there is no denying that we as a species pump way too much crap into our atmosphere. Regardless of how much this affects our planet, you can't honestly tell me that it's a GOOD thing...
According to the resolution itself (I don't agree with this in anyway) they seem to place all the blame of climate change on Chlorofluorocarbons and are convinced that CO2 has historically been naturally present and part of the circle of life and therefore it's not so bad:
WHEREAS, there is a statistically more direct correlation between twentieth century temperature rise and Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in the atmosphere than CO2; WHEREAS, outlawed and largely phased out by 1978, in the year 2000 CFC's began to decline at approximately the same time as global temperatures began to decline;
So your proposition in a reduction of CO2 is irrelevant because they find that CFCs are sole contributing factor (seemingly ignoring 'green house gas' family of pollutants).
They didn't claim CO2 is a "GOOD thing" as you put it but they say it's nothing to scale back our economy for. To reiterate, I don't agree with this, I'm just telling you of one of the routes they came to the conclusion that CO2 reduction programs should be abolished.
WHEREAS, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a blend of government officials and scientists, does no independent climate research but relies on global climate researchers;
What do you propose to collect independent data from 1950 to 2010? Time travel? Of course you have to rely on global climate researchers.
I more than understand their concerns with cap and trade but some of these premise statements are a bit off track:
WHEREAS, the recently completed Copenhagen climate change summit resulted in little agreement, especially among growing CO2-emitting nations like China and India, and calls on the United States to pay billions of dollars to developing countries to reduce CO2 emissions at a time when the United States' national debt will exceed $12 trillion;
So what the state of Utah is saying is that since no one else is taking this seriously, we shouldn't have to? I agree that it will hurt us economically and competitively with other nations but you have to look at what scientific evidence we have before you mire this in those sorts of things.
WHEREAS, according to the World Health Organization, 1.6 billion people do not have adequate food and clean water; and WHEREAS, global governance related to global warming and reduction of CO2 would ultimately lock billions of human beings into long-term poverty:
Funny that absent from their "concerns" of foreign citizens is the statement that "increasing temperatures will increase drought and famine in equatorial developing nations resulting in starvation and displacement." Third world peoples will be the first to feel the effects of climate change while people like me in the United States will hear about this on the news. We have the resources and means to deal with the beginnings of it, they don't. Their governments will have bigger problems than debt and slowed economic development.
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the Legislature of the state of Utah urges the United States Environmental Protection Agency to immediately halt its carbon dioxide reduction policies and programs and withdraw its "Endangerment Finding" and related regulations until a full and independent investigation of H. [ the ] .H climate data H. [ conspiracy ] .H and global warming science can be substantiated.
A "full and independent investigation" is exactly what the EPA tried to do. Problem is that everyone is on the planet. Good luck finding sentient beings to do an 'independent investigation' of our planet. Anyone else has a stake in this one way or the other because they live here.