The point i was trying to make is that it'll take a bit longer to recharge than it will to just tank up with gas. So given the choice, are you going to sit around twiddling your thumbs at a local recharge station while waiting 10 minutes. Or are you more likely to head to your local Starbucks for a recharge in their car park, where you can have a coffee 'n bun + browse the net and check your email until your car is ready.
Plus, given that leccy is a lot cheaper than gas, where's the profit for dedicated recharge stations? Add to that an increased turn around time getting customers in and out: 10 mins to fill up 'vs' 2, and their profits are going to go down the pan.
I just don't think it's going to add up when more attractive recharge points can be purposed just about anywhere where the vendor can offer added value (and inducement for you to spend extra) while your car is charging.
Ha! Shows just how little you understand the Linux ecosystem. If Linux based desktop technologies were proprietary; produced and promoted by a single company then MS would have every chance of killing them off: but they aren't. The desktop environments that front the Linux base (Gnome and KDE) are Open Source. Nothing can kill them bar lack of developer interest, and the two main candidates are alive, healthy and kicking. They will keep plodding on, growing, improving and snapping at MS's heals year after year after year. They are relentless and will not stop: not EVER. And this is a GOOD thing. It will keep MS (and Apple for that matter) on their toes and will force them to push their boundaries. Because if they stop for too long then they'll get caught and overtaken. Conversely, the more MS (and Apple) innovate, the more it inspires the likes of Gnome and KDE. All this means is that year on year, the choices you and I have as users get better and more interesting. We are the ones who ultimately benefit from all this. So all hail the Desktop wars, and long may they continue!
Though if you're parking at home it's likely to be for long periods of time, so a trickle charge would do just as well. Where you'd want a big hit fast is when you're out and about, and it'd be a lot easier to make commercial charge points available that can deliver when needed.
Ultimately this spells the end end for gas stations, when you could potentially plug in to charge up in a supermarket car park when shopping, or at the local cinema, or at work, or anywhere else you can think of where you park the car and leave it for a few hours to do something else.
We just did an evaluation of tools like Nagios, Munin, Zenoss & Zabbix and chose Zabbix. It's a little more effort to get going than Zenoss: compile from sources for the free version create your own account, move the files around yourself, etc than Zenoss (RPM install). But once going you're instantly more productive. Zenoss touts their strength as an agentless solution, but in practice I found that I didn't get a single system out of an initial scan of 50 PCs that picked up all the information is was supposed to get, or didn't give me a splat of SNMP errors to boot. Plus you have to block out a day to learn the Zenoss language of zenThis, zenThat, zenTheOther to even begin to understand the product and work out what you want to capture.
Zabbix by comparison was a loads easier. Edit the client conf file to point back to your server then copy the client agent conf file to the target, and the agent binary, following their instructions (create an account for it on Linux) start it, and you're done on the client side. From the server, login to the web page and follow the instructions for adding a new client and linking it to the appropriate system template. Instantly it starts collecting data and (after a period of time) you can view what it's collecting in graph form. The graphs have a nice zoom feature too: just click, drag and release on the bit you want to expand. I'm not even beginning to do this tool justice, it can do so much more than this. Go see their web site.
Zenoss looks a bit prettier, but Zabbix blew them away on ease of use once it was up and running. Oh, and Zabbix can do agent-less too using SNMP templates for things like network switches, if that's the way you want to go. Oh (again) be aware that if you have a mix 32bit and 64 of Linux builds (as we do) that you compile the agent binary for the box you're putting it on. They provide pre-built win32 and win64 agents for you.
i don't think so either. I'm looking forward to Btrfs as much as the next guy. But my experience with the birth of new filesystems is that it takes them at least 2 years to mature to the point where you would trust production data on them. AdvFS on tru64 was a dog on Tru64 V4, and quite flaky. It wasn't until V5 when it got a major overhaul that the wrinkles got ironed out and it became something you could bet your business on.
Re:Both franchise shared the same fate.
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New Star Trek Trailer
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· Score: 2, Informative
No, I mean the way the 4th series ended. Nonsensical, totally unfinished and chopped off at the knees. It was as if the writers were suddenly sacked and the ending written by the janitor because there was no money left for anything else. I remember staring in stunned silence at the TV screen with my mouth open. I had really gotten into the 4th series: it had finally found itself and developed into a good story. Compulsory watching in my house. Then someone dragged it out back and shot it through the head because the fans didn't just deserted it, but threw shit pies at it every chance they got. I clearly remember the vitriol and crowing on Slashdot when it died. Made me quite sick.
And now here you are getting all judgmental and suggesting the same, based on a 2 min clip of a film not even released yet.
Re:Both franchise shared the same fate.
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New Star Trek Trailer
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· Score: 1, Flamebait
Oh, so you must be one of the morons (fans) with a short attention span, and an over inflated sense of your own importance who deserted Star Trek like a herd of petulant lemmings and caused that sickening lobotomy at the end of the Enterprise series.
Thanks a fucking bunch.. prick !!
And yes this is over the top, and no I'm not hiding behind AC, because I've never been so mad about how a series got treated in my whole life.
If they can see everything everyone is doing then yes I think it could reduce crime.
But that's the whole point. Assuming the UK Govt were capable of pulling off a tech project of this size (and past performance suggests otherwise) all they would succeed in doing is monitoring the comings and goings of your average Joe/Jane Bloggs. The REAL terrorists aren't going to play by the rules and will take steps to hide themselves. They can easily get their hands on military grade encryption tools, and with Onion Routing networks like Tor to hide source or destination addresses ( and the hops in between ) the authorities are going to be helpless.
All this is one huge waste of tax payers money and time.
No alien civilization is expending the mammoth amount of resources needed to traverse the vast distances of interstellar space just to stick a probe up your ass. Deal with it.
That really is the crux of it as I see things.
We're only likely to see the appearance of benevolent aliens if their technology is so advanced that inter-galactic travel is relatively cheap: in both cost and time. Thus their motivation is more likely to be for scientifiy study, cultural exchange or perhaps trade.
Any alien race who is not as advanced and who have to spend huge resources to make a long drawn out journey here, is only going to do so if there's something worthwhile in it for them at the end of the trip. i.e. a hunt for new resources, living space, etc. And they would be more inclined to take what they're after to justify the effort, time and expense.
Having said that, why would any benevolent alien race really want to make contact and establish relations with us? We can hardly offer them peace and friendship without risk to themselves, as we can't even work out how to co-exist with other members of our own species without resorting to violence.
Maybe in 500 years or so, when all countries in the world have grown out of their current tendancies for feudal self interest, and are more focused on mutual economic security, then we'll we fit to interact with any benevolent aliens that (might) exist.
No, AdvFS doesn't have that. No Unix OS uses a versioning FS as far as I know.
I used to use VMS about 18 years ago before switching to Unix, and I don't miss versioning. IMO it was a bit of a pain in the ass anyway. You just run out of space faster and then have to "purge" your old versions to claw space back, which runs the risk of deleting file versions that someone else might want to keep around. In other words, it's messy.
Exactly. Ericcantona, the poster of this story is having a good laugh at the expense of the tin foil hat brigade frothing at the mouth over this. Especially considering what he posted is complete mis-information. Here's a quote from an informed article:
The laws order the retention of who called whom, when and for how long but not the content of phone calls. The internet log retention orders will also mandate the keeping of information on a user's activity but not the content of any communications.
A telecoms business lobby group told OUT-LAW.COM at the passing of the Regulations last year that the orders would have little impact on the industry.
"The reality is that nothing much has changed. The new legislation will make little practical difference as most telecoms providers keep certain information for billing purposes and customer records," said Michael Eagle of the Federation of Communications Services. "That information would be enough to meet the requirements of law enforcement agencies. There is no need to keep more data that you are ever likely to be asked for."
Only a fool believes everything he/she reads on Slashdot without checking out the facts first.
Gee, could you slap a little more sarcasm on that please: I think you missed a spot!
Did you completely miss the point of this article? It's about the announcement of the new MacBooks and one of the significant new features is the way they are built.
Well that shouldn't happen to the new ones. Being crafted from a solid block of Al should make it loads stronger.
Personaly I find it very hard to swallow that a fall of 3" onto a padded carpet could do that kind of damage. Though I won't be testing mine out to prove you wrong.
How exactly did they flub it? The arrival of the iPhone hit the cell phone market like a rock in a pool of still water, sending the incumbent suppliers running back the drawing board to design an answer. No one had produced a cell phone with a touch screen like that before and now everyone wants in on the act.
They certainly didn't flub it either from a commercial point of view. It continues to sell like hot cakes all over the world.
I'm not saying its perfect: cos it isn't. But from Apple's point of view that gives them headroom to spin the cash wheel year on year by constantly refining and improving it. That's what being in business is all about.
And how exactly is the grass greener elsewhere? Where else can consumers go (outside of the USA, cos I am) where they can find an online store that gives them access to such a huge library of up to date contemporary music? Plus vids they can buy or rent? And several hundred useful apps and games?
You vastly underestimate the pulling power that is the iTMS + ipod/iphone user experience. It's completely integrated and at the consumers finger tips anywhere they can find a WiFi connection. The technology is only part of the story. It's the holistic user experience: how it's presented, how usable it is and its availability.
Now if you can put together a truely competitive experience, you stand a chance of displacing what Apple has created: and if it's open/free then even better. But that will not be the deciding factor.
JungleDisk sounds like a great solution if your home directory is a managable size for transfer over a DSL connection. But mine (which is used for work and home) is currently at 70GB. And that's after I moved my iTunes Music folder onto an external USB drive to create more space.
It would take an age to transfer all my data to a cloud backup solution, and just as long to transfer it back again if I lost it all locally.
TimeMachine on USB disks and a fireproof safe are what keeps me sleeping soundly at night.
Hate to break this to you, but your iphone only keeps a couple of hundred emails cached (configurable by you). After that, it goes back to your IMAP server for the rest. In no way is it a backup of your google account.
What's wrong with keeping local copies? You can (for example) sync your google mail, calendar, address book, docs and notebooks with one or more computers if you have them. All the tools are there to do this.
Anyone who puts all their data in one place without keeping copies and/or backups elsewhere is just asking for trouble. It doesn't matter whether that's in a cloud somewhere, or on your home PC.
Some have argued that a current of anti-BBC thinking exists in many parts of the political spectrum and that, since the BBC's theoretical impartiality means they will broadcast many views and opinions, people will see the bias they wish to see. This argument is buttressed by the fact that the BBC is frequently accused of bias from all directions.
Many of the other respondents to my comments have mis-understood the thrust of my post by questioning the meaning (and my understanding) of what "unbiased" news reporting really means. To my mind an unbiased view is something of an oxymoron. To have established a view automatically introduces bias into the equation. Therefore the only way to present "unbiased news" is to report equally and fairly from all biased view points. From that position the viewer is able to make fully informed decisions on which bias they choose to follow. This is what the BBC News tries to do. It doesn't always get it right, but it strives to achieve that goal.
Fox News on the other hand is the antithesis of the BBC's approach.
NOTE: I can't comment on any of the other news channels. I didn't get to see them.
I'm from the UK and recently took a holiday in San Diego to visit some relatives. Great place, but unfortunately they had a limited Sat TV package that only gave a choice of a few news channels, and Fox News was the one that got turned on most.
Now I've never seen Fox News before, and coming from a country there the TV news has a mandate to be unbiased, Fox News was quite a shock to the system. I've never seen anything like it. It's completely one sided (towards Republicans) crammed with emotional rhetoric deliberately aimed at misinforming the viewer. It so over exaggerates the current level of the "terrorist threat" to America, that an outsider viewing this crap would think you're on the cusp of being invaded.
Watching it reminded me of the kind of news propaganda that the Nazi's used in WW2 to convince their population that their cause was just and righteous, and demoralize their enemies.
I know that sounds a bit strong, but I was just so shocked at the level of dishonest manipulation Fox News are involved in. And horrified that there are people in the USA who actually watch this trash and BELIEVE that it's real news!
Slashdot Mirror
The point i was trying to make is that it'll take a bit longer to recharge than it will to just tank up with gas. So given the choice, are you going to sit around twiddling your thumbs at a local recharge station while waiting 10 minutes. Or are you more likely to head to your local Starbucks for a recharge in their car park, where you can have a coffee 'n bun + browse the net and check your email until your car is ready.
Plus, given that leccy is a lot cheaper than gas, where's the profit for dedicated recharge stations? Add to that an increased turn around time getting customers in and out: 10 mins to fill up 'vs' 2, and their profits are going to go down the pan.
I just don't think it's going to add up when more attractive recharge points can be purposed just about anywhere where the vendor can offer added value (and inducement for you to spend extra) while your car is charging.
Ha! Shows just how little you understand the Linux ecosystem. If Linux based desktop technologies were proprietary; produced and promoted by a single company then MS would have every chance of killing them off: but they aren't. The desktop environments that front the Linux base (Gnome and KDE) are Open Source. Nothing can kill them bar lack of developer interest, and the two main candidates are alive, healthy and kicking. They will keep plodding on, growing, improving and snapping at MS's heals year after year after year. They are relentless and will not stop: not EVER. And this is a GOOD thing. It will keep MS (and Apple for that matter) on their toes and will force them to push their boundaries. Because if they stop for too long then they'll get caught and overtaken. Conversely, the more MS (and Apple) innovate, the more it inspires the likes of Gnome and KDE. All this means is that year on year, the choices you and I have as users get better and more interesting. We are the ones who ultimately benefit from all this. So all hail the Desktop wars, and long may they continue!
Though if you're parking at home it's likely to be for long periods of time, so a trickle charge would do just as well. Where you'd want a big hit fast is when you're out and about, and it'd be a lot easier to make commercial charge points available that can deliver when needed.
Ultimately this spells the end end for gas stations, when you could potentially plug in to charge up in a supermarket car park when shopping, or at the local cinema, or at work, or anywhere else you can think of where you park the car and leave it for a few hours to do something else.
We just did an evaluation of tools like Nagios, Munin, Zenoss & Zabbix and chose Zabbix. It's a little more effort to get going than Zenoss: compile from sources for the free version create your own account, move the files around yourself, etc than Zenoss (RPM install). But once going you're instantly more productive. Zenoss touts their strength as an agentless solution, but in practice I found that I didn't get a single system out of an initial scan of 50 PCs that picked up all the information is was supposed to get, or didn't give me a splat of SNMP errors to boot. Plus you have to block out a day to learn the Zenoss language of zenThis, zenThat, zenTheOther to even begin to understand the product and work out what you want to capture.
Zabbix by comparison was a loads easier. Edit the client conf file to point back to your server then copy the client agent conf file to the target, and the agent binary, following their instructions (create an account for it on Linux) start it, and you're done on the client side. From the server, login to the web page and follow the instructions for adding a new client and linking it to the appropriate system template. Instantly it starts collecting data and (after a period of time) you can view what it's collecting in graph form. The graphs have a nice zoom feature too: just click, drag and release on the bit you want to expand. I'm not even beginning to do this tool justice, it can do so much more than this. Go see their web site.
Zenoss looks a bit prettier, but Zabbix blew them away on ease of use once it was up and running. Oh, and Zabbix can do agent-less too using SNMP templates for things like network switches, if that's the way you want to go. Oh (again) be aware that if you have a mix 32bit and 64 of Linux builds (as we do) that you compile the agent binary for the box you're putting it on. They provide pre-built win32 and win64 agents for you.
i don't think so either. I'm looking forward to Btrfs as much as the next guy. But my experience with the birth of new filesystems is that it takes them at least 2 years to mature to the point where you would trust production data on them. AdvFS on tru64 was a dog on Tru64 V4, and quite flaky. It wasn't until V5 when it got a major overhaul that the wrinkles got ironed out and it became something you could bet your business on.
No, I mean the way the 4th series ended. Nonsensical, totally unfinished and chopped off at the knees. It was as if the writers were suddenly sacked and the ending written by the janitor because there was no money left for anything else. I remember staring in stunned silence at the TV screen with my mouth open. I had really gotten into the 4th series: it had finally found itself and developed into a good story. Compulsory watching in my house. Then someone dragged it out back and shot it through the head because the fans didn't just deserted it, but threw shit pies at it every chance they got. I clearly remember the vitriol and crowing on Slashdot when it died. Made me quite sick.
And now here you are getting all judgmental and suggesting the same, based on a 2 min clip of a film not even released yet.
Oh, so you must be one of the morons (fans) with a short attention span, and an over inflated sense of your own importance who deserted Star Trek like a herd of petulant lemmings and caused that sickening lobotomy at the end of the Enterprise series.
Thanks a fucking bunch .. prick !!
And yes this is over the top, and no I'm not hiding behind AC, because I've never been so mad about how a series got treated in my whole life.
But that's the whole point. Assuming the UK Govt were capable of pulling off a tech project of this size (and past performance suggests otherwise) all they would succeed in doing is monitoring the comings and goings of your average Joe/Jane Bloggs. The REAL terrorists aren't going to play by the rules and will take steps to hide themselves. They can easily get their hands on military grade encryption tools, and with Onion Routing networks like Tor to hide source or destination addresses ( and the hops in between ) the authorities are going to be helpless.
All this is one huge waste of tax payers money and time.
Don't forget xrotmap ... psychedelic man ;-)
That really is the crux of it as I see things.
We're only likely to see the appearance of benevolent aliens if their technology is so advanced that inter-galactic travel is relatively cheap: in both cost and time. Thus their motivation is more likely to be for scientifiy study, cultural exchange or perhaps trade.
Any alien race who is not as advanced and who have to spend huge resources to make a long drawn out journey here, is only going to do so if there's something worthwhile in it for them at the end of the trip. i.e. a hunt for new resources, living space, etc. And they would be more inclined to take what they're after to justify the effort, time and expense.
Having said that, why would any benevolent alien race really want to make contact and establish relations with us? We can hardly offer them peace and friendship without risk to themselves, as we can't even work out how to co-exist with other members of our own species without resorting to violence.
Maybe in 500 years or so, when all countries in the world have grown out of their current tendancies for feudal self interest, and are more focused on mutual economic security, then we'll we fit to interact with any benevolent aliens that (might) exist.
Not in our lifetime though.
No, AdvFS doesn't have that. No Unix OS uses a versioning FS as far as I know.
I used to use VMS about 18 years ago before switching to Unix, and I don't miss versioning. IMO it was a bit of a pain in the ass anyway. You just run out of space faster and then have to "purge" your old versions to claw space back, which runs the risk of deleting file versions that someone else might want to keep around. In other words, it's messy.
Exactly. Ericcantona, the poster of this story is having a good laugh at the expense of the tin foil hat brigade frothing at the mouth over this. Especially considering what he posted is complete mis-information. Here's a quote from an informed article:
Only a fool believes everything he/she reads on Slashdot without checking out the facts first.
Gee, could you slap a little more sarcasm on that please: I think you missed a spot!
Did you completely miss the point of this article? It's about the announcement of the new MacBooks and one of the significant new features is the way they are built.
Well that shouldn't happen to the new ones. Being crafted from a solid block of Al should make it loads stronger.
Personaly I find it very hard to swallow that a fall of 3" onto a padded carpet could do that kind of damage. Though I won't be testing mine out to prove you wrong.
Why has this been moderated flamebait? What he's saying is true!
How exactly did they flub it? The arrival of the iPhone hit the cell phone market like a rock in a pool of still water, sending the incumbent suppliers running back the drawing board to design an answer. No one had produced a cell phone with a touch screen like that before and now everyone wants in on the act.
They certainly didn't flub it either from a commercial point of view. It continues to sell like hot cakes all over the world.
I'm not saying its perfect: cos it isn't. But from Apple's point of view that gives them headroom to spin the cash wheel year on year by constantly refining and improving it. That's what being in business is all about.
And how exactly is the grass greener elsewhere? Where else can consumers go (outside of the USA, cos I am) where they can find an online store that gives them access to such a huge library of up to date contemporary music? Plus vids they can buy or rent? And several hundred useful apps and games?
You vastly underestimate the pulling power that is the iTMS + ipod/iphone user experience. It's completely integrated and at the consumers finger tips anywhere they can find a WiFi connection. The technology is only part of the story. It's the holistic user experience: how it's presented, how usable it is and its availability.
Now if you can put together a truely competitive experience, you stand a chance of displacing what Apple has created: and if it's open/free then even better. But that will not be the deciding factor.
Yeah, need two USB drives, and you have to remember to rotate them. I have one drive for even and another for odd numbered weeks of the month.
JungleDisk sounds like a great solution if your home directory is a managable size for transfer over a DSL connection. But mine (which is used for work and home) is currently at 70GB. And that's after I moved my iTunes Music folder onto an external USB drive to create more space.
It would take an age to transfer all my data to a cloud backup solution, and just as long to transfer it back again if I lost it all locally.
TimeMachine on USB disks and a fireproof safe are what keeps me sleeping soundly at night.
Hate to break this to you, but your iphone only keeps a couple of hundred emails cached (configurable by you). After that, it goes back to your IMAP server for the rest. In no way is it a backup of your google account.
What's wrong with keeping local copies? You can (for example) sync your google mail, calendar, address book, docs and notebooks with one or more computers if you have them. All the tools are there to do this.
Anyone who puts all their data in one place without keeping copies and/or backups elsewhere is just asking for trouble. It doesn't matter whether that's in a cloud somewhere, or on your home PC.
Because for the most part, it is. Wikipedia's section on the BBC News Political and Commercial Independence summs it up quite nicely where it says:
Many of the other respondents to my comments have mis-understood the thrust of my post by questioning the meaning (and my understanding) of what "unbiased" news reporting really means. To my mind an unbiased view is something of an oxymoron. To have established a view automatically introduces bias into the equation. Therefore the only way to present "unbiased news" is to report equally and fairly from all biased view points. From that position the viewer is able to make fully informed decisions on which bias they choose to follow. This is what the BBC News tries to do. It doesn't always get it right, but it strives to achieve that goal.
Fox News on the other hand is the antithesis of the BBC's approach.
NOTE: I can't comment on any of the other news channels. I didn't get to see them.
I'm from the UK and recently took a holiday in San Diego to visit some relatives. Great place, but unfortunately they had a limited Sat TV package that only gave a choice of a few news channels, and Fox News was the one that got turned on most.
Now I've never seen Fox News before, and coming from a country there the TV news has a mandate to be unbiased, Fox News was quite a shock to the system. I've never seen anything like it. It's completely one sided (towards Republicans) crammed with emotional rhetoric deliberately aimed at misinforming the viewer. It so over exaggerates the current level of the "terrorist threat" to America, that an outsider viewing this crap would think you're on the cusp of being invaded.
Watching it reminded me of the kind of news propaganda that the Nazi's used in WW2 to convince their population that their cause was just and righteous, and demoralize their enemies.
I know that sounds a bit strong, but I was just so shocked at the level of dishonest manipulation Fox News are involved in. And horrified that there are people in the USA who actually watch this trash and BELIEVE that it's real news!