you mention some interesting things, but you're not quite there yet.
consider the fact that the lower classes were always useful in the past, either to harvest crops or do building work or fight in the military. because of this, they always received a certain minimum of respect and protection from the upper class. now we have a system where the working class is getting increasingly less important, due to outsourcing and globalisation. crops are harvested using large machines, workers at building projects are governed by regulations and laws. it is difficult for a farmer to say to a homeless person 'come help me do this or that and i'll give you 20 dollars a day'. moreover, he wouldn't want to (would your insurance let you trust these people with your new tractor?).
because of this, the upper class has little interest in the working class. socialist laws have been past to try to keep the system going. these rules cost the state huge amounts of money, with a corresponding push to see 'unemployment benefit' as 'charity' and something which shouldn't be supplied by the state but rather by private institutions and churches.
the result we can already predict. either the working class will have to all become soldiers, or the ties between first world economies and developing economies will increase. the amount of people who have fallen off the social ladder will also increase greatly. the division between rich and poor will increase.
at this moment in time, microsoft doesn't really mind about kiddies copying games and xp and stuff, because they know, that these kiddies will get hooked and then at some stage found a business and pay big time through the nose.
now, if this trusted computing crap get's going, the kiddie's won't be able to copy duke nukem san andreas III anymore, and microsoft will have lost its chief method of recruitment.
someone once told me that 95% of software development takes place in companies and is never released to the public or sold. basically company-A needs a new plug-in for product-B and writes it themselves.
personally i find the 95% rather exaggerated, but my point should be clear. lots of companies write their own software, and this software is never seen outside of the company. lots of companies use proprietary software which is no longer supported by manufacturers and have to somehow keep it cobbled together themselves.
this is also the reason why linux runs on ca. 80% of all supercomputers, because these people who have just spent many hundreds of millions on a computer want to know what the computer is doing and they want the best software. they can afford to hire 100 people to write the software and linux provides the best environment for this currently available.
i find that my suse 10.0 installation on a pentium III 700MHz mit 256MB-RAM is actually slower at times than the windows 98 SE that used to be on here (Ubuntu, however is faster than windows 98 and DSL leaves all of them in its wake). I once installed windows XP on it, but it kept complaining about lack of memory when i opened word and ie at the same time. (Strangely xp hasn't been able to start since i exchanged my very old and unreliable DVD-drive for a new, reliable one. xp just hangs while booting, and when i restart it, it suggests 'abgesicherter modus'(whatever that would be in english) and then hangs too. does anyone know a way of reinstalling it without wiping the hard disk?)
part of the reason for the low performance can be found by ps aux | wc
the result is 102 processes.
top
informs me later, that there are 99 sleeping processes on the system. does one actually need all these daemons? dsl has about 20 in total and works fine without auto-mounting every data-storage-unit which happens to be in the same building.
rather worryingly cat/proc/meminfo
tells me, that absolutely none of it is dirty. i must have been surfing the wrong sites...
i think oss would make it's way by it's values, if that was the way the world worked. unfortunately you also have customer lock-in, windows-tax etc etc. this is not a level playing field.
okay, so you have the following choice:
1/ sell the hardware with a proprietry operating system. the people who get the laptop can use it and learn how to use a computer. when they install a c-compiler, they can also write software for it (provided a free c-compiler is available for the system).
2/ sell the hardware with an open-source operating system. the people who get the laptop can use it, learn how to use a computer and learn how a computer works. they can develop the software further, they can write interesting applications for it, they can download free of charge a huge amount of software, they can become independant of one large american company telling them what they are and what they are not allowed to do.
proprietry software is a way of keeping the third world enslaved. if i wanted to found a company in a third world country and had to spend about 1000 dollars on every computer i needed, this would be a financial burden to me. as it is, i just bought a pentium III on e-bay for 50 euros and have installed a linux distribution on it with which i can run apache, gcc, samba, php, mysql, etc. etc. total cost? 50 euros (and either 10 euros for a magazine with a linux-distribution on it or some internet time). if i wanted to do that with proprietry software, i'd have to pay at least 10 times as much.
so which operating system should this laptop ship with? the one which keeps the third world in its place, or the one which allows people there to learn?
the point being, that you can supply this energy as slowly as you want by climbing up the cable. to get into low earth orbit, you also have to be able to change the kinetic energy level of the object, in this case by applying a thrust to it. thrust is usually very inefficient. most of the energy goes to heating up the environment. that's why the cable is a good idea, and that's why the total energy exependiture for getting an object into geostationary orbit is less than that for low earth orbit. once you're in geo-stationary orbit the rest is a breeze, you just let the object sail down the second half of the rope, grabing its kinetic and potential energy from the rotation of the earth. you don't have to do any work at all at this stage, the earth does it for you.
of course, this results in problems with nutation etc. i wonder how they want to solve that one? how flexible will this cable be? will they use large shock-absorbers?
howie
for getting something into geo-stationary orbit it would be perfect, as also for getting something to escape the earth's gravitational pull alltogether and slingshot it's way out to the moon or similar. for low earth orbit i can't see a way of employing this technology on a first look.
howie
the easy way to hack this will of course be copying it. basically you take the output of your stand-alone blu-ray-disk player and feed it into your computer, where you can record it. it is likely the pictures will have some sort of watermarking, so you may want to run everything through the old trusty VCR before playing it onto the computer. of course, the quality will suffer immensely, and special features will go out the window, but it will allow you to save it on your portable hard drive.
sorry, i used the wrong word, i meant crop, not resize. gimp has a nice feature, that you can drag the picture you want to crop around in the crop window, so you can see what it will look like. i couldn't find a way to do this on the (admittedly very cheap) version of adobe i was using.
personally i don't have any problems with gimp, maybe because i don't have to do that much with it. all i use it for is correcting photos of an oscilloscope display (getting the perspective right, cropping the image, inverting colours, changing contrast and brightness) so i'm probably not the best person to talk about either photoshop or gimp.
i would say this though. the people who develop gimp know a lot about the software (and presumably something about the competition and the work people tend to do with the software). they have chosen this layout above the layout used by photoshop. the question you should be asking is, why?
the gimp was the first image manimpulation program i really worked with. about a week ago, i had to do some image manipulation on a windows machine with photoshop, and i found it very difficult to use. things were just in the wrong places. i ended up giving up and sending the files over my apache server to my linux laptop. i couldn't find a way to get photoshop to resize an image and preview what the image was going to look like. i imagine it's possible, but i couldn't find it.
no i'm saying you have a problem with people who love/have sex with other people of the same gender.
that's your personal problem and you should go to a shrink and work on it.
if you can't look at a gay and lesbian couple and regard them as being of equal value as a heterosexual couple, then you have a problem of your own free volition, and i don't see why i have to suffer because of it.
there is such a thing as being plain wrong, and you are it at the moment.
howie
how the hell did this get modded up to insightful? it's utter crap and a great example of christian doublethink.
first of all, you presume that the problem is being a bigot
then you define the word 'bigotry' to allow you to hate another group of people without being a bigot
what the hell does 'accept my friend for who he is as a person' actually mean?
does that mean, you can say to him 'oh, you're deviant and will burn in hell because you do something which i don't like, but i still love you as a person'? and don't you feel a little bit stupid when saying that?
to this i will say the following:
an individual defines himself by what he does.
why do you get upset when another person loves/has sex with someone of their gender? what has it got to do with you?
i think you'll find after a basic survey of the third world, that linux and open source software is used in the third world proportionally much more as a standard desktop than it is in the first world.
there's a reason why you say wrote what you did. it's because you regard the third world as being primitive and backward and poor. i'm not debating that, but i am saying that one of the reasons why the third world is poorer than the first world is closed source software.
think about it.
howie
bill gate would help third world countries much more if he opened up doc-format. as it is, in order to do business with the rest of the world, a third world country has to support doc-format (fortunately, times are changing). and that means windows and microsoft word on every computer they have, which in turn means an initial outlay of maybe 300 dollars per computer plus updates and new versions as microsoft sees fit.
bill gates can afford to give money to the third world, they're going to give it long or short back to him.
it could have something to do with wanting to run a system based on free software?
the fact that Gnu/Linux also works extremely well sweetens the pill, but in my case the choice is mainly moral.
howie
why shouldn't i be allowed to write software for free and give it away? why should i have to make business out of it? why shouldn't i just want to help other people and try to produce a work of art in the form of good software? how many poets get paid for their work? how many composers and musicians? answer: less than 5% i'd estimate. and some of the very best are amateurs in the sense of 'don't get paid'. exactly the same is true for the art form called programming.
as far as i know, mplayer is covered by the gpl. mplayer (like xine) come with out-of-the-box support for a number of free-codex. the codex one can choose to install are of course proprietry. therefore it is in principle illegal to download and install these codex (in some countries, when it comes to libdvdcss).
as far as i remember, materials in which the index of refraction is below 1 are quite common, metals show this behaviour with high frequency light. feynmann explained it quite nicely back in 1960, so it must have been common knowledge back then. maybe the new thing is finding materials to get this to work with visible light?
the method to finding how light travels which i've always used is to build wavefronts each c/(f*n) apart and see what happens (of course, you have to build a lot of wavefronts, but every classical optical problem can be solved this way, as it closely mirrors what the maxwell laws mean). having a refractive index of less than one does not make the light move faster, just the wavefront for a wave with a stable frequency. if you change the frequency, amplitude, fourier-thingy, whatever of the wave, the change in the wavefronts won't move faster than the speed of light, so no information can be conducted. as said, feynmann explained this clearly in the (first volume?) of his lectures, but i imagine everybody here has read them...
what a negative index of refraction could possibly mean is beyond me. if you choose snell's law to define the index of refraction then you get in trouble here (v = c/n therefore the speed of the wavefront is negative?). i imagine there's another more general definition of n which i don't know. anybody here have an idea?
Slashdot Mirror
consider the fact that the lower classes were always useful in the past, either to harvest crops or do building work or fight in the military. because of this, they always received a certain minimum of respect and protection from the upper class. now we have a system where the working class is getting increasingly less important, due to outsourcing and globalisation. crops are harvested using large machines, workers at building projects are governed by regulations and laws. it is difficult for a farmer to say to a homeless person 'come help me do this or that and i'll give you 20 dollars a day'. moreover, he wouldn't want to (would your insurance let you trust these people with your new tractor?).
because of this, the upper class has little interest in the working class. socialist laws have been past to try to keep the system going. these rules cost the state huge amounts of money, with a corresponding push to see 'unemployment benefit' as 'charity' and something which shouldn't be supplied by the state but rather by private institutions and churches.
the result we can already predict. either the working class will have to all become soldiers, or the ties between first world economies and developing economies will increase. the amount of people who have fallen off the social ladder will also increase greatly. the division between rich and poor will increase.
howie
i can see a huge problem with this.
at this moment in time, microsoft doesn't really mind about kiddies copying games and xp and stuff, because they know, that these kiddies will get hooked and then at some stage found a business and pay big time through the nose.
now, if this trusted computing crap get's going, the kiddie's won't be able to copy duke nukem san andreas III anymore, and microsoft will have lost its chief method of recruitment.
wierd
howie
personally i find the 95% rather exaggerated, but my point should be clear. lots of companies write their own software, and this software is never seen outside of the company. lots of companies use proprietary software which is no longer supported by manufacturers and have to somehow keep it cobbled together themselves.
this is also the reason why linux runs on ca. 80% of all supercomputers, because these people who have just spent many hundreds of millions on a computer want to know what the computer is doing and they want the best software. they can afford to hire 100 people to write the software and linux provides the best environment for this currently available.
Hello, this is Linus Torvalds, and I pronounce Linux as lnks
(if you can't read the strange symbols, either i've fucked up, or your default font doesn't support them)
part of the reason for the low performance can be found by
ps aux | wc
the result is 102 processes.
top
informs me later, that there are 99 sleeping processes on the system. does one actually need all these daemons? dsl has about 20 in total and works fine without auto-mounting every data-storage-unit which happens to be in the same building.
rather worryingly /proc/meminfo
cat
tells me, that absolutely none of it is dirty. i must have been surfing the wrong sites...
whatever
howie
i think oss would make it's way by it's values, if that was the way the world worked. unfortunately you also have customer lock-in, windows-tax etc etc. this is not a level playing field.
howie
okay, so you have the following choice:
1/ sell the hardware with a proprietry operating system. the people who get the laptop can use it and learn how to use a computer. when they install a c-compiler, they can also write software for it (provided a free c-compiler is available for the system).
2/ sell the hardware with an open-source operating system. the people who get the laptop can use it, learn how to use a computer and learn how a computer works. they can develop the software further, they can write interesting applications for it, they can download free of charge a huge amount of software, they can become independant of one large american company telling them what they are and what they are not allowed to do.
proprietry software is a way of keeping the third world enslaved. if i wanted to found a company in a third world country and had to spend about 1000 dollars on every computer i needed, this would be a financial burden to me. as it is, i just bought a pentium III on e-bay for 50 euros and have installed a linux distribution on it with which i can run apache, gcc, samba, php, mysql, etc. etc. total cost? 50 euros (and either 10 euros for a magazine with a linux-distribution on it or some internet time). if i wanted to do that with proprietry software, i'd have to pay at least 10 times as much.
so which operating system should this laptop ship with? the one which keeps the third world in its place, or the one which allows people there to learn?
the point being, that you can supply this energy as slowly as you want by climbing up the cable. to get into low earth orbit, you also have to be able to change the kinetic energy level of the object, in this case by applying a thrust to it. thrust is usually very inefficient. most of the energy goes to heating up the environment. that's why the cable is a good idea, and that's why the total energy exependiture for getting an object into geostationary orbit is less than that for low earth orbit. once you're in geo-stationary orbit the rest is a breeze, you just let the object sail down the second half of the rope, grabing its kinetic and potential energy from the rotation of the earth. you don't have to do any work at all at this stage, the earth does it for you.
of course, this results in problems with nutation etc. i wonder how they want to solve that one? how flexible will this cable be? will they use large shock-absorbers?
howie
for getting something into geo-stationary orbit it would be perfect, as also for getting something to escape the earth's gravitational pull alltogether and slingshot it's way out to the moon or similar. for low earth orbit i can't see a way of employing this technology on a first look.
howie
then dell or hp or whoever can install a media player before you buy the computer.
the easy way to hack this will of course be copying it. basically you take the output of your stand-alone blu-ray-disk player and feed it into your computer, where you can record it. it is likely the pictures will have some sort of watermarking, so you may want to run everything through the old trusty VCR before playing it onto the computer. of course, the quality will suffer immensely, and special features will go out the window, but it will allow you to save it on your portable hard drive.
sorry, i used the wrong word, i meant crop, not resize. gimp has a nice feature, that you can drag the picture you want to crop around in the crop window, so you can see what it will look like. i couldn't find a way to do this on the (admittedly very cheap) version of adobe i was using.
personally i don't have any problems with gimp, maybe because i don't have to do that much with it. all i use it for is correcting photos of an oscilloscope display (getting the perspective right, cropping the image, inverting colours, changing contrast and brightness) so i'm probably not the best person to talk about either photoshop or gimp.
i would say this though. the people who develop gimp know a lot about the software (and presumably something about the competition and the work people tend to do with the software). they have chosen this layout above the layout used by photoshop. the question you should be asking is, why?
howie
the gimp was the first image manimpulation program i really worked with. about a week ago, i had to do some image manipulation on a windows machine with photoshop, and i found it very difficult to use. things were just in the wrong places. i ended up giving up and sending the files over my apache server to my linux laptop. i couldn't find a way to get photoshop to resize an image and preview what the image was going to look like. i imagine it's possible, but i couldn't find it.
no i'm saying you have a problem with people who love/have sex with other people of the same gender.
that's your personal problem and you should go to a shrink and work on it.
if you can't look at a gay and lesbian couple and regard them as being of equal value as a heterosexual couple, then you have a problem of your own free volition, and i don't see why i have to suffer because of it.
there is such a thing as being plain wrong, and you are it at the moment.
howie
how the hell did this get modded up to insightful? it's utter crap and a great example of christian doublethink.
first of all, you presume that the problem is being a bigot
then you define the word 'bigotry' to allow you to hate another group of people without being a bigot
what the hell does 'accept my friend for who he is as a person' actually mean?
does that mean, you can say to him 'oh, you're deviant and will burn in hell because you do something which i don't like, but i still love you as a person'? and don't you feel a little bit stupid when saying that?
to this i will say the following:
an individual defines himself by what he does.
why do you get upset when another person loves/has sex with someone of their gender? what has it got to do with you?
i think you'll find after a basic survey of the third world, that linux and open source software is used in the third world proportionally much more as a standard desktop than it is in the first world. there's a reason why you say wrote what you did. it's because you regard the third world as being primitive and backward and poor. i'm not debating that, but i am saying that one of the reasons why the third world is poorer than the first world is closed source software. think about it. howie
bill gate would help third world countries much more if he opened up doc-format. as it is, in order to do business with the rest of the world, a third world country has to support doc-format (fortunately, times are changing). and that means windows and microsoft word on every computer they have, which in turn means an initial outlay of maybe 300 dollars per computer plus updates and new versions as microsoft sees fit. bill gates can afford to give money to the third world, they're going to give it long or short back to him.
it could have something to do with wanting to run a system based on free software? the fact that Gnu/Linux also works extremely well sweetens the pill, but in my case the choice is mainly moral. howie
why shouldn't i be allowed to write software for free and give it away? why should i have to make business out of it? why shouldn't i just want to help other people and try to produce a work of art in the form of good software? how many poets get paid for their work? how many composers and musicians? answer: less than 5% i'd estimate. and some of the very best are amateurs in the sense of 'don't get paid'. exactly the same is true for the art form called programming.
as far as i know, mplayer is covered by the gpl. mplayer (like xine) come with out-of-the-box support for a number of free-codex. the codex one can choose to install are of course proprietry. therefore it is in principle illegal to download and install these codex (in some countries, when it comes to libdvdcss).
very nice :)
the method to finding how light travels which i've always used is to build wavefronts each c/(f*n) apart and see what happens (of course, you have to build a lot of wavefronts, but every classical optical problem can be solved this way, as it closely mirrors what the maxwell laws mean). having a refractive index of less than one does not make the light move faster, just the wavefront for a wave with a stable frequency. if you change the frequency, amplitude, fourier-thingy, whatever of the wave, the change in the wavefronts won't move faster than the speed of light, so no information can be conducted. as said, feynmann explained this clearly in the (first volume?) of his lectures, but i imagine everybody here has read them...
what a negative index of refraction could possibly mean is beyond me. if you choose snell's law to define the index of refraction then you get in trouble here (v = c/n therefore the speed of the wavefront is negative?). i imagine there's another more general definition of n which i don't know. anybody here have an idea?
howie