What you say is true and all, but from what I've heard, the situation in our public schools is more complicated that just having sufficient free hardware and money to buy software.
That is, the biggest real, practical problems with computers in schools have to do with
Set up, installation, maintenance.
Training (not the kids, but the teachers)
so, if I might be so bold, a very good way to do something positive rather than just complain about the Borg is for Free Software advocates to volunteer their time at their local public school to help out with those tasks. Maybe your LUG could help to organize such an effort so no single person gets overwhelmed.
If you go in with the attitude of being helpful, setting up proxy web caches, and, yes, even helping to filter pr0n, maybe showing teachers how to show students how to setup a simple webpage, etc, you can do more for the sake of free software and the long term interests of the IT industry in general than either donating 50 obsolete PCs or griping on Slashdot.
that future probes consider <focus_paranoia>nuclear</focus_paranoia > reactors for long term power needs when solar panels no longer provide sufficient means?
I know they got a bad rap after a Russian satellite equipped with a nuclear reactor crashed down into Canada a few years ago, but it seems like they'd be a good idea for interstellar probes of this kind.
So, like, if I live in DC and my personal automobile is the same make and model as the bait car, then perhaps I could expect my car theft susceptability to decrease?
If they used enough of these of particular kinds, then I'd expect it to show up in the car insurance actuarial tables.
Unfortunately, the bait car is probably not a car that I would be likely to own. Mebbe a mid-1980s orange Yugo?
Well, apart from the underlying sentiment against commoditization that was mentioned in Tom's review of WinHEC that will impede the rollout of the next killer app, there are a few things that come to mind.
Smaller, quieter PCs that don't make a SOHO look like a machine room. I've got a 60 lb monitor sitting on my desk next to a noisy midtower case. If I could replace it with an LCD at equivalent resolution and a Tranmeta like OQO driving it I'd pay for such an upgrade.
Greater telephony integration. If I could plug phones, fax machines into RJ11 slots into the computer and use cheap easy software for voicemail, for automatically calling out, forwarding messages to my work number, etc.
Wireless networking to conventional Consumer Electronic devices such as TVs, PVRs, FM stereo receivers, CD players, portable MP3 players, etc.
I know that with enough money and with specialized Knerdly Knowledge it is possible to build systems to do some of these things even today, but what's needed is for it to be cheap and convenient for the average Joe.
It could be that way if all the major players weren't so worried about protecting their existing revenue streams - I suspect it will be necessary for new companies to provide these innovations. From the gist of the conference, you can tell that MS and the other attendees are not entirely unaware of what people would like to have.
Maybe instead of buying an Intel compatible laptop I'll get a Mac and not have to futz with the whole Winmodem hassles and get a way to run Unix, dial in, and show powerpoint on the screen on a reasonable PowerPC chip.
[Regarding telnetd turned off] Someone I know suggested that OS X can be tightened down more than any other flavor of UNIX. Normally I use Linux and my answer to "What's most secure?" is OpenBSD.
Is OS X really that tight from a security perspective?
Sounds cool. And I admit I'm too lazy to read up for answers.
What about
Latency. Forget about BW, I've heard that getting latency down below 0.1 second was really important for interactive conversations.
Gateways into local exchanges. So how does my VoIP traffic practically get to real world telephones? Somewhere and somehow the local carrier has to let me in.
Since you are positive, that must mean you have proof.
No, you're right.
Since those business arrangements are conducted privately, I cannot provide proof unless I was privy to them: if I were Sanders, Gates or Ballmer I wouldn't be trolling Slashdot.
Tell you what, though.
To make up for my wild fabrication, I'll agree to print out my wild accusations on paper and eat them next year when the AMD Hammer announcements fail to mention anything whatsoever about how well they are matched to work with Microsoft Windows and that no partnership between AMD and Microsoft exists.
For your part, though, if such an announcement does come out, I'd settle for half the value of your MSFT options:)
2. Fix their pricing so that it is uniform to all OEMs
Ideal, if it really worked in practice.
It seems to me, though, that there are 1001 different things besides price that MS can use to sway OEMs to do what MS wants.
For instance, how much "effort" to put in making my OS and apps work on your hardware, how "complete" is the disclosure of important parts of the API - if they're all incomplete descriptions of the behavior of Windows, or any other MS app, then there's a lot of wiggle room for them to play favorites or not with whomever they choose.
Well, yes, especially when things get accelerated by humans moving species across continents.
I've wondered how the native honeybees in the Western Hemisphere are doing these days relative to the killer African bees that have been making their way up from South American through Central American and into the American Southwest.
Several years ago I read some articles about these bees displacing the native species of bees and also having a greater tendency to swarm and attack people and livestock that were carelessly nearby.
It's a shame that AMD, that has long battled uphill against the market dominance of Intel, has bowed under like this.
I'm positive there are intangible benefits, such as MS agreeing to port Doze aggressively onto x86-64 platforms that are motivating Sanders.
I remember reading a whitepaper from AMD's site once where they were complaining about Intel being the 800 lb gorilla, etc. and then having the grand vision that Intel was not the monopoly, that MS was the monopoly and the standard to which everything must adhere.
I guess it just goes to show that in business, if the monopoly isn't hurting you directly, that an "accommodation" can be made for the sake of furthering business interests.
Unfortunately, I doubt the court will be fully informed about the benefits that accrue to AMD as a result of Sanders testifying for MS, just as there are many subtle "sticks" used on companies that are now long dead that, too, have not been fully revealed to the court.
Unlike most Linux distros, OSX ships with everything off.
Sounds like a business opportunity to me.
Bet the Linux PPC crowd and companies like Yellow Dog could release a cheap CD with "Everything OS X is Missing".
If Apple is trying to sell desktops to the UNIX crowd, they should know that UNIX "desktop" machines are very closely related to what you find in the server machine room.
Kinda like one of my Linux-using friends that runs Apache on a Dell Laptop...
It's their code, they can licence it however they damn well please.
A good and valid point.
I find it ironic, though, in all of MS crying and hand-wringing about how the GPL is so restrictive, destructive of intellectual property, anti-American, etc. that they have come out with a license that is phrased with particular vengeance against the share-and-share-alike GPL.
Despite his rabid single-minded adherence to the principles in which he believes, you don't see RMS adding clauses to the GPL prohibiting you from using such software together with proprietary software, such as MS operating systems, etc. He encourages maximum use of free software, but he does not distribute his software with the kinds of legal shackles that MS is doing.
So let the free market decide which kind of system they like better.
If it used to be the case that Australia ended up footing the entire bill for traffic with the rest of the world and it is now the case that they split the bill, then
What did they do to change the situation?
I'm sure there's a few African ISP that would like to know.
Now maybe it's something they can't do much about, such as increased volume of secure electronic transactions (purchases) originating from their domains, but OTOH, it may just be a matter of hiring a good negotiator and lobbyist.
Although formidable engineering problems remain to be overcome in abstracting the gas...
At least the hydrogen is only trapped physically and not chemically. For a while I was afraid they were going to say you could get all the hydrogen you wanted if you were willing to chemically decompose water.
If you have to pulverize a cubic meter of rock in a vacuum to get 1000 liters of hydrogen at STP, then you still have a ways to go to compete with conventional processes that rely on getting it from natural gas.
I don't know if in-situ pulverization would even help enough in terms of the economics.
I've always been partial to the multiple one-liner summaries, a la Alan Cox.
I wonder if Linus has always devoured and spit out this many patches for new kernel revisions or whether I'm just seeing an artifact of BitKeeper?
Could it be argued that kernel development is moving faster as a result of Linus adopting some kind of source code management system? I know Grandpa Eric Raymond would be pleased if that were the case:)
[Just hoping that 2.6 comes out faster than 2.4...]
I mean, IIS has such a grand history of security lapses that 8 more are probably only a few percent more. It hardly seems newsworthy it's become so common.
I suppose, though, it's important that people know about flaws in the products they buy.
But I have to shake my head at any outfit that still uses IIS if they have important company information at stake anywhere near the web server.
With Apache 2 out of beta the same week as these IIS vulnerabilities, there's a doubly good excuse to try out Apache. Since it's free and open source, there's nothing holding you back except investing a little of your time.
Go for it!
After trying out Apache this weekend, you won't lose sleep trying to guess how many more vulnerabilities are in IIS future.
If you haven't been married for long you probably don't know that sometimes, when people gain weight, the rings start to become, uh, constrictive.
With a traditional soft gold alloy you can snip the tight ring with a pair of bolt cutters or even wire cutters for thinner gauge rings.
With titanium, I don't think you'd have such an easy time removing a stuck ring. A cutting torch is not going to leave much of a finger and using a diamond saw, too, could be real tricky with in vivo parts involved.
Get ready for gangreme to set in, unless you lose a bunch of weight in a hurry or find a good lubricant.
I think we all know that the current generation robots made of metal and electronics don't have sufficient warmth, cuddliness and responsiveness to make people happy.
I'm sure there will be some stopgap measures for people that aren't too particular, including GeorgeClooneyBots for grandma and BritneySpearsBots for grampa.
But seriously, I think the only way these things can succeed is to make them correlate with what old people recognize as genuine warm and friendly loved ones.
Face it, short of the loved one actually being there, we get some small bits of satisfaction out of seeing their photographs, their videos, hearing their voice on audio, talking with them on the telephone.
That being the case, the robots should mainly be communication and recording devices. Designed so that real loved ones can present their visual and audio images effectively through the robot at at distance, or, with recording, through time.
Sure, a great idea, technically sound from the standpoint of making device API's easier to deal with and make the consumer experience easier, too. Kinda like the UNIX concept of "everything is a file", except maybe, everything is "copyrighted digital content".
So look for inserted technology in the way of DRM or, as I prefer to name it, CUR (Content Use Restriction).
Yep, I can see it now: seamless nice setup of interdevice PKI after the device keys and your VISA card number (embedded into the Longhorn Authorization process) are verifed over.NET.
Michael Eisner will be giving plaudits to Microsoft for "achieving what Intel and the hardware manufacturers said was too difficult".
I have to wonder if artificial "push" chemistry is sufficiently workable compared to the conventional exercise-induced "pull" chemistry?
Biochemistry has loads of reactions and products going on in terms of everyday metabolism. It's hard to think that just flooding in a few key reactants is going to have exactly the same effect as real exercise in all possible ways.
Slashdot Mirror
What you say is true and all, but from what I've heard, the situation in our public schools is more complicated that just having sufficient free hardware and money to buy software.
That is, the biggest real, practical problems with computers in schools have to do with
- Set up, installation, maintenance.
- Training (not the kids, but the teachers)
so, if I might be so bold, a very good way to do something positive rather than just complain about the Borg is for Free Software advocates to volunteer their time at their local public school to help out with those tasks. Maybe your LUG could help to organize such an effort so no single person gets overwhelmed.If you go in with the attitude of being helpful, setting up proxy web caches, and, yes, even helping to filter pr0n, maybe showing teachers how to show students how to setup a simple webpage, etc, you can do more for the sake of free software and the long term interests of the IT industry in general than either donating 50 obsolete PCs or griping on Slashdot.
Seems Duron's not as durable as it's name would suggest.
Duroff, then, eh?
that future probes consider <focus_paranoia>nuclear</focus_paranoia > reactors for long term power needs when solar panels no longer provide sufficient means?
I know they got a bad rap after a Russian satellite equipped with a nuclear reactor crashed down into Canada a few years ago, but it seems like they'd be a good idea for interstellar probes of this kind.
So, like, if I live in DC and my personal automobile is the same make and model as the bait car, then perhaps I could expect my car theft susceptability to decrease?
If they used enough of these of particular kinds, then I'd expect it to show up in the car insurance actuarial tables.
Unfortunately, the bait car is probably not a car that I would be likely to own. Mebbe a mid-1980s orange Yugo?
Well, apart from the underlying sentiment against commoditization that was mentioned in Tom's review of WinHEC that will impede the rollout of the next killer app, there are a few things that come to mind.
- Smaller, quieter PCs that don't make a SOHO look like a machine room. I've got a 60 lb monitor sitting on my desk next to a noisy midtower case. If I could replace it with an LCD at equivalent resolution and a Tranmeta like OQO driving it I'd pay for such an upgrade.
- Greater telephony integration. If I could plug phones, fax machines into RJ11 slots into the computer and use cheap easy software for voicemail, for automatically calling out, forwarding messages to my work number, etc.
- Wireless networking to conventional Consumer Electronic devices such as TVs, PVRs, FM stereo receivers, CD players, portable MP3 players, etc.
I know that with enough money and with specialized Knerdly Knowledge it is possible to build systems to do some of these things even today, but what's needed is for it to be cheap and convenient for the average Joe.It could be that way if all the major players weren't so worried about protecting their existing revenue streams - I suspect it will be necessary for new companies to provide these innovations. From the gist of the conference, you can tell that MS and the other attendees are not entirely unaware of what people would like to have.
You're starting to sell me on it.
Maybe instead of buying an Intel compatible laptop I'll get a Mac and not have to futz with the whole Winmodem hassles and get a way to run Unix, dial in, and show powerpoint on the screen on a reasonable PowerPC chip.
[Regarding telnetd turned off] Someone I know suggested that OS X can be tightened down more than any other flavor of UNIX. Normally I use Linux and my answer to "What's most secure?" is OpenBSD.
Is OS X really that tight from a security perspective?
That was PDQ - I just read the Reuters account here before I saw your post.
Sounds cool. And I admit I'm too lazy to read up for answers.
What about
Since you are positive, that must mean you have proof.
No, you're right.
Since those business arrangements are conducted privately, I cannot provide proof unless I was privy to them: if I were Sanders, Gates or Ballmer I wouldn't be trolling Slashdot.
Tell you what, though.
To make up for my wild fabrication, I'll agree to print out my wild accusations on paper and eat them next year when the AMD Hammer announcements fail to mention anything whatsoever about how well they are matched to work with Microsoft Windows and that no partnership between AMD and Microsoft exists.
For your part, though, if such an announcement does come out, I'd settle for half the value of your MSFT options:)
2. Fix their pricing so that it is uniform to all OEMs
Ideal, if it really worked in practice.
It seems to me, though, that there are 1001 different things besides price that MS can use to sway OEMs to do what MS wants.
For instance, how much "effort" to put in making my OS and apps work on your hardware, how "complete" is the disclosure of important parts of the API - if they're all incomplete descriptions of the behavior of Windows, or any other MS app, then there's a lot of wiggle room for them to play favorites or not with whomever they choose.
Evolutions a bitch, eh?
Well, yes, especially when things get accelerated by humans moving species across continents.
I've wondered how the native honeybees in the Western Hemisphere are doing these days relative to the killer African bees that have been making their way up from South American through Central American and into the American Southwest.
Several years ago I read some articles about these bees displacing the native species of bees and also having a greater tendency to swarm and attack people and livestock that were carelessly nearby.
It's a shame that AMD, that has long battled uphill against the market dominance of Intel, has bowed under like this.
I'm positive there are intangible benefits, such as MS agreeing to port Doze aggressively onto x86-64 platforms that are motivating Sanders.
I remember reading a whitepaper from AMD's site once where they were complaining about Intel being the 800 lb gorilla, etc. and then having the grand vision that Intel was not the monopoly, that MS was the monopoly and the standard to which everything must adhere.
I guess it just goes to show that in business, if the monopoly isn't hurting you directly, that an "accommodation" can be made for the sake of furthering business interests.
Unfortunately, I doubt the court will be fully informed about the benefits that accrue to AMD as a result of Sanders testifying for MS, just as there are many subtle "sticks" used on companies that are now long dead that, too, have not been fully revealed to the court.
Unlike most Linux distros, OSX ships with everything off.
Sounds like a business opportunity to me.
Bet the Linux PPC crowd and companies like Yellow Dog could release a cheap CD with "Everything OS X is Missing".
If Apple is trying to sell desktops to the UNIX crowd, they should know that UNIX "desktop" machines are very closely related to what you find in the server machine room.
Kinda like one of my Linux-using friends that runs Apache on a Dell Laptop...
It's their code, they can licence it however they damn well please.
A good and valid point.
I find it ironic, though, in all of MS crying and hand-wringing about how the GPL is so restrictive, destructive of intellectual property, anti-American, etc. that they have come out with a license that is phrased with particular vengeance against the share-and-share-alike GPL.
Despite his rabid single-minded adherence to the principles in which he believes, you don't see RMS adding clauses to the GPL prohibiting you from using such software together with proprietary software, such as MS operating systems, etc. He encourages maximum use of free software, but he does not distribute his software with the kinds of legal shackles that MS is doing.
So let the free market decide which kind of system they like better.
If it used to be the case that Australia ended up footing the entire bill for traffic with the rest of the world and it is now the case that they split the bill, then
I'm sure there's a few African ISP that would like to know.Now maybe it's something they can't do much about, such as increased volume of secure electronic transactions (purchases) originating from their domains, but OTOH, it may just be a matter of hiring a good negotiator and lobbyist.
You knew there had to be one.
Down in the article...
Although formidable engineering problems remain to be overcome in abstracting the gas...
At least the hydrogen is only trapped physically and not chemically. For a while I was afraid they were going to say you could get all the hydrogen you wanted if you were willing to chemically decompose water.
If you have to pulverize a cubic meter of rock in a vacuum to get 1000 liters of hydrogen at STP, then you still have a ways to go to compete with conventional processes that rely on getting it from natural gas.
I don't know if in-situ pulverization would even help enough in terms of the economics.
Well, these BitKeeper logs are pretty lengthy.
I've always been partial to the multiple one-liner summaries, a la Alan Cox.
I wonder if Linus has always devoured and spit out this many patches for new kernel revisions or whether I'm just seeing an artifact of BitKeeper?
Could it be argued that kernel development is moving faster as a result of Linus adopting some kind of source code management system? I know Grandpa Eric Raymond would be pleased if that were the case:)
[Just hoping that 2.6 comes out faster than 2.4...]
I mean, IIS has such a grand history of security lapses that 8 more are probably only a few percent more. It hardly seems newsworthy it's become so common.
I suppose, though, it's important that people know about flaws in the products they buy.
But I have to shake my head at any outfit that still uses IIS if they have important company information at stake anywhere near the web server.
With Apache 2 out of beta the same week as these IIS vulnerabilities, there's a doubly good excuse to try out Apache. Since it's free and open source, there's nothing holding you back except investing a little of your time.
Go for it!
After trying out Apache this weekend, you won't lose sleep trying to guess how many more vulnerabilities are in IIS future.
"Eight less than before" is cold comfort.
titanium hiking gear such as ovens
They sell it at REI. It's nice and light for backpacking, but pricey.
I bet it took more than one bottle of good vodka to get a set in the old days.
If you haven't been married for long you probably don't know that sometimes, when people gain weight, the rings start to become, uh, constrictive.
With a traditional soft gold alloy you can snip the tight ring with a pair of bolt cutters or even wire cutters for thinner gauge rings.
With titanium, I don't think you'd have such an easy time removing a stuck ring. A cutting torch is not going to leave much of a finger and using a diamond saw, too, could be real tricky with in vivo parts involved.
Get ready for gangreme to set in, unless you lose a bunch of weight in a hurry or find a good lubricant.
Having used Bourne shell for so long I figure everything past the # is meant to be comment, not really meant to be executed.
I think we all know that the current generation robots made of metal and electronics don't have sufficient warmth, cuddliness and responsiveness to make people happy.
I'm sure there will be some stopgap measures for people that aren't too particular, including GeorgeClooneyBots for grandma and BritneySpearsBots for grampa.
But seriously, I think the only way these things can succeed is to make them correlate with what old people recognize as genuine warm and friendly loved ones.
Face it, short of the loved one actually being there, we get some small bits of satisfaction out of seeing their photographs, their videos, hearing their voice on audio, talking with them on the telephone.
That being the case, the robots should mainly be communication and recording devices. Designed so that real loved ones can present their visual and audio images effectively through the robot at at distance, or, with recording, through time.
seamless content transfer
Sure, a great idea, technically sound from the standpoint of making device API's easier to deal with and make the consumer experience easier, too. Kinda like the UNIX concept of "everything is a file", except maybe, everything is "copyrighted digital content".
So look for inserted technology in the way of DRM or, as I prefer to name it, CUR (Content Use Restriction).
Yep, I can see it now: seamless nice setup of interdevice PKI after the device keys and your VISA card number (embedded into the Longhorn Authorization process) are verifed over .NET.
Michael Eisner will be giving plaudits to Microsoft for "achieving what Intel and the hardware manufacturers said was too difficult".
I have to wonder if artificial "push" chemistry is sufficiently workable compared to the conventional exercise-induced "pull" chemistry?
Biochemistry has loads of reactions and products going on in terms of everyday metabolism. It's hard to think that just flooding in a few key reactants is going to have exactly the same effect as real exercise in all possible ways.
There's gotta be a catch.
I lost 30 lbs in 30 days for 30 dollars! Ask me how!
Step 1: Assemble a surgical scapel and an industrial shop vac.
Step 2: [You don't really want to know. You can guess.]