on all the forms where you've entered this so-called "personal data".
If all the *AA organizations are fighting for strong copyright protection measures, then private citizens might as well enjoy some of those protections, too.
The real problem is HOW MUCH DO WE WANT TO PAY INVENTORS/CREATORS for their work.
When you get right down to it, the inventors/creators get paid very little. Corporations buy the rights and try to make as much money as possible off of the special monopoly rights. These corporations are not creative in the same sense as the original author and copyright incentives do not goad these corporations into greater creation and innovation but greater legal expertise and marketing techniques with which to protect and exploit their special assets. And this is where it really gets silly.
For example, when Sonny Bono convinced Congress to extend Mickey Mouse's copyright protection decades after the death of its creator, Walt Disney, the extra monetary incentive did not seem to have motivated Walt to create and invent new and more characters. So much for the intent of copyright law.
No matter how much money a big corporation, George Soros, or the NRA spends on an election, it's the votes that are counted.
p>Yes, only votes do count.
But one well-thought, carefully-researched and reasoned vote will always count less than two votes that are based on emotion, gullility, fear, greed, insecurity, devoid of reasoning and subject to whimsical persuasion.
Once you correlate the outrageous, offensive, stupid political advertisements and strategies that have brought their clients into office successfully through the electoral process, you will come to the conclusion that voter stupidity is a vast resource that can be very effectively exploited if you have money and intelligence.
The latest and greatest from RH will always show up in Fedora
A step forward, for sure.
And FC3 is the first Fedora I've tried. From what I've heard, I didn't miss much in FC[12]. But FC3 is pretty nice in terms of latest and greatest.
Where FC3 falls down is in completest (I migrated from RH to SuSE a few years ago for that reason) and stablest.
My paranoid side figures that RH wants to provide stability and completeness at a cost for business customers that will certainly pay to get it.
Just how far RH is willing to let the community setup things to make it easier for hobbiests to get MSCore truetype fonts, MPlayer + codecs, Flash, Java, ximian connector built with weird NTLM OpenLDAP to talk to Exchange, etc. will be interesting to see. The yum search, install, update has potential.
Q: Where are these mythical large memory systems?
A: They've existed for years in mainframe and scientific computing circles, just as 64 bit hardware has existed (Alpha chip, SPARCv9, MIPS) for years and OS's capable of dealing with 64 bits have existed for years.
Q: Do you think such workstation configurations will become pervasive in the future?
A: Yes.
Q: Will it take Microsoft's Windows XP 64 bit to legitimize their existence in larger quantities?
A: "Legitimize" is a word I don't like to use in the same sentence as Microsoft. But your intuition is correct. Once Microsoft brings out a reliable 64 bit OS that is backward compatible with its 32 bit offerings, you'll see more popularity and lower prices for systems with more than 4 GB of memory.
Let's hope everyone's learned the Bad Way of Doing Things from the 16->32 bit Windows transition a dozen years ago. OTOH, I suspect glitches in the transition will be leveraged to encourage upgrading...
and how he's the one who knows how to improve processes, costs
That's all fine and well in a business setting, but a manager in a government operation is praised for growing the size of their organization and coming up with compelling arguments why their department's budget needs to be increased for next year. Reducing the number of hell desk staff wouldn't be a trumpeted feat.
In government, a money-saving Linux deployment to servers mostly will run silent and run deep, but the money savings will be pocketed so as to more easily afford pet projects that wouldn't otherwise get funded.
So however we might celebrate SLES EAL4 cert, it STILL doesn't get them in the game without adding on a (typically) expensive FIPS 140-2 certified SSL component. My understanding is that RedHat understood this and bundled a certified solution with RHEL.
I've wondered about that after seeing some posts about it earlier.
Are the hurdles preventing something like OpenSSL or GnuTLS from receiving FIPS certification mainly technical, or financial?
The president of a democratic country is not an overlord. He is chosen by the people to administer the execution of of the people's will.
[Monied interests:] Hmmmmmmmm....
Well, then, we'll just have to work on modifying the people's will to align with our own.
People are pretty stupid, emotional and gullible and we have purchased a lot of the media outlets to which people are exposed, so we have a good chance of achieving this objective.
It's all very logical and makes good business sense. Why shouldn't the free market system be applied to the public's emotions? It's been done for centuries.
Windows and Active Directory are a proprietary ripoff of LDAP and kerberos with some gui tools.
Sort of. But I think stealing good ideas and implementing anything that makes use of open standards is a Good Thing, even if it is done by the Evil Empire. In fact, especially if it is done by the Evil Empire.
And while I've railed against MS for how their tactics have hurt competition in the IT industry for a long time, here is one instance where their heavy-handed grip on defining standards helped them rollout a directory service (nevermind that NDS was there already).
Yes, Linux has had all the ingredients for a long time, but my UNIX enterprise used NIS which was Good Enough, but insecure, incomplete, etc.
The sheer variety of Linux systems (LSB compliance, anyone?) and the competition between distro vendors (Red Hat, SuSE, etc.) makes it more difficult for them to settle on 1 way of doing a new thing.
We need a super-intellgient benign dictator (one doesn't exist in this arena) to roll up some nice pam/ldap/nss/ntlm/kerberos/nfsv4/samba combination with easy configuration that includes dynamic testing and discovery of services which more than 1 distro vendor would pick up.
Novell, Sun and IBM have some of the most experience in this area, but it will require buy-in from Red Hat to succeed. But Red Hat and Novell/SuSE are competitors.
One of the reasons this hasn't been done is that each of the distro vendors is hoping to corral the potentially lucrative enterprise market for its own. They should admit that it belongs to no One, that even though Enterprises want the convenience of One system, they want it standardized, uniform, and to be able to buy it from more than One supplier, not to be locked in like they have been historically.
The ratio depends on the environment. If it's cube farm, people running a small number of the same applications, with Nazi-like control over alien applications, everyone runs the exact same reliable hardware, firewall to the bad outside world is tight, etc. nothing brought into the environment except what is approved, workers go through thorough training on how to user their applications, then high support ratios are possible.
But get a geographically distributed workforce in a scientific or research-oriented enterprise, with technical people (Linux), managerial people (Windows), artistic people (Mac), all with different job functions that require different applications that run on different hardware, different OS, different OS versions, requiring different server services, some lab equipment interfacing with DOS controllers, some Myrinet Linux cluster down the hall, etc., then your support ratio could very well be down at 40:1.
What gadgets should I plan for, so that I don't have to do a major retrofit?
Put some T/Cs in the slab and various points in the walls. This will help later in tuning your heating system to how your climate affects your house.
Strawbale has great insulation, which is one factor. Thermal mass (concrete, adobe bricks, water) is another factor. If you get solar gain in the winter you can take advantage of it to heat your house.
Conceivably, you might live in a climate with diurnal temperature variations so that shading some of the windows at night in the winter, opening during the day would help your energy budget. Consider running power to south facing window frames in case you wan't to put in automatic blinds that open and close at the right time.
A few things I learned from building my house:
No matter what you estimate at the beginning, it will cost more.
No matter what you estimate at the beginning, it will take longer.
Really look into references for any subcontractors you use. Talk to their former clients for a while. If any doubt, no matter how small (remember, the references will use minimizing language when they talk about deficiencies) keep looking for another bid on the job.
Good people are worth the money.
You can't have too much storage space.
The fewer the roof perforations (drain pipes, etc), the better.
You can't know in advance where you'll need wires.
To address the last point, install "smurf pipe" (blue, flexible hollow plastic tubes about 3/4" diameter) in your walls, coming down from the attic to wall plates at various locations in your house. It's easy to do this during construction, before you finish your walls. A big hassle to do later.
Outdoors, if you're burying utilities, include a hollow conduit. Don't forget to lay down and bury yellow plastic tape about 1 foot on top of everything so future backhoes won't cut your OC-192 lines, gas lines, electric lines, septic lines, etc.
Finally, I'm assuming your straw bale house will have adequate structural integrity, including tying down the roof down throught to the slab so that high winds don't take it away (remember the first of the 3 little pigs), and that the slab is slightly elevated above grade and has good drainage away from the house in all directions so that water doesn't come in and damage your walls, cause mildew, etc.
Good luck on your house! Building it yourself and spending plenty of time thinking about how you live and planning, you should be able to build something that really suits your lifestyle.
The only problem being that Joe User won't think of downloading until the first sign of trouble. Which could mean that he's running \/\/1nd0z3 already, which means any downloaded CD image from that point in time forward can be made to appear bona fide.
A bootable CD with a checksum or digital signature checker ought to come with the system.
Look at their share price, for Christ's - do they look like some poor bastards who give everything away and survive on bare essentials?
One word: Services.
Linux becoming successful will mean that software services will be open to any and all comers, with no particular company gaining an advantage due to in-house knowledge of proprietary trade secrets, etc.
The advantage then goes to the company that has built trust with its clients, has a deep broad bench of intelligent staff as talent. Example: IBM.
Business services are even one of the few genuine brightspots for Microsoft itself, IIRC. Their new ventures tend to be money blackholes (Xbox) and the old cash cows like (OS, Office) won't last forever.
With all its experience in UNIX, I'm amazed that Sun hasn't clued into this idea yet and still steadfastly refuses to give up a pipe dream of displacing MS as the king of the software hill (let's put Java in place of Windows and.NET) (the RISC hardware manufacturing business being shown to be on the decline.)
I've long wanted to build my own webcam with telescope for terrestrial use but wondered if vibration due to wind would mess up the image.
Are there practical guidelines for how to build outdoor webcams to help circumvent problems with vibration and, for that matter, wireless transmission back to computers within a few hundred meters?
It is a simple coincidence that Congressional testimony concerning the dangers of chemical and nuclear terrorism are occurring just prior to a larger effort by the administration calling for renewal of the Patriot Act.
So what happens? Lobbyists go and talk to the Congresspeople and edcuate them. We end up viewing this as "greasing the palms" or as the corruption of American politics. Everyone cannot be an expert at everything.
Silly me. I would like to have thought that Congressional staffers would research the issues in depth and bring the summaries to the Congressional representatives.
Whenever certain people can repeatedly gain access to Congressional representatives more than the average voter and their concerns are expressed in legislation, it tells me that we don't have a truly representative democracy where the concerns of each individual are equally weighted.
Anyone trying design a user interface will probably come to the conclusion that no interface will suffice and that the fundamental problem is that the users themselves are inconsistent.
If you start from low expectations on that count, then count as a success anytime you get a user that does not complain about the UI you present to them.
The ingredients are all easy to say and hard to do. Make the interface intuitive, simple at the beginning, with a smooth monotonic learning curve, with the tasks that need to be done most easy to learn to do and, once learned, easy to do on a routine basis.
It's funny, though, the "File" "Edit" "View" labels on many applications are little more than abstract place holders for things I know I want to do from previous trial and error. They might as well be labeled "Category 1", "Category 2", etc.
Felons are not allowed to own guns I believe as well as give up the right to vote.
Former felons are deprived of the right to vote in many states in the U.S., but, to my knowledge, none of them are deprived of the obligation to pay taxes.
They are treated much like minors in that respect.
Or, perhaps like colonialists, or anyone that wasn't a white, male property owner older than 25.
U.S. correctional policy might be due for some examination of how effective and appropriate it is considering that the U.S. jails many times more of its citizens per capita than just about any other country in the world you could care to pick. It used to be the U.S. incarcerated less people per capita than South Africa and Russia, but I'm not sure this is true anymore. We're probably down with the countries like Myanmar that have recognized reputations for repression.
Slashdot Mirror
Serirously- this isn't paperclips these people are selling ITS YOUR PERSONAL DATA.
If you're going to take it seriously, then no doubt you will have affixed a notice such as:
on all the forms where you've entered this so-called "personal data".If all the *AA organizations are fighting for strong copyright protection measures, then private citizens might as well enjoy some of those protections, too.
The real problem is HOW MUCH DO WE WANT TO PAY INVENTORS/CREATORS for their work.
When you get right down to it, the inventors/creators get paid very little. Corporations buy the rights and try to make as much money as possible off of the special monopoly rights. These corporations are not creative in the same sense as the original author and copyright incentives do not goad these corporations into greater creation and innovation but greater legal expertise and marketing techniques with which to protect and exploit their special assets. And this is where it really gets silly.
For example, when Sonny Bono convinced Congress to extend Mickey Mouse's copyright protection decades after the death of its creator, Walt Disney, the extra monetary incentive did not seem to have motivated Walt to create and invent new and more characters. So much for the intent of copyright law.
No matter how much money a big corporation, George Soros, or the NRA spends on an election, it's the votes that are counted.
p>Yes, only votes do count.
But one well-thought, carefully-researched and reasoned vote will always count less than two votes that are based on emotion, gullility, fear, greed, insecurity, devoid of reasoning and subject to whimsical persuasion.
Once you correlate the outrageous, offensive, stupid political advertisements and strategies that have brought their clients into office successfully through the electoral process, you will come to the conclusion that voter stupidity is a vast resource that can be very effectively exploited if you have money and intelligence.
Berlusconi wins in Italy because he owns most TV stations and most of government, including the courts and maybe a few shares of Parlamat, too.
The latest and greatest from RH will always show up in Fedora
A step forward, for sure.
And FC3 is the first Fedora I've tried. From what I've heard, I didn't miss much in FC[12]. But FC3 is pretty nice in terms of latest and greatest.
Where FC3 falls down is in completest (I migrated from RH to SuSE a few years ago for that reason) and stablest.
My paranoid side figures that RH wants to provide stability and completeness at a cost for business customers that will certainly pay to get it.
Just how far RH is willing to let the community setup things to make it easier for hobbiests to get MSCore truetype fonts, MPlayer + codecs, Flash, Java, ximian connector built with weird NTLM OpenLDAP to talk to Exchange, etc. will be interesting to see. The yum search, install, update has potential.
Q: Where are these mythical large memory systems?
A: They've existed for years in mainframe and scientific computing circles, just as 64 bit hardware has existed (Alpha chip, SPARCv9, MIPS) for years and OS's capable of dealing with 64 bits have existed for years.
Q: Do you think such workstation configurations will become pervasive in the future?
A: Yes.
Q: Will it take Microsoft's Windows XP 64 bit to legitimize their existence in larger quantities?
A: "Legitimize" is a word I don't like to use in the same sentence as Microsoft. But your intuition is correct. Once Microsoft brings out a reliable 64 bit OS that is backward compatible with its 32 bit offerings, you'll see more popularity and lower prices for systems with more than 4 GB of memory. Let's hope everyone's learned the Bad Way of Doing Things from the 16->32 bit Windows transition a dozen years ago. OTOH, I suspect glitches in the transition will be leveraged to encourage upgrading...
and how he's the one who knows how to improve processes, costs
That's all fine and well in a business setting, but a manager in a government operation is praised for growing the size of their organization and coming up with compelling arguments why their department's budget needs to be increased for next year. Reducing the number of hell desk staff wouldn't be a trumpeted feat.
In government, a money-saving Linux deployment to servers mostly will run silent and run deep, but the money savings will be pocketed so as to more easily afford pet projects that wouldn't otherwise get funded.
So however we might celebrate SLES EAL4 cert, it STILL doesn't get them in the game without adding on a (typically) expensive FIPS 140-2 certified SSL component. My understanding is that RedHat understood this and bundled a certified solution with RHEL.
I've wondered about that after seeing some posts about it earlier.
Are the hurdles preventing something like OpenSSL or GnuTLS from receiving FIPS certification mainly technical, or financial?
The president of a democratic country is not an overlord. He is chosen by the people to administer the execution of of the people's will.
[Monied interests:] Hmmmmmmmm....
Well, then, we'll just have to work on modifying the people's will to align with our own.
People are pretty stupid, emotional and gullible and we have purchased a lot of the media outlets to which people are exposed, so we have a good chance of achieving this objective.
It's all very logical and makes good business sense. Why shouldn't the free market system be applied to the public's emotions? It's been done for centuries.
Windows and Active Directory are a proprietary ripoff of LDAP and kerberos with some gui tools.
Sort of. But I think stealing good ideas and implementing anything that makes use of open standards is a Good Thing, even if it is done by the Evil Empire. In fact, especially if it is done by the Evil Empire.
And while I've railed against MS for how their tactics have hurt competition in the IT industry for a long time, here is one instance where their heavy-handed grip on defining standards helped them rollout a directory service (nevermind that NDS was there already).
Yes, Linux has had all the ingredients for a long time, but my UNIX enterprise used NIS which was Good Enough, but insecure, incomplete, etc.
The sheer variety of Linux systems (LSB compliance, anyone?) and the competition between distro vendors (Red Hat, SuSE, etc.) makes it more difficult for them to settle on 1 way of doing a new thing.
We need a super-intellgient benign dictator (one doesn't exist in this arena) to roll up some nice pam/ldap/nss/ntlm/kerberos/nfsv4/samba combination with easy configuration that includes dynamic testing and discovery of services which more than 1 distro vendor would pick up.
Novell, Sun and IBM have some of the most experience in this area, but it will require buy-in from Red Hat to succeed. But Red Hat and Novell/SuSE are competitors.
One of the reasons this hasn't been done is that each of the distro vendors is hoping to corral the potentially lucrative enterprise market for its own. They should admit that it belongs to no One, that even though Enterprises want the convenience of One system, they want it standardized, uniform, and to be able to buy it from more than One supplier, not to be locked in like they have been historically.
This is a perfect project for OSDL.
The ratio depends on the environment. If it's cube farm, people running a small number of the same applications, with Nazi-like control over alien applications, everyone runs the exact same reliable hardware, firewall to the bad outside world is tight, etc. nothing brought into the environment except what is approved, workers go through thorough training on how to user their applications, then high support ratios are possible.
But get a geographically distributed workforce in a scientific or research-oriented enterprise, with technical people (Linux), managerial people (Windows), artistic people (Mac), all with different job functions that require different applications that run on different hardware, different OS, different OS versions, requiring different server services, some lab equipment interfacing with DOS controllers, some Myrinet Linux cluster down the hall, etc., then your support ratio could very well be down at 40:1.
Hey, ssh, quiet down, they're "searching".
Way to be 733t, dude.
What gadgets should I plan for, so that I don't have to do a major retrofit?
Put some T/Cs in the slab and various points in the walls. This will help later in tuning your heating system to how your climate affects your house.
Strawbale has great insulation, which is one factor. Thermal mass (concrete, adobe bricks, water) is another factor. If you get solar gain in the winter you can take advantage of it to heat your house.
Conceivably, you might live in a climate with diurnal temperature variations so that shading some of the windows at night in the winter, opening during the day would help your energy budget. Consider running power to south facing window frames in case you wan't to put in automatic blinds that open and close at the right time.
A few things I learned from building my house:
- No matter what you estimate at the beginning, it will cost more.
- No matter what you estimate at the beginning, it will take longer.
- Really look into references for any subcontractors you use. Talk to their former clients for a while. If any doubt, no matter how small (remember, the references will use minimizing language when they talk about deficiencies) keep looking for another bid on the job.
- Good people are worth the money.
- You can't have too much storage space.
- The fewer the roof perforations (drain pipes, etc), the better.
- You can't know in advance where you'll need wires.
To address the last point, install "smurf pipe" (blue, flexible hollow plastic tubes about 3/4" diameter) in your walls, coming down from the attic to wall plates at various locations in your house. It's easy to do this during construction, before you finish your walls. A big hassle to do later.Outdoors, if you're burying utilities, include a hollow conduit. Don't forget to lay down and bury yellow plastic tape about 1 foot on top of everything so future backhoes won't cut your OC-192 lines, gas lines, electric lines, septic lines, etc.
Finally, I'm assuming your straw bale house will have adequate structural integrity, including tying down the roof down throught to the slab so that high winds don't take it away (remember the first of the 3 little pigs), and that the slab is slightly elevated above grade and has good drainage away from the house in all directions so that water doesn't come in and damage your walls, cause mildew, etc.
Good luck on your house! Building it yourself and spending plenty of time thinking about how you live and planning, you should be able to build something that really suits your lifestyle.
The only problem being that Joe User won't think of downloading until the first sign of trouble. Which could mean that he's running \/\/1nd0z3 already, which means any downloaded CD image from that point in time forward can be made to appear bona fide.
A bootable CD with a checksum or digital signature checker ought to come with the system.
Look at their share price, for Christ's - do they look like some poor bastards who give everything away and survive on bare essentials?
One word: Services.
Linux becoming successful will mean that software services will be open to any and all comers, with no particular company gaining an advantage due to in-house knowledge of proprietary trade secrets, etc.
The advantage then goes to the company that has built trust with its clients, has a deep broad bench of intelligent staff as talent. Example: IBM.
Business services are even one of the few genuine brightspots for Microsoft itself, IIRC. Their new ventures tend to be money blackholes (Xbox) and the old cash cows like (OS, Office) won't last forever.
With all its experience in UNIX, I'm amazed that Sun hasn't clued into this idea yet and still steadfastly refuses to give up a pipe dream of displacing MS as the king of the software hill (let's put Java in place of Windows and .NET) (the RISC hardware manufacturing business being shown to be on the decline.)
I've long wanted to build my own webcam with telescope for terrestrial use but wondered if vibration due to wind would mess up the image.
Are there practical guidelines for how to build outdoor webcams to help circumvent problems with vibration and, for that matter, wireless transmission back to computers within a few hundred meters?
It is a simple coincidence that Congressional testimony concerning the dangers of chemical and nuclear terrorism are occurring just prior to a larger effort by the administration calling for renewal of the Patriot Act.
offers fantastically improved security and performance.
Unfortunately, it looks hard as hell to setup compared to previous versions of NFS.
So what happens? Lobbyists go and talk to the Congresspeople and edcuate them. We end up viewing this as "greasing the palms" or as the corruption of American politics. Everyone cannot be an expert at everything.
Silly me. I would like to have thought that Congressional staffers would research the issues in depth and bring the summaries to the Congressional representatives.
Whenever certain people can repeatedly gain access to Congressional representatives more than the average voter and their concerns are expressed in legislation, it tells me that we don't have a truly representative democracy where the concerns of each individual are equally weighted.
Right on many counts.
Anyone trying design a user interface will probably come to the conclusion that no interface will suffice and that the fundamental problem is that the users themselves are inconsistent.
If you start from low expectations on that count, then count as a success anytime you get a user that does not complain about the UI you present to them.
The ingredients are all easy to say and hard to do. Make the interface intuitive, simple at the beginning, with a smooth monotonic learning curve, with the tasks that need to be done most easy to learn to do and, once learned, easy to do on a routine basis.
It's funny, though, the "File" "Edit" "View" labels on many applications are little more than abstract place holders for things I know I want to do from previous trial and error. They might as well be labeled "Category 1", "Category 2", etc.
Only 374,758,170 downloads left to match the estimated 400 million worldwide IE (windows) users
IE users didn't have to download their browser.
IE users didn't even have to make a conscious decision to include it with their pre-installed operating system that came on their PC.
Firefox's adoption would have reached 400 million if it had the same advantage in deployment.
It's a simple case of "You don't get a free gift unless you're our customer."
Slightly more complicated.
"You don't get a free gift unless you're our recent customer."
It's another prod towards the apathetic that would be content to use Windows 95.
Felons are not allowed to own guns I believe as well as give up the right to vote.
Former felons are deprived of the right to vote in many states in the U.S., but, to my knowledge, none of them are deprived of the obligation to pay taxes.
They are treated much like minors in that respect.
Or, perhaps like colonialists, or anyone that wasn't a white, male property owner older than 25.
U.S. correctional policy might be due for some examination of how effective and appropriate it is considering that the U.S. jails many times more of its citizens per capita than just about any other country in the world you could care to pick. It used to be the U.S. incarcerated less people per capita than South Africa and Russia, but I'm not sure this is true anymore. We're probably down with the countries like Myanmar that have recognized reputations for repression.
"OpenOffice is Sun's dog food, not IBM's."
So when IBM pushes way too hard for full, open and standardized Java then it's eating Sun's lunch?