The D-Link/Boxee gadget uses GPL software, and at the same time engages in activities that blocks the user from modifying the system it runs on, which is explicitly prohibited by the GPLv3 agreement.
http://infinityoverzero.com/bbox/
Makes note to self about abstaining from Dlink hardware where possible in the future.
If you run a blog, you are familiar with the oodles of spam that come into the comment moderation queues. Most of it these days makes use of “happy happy emotion” stuff that tricks the non-cynical blog owners to approve it because it sucks up to them by plastering on a thick layer of praise and appeals to how awesome the blog writer is. Today, however, I found an interesting exception:
“The next time I read a blog, I hope that it doesnt disappoint me as much as this one. I mean, I know it was my choice to read, but I actually thought youd have something interesting to say. All I hear is a bunch of whining about something that you could fix if you werent too busy looking for attention.”
I got insulted by a bot. My feelings are genuinely hurt. Boo. Hoo. :’[
What is “Science”?
To paraphrase Richard Feynman, it is a way of making sure you are not fooling yourself.
More formally, it is by using strict rules of reasoning and discovery to attain knowledge about the workings of nature.
Yet more formally, it is the involved process of going through several steps in the quest to enhance your knowledge of the world:
1) You make an observation of something.
2) You propose a hypothesis about why the observed object or relationship is in such a state as it is.
3) You consider and outline what implications your hypothesis has, if true.
4) You put your hypothesis to the test by devising a way that the implications can be examined if they are in fact as your hypothesis would have.
5a) If, upon testing, you find that you cannot verify your hypothesis, you must reject it (nullify it – it is thus said to be falsified). Thereby you have gained knowledge about the workings of what you were studying, specifically on how that thing or system does not work. Go back to 2) and reformulate your hypothesis, taking your new knowledge into account.
5b) If, upon testing, you find that the thing or system you are examining, does behave as your hypothesis predicted, then it means that you have at least partially correctly uncovered some new knowledge. (Do note that because a hypothesis is tested to hold true, does not mean that it is the final truth on the subject – it can still be falsified or proven incomplete by more accurate testing, or more involved hypotheses at a later time!) Return to 1) or 2) and start reexamining what youre working on, or propose new hypothesis to test, to enchance your now expanding knowledge.
or, in short
1) Observe
2) Hypothesise
3) Examine implications
4) Test
5) Conclude; reject or preliminarily accept.
6) Continue.
That’s scientific method in a nutshell. It’s long-winded, tough work, sometimes even drudgery, and you have to (annoyingly, just as in school, the way your strict maths teacher whipped you to do it) include all the steps and calculations on how you got from A to C…
…but it works.
Science is not about finding or knowing the “absolute truth” about the world*. It is about progressively enhancing the understanding of the world, through models that are simplified (and thus by their nature imperfect) outlines of the natural systems of the universe we inhabit.
*) That is the task of philosophers, holy men, and mathematicians.
What would be nice to see from Apple?
* MacBook Pros: Upgrade those SDHD card readers to SDXC, to do away with the pathetic mini-increments from SD (maxes out at 2 GiB) to SDHC (maxed out at 32 GiB); SDXC tops out at 2 TiB, which should give decent room for future expansion. You already did it for the iMacs, why do the pro customers have to wait out? (Do I have to point out my disdain for upgrades that only last you a year or two of tech progress?)
* Speaking of pathetic, give us something newer and better instead of that stone age filesystem called “HFS+”. For pete’s sake, it was introduced with Mac OS 8.1 back in 1998, and even at the time it was already a hack-and-polish of the HFS predecessor, which dates back to 1985, when Apple introduced hard drives for their Mac line. There was a new filesystem slated for implementation, called ZFS (developed by then-Sun, now-Oracle), which got some preparation for implementation in the 10.5/Leopard kernel, but these were scrubbed away thoroughly in 10.6/SnowLeopard, most likely due to licensing issues. So now we remain stuck on HFS+… Apple, get yourself together, and bring us into the 2000′s with a new filesystem. Throw your weight behind BTRFS, contribute something serious to the open-source world for once, and stop keeping your customers locked into polished-up relic technology, geez… (Uh, did anyone mention Trim and SSDs, btw?)
* Get on the USB 3.0 as well, and do it fast. FireWire looks to be going nowhere, judging from the slow and meagre adoption of FireWire 800, which has been available for 7 years, and the no-adoption of Firewire 3200, even though that’s been available for around 2 years. FireWire was very nice while it lasted, but face it, it’s rapidly receding into an ever-smaller niche.
edit, 9/oct: Mac users don’t have… USB 3.0… proper SSD support (that TRIM again), SATA 6Gbps. Catch up, Apple, give your customers something for the premium prices of your products.
These are my (fairly) quick, rough, responses to the arguments and claim of Global Warming skeptics or deniers, or what you and me might otherwise consider common-sense objections to what is perceived to be the “blue sky theorising” of climate scientisists and global warming theorists.
1) “It’s been the coldest winter for so and so many years, where’s the global warming?” – Me: Global Warming refers to climate changes, not weather as such. Weather and climate are two different things; weather is short-term, climate is long-term.
2) “Weather forecasts can’t even be known a week in advance, why should I believe in climate models that claim to predict 100 years in advance?”. Me: This is related to #1, but with some additions. First, weather can be fairly accurately predicted in a timeframe of a few days, but over 5 days it becomes difficult to make accurate prognoses, and over 10 days, essentially impossible (though it is a question of the quality of your sensor data and how much computing power your are willing to expend to get your predictions). As for predicting the climate decades or even a century into the future, keep in mind that these ‘predictions’ aren’t really such – there are a great number of models based on various scenarios and assumptions for population, economic, climate mechanic etc. – for the exact reason that the climate scientists know they’re dealign with an extremely complex system with many “dials to adjust” so to speak. Climate science isn’t an entirely mature science yet, and while the field has in the past given sometimes erroneous or exaggered predictions, it is constantly changign and improving as observations are included into models and build on previous assumptions.
3) “Past predictions were wrong” or “it’s much colder these years than they predicted in the 1990′s”. Me: Several rebuttals to this kind of argument, which is also related to #2. a) Climate science isn’t exact, much as most science dealing in macro phenomena today isn’t. Most science operating on major, complex systems don’t make ‘predictions’ – they typically give a statistical chance of something happening, based on known initial conditions and the models these calculate from. b) You can’t dismiss the science because it can’t give you micrometer perfect data to compare up against. Skeptics should in this regard ask themselves how precise matches they want before they will accept the science/models as if not valid, then good enough to be trustworthy. Compare to my example: Would you also dismiss weather forecasting if it said that the temperatur tomorrow in your town was 12 Degrees C, and the thermometor outside your kitchen window showed 14 C? (or 13. or 12,5. or 12,1 – at which precision are you content?). Does climate science have to score a bullseye all the time for you to accept it? c) Also see next point.
4) “Warming stopped in 1997″. Me: This claim is based on data series using 1997 or 1998 as the basis year to compare against. Why is 1997 so significant? Because there is a massive ocean phenomenon called “El Niño” going on in the Pacific Ocean roughly every 7 years, which happened to coincide with that year. Not only that, it was a particularly strong example of the phenomenon. You then ask how some water current in a far away ocean should skew the temperatures so much? Keep in mind that The Pacific Ocean isn’t some village pond – it’s the planets greatest ocean, and the breadth of El Nino is from Australia to Equador – approximately 1/4 the circumference of the Earth. – Using 1997 as the base year for plotting the temperature developments globally would then make it seem like the global warming either slowed, stopped, or even reversed, depending on how agressively you cook the data. Fact of the matter is that, no, the warming has not stopped or reversed since 1997, however! it is true that it seemed to slow between 1997 and 2007, but true to the long-term trend, set new records again in 2009. Global warming has not stopped, and besides, no-one claims that it chugs along at a fixed, unchanging rate.
5) “Warming slowed the last couple of years, it must be showing that global warming is coming to an end”. Me: No. Short-term observations cannot reliably be used to make long-term prognoses. An everyday example I can offer is that because you had a fair bit of cash left over this month from after taxes, rent and food expenses are paid (as opposed to “normal” months where your personal finances ar ejust about break-even), doesn’t mean that you’re a millionaire a year from now.
6) “Surface temperature records are useless due to the Urban Heat Island effect, and thus cannot be used to show global warming”. Me: The UHI distortions are relatively minor, and second, despite the alleged major distortions of the UHI, the land station records show the essentially exact same global rise in temperatures as what is measured from satellite monitoring of the atmosphere.
7) “Artic Ice meltoff is negligible, as the 2007 drop is reversed, and the Ice coverage is back to normal”. Me: Yes, the *area* is not so far from the normal (recent recorded figures), but the *volume* isn’t. The speed of Ice meltoff depends on ice volume, not ice surface area. A solid block of 1 cubic metre of ice will of course take much longer to melt off than a slab of ice 1 square metre on the side, but otherwise 1 centimetre thick. (Try it yourself with varying sizes of ice cubes in your soft drink). Relevant to the point, the estimated volume of ice (multi-year ice) is at an all time low for the recording period.
“All the planets in the solar system are warming, so humans obviously can’t be causing Earthly warming”. Me: This claim is negated by that direct readings of the sun (solar output, insolation) shows little or no correlation with the warming observed both here on Earth, or on other planets (which by the way, have quite complex weather/climate systems of their own).
—
I’ll add and update points as I think of them and as time allows. Thanks for reading.
Oh, and for further reading, I highly recommend John Cook’s site Skeptical Science, no matter what your persuasion or extent of knowledge of the global warming phenomenon, especially as it treats these points and many others in a very thorough and accessible fashion.
I purchased a NetGear ReadyNAS Duo a few months back to provide a reliable backup system for my data.
My impressions in brief:
+ It was cheap (found it on sale)
+ It readily accepts any 3,5″ hard drive, which by the way are easily mounted in the slide-in brackets, which lock solidly in place. I’m running with two 1,5 TB Western Digital Green Power disks, but it should also work fine with 2 TB drives. Do however take note that NetGear has a “certified drive list” of hard drives that they’ve tested themselves with the unit, and they maintain that drives not on this list may not work well with the unit.
+ It’s Mac-friendly – it runs AFP as well as CIFS (aka SMB) and NFS.
+ Single-process file transfer performance is decent – read speeds up to 30 MB/s when reading large files. Write speeds are typically 10 MB/s, 15 MB/s on a good day. 
+ It allow rsync’ed backups of your data on the unit to USB-attached external drives, for that extra helping of data protection.
- It’s performance is so-so if more than one task is running on it, ex. file transfer speed bottoms out if you’re counting up files in a directory already present on the unit at the same time as you copy stuff to and from it.
- Its rsync server is a joke which won’t work with any specific triggers fx. from a Linux command line, essentially making it useless for any somewhat seasoned used needing to do more than a bare bones backup job.
- Rsync to an external drive is glacially slow and will give you lots of error messages if you are backing up more than trivial amounts of data, as the time it takes will likely make the backup jobs overlap.
- The Bittorrent client is useful, but only for files smaller than 2 Gigs in size – anything larger than that somehow bugs the embedded Bittorrent software, and the unit will attempt to download again after a reboot. If you’re thinking of downloading and serving stuff from private trackers larger than 2 Gigs in size, think again, doing it with this unit will spoil your seed ratio and possibly get you banned. It shouldn’t get you into trouble in downloading from public trackers, but it will eat away your bandwidth allowance with your ISP however. This error was known at least since July 2008 and hasn’t been fixed.
- Using the unit with AFP from a Snow Leopard Mac will display the metadata files (if any of your Mac files has metadata attached to it, it will have an invisible file in the same directory, with he same name, but with “._” prefix on its name. It shouldn’t be visible, but it is anyway. Uncertain if it’s a problem with Snow Leopard or the ReadyNAS, if it is the latter, then it hasn’t been fixed for over a year.
Summarized: It’s a cheap NAS solution that gets the basics done, but other than that it’s obvious from the functionality problems and lack of relevant updates that Netgear wants you to shell out for something higher up the product line if you want it to work without hassles.
Personal opinion: Mixed feelings about it. It’s great that I can sleep well at night knowing my data is safe from disk failures, but NetGear’s don’t care attitude towards known bugs is a turn-off that is a stark contrast to my very good experience in the past with their actual network products, and on this basis I’m hesitant to buy from them again.
The iPhone 4 DOES have a reception issue. ))
(updated 2011-nov-23)
In short: Most likely. I’ll get right to the point and list some application alternatives (to what you find on the two major commercial alternatives to Linux; Apple’s Mac OS X and Microsoft’s Windows) I either use myself, or recommend to those who need such functionality.
Task – App on Mac or Windows – App on Linux
– Communication
Web browsing – Safari, Internet Explorer – Firefox/IceDove, Galeon, Konqueror
eMail – (Apple) Mail, Windows Mail - Thunderbird, Evolution
File Transfer via FTP – Transmit, Fetch – gFTP, FileZilla
Bittorrent File Transfers – Azureus, Transmission, uTorrent - Azureus, Transmission, Deluge
P2P downloading and sharing – Shareaza – aMule
IRC chat – Snak, mIRC – Xchat
Instant messenging (IM) – iChat, Adium – Pidgin, Empathy (or Skype, which is availabel for all, but not open software)
Remote Desktop (VNC) – Apple Remote Desktop – vino, vinagre
– Office and Productivity
Calendaring – iCal, Outlook – Evolution, Sunbird, Lightning for ThunderBird
Office Apps – Pages, Numbers, Microsoft Office – LibreOffice, AbiWord, GNUmeric
Anti-Virus (if needed) – too many to mention 
– Xclam
– Other productivity apps
Graphics Editing – Photoshop (professional) – Gimp
Vector Graphics - Illustrator (professional), Corel draw – Inkscape
3D rendering - AutoDesk 3DS Max, Lightwave – Blender
Music composing – Garageband – Rosegarden
Advanced Text Editing & Programming – TextMate, UltraEdit – Geany, XeMacs, Vim (and really, really many others)
IDE / Programming Environment – erm, various – Eclipse, NetBeans
– Utility functions and Media
Editing Text files - Textedit, Notepad, WordPad – gedit
Graphics viewer - Preview -EyeofGnome, GnomeViewer
Video editing – iMovie, Windows Movie Maker – Cinelerra
Video playback – Quicktime Player, Windows Media Player – VLC, Totem
Photo Cataloguing – iPhoto – F-spot, ShotWell
Music Cataloguing and playback – iTunes – Audacious, Banshee, Rhytmbox (and yes, it does work with your iPod)
– Other
Virtual Environments for software – Parallels, VMWare - Virtualbox OSE
.NET programming environment - Mono
For running largely *any* Windows app, you have Wine, The Windows Environment.
For any kind of web (apache), data (ftpd) or database hosting (mysql), Linux or other UNIX derivatives like it are basically the best solution for getting the job done; Unix machiens have been the backbone of the internet since its childhood. If stuff like this is what you need to do, you should look to a Server edition (fx. Ubuntu Server) of whatever Linux flavor you’re reading up on.
This is a cursory list of the things people do with their PC’s today. Obviously I can’t cover all tasks and jobs you need for your computer for, and if it’s not on this list, it does not mean that Linux can’t do what you’re looking for, merely that I’ve either not thought about that particular app, or that I’m too lazy to type it in. After two years with Linux as my OS of choice, I’ll say as much that I’m of the opinion that if there somethign you can’t do on Linux, it’s probably not worth bothering with. (Games? Get a console, PC’s are for serious business. Yes.)
I’ll gather up the various idiocy for this year in this post and update it as I go along.
First, some sadness from United Kingdom, which seems to be in a race (pun not originally intended) with the United States to get the spot as the world’s first totalitarian democracy in the modern age.
BRITAIN appears to be evolving into the first modern soft totalitarian state. As a sometime teacher of political science and international law, I do not use the term totalitarian loosely. There are no concentration camps or gulags but there are thought police with unprecedented powers to dictate ways of thinking and sniff out heresy, and there can be harsh punishments for dissent.
…
The Government is pushing ahead with legislation that will criminalise politically incorrect jokes, with a maximum punishment of up to seven years’ prison. The House of Lords tried to insert a free-speech amendment, but Justice Secretary Jack Straw knocked it out. It was Straw who previously called for a redefinition of Englishness and suggested the “global baggage of empire” was linked to soccer violence by “racist and xenophobic white males”. He claimed the English “propensity for violence” was used to subjugate Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and that the English as a race were “potentially very aggressive”. (As long as you are politically mainstream and politically correct, it seems speaking racially denigrating is OK. – p)
…
A 10-year-old child was arrested and brought before a judge, for having allegedly called an 11-year-old boya “Paki” and “bin Laden” during a playground argument at a primary school (the other boy had called him a skunk and a Teletubby). When it reached the court the case had cost taxpayers pound stg. 25,000. The accused was so distressed that he had stopped attending school. The judge, Jonathan Finestein, said: “Have we really got to the stage where we are prosecuting 10-year-old boys because of political correctness? There are major crimes out there and the police don’t bother to prosecute. This is nonsense.”
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – the first sacrifice upon the altar of political correctness is humor.
Read the full text for more such lunacy. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/thought-police-muscle-up-in-britain/story-e6frg6zo-1225700363959
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When getting to grips with Linux, you’ll find that you sometimes need to invoke odd kinds of three-finger-salutes, either when things don’t work (which hopefully rarely should be the case, provided that you don’t do amateur surgery on your installation on a regular basis), or when you want to make your box do stuff out of the ordinary. Let’s have a look.
ctrl + alt + F1 : Switches you to a fullscreen TTY (text terminal – shorthand for the command line interface. Useful if your display manager freezes up or oterwise misbehaves).
ctrl + alt + F7 : Switches you from a TTY back to a graphical environment such as Xorg (if you have one such running; sometimes you have to press F9 instead though).
ctrl + F2 : When using a graphical environment, this calls up a launcher where you can instantly execute a command line app (fx. to kill off rampant processes (ex. “sudo killall Xorg”) without opening the process list)
ctrl + alt + del : Probably what you remember most fondly from Windows, this particular three finger salute doesnt do quote the same in Linux; when booted into Ubuntu’s graphical environment, it calls up the reboot/shutdown menu where you can choose to restart, hibernate or switch off your computer. If you are in a terminal environment, it reboots your computer (if you want to shutdown instead, you’ll want the command “sudo halt”).
For a lot of different and usually very handly “linux cheat sheets” for terminal hints and help, have a look here: http://www.scottklarr.com/topic/115/linux-unix-cheat-sheets—the-ultimate-collection/