Slashdot Mirror

Well, Google at least knows the answers to the important questions: What is the answer to life, the universe and everything?

The definition of STUPIDITY http://video.google.de/videoplay?docid=-2599954293614654567

If you are looking for a book to teach you UI design

To teach, maybe. But there are several good and useful books, such as Designing from Both Sides of the Screen, Observing the User Experience (well that's more about your user testing), and others that are at the office and which I can't remember right now.

Only real diffrence is that evolutionary theory suggests that everything is completely random and the best pops out as successful

Actually, it doesn't. That's just what uninformed people think. Read, e.g., Rupert Riedl to get an idea of how far the theory has come since.

Anybody who thinks that using paper ballots with optical scanners is secure should have a look at "Hacking Democracy":

http://video.google.de/videoplay?docid=4463776866669054201

Basically, optical scanners can be hacked just as easily as touch screen voting machines, and election officials can easily prevent effective manual recounts.

The only reasonable voting system is one in which all counts are conducted by hand, in public view.

There are some things that don't need to be automated: sex, cooking, hair cutting, and, yes, vote counting.

On the subject of german radio clocks: [...] you have to be within about 2000km of Frankfurt/Main to receive the signal

It's a bit off Frankfurt actually, in Mainflingen, here's google maps' aerial view of the facility.

The signal that's broadcast from there is generated in Braunschweig by the PTB (the german counterpart to the NIST, sort of) using a couple of different technolgy caesium clocks. (wikipedia about the system).

Its range is very impressive, and even intercontinental reception can happen when all conditions (weather etc.) are just right, synchronisations as far as in Canada, the US and the Sahara have been reported. That's very rare though.

dropped the PageRank on many (mine included)

They also removed your /. ''homepage'', as they did with mine (for whatever reason).

search

CC.

Because I am not a citicen of the US. Of course I don't case what google shows on http://www.google.us/ [1] but if the logo appears on http://www.google.de/ or http://www.google.ch/ I am pretty pissed (which day is it actually? - so I can check). I predict they get flamed big time if the logo shows on http://www.google.ru/ - the russians won't like it at all.

And then - last not least is http://www.google.com/ - which is [2] "Commercial entities (worldwide)" - notice the worldwide here?

Martin

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.us
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.com

definately Did you mean: definitely site:slashdot.org

Close enough?

CC.

I think, the blogger, whom you copy-pasted here, got confused and confused you...

All those blogs, oh dear, how this confuses my simple mind ... CC.

Uplink was hard to find given the generic name

I want a server-side solution that can forward Skype calls to SIP, so that you can Skype my desk phone, or so that I can use my desk phone to call Skype contacts without each contact needing additional software.

Uplink was hard to find given the generic name

I want a server-side solution that can forward Skype calls to SIP, so that you can Skype my desk phone, or so that I can use my desk phone to call Skype contacts without each contact needing additional software.

Not that I disagree on principle, but ...

"The drunken monkey hypothesis: the study of fruit-eating animals could lead to an evolutionary understanding of human alcohol abuse" (link, more)

CC.

http://www.google.de/search?q=50000000+%2F+((3.5*24*60)%5E2) = 1.96837994

Don't worry about the endless Canon / Nikon fanboy debates

For the most part. However, I have a Nikon D80, and there are issues with this camera as far as astrophotography. It's a great camera overall, but the amp glow sucks for longer exposure astro shots...

Of course the absolute pitches are just convention, but, as already noted elsewhere, the relative pitches (frequency ratios a.k.a. musical intervals) aren't. They are more or less given by the physical laws of sound generation and how our ears and brains perceive a mixture of partials and assign one or more pitches to it. It's true that, as far as our knowledge of history goes back, the Greeks (and possibly the Babylonians before them) invented those "natural" scales, but that doesn't mean that they are totally arbitrary.

There are other kinds of instruments which produce different, non-harmonic spectra, especially in non-Western music, and these also use different scales (like in gamelan music). It has been argued that the scales these musical cultures use relate to the spectra of their instruments as well, see Sethares, Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale. Specifically, it seems that scale pitches are usually very near to points where the total auditory dissonance attains local minima. (Auditory dissonance is due to different partials exciting the same "critical band" on the cochlea, when hearing two or more complex tones sounding together in musical intervals or chords.)

Another possible (but, AFAIK, at the moment still hypothetical) explanation of at least the "harmonic" scales is certain kinds of "phase-locking" oscillations of pairs of neuron groups forming a kind of "neural oscillators" with non-linear resonances.

Also, note that we share a lot of our ear apparatus (and quite possibly also a part of the central auditory nervous system) with other mammals, so some of this might actually be relevant to other mammals as well.

Businesses don't need that choice, because they are allowed to downgrade from Vista to XP as they like. There's a detailed description which OS you can downgrade to which other (older, similar) OS in this PDF , and surprisingly it's only for the business versions. They actually give you a new key to install XP on any box that came with a Vista Pro OEM version if you need one. You can upgrade back to the "original" OS whenever you want. More info.

That's a lot of stories about the same thing, maybe we better refine that search by poster

Oh. Wait. Nevermind. Zonk really is the man...

Someone missed to post the 12th anniversary version of the story.

CC.

Can we have version control in the file system, please?

kids, kids, kids - don't think to much - do more sports!
(because you know - if you think to much you might come up with some unplesant ideas
http://video.google.de/videosearch?q=terrorstorm )

Hitler-youth anyone? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler_Youth

I think Peter Dueberg may have gotten it right.

http://video.google.de/videoplay?docid=39837066684 83511310&q=hiv%2Baids%2Bfact+or+fiction

Actually, I think the example given in the article about Google already doing this outside of the US and Canada is a pretty good demonstration that this is, in fact, possible:

Try it yourself. As I write this, if you search for "BMW" at www.google.de -- the German version of Google's site -- you get only ads that are friendly to the car company. If you search for "BMW" on www.google.com -- the U.S. version of the site -- the first ad that appears in the right hand column is for Infiniti. The Trademark Protection Act merely extends the same rights already enjoyed by mark holders throughout the rest of the world to Utah.

If you haven't read the article, I'd recommend it. This is one of those rare cases when an article is actually well thought-out and well written.

I can connect to Google France, Google Japan, Google Germany and so forth. I used to be able to connect to Google China - you can even see it in google.com's search for Google China and the cache for it. But nowadays, it just redirects to Google.com. They don't want Westerners able to see what people can and can't search for in China. So what else is new, the corporate stooges are saying BS to the press, while in the back they are continuing to do what they do and are attempting to hide what they are doing.

Netcraft.com rankings: http://toolbar.netcraft.com/stats/topsites?s=2629A F9E8226E9D5E21D0E6F8945#89"

1 http://www.google.com/ November 1998 Google Inc. Go US
2 http://www.yahoo.com/ August 1995 Inktomi Corporation Go US
3 http://www.google.de/ April 1999 Google Inc. Go US
4 https://www.google.com/ May 2002 Google Inc. Go US
5 http://www.google.co.uk/ April 1999 Google Inc. Go US
6 http://www.google.fr/ November 2001 Google Inc. Go US
7 http://www.microsoft.com/ August 1995 Microsoft Corp Go US
8 http://mail.google.com/ June 2004 Google Inc. Go US
9 http://news.bbc.co.uk/ December 1997 BBC News Online Go UK
10 http://www.bbc.co.uk/ August 1995 BBC Internet Services, Docklands. Go UK

Slashdot is some 89 today.
Looks like the rank depends on who does the counting.

I have been preaching this for years. Glad raises the topic.
Actually, a year ago I wrote a song inspired by some concept art from the 70s:

Here it is, for your convenience, hope you like it. :)

ARTIFICIAL SUMMER BREEZE (BERNAL SPHERE)

Have you heard the news my dear?
Were moving in our Bernal Sphere
I read the brochure, it was clear
the futures here within a year.

I bought a semidetatched place
close to the zero G estates.
well work on earths first SPS
a giant maser, whod have guessed?

REFRAIN:
We will wake up every morning
under our acacia tree
life looks just like california
at the end of history
A Bernal Sphere, a Bernal Sphere,
a Bernal Sphere, my dear!
Ohhh...Were moving in...

Our kids will attend junior high
first generation born in sky
everyone will life in peace
in artificial summer breeze

Happy hour 24
everything you dream and more
interstellar travel tickets
outdoor family spacewalk picnics

REFRAIN:
We will wake up every morning
under our acacia tree
life looks just like california
at the end of history
A Bernal Sphere, a Bernal Sphere,
a Bernal Sphere, my dear!
Ohhh...Were moving in...

                ---

BRIDGE:
Well go jogging on the riverside
breakfast on our own terrace
floating high above the earth
well go and surf the skies.

REPRISE:
Come take my hand and have no fear
our future is the Bernal Sphere
but then again on second look
just sketches from a 70s book.

Don't know about movies, but the iPod Invisa will hold every photograph ever taken: http://video.google.de/videoplay?docid=-6959001532 717637399&q=ipod+snl

Since I live in Germany and I don't watch TV as a principle, I think this fee is imbecile and unjust. And unless the penalty for doing this is death or going to jail, I am just not going to comply. The GEZ bastards cannot enter your home without your permission, so just tell them to go fuck themselves.

To which I say...

I've been wating a while to place this one, but the hour has finally come :)

Hundreds of enemies aren't possible on current gen consoles? Ever played Earth Defence Force?

So can Google.

http://www.google.de/search?hl=en&q=sqrt(-1)

Well,

thre are only 3 kown buildings, big buildings, that crashed/collapsed after a plane hit them.

For the 2 towers of WTC it seems very obvious to me that the got pulled down by a controlled demolition and not by the burning fuel of the plane. You clearly see that on lots of CNN videos. Several organizations in the US try to invstiate this issue, e.g. http://video.google.de/videoplay?docid=-1272980089 639960023&q=loose+change (the .de domain is no problem for english speaking people only the subutitles in this movie are german) I guess you easyly can google for similar stuff.

Anyway: a space elevator likely will much better defended than NYC WTC ;D and definitely much more robust. Also depending on the way how you build the elevator you could imagine that the lower end of the elevator is in the upper atmosphere, lets say in 15 km to 20 km hight. That could be a big platform which you reach with air ships. No "standard" (private air craft or commercial airline) plane can reach that hight.

angel'o'sphere

Of course you can resort to other, harder to calculate questions like: "What is the answer to life, the universe and everything?" Oops, Computers seem to have become much faster since Deep Thought! :-)

God. That video isn't just humbling, it's damn near humiliating. Compare it to the nextstep 3 demo someone else posted I think today. It isn't that nextstep isn't better - in many places it is, by far. But only in detail, and only some ways. There's stuff in NLS I still want. Anybody else seen folding that good? Where? I want it. What the hell have we been doing for forty years?

Looking at those 20 year old GUIs always makes me sad, since it shows how basically nothing has changed since then. We got more colors, higher resolutions and a few more mouse buttons, but the basic user interaction is still very much the same as back then and still flawed in many ways. For example no mainstream GUI today manages to properly merge the power of the command line with the ease of use of a mouse driven interface, instead both act side by side, where the most 'integration' you get is lausy copy&paste support of filenames from GUI to CLI, however not the other way around. But thats really just the tip of the iceberg, computer interfaces could do so much more, but most of them don't even try. Don't get me wrong, some transparency, drop shadows and other effects can help, but they are really just polishing of something that is broken at a much deeper level.

As another drastic example of the lack of GUI progress one can look at this NeXTSTEP presentation from 1992, even today that video still shows plenty of features which a normal Linux or Windows still can't compete with and with MacOSX it doesn't really look that much better, while it is actually based on NeXTSTEP, it has allocated a whole bunch of cruft from old MacOS, which doesn't really make the overall experince all that good.

... can be found here:
http://video.google.de/videoplay?docid=19129148773 97973721&q=%22zinc+oxide%22

probably as just many members of the techno-gizmo brain-washed generation, I can't follow the historical part of the article. However I can read the Times, and Michael Elliot and the others still create pieces worth mentioning. It's maybe a part of the "old media" that couldn't be yet digested by the junior?

Anyway, the raised points are valid and makes you wonder: what is it worth writing about? Seth Godin (video)gives no clues, but makes you think about it.

Bush finished what Bin Laden wanted

Lets be honest here, you were scammed but why? What was it in the e-mail that immidialtly send you to the telephone ready to hand over your credit card number.

You now know that you been had and that it was stupid, you are, judging from your ID, a fairly recent slashdot user but the mere fact that you are here probably means you have heard about phishing scams before especially in concern to paypal and that in general handing over your credit card number is a bad idea.

Why take prostitutes, when your followers can do the same for you?

It is NOT an established fact that comments or trackbacks are part and parcel to a blog

If that were so, you could get a site indexed just by leaving a well-worded racist comment and then lodging a complaint.

The quoted comment isn't worse than a thousand others on Daily Kos (search [google.com]) Democratic Underground (search [google.com]).

Holocaust Denial
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/6/13/162842/565 [dailykos.com]

General Antisemitism
http://news.google.de/news?hl=en&ned=&ie=UTF-8&q=s ite%3Aindymedia.org+jews&btnG=Search+News [google.de]

Jewish conspiracy for 9/11
http://news.google.de/news?hl=en&ned=&q=jews+wtc&b tnG=Search+News [google.de]

Considering your abject failure to cite even one thing you claimed to be citing in the first two, I didn't bother to waste my time even checking this.

Cite some actual articles or go away.

It is NOT an established fact that comments or trackbacks are part and parcel to a blog

If that were so, you could get a site indexed just by leaving a well-worded racist comment and then lodging a complaint.

The quoted comment isn't worse than a thousand others on Daily Kos (search [google.com]) Democratic Underground (search [google.com]).

Holocaust Denial
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/6/13/162842/565 [dailykos.com]

General Antisemitism
http://news.google.de/news?hl=en&ned=&ie=UTF-8&q=s ite%3Aindymedia.org+jews&btnG=Search+News [google.de]

Jewish conspiracy for 9/11
http://news.google.de/news?hl=en&ned=&q=jews+wtc&b tnG=Search+News [google.de]

Considering your abject failure to cite even one thing you claimed to be citing in the first two, I didn't bother to waste my time even checking this.

Cite some actual articles or go away.

You're begging the question. It is NOT an established fact that comments or trackbacks are part and parcel to a blog. And it's not stated specifically anywhere in Google News' terms or conditions, at least as far as I can find. If that were so, you could get a site indexed just by leaving a well-worded racist comment and then lodging a complaint. That's why sites like Slashdot have disclaimers.

The quoted comment isn't worse than a thousand others on Daily Kos (search) Democratic Underground (search). But that's the whole point. They're COMMENTS.

Typical. Claim with no backup. It's amazing how liberals are engaged in all this bad behavior that nobody can ever seem to source...

If you'd like examples of racist news items from the left at Google News, here's a couple to get you started:

Holocaust Denial
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/6/13/162842/565

General Antisemitism
http://news.google.de/news?hl=en&ned=&ie=UTF-8&q=s ite%3Aindymedia.org+jews&btnG=Search+News

Jewish conspiracy for 9/11
http://news.google.de/news?hl=en&ned=&q=jews+wtc&b tnG=Search+News

It is censorship, but Google's a privately-held company and can censor their content all they want.

You're begging the question. It is NOT an established fact that comments or trackbacks are part and parcel to a blog. And it's not stated specifically anywhere in Google News' terms or conditions, at least as far as I can find. If that were so, you could get a site indexed just by leaving a well-worded racist comment and then lodging a complaint. That's why sites like Slashdot have disclaimers.

The quoted comment isn't worse than a thousand others on Daily Kos (search) Democratic Underground (search). But that's the whole point. They're COMMENTS.

Typical. Claim with no backup. It's amazing how liberals are engaged in all this bad behavior that nobody can ever seem to source...

If you'd like examples of racist news items from the left at Google News, here's a couple to get you started:

Holocaust Denial
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/6/13/162842/565

General Antisemitism
http://news.google.de/news?hl=en&ned=&ie=UTF-8&q=s ite%3Aindymedia.org+jews&btnG=Search+News

Jewish conspiracy for 9/11
http://news.google.de/news?hl=en&ned=&q=jews+wtc&b tnG=Search+News

It is censorship, but Google's a privately-held company and can censor their content all they want.

Then again, there are references to morgellons.org in Usenet back to 2002:

http://groups.google.de/groups/search?q=morgellons &start=60&scoring=d&hl=de&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&

(I don't know if one can fool Google's Usenet archive with a faked article date, though.) All those articles are in the paranoid conspiracy discussions, so that's where I'd file this topic, as well.

> No", who would run PHP on Java anyway?

Those who are fed up with the JSP crap: http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2004/06/09/jsf. html?page=1

> Why?

Because Apache/PHP on Tomcat delivers java based content more than two times faster than Tomcat standalone: http://php-java-bridge.sourceforge.net/NEWS

> Why would open-sourcing it help?

So that we don't have to re-invent the wheel everytime a new API comes out: http://php-java-bridge.sourceforge.net/server/docu mentation/API/javax/script/Bindings.html. Note that it is (C) by Nandika Jayawardana , Sanka Samaranayake, a clean-room implementation of the abandoned JSR223 API from SUN: http://www.jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/edr/ jsr223/

Also note that the JSR223 API is *not* part of the official java, rather a re-written API which has been inspired by JSR223. If java were free software (not necessarily open-source) that crappy JSR223 API whould have never appeared.

> No, what is lacking?

Support for Unix Domain Sockets. Because of this the FreeBSD Java implementation is 300 times (!) slower than the Java implementations on Linux, Solaris or Windows:

http://groups.google.de/group/comp.lang.php/browse _frm/thread/1eeeddb37086688/8d3414d188a327a9?rnum= 2#8d3414d188a327a9

And

http://php-java-bridge.sourceforge.net/snaps/FreeB SD/TestServ.java

But we all digress: This article is looking for hints on learning Japanese; maybe German is just too easy (and it's currently "in beta" - remaining issues will be settled right after the release of Duke Nukem Forever for Windows Vista though)... ;-)

It seems that they do give you a notice: see http://www.google.de/search?hl=de&q=stormfront&btn G=Suche&meta= , for example.

They could start by warning people from Germany, France and Switzerland that they censor their results:

http://www.google.fr/search?hl=fr&q=stormfront&btn G=Recherche+Google&meta=
http://www.google.de/search?hl=fr&q=stormfront&btn G=Recherche+Google
http://www.google.ch/search?hl=fr&q=stormfront&btn G=Recherche+Google&meta=

How do you think the people in this Austrian village feel?