Domain: livejournal.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to livejournal.com.
Comments · 2,274
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Re:Bullshit
We have much more complex ballots in the United States than elsewhere.
In Canada, voters only have 1 decision: their representative for parliament.
In the United States, ballots can have, literally, dozens of choices. Presidential, senate, house of representatives, propositions, and various local elected officials. All of which adds up to dozens of options.
Hand counting so many options would be much more complex than in a country like Canada.
Zestyping (see grandparent) described this in his dissertation: http://zestyping.livejournal.com/234617.html.
Daniel -
Too simplisticYour post is simply a rehash of this erroneous analysis. It was discussed here and debunked here
Essentially, this is how you should look at that first graph: "Mr. Ferris makes one of the biggest errors in statistics by not accounting for other factors that changed over the same period. In fact, I could plot the same graph showing a steady increase in youth incarceration rates beginning in the mid-1990s, but it would be equally flawed (although somehow I doubt that it would get as many diggs). The point is that an analysis of crime needs to use multivariate regression. Simply making a two-dimensional plot and attributing the subsequent drop in violent youth crime to playing video games, as some people have unfortunately done based on this graph, is simply wrong when more significant factors like economic conditions, youth incarceration, and passage of state laws that try children as adults dramatically increased over the same period. In fact, it's theoretically possible for exposure to media violence to cause a small increase in violent youth crime and yet to observe the same downward trend when these other factors have a larger and negative influence on violent crime rates. Just my two cents. " My personal opinion is to agree with you, but your analysis of that data is too simplisitc. -
Too simplisticYour post is simply a rehash of this erroneous analysis. It was discussed here and debunked here
Essentially, this is how you should look at that first graph: "Mr. Ferris makes one of the biggest errors in statistics by not accounting for other factors that changed over the same period. In fact, I could plot the same graph showing a steady increase in youth incarceration rates beginning in the mid-1990s, but it would be equally flawed (although somehow I doubt that it would get as many diggs). The point is that an analysis of crime needs to use multivariate regression. Simply making a two-dimensional plot and attributing the subsequent drop in violent youth crime to playing video games, as some people have unfortunately done based on this graph, is simply wrong when more significant factors like economic conditions, youth incarceration, and passage of state laws that try children as adults dramatically increased over the same period. In fact, it's theoretically possible for exposure to media violence to cause a small increase in violent youth crime and yet to observe the same downward trend when these other factors have a larger and negative influence on violent crime rates. Just my two cents. " My personal opinion is to agree with you, but your analysis of that data is too simplisitc. -
Re:Base64
OK, so apparently (and this is again from hints on the web, not my doing) all you need to do to pass that whole part 1 of the test
is to go to http://wanted-master-software-developers.com/ and the URL will change to http://wanted-master-software-developers.com/?key=
so you paste the word coLLAborATE at the end: http://wanted-master-software-developers.com/?key=coLLAborATE and you get to the next step.
For an explanation of the in between parts see http://edschweppe.livejournal.com/88912.html -
Re:4 versions of Linux
Actually Fedora IS one of them
... See http://spevack.livejournal.com/40827.html. -
Re:The Philosopher's Axe
This is my father's axe. I've replaced the blade twice and the handle three times, but it's still my father's axe.
Some more discussion about it here. It's also called the Ship of Theseus Paradox, which the discussion references.
There's a mention of Pratchett's Scone of Stone in "The Fifth Element." Is that what you're thinking of? -
Re:Damn good article about faith...true.
by the way, i just recently saw articles on "the holographic principle." It states that the universe is made up from information and that matter/energy are merely accidentals which pose resistance to the flow of information. How the information moves is dictated by "laws" on the boundaries of preceding dimensions. So for example a 2d boundary describes a 3d, this last dimension acting as a projection of the last. The catch is that the dimensions are nested, so they inform each other, like links on a chain.
it's all quite interesting, perhaps the problem in understanding this problem lies in language. using words like "laws" and "random" when signifying cosmic, or even meta-cosmic properties tends to muddle the whole thing. Ironically, mathematical language is what gives us that middle point.
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Similar event occured to me.
A similar event occurred to me, except in my case. The registar messed up. I had paid all my fees etc.
This ended up killing part of the community I was running, we still haven't found everyone who used to use it.
I considered buying the domain back, but the moment I attempted to, they increased the price to 1000USD. -
Re:social web sites
Just because LiveJournal sells something doesn't mean people are buying.
Wait a minute... did you...? I'm sorry (*cough*).
Not me, but people do buy. I don't think there are any official figures, but http://news.livejournal.com/100876.html suggests that the number of permanent accounts sold last time has a lower bound of 1040. -
Re:My Macbook
Sorry - but that strikes me as an "Oh Really?!?" moment, in regard to windows at least. Explorer crashes fairly consistently on any version of windows - the big advantage of XP is that when explorer crashes it doesn't generally crash everything else with it and *usually* restarts itself.
Not that I haven't seen that too under XP. But yes, it's a heck of an improvement.
Now I have officially wimped out and am dualbooting to play games under windows, which really simplifies many things since I keep everything else on the Ubuntu partition except the games and a copy of Firefox and utorrent to download patches with. But if it wasn't for games, I believe I'd be done with Windows.
Vista can *have* it's "So Beautiful, So Disturbing" appeal. As it happens I have a os that looks good in jeans even when she has dirt under her fingernails.
Pug -
"Proud?" father of a hack
It's one thing to run your business systems well. But I do have to point out that hacks to code and systems are required from time to time. If your business is doing anything beyond just using single package A, there is always integration with other packages. Things go wrong. People have to recover somehow.
I'm particularly... well I'm not proud of this, but I feel accomplished for figuring it out. The pipe command of << stopped working on my jumpstart, and while I don't know WHY it happened, I figured out what it was breaking and worked around it. It's annoying, yes, but at least now google will hopefully pick it up, and the next person who has to do the same ugly ugly hack will not be alone.
In the comic, as a sysadmin, I'm the one who's breaking the branch that I'm tied to, so instead I'm tying it to 10 other small branches that would break one at a time, but collectively, hold together. At least, sometimes that's how it goes. But at least the next person who has the error knows that doing this might work for them. -
Why is Linux not at fault????
I'll start off by saying I don't intend this to be flamebait, and that I've read the article but not all the responses.
1. http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=freeagent-pro-320gb-usb2.0-esata-firew-external-hd&vgnextoid=0e4e26bbdae90110VgnVCM100000f5ee0a0aRCRD&vgnextchannel=03d5368407f70110VgnVCM100000f5ee0a0aRCRD&reqPage=Model
Where does it say here that is supports Linux??
2. From what I've read from http://alienghic.livejournal.com/382903.html the drive has no spin-down/up problems on the e-SATA interface in Linux. Equally it has no problems with USB in Windows. So surely the issue is how Linux is handling this power state feature (or USB)? Why does it have to be the manufacturers fault if they implement something that it is not neccesarily handled correctly or at all by Linux, yet is on another OS (heaven forbid that OS by Windows).
Now I'm sure this will cause some anger amongst the /. crowd, which isn't my intention but perhaps it isn't fair to blame the manufacturer if the real cause is the OS? -
False Dilemma
Dvorak probably hasn't spent much time in Africa. In my travels in the poorest province of South Africa, I came across a lot of kids who had food and shelter (humble but sufficient) and were dying for computers. They want to learn, to be part of modern society, which they are fully aware of because many of them have DVD players at home and they rent American movies. Africa is not mostly made of starving babies with flies in their eyes.
I don't mean to diminish the suffering of the many places where people are starving, and obviously in those areas people need food and medical care and more basic education before they get to computers. But it is absurd to complain about a useful humanitarian effort because it's not a different humanitarian effort. It's not like the companies that make the components for the OLPC would be making foodstuffs otherwise. The OLPC has the potential to serve a very real need in those areas, and perhaps develop people who would go on to help with the problems he's concerned with.
In any case, I'm not so concerned about the Dvorak troll as I am about perpetuating the ideas that a) "poor" areas need only food and medicine and b) anything other than that is somehow a waste of resources. It's a complex world and there are many ways to help. If one inspires you, do it, it's better than doing nothing.
Cheers. -
Re:What the poorer countries really needIs for the richer countries to stop giving them access to easy credit, foreign aid and programs like this.
No, there's a place for foreign aid. Consider the history of 'developed' countries like the US and Canada, which were built up from virgin nature in a little less than two centuries. In both cases, large-scale development projects were underwritten almost completely by government. Railroads, the highway system and especially rural electrification were all heavily subsidised by the central government, with little or no thought of ever getting a direct return on the investment.
Give them trade opportunities instead.Trade opportunities are critical, that's true. But they have to be fair trade opportunities. Typically what we see are deals that maximise the extraction of natural resources, with very little incentive at all to produce finished goods or to provide services. Quite the contrary, trade negotiations are usually excuses for developed countries to create new export markets at the expense of local industry.
The EU's European Partnership Agreements (EPA) are a perfect case in point. They have manipulated small countries in Africa, the Pacific and the Carribean into accepting virtually free trade conditions where imports from Europe are concerned, but given almost nothing in return. In fact, import duties on a number of critical products (e.g. coffee, copra and sugar) would rise rather than fall.
The conditions are so punitive that the majority are outright opposing it. The minister of Trade for the small developing nation I live in actually sat there at a major public forum and politely but quite firmly told the EU that no deal at all was better than the terms they were offering.
That's the only way you are going to encourage them to create real economies that will alleviate poverty. The obstacles to these people creating wealth and getting themselves out of poverty are a whole hell of a lot more complicated than just access to computers...I agree with your statement, but not with the implications. There is a definite need for large-scale donor support in order to build basic infrastructure. And these days, the single most critical element of infrastructure is communications. I write a weekly column on ICT in development for one of our national newspapers, and I'm constantly harping on this note. Here's an excerpt from a recent column:
"When asked to forecast growth and capacity in markets such as Vanuatu's, many analysts will simply plot a linear curve that shows a slow but steady increase based on previous trends. The problem is: they're right. Or they will be, if we listen to them.
"You see, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you act on the assumption that nobody will use a network, then - surprise surprise - nobody will. But it works the other way as well. If you simply build out the network, trusting that people will use it... well, they will. What for? It's impossible to say for sure. My guess is that it will dovetail itself into normal life, more or less as described above. But honestly, the only way to be sure is to roll out the network first, then wait and see.
"This kind of advice is, unfortunately, the worst kind of absurdity to planners, donors and business people alike. There's really only one argument for it, and that is: It Works."To make a long story slightly shorter: Invest heavily and well in infrastructure. The XO is a great investment, because it requires so little else to start being useful.
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Re:Deadly Power Games in the Kremlin
Chechen population has really a lot to thank Putin's FSB for...
for saving them from iraq/afgan chaos and genocide GB planted for them.
May be visual clues could open your eyes,
http://fenrir93.livejournal.com/17143.html
although MI6-washed brains usually have no chance to recover. -
Re:Putin does not need to rig any election.
Pretty much everyone here knows, that the election was forged. There is no doubt about that, as there multiple evidence from variuos sources. Some believe, Russia goes back into 1937, but, on the other hand, if you remember, last US elections was no better.
:( Still both Putin and Bush have won. I don't think, that without forgery, the victory of the "Edinaya Rossiya" (Putin's party) would be that clear.
I don't know, if there are better countries, where democracy and plebiscite still matter. :( -
Re:ExplanationThere's no "explanation", the interpretation of the graph given in the blog is simply wrong. If you look at the what the blogger says, he thinks that voters for all parties are comparable, eg
If the election is free and unbiased the turnout % depends on the local factors like weather. When the ballots are stuffed or when the voters are forced to attend you will see the graph like this.
This is wrong of course: different geographic populations and different demographics behave very differently, which is why for example the US presidential candidates change their message to voters in each state and age group, and why proportions of invalid ballots in poor rural neighbourhoods aren't comparable with those in richer city neighbourhoods.It's really not surprising that voters for the most popular mainstream party in Russia behave differently from voters for say neo-nazi fringe parties. But the blogger thinks neo-nazi voters or communist voters are exactly comparable to Putin voters, and because he sees different statistical patterns, he thinks there's been fraud.
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Where did the data come from?
The altz_gamer blog entry gives a link to this Excel file with the raw results. Where did this data come from?
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Re:Unsurprisingly...
So what is the ultimate goal here. Is Wikkipedia really an open encyclopedia accessible to everyone or id it an exclusive club of yes men attempting to push some hidden agenda.
"Yes."
For a lot of topics, Der Fuehrer Jimbo or one of his cronies probably don't give a rat's ass. So they wind up leaving those alone, at which point other dynamics (also here) come into play.
And if it is even remotely the second, I could see how exposing the corruption would be a serious things. It threatens the validity of the agenda. But I have to ask, if there is no agenda, then why would corrupt practices be something of interest.
Corrupt practices should be of interest on the basis that they're corrupt, but also because everything has real-world implications. Articles on a country have real implications - they can impact tourism, they can impact politics, they can impact how people view the country. Articles on a political dispute, or a political leader, can have a formative impact on how they are viewed, especially as Wikipedia has hit so high in its search rankings seeing as it's essentially one gigantic fucking linkfarm (that gives out no bump to anyone else now that they implemented external-link "nofollow" tags).
Psychological research for decades has shown what ought to be pretty obvious - the first impression someone gets about something is always the strongest, and absent a massive shock or mound of evidence, will always have more impact on thought patterns than later information. Wikipedia, by virtue of being engineered to hit high in the search rankings, is the first place most people will get information on a given random topic.
That makes it important.
And if there is an agenda, what might it be? I know they have had slanted coverage of politically charged events. Things like one paragraph somewhat hidden on other pages explaining the real problems with the Katrina response and three quarters of the main article focusing on the government, Bush and how evil they are. But I doubt their motivation is purely political.
Depends what article and who you're asking. A number of $cientologists work to bias the hell out of $cientology articles - hiding what the Cult of $cientology wants hidden from view, such as the fact that the "Oxford Capacity Analysis" (their rigged personality test) has nothing to do with Oxford University for example. A rather sizable group of Arabs work to whitewash and control any article related to Islam and regularly war over the Israel/Palestinian issue... the trick is getting yourself entrenched and acquiring allies who are equally fanatical on some other topic that you don't really give a rat's ass about. You scratch their back, they scratch yours... and at the end of the day, the result is that most of the administrators on the site aren't set up about making a better encyclopedia, but keeping an article under their control and helping their new "friends" do the same on theirs.
Check out This page as one example. What do we see? A user named OrangeMike, who just "happens" to be a well-known Democrat operative in Milwaukee and longstanding friend of communist mayor Frank Zeidler comes along and starts whitewashing articles that mention his friend, and abuses his connections to other admins to get his opponents banned. The situation is almost a textbook example of what Parker Peters refers to.
A short time later, after questions of his conduct are removed from >his Adminship candidacy page by his abusive-a -
Re:Unsurprisingly...
So what is the ultimate goal here. Is Wikkipedia really an open encyclopedia accessible to everyone or id it an exclusive club of yes men attempting to push some hidden agenda.
"Yes."
For a lot of topics, Der Fuehrer Jimbo or one of his cronies probably don't give a rat's ass. So they wind up leaving those alone, at which point other dynamics (also here) come into play.
And if it is even remotely the second, I could see how exposing the corruption would be a serious things. It threatens the validity of the agenda. But I have to ask, if there is no agenda, then why would corrupt practices be something of interest.
Corrupt practices should be of interest on the basis that they're corrupt, but also because everything has real-world implications. Articles on a country have real implications - they can impact tourism, they can impact politics, they can impact how people view the country. Articles on a political dispute, or a political leader, can have a formative impact on how they are viewed, especially as Wikipedia has hit so high in its search rankings seeing as it's essentially one gigantic fucking linkfarm (that gives out no bump to anyone else now that they implemented external-link "nofollow" tags).
Psychological research for decades has shown what ought to be pretty obvious - the first impression someone gets about something is always the strongest, and absent a massive shock or mound of evidence, will always have more impact on thought patterns than later information. Wikipedia, by virtue of being engineered to hit high in the search rankings, is the first place most people will get information on a given random topic.
That makes it important.
And if there is an agenda, what might it be? I know they have had slanted coverage of politically charged events. Things like one paragraph somewhat hidden on other pages explaining the real problems with the Katrina response and three quarters of the main article focusing on the government, Bush and how evil they are. But I doubt their motivation is purely political.
Depends what article and who you're asking. A number of $cientologists work to bias the hell out of $cientology articles - hiding what the Cult of $cientology wants hidden from view, such as the fact that the "Oxford Capacity Analysis" (their rigged personality test) has nothing to do with Oxford University for example. A rather sizable group of Arabs work to whitewash and control any article related to Islam and regularly war over the Israel/Palestinian issue... the trick is getting yourself entrenched and acquiring allies who are equally fanatical on some other topic that you don't really give a rat's ass about. You scratch their back, they scratch yours... and at the end of the day, the result is that most of the administrators on the site aren't set up about making a better encyclopedia, but keeping an article under their control and helping their new "friends" do the same on theirs.
Check out This page as one example. What do we see? A user named OrangeMike, who just "happens" to be a well-known Democrat operative in Milwaukee and longstanding friend of communist mayor Frank Zeidler comes along and starts whitewashing articles that mention his friend, and abuses his connections to other admins to get his opponents banned. The situation is almost a textbook example of what Parker Peters refers to.
A short time later, after questions of his conduct are removed from >his Adminship candidacy page by his abusive-a -
Unsurprisingly...look at the chain of wikipedia's former administrators who've been booted off the project.
Look at how they operate. Parker Peters did a fantastic job writing it up: http://parkerpeters.livejournal.com/
If you look at every one of these cases, who keeps popping up? It's the same group of editors - David Gerard, JayJG, JzG, SlimVirgin, etc... all with the blessing of Der Fuehrer Jimbo.SECOND - Interesting emails have come to me. They are transcripts of the private "discussion" surrounding the banning of anyone who disagrees with abusive administrators in general on wikien-l, and in particular, my own ban - which was placed, not for the lying reasons they gave, but because I was making sense, I had exposed their lies and abuses, and they knew that I had the proper evidence on a CheckUser that they had deliberately lied about. They source to David Gerard, and my analysis was spot-on; he was the genesis of the banning campaign, which is no surprise, as he's always been the most totalitarian, corrupt, hotheaded, and completely worthless representative of any of the Wikipedia and Wikien-l higher-ups.
Such is the Wikipedia way, the way that exists in most totalitarian states; if you are not right, you simply kill the messenger. They are doing their level best to do this, to this day. That they are trying to close off and shutter anyone who exposes them, and further hiding their back channels to hide their misdeeds, is plenty of proof.
If Der Fuehrer Jimbo did bother to pop up on Slashdot as a few posters have wished he would, what would he say? It'd doubtlessly be the same thing he says on Wikipedia as he goes around threatening to ban anyone who exposes the abuses of his buddy clique as a so-called "troll." -
Re:Putinist Russia
It is not clear yet.
SUP is controlled by Alexander Mamut - one of the powerbrokers during Eltsyn times. Right now he lives and owns businesses in Russia, which means that he is loyal to Putin.
It is interesting that two of the top Russian bloggers[Russian] officially work for SUP (Anton Nossik,Roustam Agadamov).
Politically aforementioned SUP bloggers distance themselves from support of Putin, and quite often Mr. Nossik expressed mild political opposition to Putin.
The purchase of Livejournal is a pure formality in terms of Russian politics, since SUP has been controlling cyrillic sector of Livejournal for quite a while now.
The completion of the transfer of the main blog-service in Russia into the hands of the company based in Russia is a logical conclusion and definitely does not add more independence to the future of content in Livejournal blogs.
So far politically motivated censure of top cyrillic Livejournal blogs has been applied to extreme right blogs.
It is somehow amazing and funny that the most danger to top Russian bloggers does not come from authorities but rather from some Russian hacker "Hell", who resides in Germany and periodically destroys and defaces top Livejournal blogs. He is loosely associated with a group of Russian internet activists calling themselves "padonki" (punks, scoundrels) and often meddles as a brute force on the side of his favorites in some heated disputes between top bloggers.
SUP was able to do little to strengthen the security of Livejournal, since little could be done. For example, Igor Petrov's journal was broken using an off-line trick: apparently the "hacker" presented a fake Russian passport in the name of Petrov (who also lives in Germany) to prove that he is the person who "lost" his access to journal. -
Re:Putinist Russia
It is not clear yet.
SUP is controlled by Alexander Mamut - one of the powerbrokers during Eltsyn times. Right now he lives and owns businesses in Russia, which means that he is loyal to Putin.
It is interesting that two of the top Russian bloggers[Russian] officially work for SUP (Anton Nossik,Roustam Agadamov).
Politically aforementioned SUP bloggers distance themselves from support of Putin, and quite often Mr. Nossik expressed mild political opposition to Putin.
The purchase of Livejournal is a pure formality in terms of Russian politics, since SUP has been controlling cyrillic sector of Livejournal for quite a while now.
The completion of the transfer of the main blog-service in Russia into the hands of the company based in Russia is a logical conclusion and definitely does not add more independence to the future of content in Livejournal blogs.
So far politically motivated censure of top cyrillic Livejournal blogs has been applied to extreme right blogs.
It is somehow amazing and funny that the most danger to top Russian bloggers does not come from authorities but rather from some Russian hacker "Hell", who resides in Germany and periodically destroys and defaces top Livejournal blogs. He is loosely associated with a group of Russian internet activists calling themselves "padonki" (punks, scoundrels) and often meddles as a brute force on the side of his favorites in some heated disputes between top bloggers.
SUP was able to do little to strengthen the security of Livejournal, since little could be done. For example, Igor Petrov's journal was broken using an off-line trick: apparently the "hacker" presented a fake Russian passport in the name of Petrov (who also lives in Germany) to prove that he is the person who "lost" his access to journal. -
Re:Putinist Russia
It is not clear yet.
SUP is controlled by Alexander Mamut - one of the powerbrokers during Eltsyn times. Right now he lives and owns businesses in Russia, which means that he is loyal to Putin.
It is interesting that two of the top Russian bloggers[Russian] officially work for SUP (Anton Nossik,Roustam Agadamov).
Politically aforementioned SUP bloggers distance themselves from support of Putin, and quite often Mr. Nossik expressed mild political opposition to Putin.
The purchase of Livejournal is a pure formality in terms of Russian politics, since SUP has been controlling cyrillic sector of Livejournal for quite a while now.
The completion of the transfer of the main blog-service in Russia into the hands of the company based in Russia is a logical conclusion and definitely does not add more independence to the future of content in Livejournal blogs.
So far politically motivated censure of top cyrillic Livejournal blogs has been applied to extreme right blogs.
It is somehow amazing and funny that the most danger to top Russian bloggers does not come from authorities but rather from some Russian hacker "Hell", who resides in Germany and periodically destroys and defaces top Livejournal blogs. He is loosely associated with a group of Russian internet activists calling themselves "padonki" (punks, scoundrels) and often meddles as a brute force on the side of his favorites in some heated disputes between top bloggers.
SUP was able to do little to strengthen the security of Livejournal, since little could be done. For example, Igor Petrov's journal was broken using an off-line trick: apparently the "hacker" presented a fake Russian passport in the name of Petrov (who also lives in Germany) to prove that he is the person who "lost" his access to journal. -
Re:Putinist Russia
It is not clear yet.
SUP is controlled by Alexander Mamut - one of the powerbrokers during Eltsyn times. Right now he lives and owns businesses in Russia, which means that he is loyal to Putin.
It is interesting that two of the top Russian bloggers[Russian] officially work for SUP (Anton Nossik,Roustam Agadamov).
Politically aforementioned SUP bloggers distance themselves from support of Putin, and quite often Mr. Nossik expressed mild political opposition to Putin.
The purchase of Livejournal is a pure formality in terms of Russian politics, since SUP has been controlling cyrillic sector of Livejournal for quite a while now.
The completion of the transfer of the main blog-service in Russia into the hands of the company based in Russia is a logical conclusion and definitely does not add more independence to the future of content in Livejournal blogs.
So far politically motivated censure of top cyrillic Livejournal blogs has been applied to extreme right blogs.
It is somehow amazing and funny that the most danger to top Russian bloggers does not come from authorities but rather from some Russian hacker "Hell", who resides in Germany and periodically destroys and defaces top Livejournal blogs. He is loosely associated with a group of Russian internet activists calling themselves "padonki" (punks, scoundrels) and often meddles as a brute force on the side of his favorites in some heated disputes between top bloggers.
SUP was able to do little to strengthen the security of Livejournal, since little could be done. For example, Igor Petrov's journal was broken using an off-line trick: apparently the "hacker" presented a fake Russian passport in the name of Petrov (who also lives in Germany) to prove that he is the person who "lost" his access to journal. -
Pure Coincidence or Kremlin Shenanigan?The Russian election for the Duma concluded on December 2. During this process, Golos was instrumental in identifying voting irregularities that skewed the vote in favor of United Russia, the pro-Kremlin party. Golos is an independent organization that monitors elections and receives funding from the United States and the European Union.
Golos and its supporters have been maintaining a blog page at LiveJournal. You can read either the actual blog page in Russian or the English translation of the blog page. It contained plenty of damning evidence showing that the Kremlin had manipulated the election.
Then, after the election concluded, a Moscow-based company acquired LiveJournal. Is the timing merely coincidence or is the Kremlin somehow connected to this business deal?
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So...
JWZ will have to write blog in Russian now?
http://jwz.livejournal.com/ -
Death of an open source project
Here's some of the dirt on SUP:
http://community.livejournal.com/no_lj_ads/tag/sup
This is basically going to mean that LJ, which was in a good position as an unincorporated open source project and a somewhat uncared for and misunderstood position under Six Apart, is being sold to a shoddy and inconsistent company an ocean away from half of its userbase. There is no guarantee that LiveJournal's new owners will take as good care of the seven years of information (ranging from useless to invaluable) its users have saved up.
Let this stand as a warning to new community start-ups: pick who you deal with wisely, because once you sell there's no going back. -
Re:Putinist Russia
You may be joking, but there appears to have been a considerable amount of concern about this when SUP first got involved with LJ -- Alexander Mamut, one of SUP's main investors (or possibly its owner -- I've seen both descriptions in articles), apparently has some ties to Putin. Brad had tried to assuage fears about it at the time, but I unfortunately don't really know how the situation stands on the Russian side after those initial reactions.
As a longtime LJ user, I'm encouraged that Brad's still optimistic about SUP today, and I don't think Six Apart ever really knew exactly what to make of LJ, but I'm still having a hard time getting over a vaguely uneasy feeling about the whole thing. -
EA is no longer alone at the top.
Many news-sites are actually reporting this as a merger between Vivendi and Activision (perhaps more of a semantic distinction, but it does serve to remind that Blizzard is owned by someone, and is not an independant self-owned development studio, in the strictly on-paper sense).
This is a fascinating move for one very important reason: EA. This merger combines a hugely profitable juggernaut of game-making (Blizzard) with what is probably the largest publisher out there (Activision). Electronic Arts suddenly got not only competition, but may have just dropped into second place, all in one fell swoop.
This is a great move for Blizzard: there is no other development company that is such a proven success, having long passed the point of "one hit wonder" or "a lucky run," and they now have access to, in light of how bankable they are, absolutely vast wodges of capital for their future plans. This is an awesome move for Activision: a publisher (with some developer in there too) that has quietly grown over the last decade to become one of the largest now has pretty much the ultimate triple-A development juggernaut at its core. This last bit is a key point, as it reflects EA. EA is large publisher wrapped around a large and important development house. Vivendi and Activision have now stepped up to that level and type of operation, and can be expected to give EA a run for its money.
What particularly pleases me is how this could be seen as providing a "good guys" team to stand against EA's often-percieved "bad guys" team, which should be an interesting public dynamic to watch :P -
Re:AdultSwim
The third season has just started post-production and is tentatively set to debut in June. Jason Publick, co-creator and writer, has a blog where he occasionally posts production updates and art. No date for season four as of yet, but he says the wait between seasons shouldn't be as bad this time around.
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Re:Its called saving face.
Here's a blog from a smaller band regarding an record company trying to get them on board.. and the amusing result.
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Gnome developer's review
I co-maintain Gnome Games and decided to do a review of KDE 4 RC 1 yesterday. I posted it on my blog.
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Google Hash
I know of efforts in this regard that date back 3 years or so, although I'm not aware of whether these projects are still online. There are some good discussions about the idea at http://ibneko.livejournal.com/668715.html and http://www.dragoslungu.com/2007/06/22/google-md5-hash-search-engine/. My interest is that I'm attempting to get Google to index such hashes at http://www.nth-dimension.org.uk/utils/ghash.php. In my case I'm actually attempting to get Google to cache my hashes to minimise my storage costs as rainbow tables take a fair bit of disk space to store although the idea hasn't been particularly successful due to Google algorithms
:(. -
Re:Government-granted monopoly leads to no alt. ISNobody really wants ISPs to be common carriers. Part of being a common carrier is that you are required to be content-agnostic. Think about what the Internet would be like if ISPs couldn't block customers for spamming, spreading worms, DoS attacks, etc.
With all due respect, that's not really accurate. I wrote a 'Net Neutrality For Dummies' column in our local weekly, so I won't repeat myself unnecessarily. Suffice it to say that nobody minds having traffic rules. What we don't want is to have traffic rules that get selectively enforced according to the whims of a given Internet provider.
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Re:Google versus ApacheWell, if the licensing of the SDK is anything to go by it seems more like it's a case of Google vs. Free Software. Well, we always knew that there were going to be parts of the software stack that aren't going to be Free software. The FCC won't allow the parts that control the radio, for example, to be user-modifiable. So there have to be some big locked-down chunks, just because it's a cellphone.
If Google actually said that the "full stack" would be OSS, then shame on them. But it seems like they're going to be way more open than anyone else, and possibly as open as they can be while still getting FCC approval for the device.
At any rate, I find the whole project interesting but I'm not getting personally invested in it yet. I'll see what the license is like on the real thing before praising or condemning it. -
Re:Google versus Apache
Well, if the licensing of the SDK is anything to go by it seems more like it's a case of Google vs. Free Software.
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UnFAKEable Linux
Yep. That is why Red Hat made these t-shirts. Red Hat does not seem to have problems with Centos, but I'm not so sure about Oracle's copy of their distribution...
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Re:Does anyone know...
Sorry I forget the reason for why they might change, but it had to do with compatibility and ease of use.
Something to do with having to maintain two different Linux kernels (the kernel and kernel-xen) and having a hypervisor underneath it all which essentially copies functionality from the Linux kernel. Ulrich Drepper explains it a bit better here. KVM is a simple kernel module and just makes a lot more sense.
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"rocked by rape "
not directly related but http://jwz.livejournal.com/ has a mix tape (.m3u) you can stream that starts with a ponient track "good evening" but the third one, "rocked by rape" really gets into "what the f**k is wrong with the world" thing. "http://cerebrum.dnalounge.com/mixtapes/
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this will finally means java for PPC :-)
RH interest in OpenJDK has some interesting side effects: they're actively working on porting it also to powerpc, both 32 and 64 bit.
Gary Benson, main RH powerpc developer, is keeping a journal about his work, quite interesting stuff. -
Re:She's in Russia
Sorry, but I do not believe the living out of his car story one bit. People that do that do it as a last resort. Nobody lives in their car and walks around with 9000k in their pockets and runs a business. Being homeless is very very dangerous.
Okay, you don't know much about humans. People do odd things all the time. Billy Corgan lived in a storage unit when he had over a million dollars in the bank. (source: http://billycorgan.livejournal.com/ Apr. 23rd, 2005|12:00 pm) Your premise that people don't live beneath (Or WAY beneath) their means unless they NEED to is clearly wrong. -
Nothing to see here, Please move along...
RedHat does *not* hate CentOS... the issue has come up on the mailing lists over the years, and some see CentOS as the "gateway drug" that eventually brings more users to RHEL. Others feel that having CentOS around increases the RHEL{,-derived} userbase and therefore indirectly helps increase the quality of RHEL itself.
In fact, CentOS and Fedora shared a developer booth at FOSDEM this year.
http://wiki.centos.org/Events/Fosdem2007
http://spevack.livejournal.com/2007/02/25/
Additionally, it would have taken the author of TFA about 10 minutes of reasearch to turn up the FOSDEM tidbit and these little bits that make TFA completely irrelevant:
http://www.linux.com/?module=comments&func=display&cid=1161341
http://www.linuxformat.co.uk/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=511
(scroll down to the RH Q&A) on the second link. -
Re:This is not an Ubuntu problem. Read the referen
Sorry - forgot the link!
http://mjg59.livejournal.com/77672.html -
From the horses mouth
http://mjg59.livejournal.com/77672.html
Matthew garret, who runs the laptop testing team. Read this, instead of just spreading FUD. -
Re:My review of OSX
Excellent post (and ignore the guy who doesn't get that "the Leopard" is part of the joke--this thing is packed with lots of subtle, subtle jokes) but you should have mentioned that you actually did write that--since you obviously didn't whip that up for a slashdot comment, I went to google to find the source so I could accuse you of plagiarism, only to be led here. Nicely done. But next time, give credit where credit is due--even if it's to yourself. A) you deserve it and B) it'll save me some time.
:-)
Again, great job. The whole thing is great, top to bottom (and the punchline is a killer.) Well played. The style reminds me a bit of this guy with the way he gets details wrong and is unaware of some major things. -
Re:It happened before
This brings to mind something I went through with Beastly Buy this Summer.
The beginning
No good deed goes unpunished
The punch line.
If you don't want to read TF Blog Entries: I bought a cakebox of DVD+Rs through BestBuy.Com. They sent me a Toshiba laptop instead. I wanted to do the right thing and return it, and Best Buy made it really tough to do it. I should have kept the thing. :P -
Re:It happened before
This brings to mind something I went through with Beastly Buy this Summer.
The beginning
No good deed goes unpunished
The punch line.
If you don't want to read TF Blog Entries: I bought a cakebox of DVD+Rs through BestBuy.Com. They sent me a Toshiba laptop instead. I wanted to do the right thing and return it, and Best Buy made it really tough to do it. I should have kept the thing. :P -
Re:It happened before
This brings to mind something I went through with Beastly Buy this Summer.
The beginning
No good deed goes unpunished
The punch line.
If you don't want to read TF Blog Entries: I bought a cakebox of DVD+Rs through BestBuy.Com. They sent me a Toshiba laptop instead. I wanted to do the right thing and return it, and Best Buy made it really tough to do it. I should have kept the thing. :P -
Re:jesus h christ
Ubuntu has long held an anti-automatix position precicely because it does stupid, unsafe things (see http://mjg59.livejournal.com/77440.html). We obviously can't stop everyone from using it obviously, as it's their machines to break any way they like. I'm not sure of Apples stance on APE, but that could be one aspect that's different. (Yes, I'm using this post as a soapbox to discourage automatix use)