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Thanks, I'll look at it, but Gentoo says not to use binary drivers. More of the same here. The only xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-1.0.8762 I could find is for Fedora.

Stereotypes are part of human psychology because, more often than not, they are statistically the right thing to think. If you buy into Bayesian reasoning, every statement has a "prior" value - a degree of belief assigned to it before any actual information on that statement has been gathered.

It is the experience of most individuals that true computer 'geeks' are rare among females, and therefore it is especially surprising to find one. Many of the few female CS majors I knew while doing my degree were anything but computer geeks (indeed I think they were very much bothered by them).

In most situations these stereotypes help an individual because a male geek is less likely to start spouting unappreciated computer nonsense out to a random female until and unless he has reason to believe (sometimes incredulously) that she would "get" it.

Another factor is that it seems (though this is a bit contraversial) that while the average intelligences of males and females are the same, that the standard deviation is somewhat higher for males. So there are fewer "genius" level females, but also fewer "idiot" level males. There is a hypothesis that this may be explained by X chromosome-linked genetic factors, which have much higher variation when a single gene is present (in males) than in females. Another explaination is that males are born in a ratio that's totally unnecessary, which explains why males are much more likely to engage in risky behavior, and possibly even express genetic traits in a more risky fashion. This article has a bit more along those lines, though I cannot vouch for its authority.

I really hate how political correctness has surpressed studies of these types of things - I'm very much a feminist and believe it is important to continue to advance the rights of females, after all even conservatives should see that it's important to make the best use out of your population. I really hate seeing someone get in trouble for saying these things are issues that should be studied.

You are right. There are other solutions available, and there will be more to come.

By the way, paravirtualization is quite different from OS-level virtualization (which OpenVZ and others do). For now, Xen is the only open source solution in the paravirt. area (other is VMware, there is also a patch from Rusty Russel to add an interface for hypervisors), while in OS-level virt. we have as many as four players, and at least two open source solutions. Who are those players and solutions? See below (taken from OpenVZ blog). Why this is good? Because competition is good. Why it works and Xen does not? Because OS-level virt. is a less dirty hack than a hypervisor.

* Eric Biederman wants to have so-called namespaces in kernel. Namespaces are basically a building blocks of containers, for example, with user namespace we have an ability to have the same root user in different containers; network namespace gives an ability to have a separate network interface; process namespace is when you have an isolated set of processes. All the namespaces combined together creates a container. But, as Eric states, an ability to use not all but only selected namespaces gives endless possibilities to a user.

* IBM people (ex-Meiosys) want application containers, and for them the main purpose of such containers is live migration of those. The difference between app. container and the "full" (system) container is a set of features: for example, an application container might lack /proc virtualization, devices, pseudo-terminals (needed to run ssh, for example) etc. So, an application container might be seen as a subset of a system container.

* OpenVZ wants system containers that resemble the real system as much as possible. In other words, we want to preserve existing kernel APIs as much as possible inside a container, so all of the existing Linux distributions and applictions should run fine inside a container without any modifications. Of course, the goal is not 100% achievable, for example we do not want the container to be able to set the system time.

* Linux-VServer wants just about the same as OpenVZ, it's only that their implementations of various components are different, and their level of a container resembling a real system is a bit lower (for example, in networking).

You'd distribute the mashup, alongwith a special player application. The viewer would be required to have a Star Wars DVD. The mashup file would use frames from the original DVD by reference. The player would composite the two video sources ( the mashup, and the DVD ). This is much like the Video Internet.

We're not helping Microsoft fast enough. So they say, "let us help you help us better". The more people are online, the better for everyone, especially a company like Microsoft. Read "What are Mr. Gates and Mr. Buffett up to?"

I added it to my livejournal today, although I saw it earlier when I was metamoderating.

Your "~~~" idea doesn't even come close to solving the problem. It still won't help with newlines in the data, if the parser parses line by line. It still doesn't solve the problem of weird characters in the key, either. To really solve this problem you need to escape the sequences with a special meaning (which would involve lots of extra complexity for both writing and reading), or encode it as length/data pairs, at which point it stops being usable for humans.

Now, in most projects, parsing configuration files isn't one of the primary objectives. If that's the case, why not just use an XML library, where all those issues have been dealt with already?

Hofstadter also gave a talk at the Singularity Summit at Stanford. Also, here's a summary of the Artificial Life X talk.

Is that the sound of a million emo's cry of anguish?

Nah, LiveJournal is still up.

http://herenot.livejournal.com/29371.html

this is true, and the potential for fun is endless. think of going into an israeli computer store and askeing the worker there (Specificly a female worker) "how much does a fuck cost here?"

The chipped passports were originally to have been issued last October. Undersecretary of State Frank Moss, in a rare display of common sense, came to the 2005 Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy to hear out the critics. Travel writer Ed Hasbrouk (his writeup andblog item on his recent TSA runnin) raised the spectre of the chips serving to trigger explosives. Moss got it, and delayed the rollout until shielding could be added to the design.

photo Moss shows his prototype to John Gilmore, as Hasbrouk and I look on.

Microsoft Windows File Sharing needs to get fixed,
  too many wizzard interfaces with Windows XP and Vista hide what is really going on with the settings .

  Windows 95 and 98 had a great interface . Sure NTFS wasnt around then , but it was simple for the user
  http://www.wellesley.edu/Computing/FileSharing/Win dows/98me_imgs/properties.jpg

  So many people Windows XP Home have lost data due to it sharing via Administrator and full rights .
  ( Yes the common user doesnt want to pay a extra amount for classic file sharing)
  The amount of times Ive seen people cut and paste data accross the network ,
  in the process losing it off the source PC is amazing .

  In the home envoirment most users now use DC++ instead of Windows File sharing ,
  its secure, easy and quicker only draw back they have to run a DC++ server .

  Isnt it about time a Desktop Windows os finaly removed Server and admin functions :
  Remove admin shares ,
  dont allow people to share the windows drive ,
  Store profiles , bookmarks and data on another partition ,
  Remove telnet server
  Remove ICS
  Remove ISS Webserver
  (basicaly a lot of options and stuff that Nlite and XPY does to fix windows bloat)

  Also another thing that beginers mixed with Windows file sharing is when DHCP fails
  on class C network , instead of re trying to askin the user , it goes to a class b 169.x.x.x IP

------------------------

Charliebrownau
http://charliebrownau.livejournal.com/

In one letter, written in 1914, less than two years before Einstein revolutionized science with the publication of his theory of relativity, he tried to impose extraordinary conditions of marriage on his first wife, Mileva. He told her:

1) You will expect no affection from me and you will not reproach me for this;

2) You must answer me at once when I speak to you;

3) You must leave my bedroom or study at once without protesting when I ask you to go;

4) You will promise not to denigrate me in the eyes of my children, either by word or by deed.
---
In another letter, he wrote: "I treat my wife as an employee whom I cannot fire. I have my own bedroom and avoid being alone with her."

It's one heck of a design problem. I was originally an aerospace engineer, but I've shifted my focus to work on precisely this problem. It's both the most challenging and the most important problem facing us right now.

The short answer, I believe, lies with biomimicry and a respect for the limitations of natural systems. Nature designs for the long term, and we can learn from those techniques.

For additional references, I would point you to the links on my home page.

As a final note, I would suggest that a design horizon of 100 years is a bit on the short side. 100 years really isn't a very long time, and I think there's a decent chance we could muddle through the next 100 years doing more or less what we have been doing. Thing is, if we do that, we won't make it through the next hundred years.

There's not a lot of social networking projects that are open source or free to the communities. Every single one seems to be some ad revenue money grubbing scheme anyway. You have PeopleAggregator and maybe NovaShare though the latter doesn't really support degrees of separation searching.

Callender's remarks were contained in a press release issued late yesterday by California Assembly Speaker pro Tem Leland Yee (D), author of California's contested video game violence law. Yee also expressed concern over the PSP White ads, saying, "I am deeply disappointed in Sony's senseless decision to publish this racially-charged advertisement. I can't begin to determine Sony's motivation but I believe this marketing strategy is unnecessary and is clearly offensive to many in our community."

I'll give you most points you made, but the fact that you have to do any reverse-engineering at all is a much bigger hurdle than you think. It's just wrong that it requires someone like jwz asking for the meaning of the flags field, and an anonymous benefactor (aka, almost certainly an Apple employee who knows he'd get in trouble if he revealed this information under his own name) to give a person full access to his own data.

It's much more likely for a proprietary and undocumented format like this to become unsupported. Without a good specification, all the subtle and inherent and assumed bugs that other bits and pieces start to rely on become one enormous hell to reverse-engineer. Just ask some of the WHATWG or Mozilla or Opera people who're currently trying to write specifications to make some IE-extensions like XMLHttpRequest or offsetParent work interoperably and completely sane for all edge-cases. (And those are the simple and relatively well understood extensions.)

But anyone, for you this personally isn't (recognized as?) a big enough issue (yet?) to switch to Linux. (To be honest, it isn't for me either.) But for some people, who many believe to be at the forefront of wherever it is we're going, it finally is a big enough issue, and I'm glad to see that more people are willing to consider their point of view. Awareness is half the battle won.

1) The issue of abortion is the ultimate case study in the right of people not to be ruled by others' moral beliefs, whether religious or otherwise.

(A) On the one hand, you have women who might desire an abortion, but could be prevented by legislation based upon a certain set of moral beliefs. That is certainly an undesirable situation.

(B) On the other, you have unborn children who are as deserving of legal protection as any other "blob of cells" that functions as a human being; yet, they might be denied their legal protection because of legislation -- in my state of Maryland -- based on a certain set of legal beliefs. That is also an undesirable situation.

In either case, the moral beliefs of one person or group will have a significant effect on the future life of another person. It is incorrect to argue that people who believe that (A) is more tolerable than (B) are "religious nutjobs", or are even trying to impose their beliefs on others. Many, like myself, feel that we must support the lesser of two evils, until a third solution appears. Isn't that what real ethical decision-making is all about?

2) The belief that humans are people from conception transcends religious boundaries. It is true that certain religions -- notably, Catholicism -- promote that view. However, it is also true that some atheists and pagans hold that life begins at conception. That was the official position of the AMA prior to 1973 (no position is held now), and it was the official position of most of the US legal system prior to 1972.

Bottom line: you can't divide up the world into "all the idiots that disagree with me" and "the reasonable people that agree with me."

He's wrong - take it from the former editor of Communications Week South Africa :) If you want to see how clueless he is in general, you can read his laughable article on FLOSS here.

TelkomInternet powered by ADSL

This is the key phrase. I have an ADSL connection but I don't use Telkom as an ISP - I use a Tier 2 who has an upstream Tier 1 provider with their own link to the US. The Tier 1 must buy his half circuit from Telkom but it's just bandwidth - it doesn't get IP services from them and it certainly doesn't go through Telkom's cache. In fact, there's an additional carrier with its own license that doesn't have to use Telkom at all.

Maybe TelkomInternet's cache is banned but that's hardly Slashdot's problem and it certainly doesn't affect me. *hits Submit button*

Unfortunately, for the time being, due to financial considerations, Agnostic Anabaptists For Free Love And Chocolate Chip Cookies, Ltd., are implementing a BYOB policy regarding the wimmens. I found mine on the Internet, but we encourage our acolytes to use any and all available means. Luckily, chocolate chip cookie ingredients can be found at any local supermarket for very reasonable prices, and oftentimes such grocery markets contain (at higher price and more effort) cute blond women as well!

perldoc perlmodlib tells you which modules come with perl.

In the 5.8 version of, one modules such module is Digest::MD5. The core crypt() function also passes things directly through to the OS's crypt library. However, for portability reasons, you should use Crypt::PasswdMD5 for MD5-base crypted passwords, as some libraries (such as Windows') don't support MD5 hashes.

Having said that, I have my own list of things I dislike about perl.

Also check out this famous Usenet post:

http://jwz.livejournal.com/94645.html

You fail.

Shit happens. If you do things that help make it happen, you are to blame. In this cursed city, I've been robbed, stolen from, accused, and treated with the greatest contempt, but unlike the girl and her honourless parents in this story, I didn't make dumbfuck decisions like inviting people on the internet to meet me.

It's the first rule of the internet: What happens on the internet stays on the internet, because it's too dangerous a place to be fucking around. ESPECIALLY if you're 14.

While I could see this coming as soon as I read the law itself (and I'm a layman), there's Another Law in the same stat that is receiving full support of the game industry.

The difference with this law is that it only targets sexual content - and thus is allowed to use the "Millar" test. The one that is blocked uses vague/ambiguous definitions that could (in theory) be used to ban the game of Chess.

I'd think twice about buying that... Old El Paso are spammers.

is indeed valid IMO.

A lot of people de facto dismiss slippery slope arguments, but is valid especially when it comes to government and other human behavior that can be reviewed with history.

Those that ignore history are doomed to repeat it etc...

But as far as registrars go DirectNIC is my favorite
$15 and no bullshit.

To me they are like the Google of registrars - "do no evil".

They even are based out of NOLA and had very little if any downtime during Katrina. You can read about it and see damage to their building here:
http://interdictor.livejournal.com/

...by far is DirectNIC.
$15 and no bullshit.

To me they are like the Google of registrars - "do no evil".

They even are based out of NOLA and had very little if any downtime during Katrina. You can read about it and see damage to their building here:
http://interdictor.livejournal.com/

Google currently returns 703 hits for Brand Necrophilia.

This is what Snapzilla is for. Or an image gallery on http://pics.livejournal.com/shatterstripes/gallery /00006bp6>Livejournal or Blogger or whatever you prefer, or on your own website. Fickr is for photographs, not general image hosting. Screenshots of a video game are not photos - if they were, we'd call them that.

flickr should definitely change their policy for things like this.

"iPods are made in China by women who work 15 hours/day"

Huh. I guess Apple should be looking at buying Electronic Arts instead of Nintendo, then...

I'd say Elli (NSFW!) has it done right. But that's just my opinion. Elli and her ilk could dominate the rest of the commercial industry. And god bless 'em.

Yeah, we've had Dog Shit Girl and The New York Subway Wanker (and another similar).

It's going to get more and more common. Everyone ought to read David Brin's The Transparent Society.

I think episodic content sounds very interesting. It for sure is not a new idea, but one that deserves more and more attention due to the dawn of the casual gamer masses.

I remember sitting in on a presentation held by Seamus Blackley at the Game Developers Conference 2003 (that is one of the three fathers of the initial xbox project who convinced Bill Gates in getting into the whole console/gaming business and generally a slick dude) where he addressed some of the harder financial issues surrounding game development.

Even though I am absolutely not a proponent of the EA model, where you orient your whole business towards short-lived trends in the casual gamer market and obviously neither succeed in innovating nor in motivating your employees to put any love and spirit in the games (remember the ea_spouse article http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html), I agree with the fact that the current path of games development is not catering to the current incarnation of gamer's needs.

Games taking some 40+ hours to complete were great when I was in high-school and stripped of any responsibilities that come as early as in college life (yeah, who would have thought :)), but once you lack the ability of investing significant time in your games, you miss out on the whole gratification thing that comes with kicking the endgame bosses in the $!@#$! and saving the hottest chick around the kingdom (where have those gone by the way?).

Then again grabbing a game to be completed in a little over 5 hours does not justify some 40 bucks plus spending.

So episodic content feels just right and was actually one of the things not only mentioned by Seamus in his talk. Game studios should cut back on up-front development time for content, instead releasing their games earlier and cheaper. This could also prove to be a great model for studios lacking the experience to produce good games, as they probably won't kill themselves with their first flopping game and get another chance at improving before facing a life of paying back debt ;)

And here comes my actually-not-so-revolutionary proposal: Adopt shareware for games again! If your game's good, people will pay for your content, if they are for the trash bin, you won't have screwed over people! I vividly remember getting my hands on the original first eight levels (was it eight or seven?) of Doom as shareware and then shelling out my allowances for the rest. This concept did work. Why did it disappear? Anyone?

I think you're absolutely right about those design decisions.

Step 1. Guy walks around offering "massages" to artists at convention.
Step 2. Guy buys commission from an artist.
Step 3. Guy yanks on a different artist's hand hard enough that it'll be weeks healing.
Step 4. Guy comes back later, offers to "fix" whatever has required artist to put on wrist brace.
Step 5. Guy doesn't even apologize, just walks away.
Step 6. Artists, who are in same studio together, compare notes on guy.
Step 7. Artist puts up pictures with full name.
Step 8. ???
Step 9. Profit!

My parents have had my old K6-233 for YEARS running Windows 95. It still worked fine for what they do believe it or not. Came across some spare hardware, a Duron 800 with 512MB of RAM, figured it was time they had an upgrade. I put a PC-BSD pre 1.0 on it, believe it was RC2 had it installed here at the house forever, finally deployed it to them. Dad loves it, mom says he never gets off of it. Of course all they do with it is play Pysol, SameGame, and FrozenBubble. UT2k4 and Armagetron are installed on it,but those were more of stress test for my own testing more than anything and wont be used by them. Overall I loved it. I like PC-BSDs single program installers, they're as easy if not easier than using Windows installers, but I tend to use the ports system instead. If you're interested in my adventures in PC-BSD land here's a link.

However, she is quite real if you trust her history on bookcrossing (although currently out at the farm and thus unable to post); she's of their top posters--I just don't have the time to sockpuppet to that extent. As to whether or not we are coupled, you could ask one of her livejournal friends.

I don't think that /. account is her, though(I would have friended her account by now if she had one)

Now that you mention it, I should get her to sign my GPG key :D

It seems that he called a local businesswoman a prostitude.

A perfect example is this joke. People link forever, and nobody will just paste the stupid joke into the form!

If anyone's interested in the "logic" behind this bill, you should read the coverage at GamePolitics or watch the entire hearing linked therein.

In summary, Jack Thompson was the star witness for the hearing, so one could imagine the mountain of crap he spewed about games. Perhaps even more fantastic than Thompson's testimony was the list of "racist games" Representative Burrell used to terrify the House with (a list no doubt provided by Thompson). Burrell spent about five minutes naming off a bunch of racist Flash games one can find on the internets. However, instead of telling the House these "games" are only available online and wouldn't be affected by the bill, he made it sound like the game industry was making millions from selling them in stores directly to kids.

Worst of all (or best, if you can appreciate the irony), he told the House about how the suspect in the rape/murder of a ten year old in Oklahoma "trained" on a "video game" called Kingdom of Loathing. Yep, that's right, a non-sensical, browser-based RPG, where stick figures with classes like "Pastamancer" and "Accordian Thief" do battle with saber-tooted limes, somehow trained a 26 year old to rape and murder. And a law about carding minors in retail stores would have somehow stopped an adult from playing a browser game? Oooookay.

Normally, it would be a silly idea to tell anyone to vote based soley on a candidate's position on video games. But if anyone from Louisiana is reading this, please, vote these bastards out of office for their stupidity alone!

The OpenChrome project may support DeltaChrome for AGP and GammaChrome, Chrome S25 & Chrome S27 for PCI Express one day.
I'm vaguely following progress and here are the useful / relevant posts so far.

http://wiki.openchrome.org/pipermail/openchrome-us ers/2005-November/000038.html
http://wiki.openchrome.org/pipermail/openchrome-us ers/2005-November/000043.html
http://wiki.openchrome.org/pipermail/openchrome-us ers/2005-November/000048.html
and
http://wiki.openchrome.org/pipermail/openchrome-us ers/2006-March/000821.html
are relevant to DeltaChrome products
http://wiki.openchrome.org/pipermail/openchrome-us ers/2006-February/000648.html
http://wiki.openchrome.org/pipermail/openchrome-us ers/2006-February/000649.html
talk about all the non-integrated S3 Chrome products.

Until then I'm stuck with my 256MB Radion 9250 for which we may one day get XVMC (yay MythTV)
http://airlied.livejournal.com/17114.html
and for which we have open source 3D drivers that apparently don't perform that well,
http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=6482
but that can change.

Although that sounds a bit negative I love these cards, they're cheap and drive my desktop at 2560 x 1024 flawlessly, in Linux or Windows and the OS drivers seem very reliable, my only complaint would be the lack of a second DVI port and the slightly undersized heat-sink sapphire permanently glued onto the GPU, even with that I'm happy enough that I plan to build my next system around one using the ASRock 939Dual-SATA2 and some dual core Athlon 64.

If / when the OpenChrome project supports the standalone GPUs I'll finally have an alternative to the undeniably ageing R200 RV280 chip.

Did you miss the memo about the gaming industry (Followup here)?

Sure, unions are often used for wage disputes; which is not much of a problem in the IT world as in the bluer-collar world. You don't see many full-time IT personnel talking about fair-wage increases much.

But what you do see are horrible work environments, tacit and explicit requirements to work constant overtime, abuse of salaried staff, poor medical coverage/leave for RSI-type injuries, crappy vacation plans with constant on-call status... (what do you mean you're at the beach? the server's down!!)

These are all issues that unionization can help.

Further, IT industry unions could push for standards compliance, and have a real voice in pushing the Microsofts of the world to adopt things like the ODF and, heck, I dunno, maybe better CSS rendering in IE*. There's lots of good reasons to unionize, even in the tech world.

*(IE7 renders PNGs correctly at least. Welcome to the alpha-blending 21st Century, Bill. Took ya long enough.)

The fact you have "no idea" what my rant was about proves my point exactly. If you were listening to your users and not just being an elite coder you would know exactly what I'm talking about. Go ahead keep coding unusable crap, gimp, http://gimp.org/ ring a bell? I would really like to use to use mainly FSF software, truly I would, but I'm NOT going to become a coder to do it, there are too many OTHER (see previous post) important things in my life to do. So I guess I'll just keep plugging away on my ibook. Have fun re-writing config files to get your sound card working properly. Hint it's not just me, even hard core open source coders like Mozilla programmer Jamie Zawinski gave up on Linux as being too frustrating for every day use and switched to a Mac:

http://jwz.livejournal.com/494040.html

Until FSF advocates wake up to the hard reality of just how difficult much OSS software is to use you will always be a niche player, which IS sad because I actually agree with you that freedom for programmers would make for a better world. But an unusable better world helps NO ONE, except the couple thousand people who think hand coding a config file is a fun and useful way to spend a weekend.

To counter the people who keep saying "No stats! Where are the stats?" (which is a very fair point) take a look at this diary entry by Dave Jones (one of Red Hat's kernel hackers) talking about bugzilla numbers when rebasing kernels.

(Davej is a long time kernel hacker and currently the Fedora kernel maintainer.)

Are you sure about Spitzer? Video Game Industry Reacts to Spitzer's Call for Legislation

Agreed. And since I check my LiveJournal friends page more often then I check email, throwing NetFlix's RSS feed into my friends page makes it trivial to keep up on what new stuff has been released.

Yes yes yes, I know what SQLite is. It's still a monumentally dumb idea. The current format is simple, machine-and-human parseable, portable and reliable. SQLite is none of these things. This is a non-solution to a non-problem, brought to you by the usual bozos who always think that adding a database to something makes it swoopier, without considering the real-world failure scenarios for a heartbeat.

Aside to the moderators: my "flamebait" comment is essentially the same opinion as the guy who wrote Communicator 1.0 and 2.0 for linux, so kindly bite me.

*shrug* It's a place where I can fool around and look like this or this or this.

On the other hand, I don't go there much except for spates of avatar-hacking, because my laptop doesn't run it too well, and the conversation UI is like a bad IRC client. I'd rather go to SL and make something myself than go to WoW and endlessly grind to make a few numbers increase on a server, though.