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I'm surprised nobody considered GNU Arch http://www.gnu.org/software/gnu-arch/ to replace BitKeeper - it was probably started in direct response to the Linux Kernel using a non-free tool.

I must say I haven't used it, but from reviews and comparisons I've read, it seems to be a good tool.

This is virtually non-sensical to me. Can anybody explain this to me in English?

Assertion 1: The only difference is that with Adobe, nobody else is actually after the guitar. Adobe only thinks they are.
Justification: Not forthcoming

Assertion 2:Its paranoia stems from Microsoft.
Justification: Not forthcoming

Assertion 3:And apparently this paranoia permeates the corporate culture.
It's NOT apparent

Assertion 4:So, mostly out of fear, Adobe buys its main competitor and now must shoehorn the company into its unfortunate not-invented-here corporate culture. (This aspect of Adobe is another story in itself.)
Pray, I would like to here this other story

Assertion 5:But easily absorbing Macromedia is another story, especially since a lot of ill-will was generated by a lawsuit between them a few years ago.
Yeah it is another more interesting story that Dvorak's rant. But skills of even storytelling are beyond Dvorak.

Assertion 6:It's assumed that Adobe will redesign the interfaces of key Macromedia products to match its own and then discard most of the rest of Macromedia, much like the guitar in "Blow-Up."
Assumed only by Dvorak

Assertion 7:Was it worth $3.4 billion? I doubt it.
And I doubt Dvorak

Microsoft has enough monopoly issues of its own to worry about without buying the company that makes Flash.

The author makes a number of assertions without justifying them.

Next

Loading salad at a restaurant before paying is a crime.
But Selling children for sex isn't.

I feel so glad that Bush is the President of US in this Post 9/11 world.

Loading salad at a restaurant before paying is a crime.
But Selling children for sex isn't.

I feel so glad that Bush is the President of US in this Post 9/11 world.

One ought to be more careful in this Post-9/11 world.

$rss_feed = file_get_contents('http://example1.com/feed.rss');
mail('...@example2.com', 'RSS Feed from Example1.com', $rss_feed,
'Content-Type: application/rss+xml');

RSS On Slashdot: Iran captures three CIA agents

Unable to understand address 10 downing street. Please try another address.

Suggestions: - Make sure all words are spelled correctly. - Try using a less ambiguous location like a post code

Or they have cracked even the strong hashes. In which case they are really cool. I know Mr. Torvalds is Finnish, but I doubt even he could come up with algorithms to do that.

In their conceited press release, they have compared Spoofing vs DRP/a

From TFA:"There are some tremendous questions being raised about this," said Dietz. "On whether they (JFCCNW) have the legal mandate or the authority to shut these sites down with a defacement or a denial-of-service attack."

According to TFA, the main task of JFCCNW is to bring down websites that don't portray America in good light.

It is going to be more of a PR-damage limitation excercise than anything else. And a good way to spend millions of taxpayer money.

This makes good sense from both companies' perspective and this is clearly signalled in the fact that it comes with the blessing of both boards. Adobe has traditionally been strong in the offline graphical design business particularly with respect to desktop publishing in the newspaper and magazine publishing world. The company has also made its PDF reader ubiquitous in the desktop space and has a strong enterprise play.

Macromedia, on the other hand, has a much stronger presence in graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for the desktop with its Dreamweaver and Flash product set. Both companies have made plays into the wireless market with the promise of rich media applications and cross platform access.

Macromedia, however has made stronger inroads into this market with recent deals with key operators and device manufacturers that will see Flash expanding its reach from the desktop environment to wireless platforms.

The deal itself is not without issues from a competition standpoint since the resulting business will almost certainly hold a sizeable chunk of the GUI market that would make it difficult for some smaller vendors to play in. The companies have overlapping product sets and a product portfolio that goes in many different directions. That is both a positive and a negative and will need to be addressed, going forward.

Interestingly,Dr. Smalley talked about armchair nanotube technology at the senate Oversight hearing on sustainable, low emission, electricity generation Full Committee Hearing almost one year ago. The full text is here.

Interestingly,Dr. Smalley talked about armchair nanotube technology at the senate Oversight hearing on sustainable, low emission, electricity generation Full Committee Hearing almost one year ago. The full text is here.

However, I do see a use in this for GIS applications. You can redefine the term overlay with this.

For those who do not wish to RTFA, the gist is:

Briefly, IBM asked the judge to rule that they weren't infringing any of Calsera/SCO's copyrights by distributing Linux. And they further asked for that ruling immediately, before the trial is complete. In such a pre-trial summary judgement motion, the rules are heavily biased in favor of Caldera/SCO; they only have to show a tiny bit of evidence to defeat the motion.

By the time Longhorn ships, according to Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, PCs will have 4GHz to 6GHz processors, more than 2GB of memory, at least a terabyte of storage, and graphics accelerators three times more powerful than those offered by ATI and Nvidia today. He says that Longhorn is designed to take advantage of all this muscle, and nowhere is that more evident than in the rich, three-dimensional interface known as Aero.

Points to ponder:

1. People don't even want to move to SP2, do you think people will buy all this muscle for Longhorn?

2. What exactly is a 3D interface? Would we need to wear 3D goggles to use it?

3. Longhorn is built around three major advances--a new graphics and presentation engine known as Avalon, a new communications architecture known as Indigo, and a new file system known as WinFS that borrows from Microsoft's relational database technology. Avalon and Indigo are catchy names, but are we going to have loads of compatibility issues?

4. How much MORE is Longhorn going to cost? Is it going to be subscription based?

5. How many software patents are MS going to secure for this?

Read more and see the image

But now that your average PDA is small than the magazine, and you can get the latest news online, not to save the number of trees you save, there's not really a justification for having paper publication of periodicals.

But I still prefer reading my books on paper. And most people I know feel the same.

I thought "de-volving" DNA was a 50's sci-fi movie myth. I understand that it is sometimes possible, at least in theory, to "turn on" suppressed DNA, and that one could mutate and selectively breed modern species into creatures with traits resembling extinct species, but without the full genome of the extinct species to "rewrite" your modern genome into a copy of, you would just end up with a vaguely dinosuar-like modified bird, which would exhibit any mistaken assumptions of the breeders.

Simply put, a bird would not "revert" into a real dinosaur, it would evolve into an immitation dinosaur. As far as frozen mammoth thread goes, I think it should be possible to reconstruct the mammoth genome from frozen DNA, as I understand that DNA is much more stable than most other organic structures. Once you had your genome to work from, if you had the time and money to devote vast biotech rescources I suppose a mammoth zygote could be synthesized, but it would be immpossible to guess the cost or time involved anywhere within several orders of magnitude. I have no proffesional training in any of this, I'm just an informed interested person throwing in my $0.02 worth in. However, if I was a betting man, I'd put my money on the mammoth resurrection group over the bird devolution group without a second thought!

Most of the positive fanatics write lots of papers; those who think it's not going anywhere (like me) don't. There are sound physical reasons to be skeptical, in my mind:

1) Wavelengths are too big: 1 micron is now a large number, and optics doesn't work much smaller than this.

2) There are no good nonlinearities. Anyone can make a linear OR gate optically, but to function as an effective digital technology you need nonlinearity and level restoration. This is missing in pure optical systems, except at very high power levels. The high power levels imply low density. There are some optical gates which process data in "femtoseconds," but ask them how long it takes to get to the next gate. Maybe someday someone will invent a great, low power, fast, optically nonlinear material. Don't invest in it yet.

3) The serious workers are now mostly working in combined electronic/optical modes. The speeds here are limited by the gate speeds of the electronics, just like normal computers. You have to then ask if optics is a good (cost effective, space efficient, low power...) replacement for wire. Ultimately, the answer is probably yes, but there's an awful lot of work to do before that's true (for the distances of a few centimeters in high density computers, that is).

In practice, a word processor that can't read Microsoft® Word documents is an economic dead end. The formats used by the Microsoft Office applications have become a de facto standard, giving Microsoft a substantial competitive edge because each new release of its software can deliver for it a window of opportunity during which only its software is fully compatible; this is mitigated a bit, though, because incompatibility in a new version makes customers slow to upgrade to that newest version.

Not true. Even Microsoft makes its products backward compatible. (One might say they make their products backwards, but that is another story).

In some cases, a standard comes with some kind of licensing restrictions, or involves something that someone has a patent on. For instance, Unisys had a patent governing a bit of the algorithm used for GIF images. In general, patents are a huge weakness for a standard. The MP3 standard is used very widely by people who simply don't know -- or don't care -- that someone theoretically has a patent on part of it, and only some code using the patented algorithm actually has a license from the patent holder. Developers and users can be bitten by this many years after they make the design decision to use a patented algorithm, due to the nature of patents. De jure standards often require contributors to clearly disclose any known patents; de facto standards generally have no way to do this.

Software patents are evil. Full stop. It has nothing to do with standards.

Ironically, this article, published by IBM, fails to mention how once IBM itself used to be a de facto standard for PCs.

In practice, a word processor that can't read Microsoft® Word documents is an economic dead end. The formats used by the Microsoft Office applications have become a de facto standard, giving Microsoft a substantial competitive edge because each new release of its software can deliver for it a window of opportunity during which only its software is fully compatible; this is mitigated a bit, though, because incompatibility in a new version makes customers slow to upgrade to that newest version.

Not true. Even Microsoft makes its products backward compatible. (One might say they make their products backwards, but that is another story).

In some cases, a standard comes with some kind of licensing restrictions, or involves something that someone has a patent on. For instance, Unisys had a patent governing a bit of the algorithm used for GIF images. In general, patents are a huge weakness for a standard. The MP3 standard is used very widely by people who simply don't know -- or don't care -- that someone theoretically has a patent on part of it, and only some code using the patented algorithm actually has a license from the patent holder. Developers and users can be bitten by this many years after they make the design decision to use a patented algorithm, due to the nature of patents. De jure standards often require contributors to clearly disclose any known patents; de facto standards generally have no way to do this.

Software patents are evil. Full stop. It has nothing to do with standards.

Ironically, this article, published by IBM, fails to mention how once IBM itself used to be a de facto standard for PCs.

Here's are some thoughts from me:

1. Quantum Technology and/or Bio-molecular computing will become the next big thing.
2. Software Patents will effectively make software development exclusively a big player game
3. Virus infected nano-bots will wreak havok.
4. High fuel prices will effectively slow the pace of technological development all around.
5. Slashdot will hire paid editors.

Here's are some thoughts from me:

1. Quantum Technology and/or Bio-molecular computing will become the next big thing.
2. Software Patents will effectively make software development exclusively a big player game
3. Virus infected nano-bots will wreak havok.
4. High fuel prices will effectively slow the pace of technological development all around.
5. Slashdot will hire paid editors.

Let's take the example of the SAT.

SAT has been called racist, sexist and classist for as long as today's test takers have been alive. Universities that require the test open themselves to charges of racism; Universities that don't are accused of reverse discrimination.

Carl Brigham, a bona-fide racist designed the SAT in 1925. Brigham's book A Study of American Intelligence claimed tests like the one he would design proved the superiority of "nordic stock."

While the racism issues linger, it's the wider socioeconomic issue that has preoccupied the tests' makers at the Educational Testing Service (ETS). The conventional wisdom is that the test is just another leg up for rich kids who can shell out $1000 for a test prep course. To some, the likes of Kaplan and Princeton Review have turned good SAT scores into a commodity, another saleable ticket into America's Ivy League aristocracy.

Kaplan proved beyond a doubt that the test can be taught; his successors put the price of a class out of reach. A good SAT score might mean you're smart, or it might mean you've got pushy parents with a lot of cash. To try to resurrect some notion that the SAT is actually a yardstick of academic potential, ETS has changed up the test, replacing the analogies with an essay and jacking up the total score from 1600 to 2400.

Rumour has it that Bill Gates is going to suffer a wardrobe malfunction on the show and reveal to the world the true meaning of microsoft and why he is not trying to get perpendicular.

Read More

Why do Indians get all the outsourced work?

I think what is happening is a good thing rather than a bad one. Thanks to news aggregators, people can now read the same story from different sources to gather a balanced view.

Take the story about Britain banning Nigerians from entering Britain. Both press esc and BBC carries the story. But the BBC story is far more sympthatic to the British government than the PressEsc story, which is, if anything hostile to it. I bet the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Thanks to RSS feeds and new aggregators, I am able to make up my own mind.

I can understand why the big newspapers are worried. Thanks to RSS not-so-well-established but corporate interest free newspapers can get their news across to the people at large.

How can you expect "do no evil" from a company that patents algorithms.

All the song and dance for that?

I will stick to Wiki

I honestly don't think the MP in questions gives a damn about the rights of the listeneres. But at least he is doing something for whihc people would remember him, in a positive light.

British style Parliaments have their own problems, but I think Canada has quite successfully implemented that by using the PR system.

On the Patriot Act:

The 9/11 Commission has emphasized the importance of the Patriot Act and considers it to be an essential weapon in the global war on terrorism. Prior to September 11, there was a wall of legal and regulatory policies that prevented effective sharing of information between the intelligence and law enforcement communities. Read More

Paul Rosenzweig On Transparency:

After all, why do we seek transparency in the first instance? Not for its own sake. Without need, transparency is little more than voyeurism. Rather, the reason for transparency is oversight - Read More

On the Patriot Act:

The 9/11 Commission has emphasized the importance of the Patriot Act and considers it to be an essential weapon in the global war on terrorism. Prior to September 11, there was a wall of legal and regulatory policies that prevented effective sharing of information between the intelligence and law enforcement communities. Read More

Paul Rosenzweig On Transparency:

After all, why do we seek transparency in the first instance? Not for its own sake. Without need, transparency is little more than voyeurism. Rather, the reason for transparency is oversight - Read More

On the Patriot Act:

The 9/11 Commission has emphasized the importance of the Patriot Act and considers it to be an essential weapon in the global war on terrorism. Prior to September 11, there was a wall of legal and regulatory policies that prevented effective sharing of information between the intelligence and law enforcement communities. Read More

Paul Rosenzweig On Transparency:

After all, why do we seek transparency in the first instance? Not for its own sake. Without need, transparency is little more than voyeurism. Rather, the reason for transparency is oversight - Read More

Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that's stale.

Read More

ALPHA GEEK The most knowledgable, technically proficient person in an office or work group. Ask Larry, hes the alpha geek around here.

Read More

Saw it Here first.

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Jim claims that the traditional music in Sri Lanka has far greater diversity than its western counterpart. Thus a simple music notation system, in his opinion at least, is far better than a complex rigorous one. kq