Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Tableturkey, Stromlo, Mandrake
The silver lining.dragonsister writes "Regarding the recent slashdot story on Mount Stromlo Observatory being hit by fire, it seems the damage is not nearly as extensive as it might have been. The Australian National University has posted details here. In particular, the office buildings were spared, meaning that the work of staff and students is safe, and the many years worth of data collected should still be usable. The main question remaining in my mind is whether or not there were backups of the data on the computers that were actually located in the telescope buildings themselves, as these contained information crucial to the interpretation of some of the data. The importance of off-site backups has just been demonstrated. Everybody backup now!"
And blakduk writes "We were able to enter the site and retrieve computing equipment that survived the fire. This enabled us to set up our servers and have all staff back on-line within 24 hours."
Other than that, how was the parade? Back in November, I posted an article about the DocuNote, an inexpensive tablet PC available with Linux. According to richardbondi , maybe "cheap" would be a better word. He writes:
"I bought one, it arrived today. It was clearly used, not new, and didn't work. If you tilted it, it hung. I gave up after a dozen reboots. Only purchasable from www.microsono.com, where all sales are final.The handwriting recognition software turned out to be trialware.
And although the stepupcomputing.com site says it works with Windows 2000, it came with a note that said now it has to be OEM installed.
One user's bad experience -- bad hardware, deceptive advertising re software."
Looks nice over two monitors, too. Znonymous Coward writes "Mandrake is trying to prove it's not dead yet. Yesterday[Note: the 19th, that is], they released Beta 2 of Mandrake 9.1. You can get the 2 ISO images from the usual mirrors." There's a (critical but mostly positive) review of this 2nd beta running at DistroWatch, too.
Once this starts it always gets messy. Per Hansson writes
"Yesterday we at Techspot posted a Interview with Nvidia plus high-resolution pictures of the Geforce FX.A few sites rightfully claimed that this material had been stolen from Nordichardware however this was not the case, we interviewed Nvidia at the same time and therefore our Interviews looks so similar."
Anton Nilsson, assistant editor in chief of Nordic Hardware writes, in contrast,
"... [I]t seems as if they have used my material as found here.I've spoken to the TechSpot staff and the person who reported the news item to you and it seems as if they overheard me doing my interview with nVidia at Comdex. Since they didn't want to bug nVidia with the same questions again they later on read the interview at my page and then posted it on theirs. Still that doesn't make up a fair excuse in my opinion."
You'll have to make up your own mind on this.
The Marquis de Lafayette who came here to fight in our Revolution said, "The welfare of America is closely bound up with the welfare of mankind." Today, however, I suspect he would reverse that to say that the welfare of mankind is bound up with the welfare of America.
In a recent column about Europe, Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, wrote of "the new anti-Americanism, a blend of jealousy and resentment of America's overwhelming economic and military power." One German editor calls it the "Axis of Envy." The bottom line, said Friedman, is that "Many Europeans today fear, or detest, America more than they fear Saddam."
For some time now, whenever we have read or heard a news story about Europe, it is usually about its refusal, nation by nation, to cooperate with the United States, to berate the United States, and to cling to some very outdated and unrealistic notions. We used to think the Europeans were our allies, but they are really more like our spiteful, poor relations.
The resentment Europeans feel reflects the fact that America is the future and Europe is the past.
This is brought into sharp focus in a brilliant analysis, "Old and In the Way", by Karl Zinsmeister. It appears in the December edition of The American Enterprise (www.TAEmag.com). He is the Editor-in-Chief of the magazine and has the happy facility of taking very complicated subjects and clarifying them. The magazine is published by the American Enterprise Institute and is devoted to politics, business, and culture.
"If Europeans want to ban the death penalty," writes Zinsmeister, "that's fine with Americans; but don't ask us to follow the same dictate. If Europeans think selling military technology to North Korea and Iran, and helping Libya and Iraq with their oil industries is a good idea, expect not a shred of support from the US. If Europeans believe their determination to send billions of dollars to Yasser Arafat is likely to speed peace in the Middle East, we won't stop them."
This is, of course, precisely what the Europeans have been doing in the face of every indication that the nations with whom they are doing business want an Islamic Europe or, in the case of North Korea, have demonstrated once again that no Communist nation can be trusted.
Zinsmeister points out that the elites who run Europe have an exaggerated belief in the power of diplomacy. This is odd considering the last century's history in which European diplomacy failed to deter two World Wars. If war is simply a different form of diplomacy (we've tried talking to Saddam) then we are soon to apply it to the one man who has given the United Nations the opportunity to prove beyond any doubt its utter impotence and irrelevance. The UN is the world's epicenter of blather.
A number of key factors have consigned Europe to stagnation and most of them reflect its love affair with Socialism. Its embrace of statism was undeterred by the long years of the Cold War when the then-Soviet Russia threatened to impose Communism on the whole of Europe. It had seized or was ceded Eastern Europe after World War II and it took nearly fifty years for the Poles to cast them out. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, its captive states rapidly breathed free air again, but then decided to create its own Soviet in the form of the European Union, thinking that was the way to compete with the United States.
The EU is a bunch of bureaucratic elites and Europeans have little or no say in their dictates. Socialists to the core, they think they will be able to compete with the US if they just pass a few more thousand rules, regulations, and, of course, trade restrictions.
The Europeans, however, cannot compete with Americans and Zinsmeister tells us why. "The locomotive of Europe is the German economy, which has been in a serious mess for more than a decade. Germany's annual growth rate over the past ten years has been a limp 1.4 percent." The answer is just too obvious. "The German labor market has become one of the most inflexible and uncompetitive in the world, which is why unemployment has been stuck at 9-10 percent for years, even amid a global economic boom." Ours, by contrast, is about five percent. If we stop importing high tech and other workers, unemployed Americans with comparable skills will be able to get back to work.
To state it plainly, Europeans don't work as hard or as long as Americans. We are far more productive. Unlike America's immigrants who assimilate, Europe's immigrant population tends to end up on welfare. The European Union estimates that it will take fifty million immigrants over the next few years just to maintain a big enough working population to fund the programs for those who are retired or soon will be. Most of those immigrants will come from North Africa and the Middle East. Since Europeans are not reproducing, the native born Germans, Italians, French and others are becoming nations of old people with too few to replace them. If this continues, Europe is a generation away from becoming an Islamic continent.
woooooooo open source
Yup, my buddy Bruce. Still taking the big pink missle up the big brown hole. You have to admire anyone who has dedicated his entire life to man-on-man slip slidin'. Nothing like eating the veiny popsicle for fun AND profit. Gotta love it. I hope when I'm his age I'm still trollin' for snatch in much the same way he's hunting for petrified cave snakes. Bruce, Bruce, Bruce. Getting his molars cleaned by the armless dentist, twice a day at least. A legend.
nice try you cocksucking douchebag
Whats up with the new moderation totals being done in percentages instead of totals?
Slashdot math barely made sense when it was merely adding & subtracting, now they want us to understand slashdot percentages too???
WTF?
Wow...after such a superlative exposition of alternative schlong slang, the only question remaining to be asked is:
Did that qualify as a troll, or flamebait?
And it looks like you guys can't even get it to work right, and still push it out the door on us.
Will any slashdot editor make any comment or update about these changes to its readers??
BTW: This is not offtopic, this is slashback, as appropriate a place to mention this as it gets since slashdot hates meta stories.
Cat got your tongue?
(something important seems to be missing from your comment
No, but I've got my tongue up your pussy!
No insult to the original poster, (who didn't apply the moderation points), but this moderation thing is beyond me. +5 Funny I can understand.
Anyhoo, as another poster pointed out (making me -1, Redundant), misrepresentation is fraudulent. Quite often, your local laws may trump whatever boilerplate they throw at you.
If it were my Mom, I know she'd get her money back, no matter what the fine print said. People like her make me glad I don't work in retail.
From EETimes (http://www.eet.com/sys/news/OEG20030123S0034) : "Japanese consumer electronics manufacturers are backing away from efforts to push proprietary operating systems into wider use and are turning instead to open-source OSes, specifically Linux. The retreat underlines the failure of proprietary OS strategies for consumer electronics."
/. but it got censored as usual, so here we go.
I tried to submit it to
Don't ever bother trying to find out the logic behind moderation, and for god's sake never post about it. It's a guaranteed -1 offtopic every time.
>> If you tilted it, it hung. I gave up after a dozen reboots.
... would be followed by the now ubiquitous and much-cliche'd "well, it's Windoze, by M$. what did you expected?? HAHAHA, OMFG!!! LInux ROXORZ" comment.
>
> I was going to say something about him getting a mislabeled Etch-A-Sketch.
In Soviet Russia, Etch-A-Sketches tilt and hang you
my livejournal is interesting and worth reading - I swear. I know everyone thinks their blog is interesting. mine is.