Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Unstranding, Xecurity, Spurning
Multi-player markets are a good thing. Indiana University seems to be one of the first big fish to publicly announce a license agreement with Progeny's Transition Service. This service provides updates for RedHat 7.2, 7.3, and 8.0 beyond January 1st 2004, and RedHat 9 after May 1, 2004. According to the press release, this will allow for 'a flexible migration path as the University considers various options regarding Linux distributions during the coming year.'"
But I thought MPlayer ... Simon Bysshe writes "In response to some complaints about the WMV encoding of the recent pro-gaming film 'Intel Extreme Edition Challenge' (featured here on Slashdot). Intel have requested that the film also be encoded as a DIVX file especially for Slashdot. This divx file can now be downloaded here."
More on (At Least) 100 Years Of Powered Human Flight relbs was one of many to submit word (as reported by MIT News) of a replica of the Wright brothers' Flyer perched above the Great Dome early yesterday morning, and relbs adds a link to additional photos, too.
They had better luck getting off the ground than did those trying to actually fly a Wright flyer: CrazyTalk writes "As a follow-on to the earlier story, the much-ballyhooed attempt to recreate the first flight of the Wright's literally fell flat."
Maltese Falcon writes with another candidate for First Powered Flight. "Or was it Gustave Weiskopf (aka Gustave Whitehead)? There are many claims that he flew up to 2 yrs before the Wright Bros. NPR's report yesterday seemed to imply almost paranoia as far as a conspiracy to why the NASM only recognizes the Wrights, but this link provides more info on why this could be true. Look here for another article."
Speaking of audacious pilots, jcenters writes "An earlier Slashdot story reported that Australian adventurer Jon Johanson was trapped in Antarctica, and scientists stationed there refused to sell him fuel. Reuters is reporting that Johanson has now obtained fuel from a British rival, but weather conditions are preventing his departure. Johanson hopes to leave by the end of the weekend."
BlameFate writes that "British adventurer, Polly Vacher has allowed Johanson to use her pre-stored fuel at the base after her expedition was forced to be cancelled. Fox News has the scoop. Choice quote from the head of NZ's Antarctic Research dept: 'Polly's trip was well organized and properly planned,' he said. 'It is ironic that she is now assisting a stranded pilot who embarked upon an ill-prepared and secret flight over the South Pole.'"
If something happens in Berkeley, does it count as a "real world" experience? codythefreak writes to deflect certain barbs lately directed at the security level of Mac OS X: "Working as a sysadmin at UC Berkeley's Residential Computing, since we serve more than 6,000 clients living in the dorms, we tend to know the major computing trends. There are 5,120 registered Windows XP machines in our system, and our staff have logged 2,452 duty logs to assist them (about one in two). On the other hand, there are 341 Mac OS X machines, and only 56 duty logs (about one in six). If we restrict these to virus and security related duty logs: Windows XP has 491 (about one in ten) and OS X has 2 (less than one in a hundred)!"
(See also this well-reasoned response to the recent OS X criticism.)
Was it the tail? Really, is the pointy tail a deal-breaker? Mister.de points out this Seattle Post-Intelligencer story which says "VMware Inc., a business-software maker that is being acquired by EMC Corp. for $635 million, turned down an offer last year from Microsoft Corp.
'"We were unable to come to terms, so they bought out our distant competitor, Connectix" Corp., said Diane Greene, VMware's chief executive officer and co-founder.'"
Alas, we hardly knew ye. dlc3007 writes "The Register has published the results of the JenniCam Poetry Competition. There is little funnier in the world than creative geeks pouring their hearts and souls into 'a haiku or limerick lamenting the demise of JenniCam.'" I can think of some things ...
Battlestar Galactica 2003: Series Highly Likely, Say Recent Rumors Cliff writes: "Syfy Portal reports that officials for the Sci-Fi channel are likely to announce that the new Battlestar Galactica will become a series, most likely to air as early as Summer of 2004. No official announcement has yet been made, but since the 'mini-series' is Sci-Fi channel's third highest rated program, it is assumed that such an announcement will be made before the end of 2003, if they are going to keep options on the major actors. Personally, I'm looking forward to the show, as long as they stay away from monkeys in robot-dog suits!"
They are using the number of support calls to determine the security of an OS? Maybe the fact that they are using OSX immediately indicates that in many cases they are a more technical user and so are less likely to need support.
Macintosh computers are marketed towards people who are new to using computers, and to the casual user. If anything, Mac users tend to be less technical than the general population.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
" Maybe the fact that they are using OSX immediately indicates that in many cases they are a more technical user and so are less likely to need support."
I would add that if they're using OSX, they're probably using it for a very specific reason, illustration for example. If all that Mac does is run Illustrator all day, then no, you're not going to need a lot of support calls on it unless something fails.
Anyway, the point of my post isn't to defend XP, but merely to point out that these numbers aren't qualified well enough to draw any real conclusions. An OSX zealot could bend them into the shape of "Windows is a crappy bug riddled OS", whereas a Windows zealot could spin it like "OSX has less software, therefore it has fewer chances to break." The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, but since we don't know much more than the most drastic numbers in the vaguest sense, it would be ill advised to take this data and try to win an argument with it.
"Derp de derp."
Windows people buy Pontiac Firebirds thinking they are powerful but really getting 4 cylinder peice of maintinence hell.
linux users are like fiat owners. And people who re-program their honda's computers. Fun cars if you can keep up with the tweaking and constant search for parts.
by the way did any one read that rebuttal on the DNS security hole. After you get past the neener neener bit the discussion on the DNS protocol makes the guy who reported it and the Slashdotters who slammed mac look like total idiots.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
codythefreak writes to deflect certain barbs lately directed at the security level of Mac OS X: "Working as a sysadmin at UC Berkeley's Residential Computing, since we serve more than 6,000 clients living in the dorms, we tend to know the major computing trends. There are 5,120 registered Windows XP machines in our system, and our staff have logged 2,452 duty logs to assist them (about one in two). On the other hand, there are 341 Mac OS X machines, and only 56 duty logs (about one in six). If we restrict these to virus and security related duty logs: Windows XP has 491 (about one in ten) and OS X has 2 (less than one in a hundred)!"
I was a sysadmin at Berkeley for 5 years.
I have the following observations: 1. The attitude of Windows users was less snobbish (i.e., they viewed their computer as a tool, not a fashion accessory),
2. There were less Macs, resulting in less assistance tickets for that platform, but the amount of time we spent dealing with each Mac issue was far greater than the amount of time. This was usually due to the fact that Apple had made some change, rendering recent hardware (~2 years) useless. (i.e. changes like dropping floppies, dropping SCSI, extremely poor hardware support with the launch of OS X, the OS 9/OS X dual boot requirement, shoddy DVD/USB support in OS X.0, etc)
3. We kept all machines patched, firewalled, and up-to-date with antiviral software, so viruses were not an issue.
Your Mileage May vary, of course.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
God forbid that anyone outside of the USA might have ever been first at anything
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Also, he was scarcely stranded. He had been offered a ride back to NZ in an Air Force Hercules, and he could have arranged to have the plane shipped back later.
When he did get the fuel, it is telling that he did not continue on to Argentina as per his 'plan', but went straight back to NZ. I had no sympathy for this individual and applaud the stance of the NZ and US governments.
I am sick and tired of so-called 'adventurers' depending on other people to help when they almost invariably get into trouble (another adventurer recently got into trouble and had to be rescued by a NZ government ship at considerable taxpayer expense).
I downloaded the DivX version of Intel Extreme Edition Challenge to see how the quality compared to the WMV version. However, the conclusions that I've drawn come from the encoding process itself, and really don't concern the particular codec choices themselves. (I should note that Ben Waggoner voiced the same concerns when Modern Day Gamer 2 was released.)
The video could have been compressed a lot smaller (and quite possibly with an increase in quality, to boot), if it had been deinterlaced first--after all, PC monitors are progressive scan--and resized to something smaller and in the proper aspect ratio, like 640x480, instead of leaving it in native PAL resolution as it was here. Also, using non-square pixels requires user intervention to correct during viewing, unless the video was encoded with the pixel aspect ratio stored in the file, which is possible--but not used in this case--for WMV, but not AVI.
Just the small changes of not having to deal with all the little lines created by interlacing, and also having fewer pixels in general to encode would result in a lighter download and less artifacted video for all.
These films have all been great, content-wise, even for a non-team-oriented gamer such as myself, but once in a while, I can't help but wonder what would have been possible at the same download size with just a little bit of filtering and resizing.
Many people somehow think that Polly Vacher's flight around the world is better planned and organized than Jon Johanson's trip.
She, like Jon Johanson, had made sure that fuel was available at all her planned stops, but she did not make sure that fuel was available at all possible diversion airfields (the list of planned legs on her web site shows that McMurdo was a planned fuel stop).
She, like Jon Johanson, ran into higher than expected winds over Antartica, and had to divert. She, like Jon Johanson, diverted to an airfield that did not have fuel for her (she went back to her destination, but she had already used all the fuel in her fuel cache).
http://www.worldwings.org/route.htm& ID=226 & ID=228
http://worldwings.mantaur.co.uk/diary.aspx?mode=D& ID=230
http://worldwings.mantaur.co.uk/diary.aspx?mode=D& ID=232
http://worldwings.mantaur.co.uk/diary.aspx?mode=D
http://worldwings.mantaur.co.uk/diary.aspx?mode=D
Kevin Horton
Apple did not *create* OS X, they bought it. In actuality it is NeXTStep 6.4 or so (depending on how you like to version things.)
And a little known thing happened at Apple that apparently most of those not familiar with NeXT/Apple are not aware of: The purchase of next was in fact a sort of reverse takeover... That is, most of the people in charge of the low level stuff in OSX are old NeXT engineers.
So while most people consider OSX a new OSX, only a few years old. The core of the system is in fact more than a decade old.
Note: Cocoa is in fact made up of the original programming calls for NeXTStep while 90% of the old stuff was rolled into Carbon.