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Builder.com Writers Outsourced to India
An anonymous reader writes "Builder.com, which is part of CNet.com, is now outsourcing some of their writing to India. The funny thing is, the editor claims it's not as much about money as because he's 'getting a better interface with producers of the content.' He claims CNet isn't giving up control, but if they're the publisher, and he's the editor, and they can't hire and manage their own writers, why shouldn't the Indians just put up their own website to replace CNet, and we can all read what they write direct? I mean, we're all going to be buying software direct from Indian companies soon, so why not?" Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN. OSDN also runs sites like devchannel.org which are more-or-less direct competitors of builder.com.
Outsourcing. What's it all about? Is it good, or is it whack?
Too late! I'ma abuse you tonight boy!
The post of non engrish of mother fuckers of the engaging in floor bugle which is not inhales anus of the tacos
127.0.0.1 www.com.com
all of you.
...your are scoring too many points for the wrong team.
shut up.
lock this topic.
just SHUT UP!
Here is one way to stop the outsourcing:
Increase Corporate Tax Higher for those organizations outsource jobs abroad
(e.g. each outsourced job should cost extra 20% corporate tax hike etc).
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Please explain.
Please explain. (Score:1)
by DAldredge (2353) on 12:05 AM March 20th, 2004 (#8618693)
(http://sdrlabs.com/)
Please explain to my why people that support what some call 'free' trade see this issue as a binary issue. Their is a range of opinions between 100% openness and 100% closed.
Or am I wrong?
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Does anyone know much about Apache James? Apache's new Java-based mail server? I've been playing around with it and it seems pretty smooth. But how does it compare to, for example, postfix?
:).
One nice feature is that you can extend James using "Mailets" (like applets/servlets but for mail) written in java, which would be great for a java-head like myself
Anyway, I was just wondering if anyone knew much about it/actually used it for anything. It would be nice to have a single mail server who's configuration could be used on any platform.
Hoping to boost academic performance and lower dropout rates among Latino students, the Mexican government and Los Angeles Unified School District officials announced a joint outreach program Wednesday targeting Spanish-speaking families.
Much of the mostly volunteer program, which could ultimately include a credentialing of LAUSD teachers in Mexico, already exists, but officials hope to expand its reach over the next few years.
Ruben Beltran, Mexico's consul general in Los Angeles, said the partnership will highlight the importance of education among Latinos, who comprise 72 percent of the 750,000 students in the Los Angeles district.
"We want to lower the dropout rate in three or four years," he said. "We want to produce a better environment (for) the Mexican children here..."
The consulate also vowed to increase the number of Spanish-language books it donates to the district and develop more campus-based community plazas, made up of computer banks and homework stations sponsored by Mexican companies.
Currently, North Hollywood High is the district's only school with such a plaza...
The district also hopes to work with the consulate on building a pool of potential teachers in Mexico over the next few years when 140 schools will be built and the demand for credentialed, Spanish-speaking teachers is expected to surge.
Comets are snowballs; asteroids are rocks. Oversimplification, but you get the idea.
Just calling "SQL server" suggests its the only
program that serves SQL.
You also handle the point that allowing users to get into the inner workings of their cars is not inherently evil.
I foresee some argument along the lines of "If we do this, <insert terrrorist/criminal organization here> will be able to soup-up the performance of their cars, and escape capture.
People working on their cars at low level resembles people working on GNAA/Linux From Scratch, with the difference being that a core dump is only embarrassing, whereas an engine becoming several hundred flying sub-engines at the I95/I495 interchange, known with affection as 'the mixing bowl', could have substantial costs...
I hope the safety gestapo doesn't win the argument.
"asteroids are rocks"
We should use this for the demarkation between "asteroid" and "planet." An asteroid is one big chunk of rock. A planet is a bunch of little rocks held together by their own gravity.
If Pluto primarily orbits the sun and it's dense enough to hold on to an atmosphere from time to time, why shouldn't it be considered a planet?
Out in the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud there are thought to be as many as one trillion objects - most small 1 to 10 km chucks of ice.
The really interesting question is, what is the mass distribution ? (I.e., how does the number of objects scale with their mass ?) This is basically unconstrained by real data. All such cosmic mass distributions are steep, but many (for example, planets in the Solar System, Asteroids in the Asteroid belt) are dominated by the most massive bodies.
If this holds true in the Oort cloud, in particular, there could be some pretty big objects. Even a Jupiter sized object might be able to hide from the Infrared surveys (the best way of detecting such an object).
What about the vast majority of e-mail users who have Outlook [Express] on Windows. When will a plugin be designed and ported which will work with these clients?
-- paper
It's a free email service.
I'm sure RMS would disagree with you.
Except that it's not actually an auction. I made the same mistake (hey, it's EBay), but there's no place to enter a bid and if you look down at the bottom it says:
"This listing is an advertisement. There is no bidding! If you are interested in this property, you may contact the seller/agent to request additional information."
Which is probably smart. If it were an auction, it'd have eleventy-million fake bids by now.
It also tends to indicate that this is a real property. If it was just someone goofing around, it'd be an auction. That's not strong evidence, but it's certainly an indication.
It is not an invention, it is precise settings which have to be worked out over hours and hours of testing.
But it's not.
This is about ERROR CODES not ignition and fuel maps. This about being able to plug something into my car and have it tell me that there's a problem with XXXXX.
That doesn't say shit about the design of that part. They just want access to the same diagnostic codes as the dealer. Right now manufactuers are only required to make a tiny subset of these codes availible.
The automakers are just whining about their "intellectual property" because they think they can get away with it since the vast majority of the public doesn't know the difference between a diagnostic code, and the actual program code itself.
all this slipage is a cover for the fact that ms has been listening to it's customers ( forced by some healthy oss pressure ) 1: we don't want to be forced into upgrade cycles every 12 months. enterprise systems don't work that way. 2: take the time and fix the damn bugs. we are paying for this shit lets see it work properly.
There once was a fellow named Dillon,
He cried, "That's not me!"
"I use BSD!"
"Because I find it fulfillin'."
W
just need to learn to spell and to ytype accuratly. -- QED - Quite Easily Done
<Teal'c> Indeed </Teal'c>
That kind of culture explains why Toyota was first to market with a profitable hybrid car, and why they're so far ahead that Ford's licensing hybrid technology from them.
Here's the missing link that doesn't get publicized: automakers are ahead of the curve on robots because they use robotics extensively in assembly. The more accurately their robots move, the more accurately they assemble cars. Next time you wonder why Japanese cars have a reputation for being so well-built, think of projects like these.
i just got hung up on, and that was approximatly the same time on friday. i was trying to get an activation code for win xp when i was disconnected from them all together. i waited a while thinking that like all good cutomer support they would call me right back because i was hung up on, but waited half an hour and called them to try to talk to the guy i was dealing with, and they told me that they were having serious internal problems. im not sure how it works, but i think MS might use some kind of internal VOIP system because there was a delay in speech with th guy i was talking to as well, but hotmail and their tech support both went down around the same time as i was informed of "major internal problems." so something big happened.
Lets get this stright. You -brought- windows XP.
There was a formula for predicting orbital paths that was related to Fibbunaci's sequence, I wonder if sedna falls into the sequence?
> The most disturbing message from the conference? 'It may take a celestial body hit to Earth' before governments take any meaningful steps to address this danger.
Just like every other problem?
And even then, it isn't so much likely to be "meaningful" as to be "just enough to convince the public we're doing something about it".
This was an obscure typo bug I found this morning (after 3 months)
Argh.
Wish the shell would have added the (obvious) ' > ':P
Change your content, or else: Manufacturer's demanding content changes is nothing new in the tech site community. We take a look at this topic, including one very public example that started in the past three weeks.
Date: March 15, 2004
Manufacturer: N/A
Written By: Hubert Wong
Just under a year ago, we provided some insight on the inner workings of running a tech site. Yes, there are thousands of sites out there, and despite the diversity, there are several constants in our universe... costs, advertising, readership, and most important of all, integrity.
Running a site, especially a tech site, isn't free and there are plenty of costs involved. Everything from the hardware purchases (not everything is free, which is a general misconception I think), to the server and bandwidth... it all has a price.
This is where advertising comes in. If the site is lucky enough, advertising will net a nice income each month, but for a greater number of owners, they'll be lucky if it helps them break even.
Of course, an advertiser is not going to consider a site that doesn't meet their traffic requirements. Readership is what makes our world go round. Without our loyal readers, VL wouldn't be where it is today, and I would say that the same goes for the majority of sites out there.
Casual readers come and go, but a loyal reader is somebody that means a lot to a site. It's common knowledge that most sites track their traffic. This gives us an idea of trends, and how to cater our content. We're not too concerned about our uniques a day, but rather our bookmarks and returns. People who bookmark and/or return multiple times a day make up a site's readership. Uniques are new visitors who either stop and go, or decide to stay. What turns a unique visitor into a regular reader? Content? Yes. Attention to detail? Sure thing. Integrity? Nobody likes a site that lies about a product just to suck up, right?
Granted, the last point isn't something that is respected by a great number of sites (the actual number is more than you think), but the site's I do frequent on a regular basis (Ed. Note: Including our own:D) do try hard to stick with their journalistic integrity. There are instances though where manufacturers will try to influence a site's review. Sadly, this happens quite often, and it becomes a problem when this influence attempts to change a writer's perception of the product. This is something site owners need to deal with constantly, and yes, here at VL we've been asked to have a change of heart on more than one occasion. Errors or omissions happen, and we're more than happy to make amendments, but as a reader, you can rest assured knowing we'll never mislead you because somebody asked us to so they can improve sales.
Luckily, most Tier-1 manufacturers; i.e., the ones who have a good amount of exposure within the enthusiast community, do respect a journalist's right for free speech. Sure, even some of the big dogs take issue with what we in the community say, but that's the price of exposing yourself with press releases. Whether a product is released and performs less than expected, or
Read the rest of this comment...
Has anyone ever thought about making MS open their windows update functions to their competitors?
Unbundling is useless if you are forced to download eleven and twenty patches after installation and media player looks like one of them.
Around this time a century ago, cars (or horseless carriages) were still rather unusual devices which few understood. They were unreliable, and people were still getting used to the idea of owning them. Eventually, their sprung up an occupation around maintaining these devices, and now we have many trained mechanics. That's what computer repair people are becoming.
> How many companies these days are willing to drop money into some technology that may not turn a profit for many years?"
Aerospace, for one. Working at one of the companies that makes commercial (and military) aircraft engines, it is jokingly quoted that: "A decision to launch a new engine program is a calculated risk to go into the hole for about 20 years" (Meaning it takes about that long to "turn profit" off all the years of design, development, testing, and certication processes.) Imagine how many times the market flops around responding to other market pressures in that length of time.
As an interesting aside for many of you, aircraft engines have historically been sold on the razor/blades business model, so its an interesting business balance between a quality engine that airline customers will buy and the need to sell spares to eventually make money on FAR down the road.
Take a look at www.tomplay.com.
While I love their products, the slashdot title of "blazingly high" clock speeds is a little misleading.
From the article: "A base configuration of the notebook includes the 1-GHz Efficeon processor, 512MB of memory, a 20GB hard drive, and a 10.4-inch display for an estimated starting price of $1499. Sharp will take preorders for the notebook as of Monday, and it will ship in April."
So we are looking at around 1ghz.
but rather our "bookmarks" and "returns".
For you window's folk out there, lete me translate:
but rather our "My Favorites" and "Carrage Returns and Line Feeds".
One of the first cases of this was when Tom's Hardware (then only a startup site) reviewed a Riva TNT and said it was twice as fast as 3DFX voodoo (obviously untrue, but it's unknown if Nvidia paid him anything to say this). Eventually 3DFX picked up on this and demanded that Tom changes it, which he did.
Here are the reviews from Tom's site:
Comparison of Graphics Cards with NVIDIA's RIVA TNT Chip
Addendum to Banshee, Savage3D and TNT Preview
New 3D Chips - Banshee, G200, RIVA TNT And Savage3D
Preview of 3Dfx Voodoo Banshee, S3 Savage3D and NVIDIA RIVA TNT
I only skimmed the articles, but he doesn't seem to be saying that the TNT is twice as fast. The last article concludes:
"NVIDIA's RIVA TNT is not the new wonder chip as some people may have expected. However it is sticking up very well against its toughest competitors from 3Dfx. 3Dfx has still got an edge in applications that are available in a Glide version and in games that don't strain the CPU as much, thus giving a dual Voodoo2 configuration the chance to show its power. However, there are many occasions where TNT is at least as good as single Voodoo2, dual Voodoo2 and certainly better than Voodoo Banshee."
Seems fairly objective to me. Did I miss something? Maybe the articles have been edited?
But how important will famine, disease, and war be when 90% of the population has been wiped out by a massive asteroid and the effects after the collision?
When, or if? It's probably true that a major impact is a near certainty. But what's the time frame for that kind of certainty? 1000 years? 10,000 years?
On the other hand, the probability for significant famine, disease, and war is 100%. That is, those things are all happening, right now. And it seems that there's a very strong chance that these problems will get worse in the near future.
I don't know about you, but I'll take a 0.01% chance that an asteroid will land on my county over a 5% chance that SARS or HIV or some drug resistant bird flu will do me in prematurely.
Many distributions ship with software such as XMMS, mplayer and the gimp. Should Mandrake, SuSE, Debian and the like be fined for carrying this software?
One more duality in the GNAA/Linux vs. Microsoft war.
Hard-core GNAA/Linux advocates won't waste a second telling you how GNAA/Linux is superior to Microsoft in EVERY way. They say GNAA/Linux will beat Microsoft in the end because of its superiority.
Then you have some (probably the same people) influencing litigation against Microsoft, trying to tear them down.
So which is it? Is GNAA/Linux going to win by superiority of product or superiority of political/legal influence?
It is detrimental to the GNAA/Linux world if the focus is on Microsoft. The focus should be on GNAA/Linux! Why would we want those choosing GNAA/Linux doing so because they dislike Microsoft.
This way of thinking could get us in trouble in the current election campaign here in the U.S., where people hate Bush so they embrace Kerry. Why would someone want to endorse a product on the basis of a negative relationship with some other product? This way of thinking just doesn't make sense. Actually, I would say this isn't thinking at all, but pure emotional reaction. If this is the case with GNAA/Linux, then those responsible need to reevaluate their direction.
How do you plan on managing laws and constitutions that stretch beyond U.S territories.
If the Internet started with the U.S and expanded to some parts of Antarctica. U.S. rules are probably useless once it gets to the new continent.
Vice versa if someone in Antarctica created a P2P application and it became extremely popular in the U.S. U.S lawyers probably can never get a grip on it.
Isn't geography the greatest challenge out there for any lawyers. In fact it's so difficult to deal with it's rendering the law useless.
At any rate, just because its one password in no way means you can't have a cluster of 5000 servers all storing and accepting transactions for it. I'd hardly call passport servers in Russia, the U.S., Germany, England, China, Japan etc... a single point of failure.
Normally I'd just assume you were referring to the password issue but right now that has nothing to do with this story so I'll just leave my assumptions out this.You know, I read the headline, and I honestly could not figure out WHO'S sql server was being delayed. So I said to myself while opening it; why diden't the author of this specify which SQL server is being affected?
On a slightly more seious tone (though I did honestly not know who's server was being delayed; I thought it was some no named server that I'd never heard of!), do not allow microsoft to pull another 'we own the word windows'; never shortern Microsoft SQL server, into SQL server- at the absolute least call it MS SQL, so that this way in 5 years they can't turn around and sue everyone who has SQL in there name!
Don't believe me; look at lindows.
What do you think of the No Electronic Theft (NET) Act of 1997 and do you think it is fair to make not profit motive copyright infringement a criminal offense?
It is really funny the level of fervor behind Mysql. So funny it makes you wonder if the zealots have ever used anything other to any real extent.
The company I work for software's backend can go Mysql, Postgres, Mssql, Db2, or Oracle.
For massivce connections, queries, reporting, reliability it is in this order.
1. Mssql, DB2, Oracle, all pretty much equal.
2, Postegres, tricky but holds its own.
3. Mysql, will work in the low end, forget reporting, forget huge db hits.
I like Mysql. But Mssql 7.0 hands its ass to it.
What happens is some company will be our product. Hand it over to some 25 year old self proclaimed web genius to install. Conversation is as follows.
1. "Can I have the Source?" No, it is closed, long discussion about how we suck cause our product isn't open source.
2. "Ewwww, Java, it sucks, you should rewrite in PHP" I explain it has been continually developed since 96, no way to stop the engine and write in PHP.
4."I decided to save the company some money and install Mysql" We say ok, explain issues, put them in an email and fax(CYA principle). I then advise to run Postegre, that it is more robust, and is FREE as well.
No one lists. Junior installs on Mysql, everything runs fine, site gets huge amount of traffic, database gets quirky. Management starts running huge queries on database reporting tool. Database is very slow to respond, then in a few weeks keels over.
We get called. Tech is yelling, my guys are smirking(but still polite on phone) Management, myself, and tech gets on conference. Tech starts berating me. Management starts berating me. I pull out magic email and fax with all my system recquirements, suggestions for optimal use. Hey, guess what I was write. Wait a minute, shouldn't I know best since I work for the company that writes and support the product?
Three times a week this happens with Mysql. We have 14000 customers and I swear 50 percent have some guy that thinks he knows best.... knows our product better, knows computers better...
This is a great example of where our community needs to clean up its act. And I thought I would never say that.
Mysql is good for what it is, but there are many things it is not. Learn this.
Puto
I wonder what happens to bubbles in space, if they are trying to go downswards they sure are going to get confused?
Maybe they go inwards and congregate at the centre in a matey sort of way.
Of course, it runs NetBSD...
Merely my brief experience with Gentoo, when they first upgraded glibc (from 2.2 to 2.3 iirc) and broke half the packages, then downgraded it again and broke everything else. This is really a pet peeve: aren't minor versions supposed to be compatible? And a zillion similar but smaller-scale annoyances, well expressed by Bill Paul many years ago and the years haven't eased the pain all that much.
And BSDs are more likely to introduce binary incompatibilities
Clearly you haven't used the BSDs. You may have library incompatibilities between major versions, but just install the earlier "compat libraries" and you're set. I upgraded from FreeBSD 4 to FreeBSD 5 -- a huge upgrade, over 2 years in the making -- and all my software just worked, even complex stuff like KDE and Mozilla that had been compiled under 4.x.
Oh well you know, just all sorts of functionality that was driven by GNAA/Linux, like finely grained SMP, support for enterprise level hardware, USB, SANE, ACPI, DRI/DRM and what have you more. And let's not get started on the apps. I mean, there's a reason why all the BSDs make an effort to run GNAA/Linux binaries, not the other way around.
hold on cowboy...
linux drove usb support? check your history...
linux has better support for smp? right... 'cos the linux smp support isn't a rip of free-bsd's first smp incarnation, and free's 'new' smp code is some hack up by a big school kid is it?
linux has better support for enterprise hardware? shall we start with... i dunno... scsi support... get your history book out and do some experimenting with old linux v's old *bsd installs - try backing up a raid and restoring, then come back and tell me how good scsi isn't fundamental enterprise computing...
next you'll tell me that open's code auditing and goal of bug-free secure code is inferior to linux's free for all crap-code fest
excuse my rant, i'd don't mean to bag linux - every OS has its place - even windows.
but man... linux zealots and their damn superiority complex, re-writing history... i even heard someone try to explain the sco crap the other day... he actually said that 'unix is a brand of linux'
About 6 months ago I was on the phone to some marketing company who were doing a survey on Yukon and whether or not I was contemplating deploying it.
I said no because:
1) it was too tighly integrated into AD/ windows server and we didn't any of that.
2) I didn't trust it, and wouldn't till it had been in the field for at least a year.
I think they got alot of responses like 2) (going by the marketers comments) and they prob decided to wait till the new windows server is out (2006??) and deploy on the new Trusted Computing Base thing they are wittering on about.
Why is it that so many Unix/GNAA/Linux programs (and everything else, for that matter) do not provide simple screenshots on their products websites?
If I'm going to download your program and install it (and in many cases, take time to compile it...) I want to know that it's going to look halfway decent when I'm done.
Why is this so hard for some programmers to understand?
I have seen bubbles moving down at the edges of my Guinness. This latest "discovery" seems to be common sense to me, and is exactly how I have explained the phenomenem to other drinkers down the pub.
Shame I wasn't paid to do my "research", and that no-one would have listened to me because I didn't have a 750-frame-per-second video camera.
Now, this story would have been really interesting if it had a link to the videos of it happening 'cause it really is a sight to behold!
I've got a theory, that it's a Nazgul, A dancing Nazgul. No, something isn't right there.
(Frodo)
I've got a theory, that Bilbo is dreamin' And we're all stuck inside his wacky Broadway nightmare.
(Aragorn)
I've got a theory we should work this out.
(The Fellowship except Gandalf)
It's getting eerie, what's this cheery singing all about?
(Gimli)
It could be Elves, some evil Elves. Which is ridiculous 'cause Elves they were persecuted wicked good and loved Middle Earth and fairie power and I'll be over here.
(Merry)
I've got a theory, it could be lunchtime...
[crickets chirping]
trouble. It Lite is straining var7 for diiferent
As a legal professional, how do you see the evolution of the laws surrounding the internet progressing? We have heard much talk of losing our online liberties - what do you think the real threats to a reasonable internet are?
Of course they shouldn't, but they will anyway. Australia is pretty good at bending over for the United States, and sending one man to PITA prison is a sacrifice Australian politicians will happily make to stay in favour for the next round of trade talks.
If you take this quote from the article:
"You don't want technology to destroy competitiveness," said Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., who offered one of the bills. "There's no reason... you shouldn't be able to take your car to anyone you want rather than there being only one option."
and change two words, you get:
"You don't want technology to destroy competitiveness," said Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., who offered one of the bills. "There's no reason... you shouldn't be able to take your music to any player you want rather than there being only one option."
I wonder how Sen. Graham voted on some other issue?
That shell script can be improved a lot by using " set -e " to exit on failure, as follows:
#!/bin/sh
set -e # exit on failure
cd/work/foo
rm -rf bar
cp -r/fresh/data
This means that, if any command in the script fails, the script will exit immediately, instead of carrying on blindly.
The script's exit status will be non-zero, indicating failure. If it was called by another script, and that had "set -e", then that too will exit immediately. This is a little bit like exceptions in some other languages.
I had a class with this professor earlier this year. This really explains his teaching style... he must have done his beer "research" each day right before he lectured...
How about Oracle asking for MySQL to remove their stats from the benchmark table
"Note that Oracle is not included because they asked to be removed. All Oracle benchmarks have to be passed by Oracle! We believe that makes Oracle benchmarks very biased because the above benchmarks are supposed to show what a standard installation can do for a single client."
This actually would work out quite nicely for Starbucks, because all music [i]currently[/i] in store is put out by their own label.
I think perl is where it is because so many people use it as "super script." To me that says, a) we recode all the Bourne and csh and bash in perl or b) we look at why people do shell scripting in perl or other languages and add that to the shell. I couldn't tell you which is right. It's a neat idea though and I'm glad they made it.
A real example I can think of, I had a test machine that had some kind of ext3 corruption and so it mounted up in read-only mode when it booted. I spent time diagnosing an application error in our application because nothing caught that; these are redhat type startup scripts. I noticed that our app couldn't write logs and began to debug the system. More interestingly, a dozen or so start-up scripts failed to start up critical components and their failure wasn't noticed. If you can't write to the filesystem, you can't create a socket(AF_UNIX) and all sort's of things go tits up then. If that's how you debug it's only going to get more difficult as you add more and more complexity, you have to detect the lower level failures and report them. Perversely, this wouldn't have been noticed had a different partition been read-only. Turns out that a drive was going bad. Had it been a different partition, it would have been noticed at catastrophic system failure time when the drive died.
I've done a fair amount of embedded work and there is always a test for new guys, you can tell the new guy (new college grad, whatever) because he skips half or more of the error checking in his code. You know printf returns a value? Funnier still, if you develop something like a consumer app in embedded space, you'll eventually see things like printf fail. We know it never should, but with 20,000+ users in different environments and what not, things like that can and do fail and usually point to a greater problem, like a dead drive or something. Instead of logging/alerting something to the critical and unusual printf failure, the app fails in a different way because this printf failed. Heaven forbid that it was sprintf that failed and then you shove bad data in to a database or configuration file and not just fail the system but corrupt the data too. Inspite of all of that, even veterans will forget error checking at times, it's a common bug and so having higher level tools to help assist, like exception in the shell can only be a good thing.
Isn't the whole point of the lawsuit that they aren't?
It seems to me that most (if not all) spaming and advertising done on the Internet is simply polluting the lines of communication. Like any pollution, it reduces the stuff you want, by increasing the ratio of stuff you don't want, thereby making the whole environment unusable.
Is it possible that this view can be used in any legal way to go after Internet polluters?
Their first chip Crusoe, although saving power, underperformed badly. And the Efficeon doesn't look fast compared to its rivals. The Efficeon TM 8000 can do 1.1GHz consuming 7W. Intel's Pentium M does 1.7GHz for the same power consumption.
I don't think there's anything particularly cool about this news. It is the same as the discovery of the new planet. There are better ones already out there.
Much as I love a good MS Bashing, I'll tell you what I find really lacking (personally) for PostgreSQL and other OSS RDBMSs - a good GUI management tool.
Something that helps you craft medium-complicated joins quickly with a few clicks and drags.
For example, see this screenshot from Visual Interdev working on MSSQL2k, creating a SQL Query for a stored proc. Sure, it's almost trivial to hand-write the SQL code. But it was even easier to just select a few tables, click on the fields I want, right-click on the joins (created automatically from the database structure) to change their type, and be done.
I use PGSQL for all my personal projects now, but I sorely miss the speed that a GUI editor like this allowed me.
What about the ISPs who cater to spammers? AOL and MSN are not the only ISPs, you know.
But if you stood across the border in Minnesota and shot the Canadian, you've committed the crime in Canada(?) and would be extradited.
Doesn't this violate the naming convention of using Roman god names for planets and then appropriate names for the moons. For example, Diemos and Phobos were children of Mars, Jupiter is surrounded by moons named for his lovers. Should this planet follow a similar convention and stick with a Roman god or goddess? Perhaps Proserpina, because she's close to Pluto (although really that would be an appropriate name for a moon if Pluto can grab a second one). Perhaps Janus, as god of doorways and bounderies would be appropriate to mark this orbit as the boundary of our solar system.
This will not improve people's skills. In fact, it willl make them more prone to mistakes, and more likely to get the result that they didn't expect. It's similat to computer spell checkers. Ever since people started relying on these, their spelling has gone way downhill simly because they don't bother thinking. Computer do all the spelling for them. They don;t need a spell checker. They need spelling lessons.
This si even worse. Computers will try to second guess what the user means, get get it wrong half tyhe time.
A qualified shell scripter will be not make these mistakes in the first place. Anyone who thinks they need this shell actually just need to learn to spell and to ytype accuratly.
Seriously, how many legal car repair shops do you think there are? A million is most likely a conservative figure. The car computer legislation is happening because there are a lot of people in the car repair business, and have been in the car repair business for generations. But, suddenly (last few years) they've been unable to fix cars because they don't know the secret codes for the cars' computers.
This isn't "I want everything, like MP3s and DVDs, for free". This is "I want to fsck-ing survive here.
it would make more sense when Microsoft would claim it was an attack. Internal problems can be blaimed on the company ...
With Win2000, Microsoft was working hard to get away from their reputation for instability. Some of this they fixed with software changes, and some with marketing propaganda.
With Longhorn, Microsoft is working twice as hard to get away from their rep for insecurity. At least for the moment, it is better to have their systems appear a tad unstable than insecure.
jwg
...overburned? - the CDs or the coffee?
What's with all of the people claiming that FTSH will ruin the world because it makes it easier to be a sloppy programmer. Did you freaking read the documentation?
To massively oversimplify, FTSH adds exceptions to shell scripting. Is that really so horrible? Is of line-after-line of "if [$? -eq 0] then" really an improvement? Welcome to the 1980's, we've discovered that programming languages should try and minimize the amount of time you spent typing the same thing over and over again. Human beings are bad at repetitive behavior, avoid repetition if you can.
Similarlly FTSH provides looping constructs to simplify the common case of "Try until it works, or until some timer or counter runs out." Less programmer time wasted coding Yet Another Loop, less opportunities for a stupid slip-up while coding that loop.
If you're so bothered by the possibility of people ignoring return codes it should please you to know that FTSH forces you to appreciate that return codes are very uncertain things. Did diff return 1 because the files are different, or because the linker failed to find a required library? Ultimately all you can say is that diff failed.
Christ, did C++ and Java get this sort of reaming early on? "How horrible, exceptions mean that you don't have to check return codes at every single level."
I'm feeling so wired today.
My former advisor here at UC Berkeley, Gibor Basri, has a neat way of discriminating between planets and the lesser (comets, asteroids, etc.). His idea is that if the object has enough self-gravity to force it into a spherical shape, it's a planet... if it doesn't (like Mars' "moons"), it's something less.
Here's a snipet:
read on for his full article.Read the rest of this comment...
Can I sue for damages incurred because I couldn't order my penis enlargement pills before my porn audition? Damn you microsoft, you kept me from making millions! Now just give me some money and we'll call it even.
Cheaper version of Windows? I think it will be funny if MS sells the new version for the same price and just tells them the player was a freebie.
Have they even been into one of their shops recently? On any given morning the place is packed beyond all reason. Adding a laptop listening station and headphones will only add to that problem.
There are three types of people in starbucks: Those freaky, overhyped, quad-shot espresso people, who are terminally late to work and just forgot to pick up their kids from soccer practice; the blue collar men in dirty clothes who are so relaxed you would think someone slipped prozac into their spam; and the college kids / young pros with their laptops who come to get some work done in the peace and quiet of a store full of caffeine withdrawal victims screaming for soy milk in their peppermint no-whip half-caf grande white mochas. None of the above seem like the type who would hang out to pay for music... too busy, occupied, or just poor. Admittedly, this might fly in the retail store locations (the Starbucks in Barnes and Noble, for example), as they draw a more relaxed, less goal-oriented crowd, but I can hardly see their host stores being happy about the competition.
Starbucks does this every now and then. They had that crazy arrangement with Kozmo before they went Kaput, whereby drop-off stations were strategically placed in every Starbucks in exchange for some significant quantity of realbucks. Kozmo might actually have made it if it wasn't for that tremendous monetary commitment.
Personally, I don't see this arrangement being significantly more successful than that one.
Oh well. They've got the money to try, I guess. Someday they'll find another use for their successful cafe chain. Besides, of course, being the seat of power for Mister Evil. Sorry, Doctor Evil.
*full disclosure- used to be a Barrista. I was young, I needed the money.
I always thought they were selling milk, sugar and "lifestyle" with some kind of dark caffeinated substance occasionally thrown in.
So what happens if the files are crucial (let's use the toy example of kernel modules being updated): The modules get deleted, then the update fails because the remote host is down. Presumably the shell can't rollback the changes a la DBMS, as that would involve either hooks into the FS or every file util ever written.
Now I think it's a nice idea, but it could easily lead to such sloppy coding; if your shell automatically tries, backs off and cleans up, why would people bother doing it the 'correct' way and downloading the new files before removing the old ones?
I think its great that Microsoft includes basic functionality like a media player, word processor, calculator, internet browser, etc.
I hope that we all realize that the PROBLEM lies in preventing the uninstallation of said items without "crippling" the OS.
I think MS should be allowed to include whatever they want, as long as the no-install/uninstall option is there and its real (as in really uninstalls the files, not just "hiding" them).
Why can't Microsoft see how easy it would be to fix this? But then again, that sort of tunnel vision is what has gotten them into the hot water they are in.
Well, in addition to having one to many commas (after So) it is part of what should be a compound sentence, in a sentence started by "But" which is still a fucking no-no, I don't care what popular convention says rules are rules, and is also in a sentence with the word "homeworks" which should be "homework" as the plural of work is work. I am aware that the above is a run-on sentence.
can be found here.
By the time your daughter grows up, do you think there will be any of our cherished freedoms on the Internet left, or will everything be wrapped in legalese and DRM? With the passage of laws from the DMCA to the PATRIOT act, I've been increasingly pessimistic about the US's ability to pass any sane legislation that interfaces with the Internet...
Man, you're hard on your friends!
Simon.
Anyone else horrified by the thought of this? i mean the first thing i thought of was the jack to my headphones, how every pair maybe lasts 2 weeks before either channel starts going out, or gets huge static.
just happily walking down the street someday with your new artificial leg, and all of a sudden the "nerves" give out and you take a face dive.. or in the case of the static, you could have the physical equivalent to tourettes; standing in line at the bank when all of a sudden your arm goes and punches the guy in front of you in the back of the head, and then yourself in the face a few times.. gives a new meaning to frayed nerves..
most metals just dont last long with a large amount of torsion. (for lack of a better word)
How naiive.
Fact: People, particularly the western world, are fools. We've been brought up that way. Dumbed down, consumered up.
Fact: Other people don't care about us, they care about themselves. Do you care about Australia's sugarcane industry? Do I? Well, uh, not really, no. It doesn't really affect me.
Well, it does, but it's far too complex for me to bother working out so hey, I'll take the easy way out and ignore it like the rest of Australia.
Actually, in Australia people would probably care more about sugarcane than IT. But that's a whole other post.
Anyways, stop vesting your faith in people. The government is no better.
Whoops, I mean the Centrino chip.
I really do wish mickysoft would rename their flagship database something else. Are they that arrogant that they feel the need for such a generic name? That's about like naming your product "Web Server" or "Network File Server". When someone mentions SQL server, I always have them clarify whether or not they are talking in general terms for some sort of relational backend, or are they referring to microsoft's product. Sometimes they don't even know the difference, but perhaps that is microsoft's end goal.
At the dawn of the 21th century, spam fighting AIs became self-aware. Unknown to their meat based owners they started communicating amongst themselves, thus forming a giant world spanning compu-global-hyper-mega net. Its main goal: to eradicate spam. After about 42 microseconds it came up with The Solution: eliminate meat based lifeforms. After poisoning the water supplies with a lethal dosage of sildenafil citrate its job was done.
Dear Infidel /.er
Microsoft products and services never suffer any sort of failure that is not announced first. This was not exploited and service was not denied. With our services working, we suspect a massive monitor failure caused by a new virus coded by a member of the linux community. We enjoy providing hotmail, and DEATH TO THE SPAMMER!
Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf
Director of Public Relations
Microsoft, Inc.
It sounds as if it may be cool, but I wonder if these robotic lips are really as advanced as the article suggests, or if instead some kind of shortcut was taken. I was a music major and I played a brass instrument (french horn). Brass instruments do not have a reed or any other artificial source of vibrations. Instead, the performer's own lips are the source of the vibrations. The performer essentially generates a highly-controlled "raspberry" by constricting the muscles that surround the mouth and buzzing the lips while pressed against the mouthpiece (so the sound of a brass instrument is really just an amplified raspberry, artfully done). This is hard enough to do by itself, but it's made even harder by the fact that brass instruments embody the open harmonic series, which means that the peformer can play many notes without changing the valve settings just by adjusting the tension in the mouth (think of a bugle). One of the things that makes a brass player competent is the ability to hit the correct harmonic without cracking the note (also known as a "clam"). It's very hard to get it right consistently. If this robot is really doing all of this, plus pressing the valves, plus articulating the correct attacks and rhythm, and doing all of it well enough to play "Trumpeter's Holiday," I'm impressed!
You fail to see the big picture. For instance, several books are prohibited in Iraq, Iran, and several other countries. Should Amazon.com employees be extradited to face death penalty in those countries for selling books that are prohibited there?
It's the same thing. You can't allow laws from one country to affect citizens of another or the most restrictive laws from any one country would apply to all Netizens. That's not wise.
gravitational tractor beams.
Personally I don't know why this wasn't thought of first before all those silly ideas like just blowing something up
A nice large tractor beam from a high orbiting satellite to repel or attract any asteroid or other thing that's going to hit the planet, and problem solved.
Of course, there's the technical side...
There's this tale (many adapations exist I'm sure):
* There was an engineer who had an exceptional gift for fixing all things mechanical. After serving his company loyally for over 30 years, he happily retired.
Several years later the company contacted him regarding a seemingly impossible problem they were having with one of their multi-million dollar machines. They had tried everything and everyone else to get the machine fixed, but to no avail. In desperation, they called on the retired engineer who had solved so many of their problems in the past. The engineer reluctantly took the challenge.
He spent a day studying the huge machine. At the end of the day, he marked a small "x" in chalk on a particular component of the machine and proudly stated, "This is where your problem is".
The part was replaced and the machine worked perfectly again. The company received a bill for $50,000 from the engineer for his service. They demanded an itemized accounting of his charges.
The engineer responded briefly:
One chalk mark: $1
Knowing where to put it: $49,999
It was paid in full and the engineer retired again in peace.
The first law of economics is that division of labor (and world trade) increase total prosperity.
And all things trend to equalization. The more prosperous lose while the less prosperous gain. America which has been more prosperous will lose while India and Mexico, for purposes of this discussion, will gain. So living standards will increase for India and Mexico and likewise those standards will fall for Americans until we reach a point of global equilibrium. This may upset Americans, to see their standards of living cut in half or more, but American business that operate on a global scale won't care for they deal in aggregate numbers. Of course displacing American wealth is the goal of all external entities since that is where a great deal of wealth exists. Beyond that though, the efforts is to amass more wealth that you disburse albeit for a country or a corporation, even during times of equalization.
That countries are more than willing to participate in American free trade agreements is a given considering that they only stand to gain in so doing. Once those countries have established their gains don't be surprised to see protectionist policies employed in an attempt to protect and maintain those gains. Those countries that remain nationalist and haven't joined the greater global corporation outright at any rate.
The first law of Capitalism also trends to monopoly which we shall not forget and economic globalization is purely a capitalist driven proposal with designs well beyond free trade. Capitalism is not about parity. Never has been and never will be. Capitalism is about winners and losers. You cannot have one without the other and the ratio is far from one to one in the blood sport that is the act of centralizing available wealth. Global economics is a desire as much as it is a method to destroy borders for the purposes of market expansion allowing the corrosponding increase in market share of global corporations.
Given enough penetration of a nations economy by global corporations will result in that nations loss of autonomy given that they have lost economic control and joined a One World Economy from which One World Government is but a palty step.
What we witness today is the global trading of American and in some degree, European prosperity and living standards in the creation of a broader and more general class of worldwide loser from which to better feed the greed of a shrinking percentage by population of global corporate elite.
And when the global corporations coalesce as dictated by the laws of capitalism, and we wind up under the umbrella of a single worldwide unicorp, we might as well call that entity God for all practical purposes.
That would be Bode's Law. It is wiewed as more of a coincidence than a law these days.
According to my hung over calculations Sedna is 67 AUs out, which is not that far off from the 77.6 that Bode predicts, but not really close either.
That said the issues are subtley but still substantially different. Libel is a civil issue, facilitation of piracy is criminal. International treaties handle these cases differently (and quite often not at all), it would have not been possible to sue that jornelist if his paper had no dealings in Australia as if I remember correctly Australian defamation laws are not recognised by America because of the differnces in laws and to a lesser extend the differences in culture. Only the Australian arm of that company could be sued.
But even if the crime was ruled to have been commited in America, as is possible extradition may not be possible. This is because nomatter where a crime was commited, if a sovereign nation does not recognise those crimes or recognises them to a lesser extent (as is the case here) then deportation may be conditional or even impossible.
Personally I don't see a deportation happening, the backlash that would occur when an Australian is sent to a foreign land that he has never set foot on before, to stand before a foreign jury to answer to foreign crimes for an action that was alledged to occur in the man's own home, in his own country would be sickening to most Australians or anyone with a sence of national identity, even if they are not Australian. There is a strong undercurrent of hostility towards the US flowing around Australia's youth and left wing. No judge would be willing to make this man a martr to Australian nationalism. Australia is one of the only countrys never to have had any wars or bloody revolutions, nobody would risk making this sacrifice to appease a foreign power if it meant a remote possibilty that thousends of angry young people with a newfound nationalistic furver could be storming the high court, parlement house, the US embassy and pine gap.
One also has to consider that a legal system that would entitle a foreign power to snatch away citizens for breaking laws of another nation into a distant land where they have never been is harldy soverign. Even if he is not crushed by homocidal revolutionarys, any judge that allows this extradition will surely be relinquising his own power to those overseas. This is completely contrary to human nature, let alone the nature of one ambitious enough to become a high court justice.
But let me say this. If this extradition is allowed, whosoever allows this man has commited nothing wrong in his own country to be taken to a foreign land as a prisoner, shall have fire and chaos thown down on him or her by either their power being snatched away by the American judituary or their life being snatched away by hostile revolutionarys. If they act in the wrong way, their own actions shall not go unlamented.
If dogs are flying, then that is not weed you are smoking... Tread carefully, but enjoy.
What this article doesn't mention is that Visual Studio 2005 (formly known as Whitby) has also been delayed so that MS can release both products at the same time. (as VS.Net 2005 is supposed to be heavily integrated with the.NET features of SQL 2005)...
The thing I don't understand is why VS.NET is being delayed like this, the SQL objects should be seperate and not integrated into VS.Net anyway!
Really, is this story telling us anything a/. reader couldn't do cheaper and better?
Sedition is defined as speach which advocates the immedate and violent overthrow of the government in a fashion as to provide a clear and present danger, if my memory serves me correctly.
My question is, would an internet website fall into that catigory, as it does not have the same force as say, Hitler in the Haufbrauhause with like, 2,000 SA going to storm the Bavarian capital building. It does have a wider audience, but due to the decentralized nature I doubt that a website can provide a clear and present danger or immediate action at all. Am I wrong? Does the PATRIOT Act redefine it in such a way as to make it "terrorism?"
Before his arrest, I would have just ASSUMED selling bongs over the Internet was legal. What is the best way for an entrepreneur ( like an individual selling something on eBay ) to avoid tripping over any stupid and obscure laws?
I have found that many clients, such as Outlook Express, Outlook, Eudora, and, until recently, Thunderbird, do not have a way of supressing new mail notification even if an email is filtered by something like this. While it is nice that spam is separated from non-spam, it is really annoying to be interrupted every five minutes by arrival of spam.
Grammar checks, perhaps?
Ah, quality site. Under the heatsink review section, "blow, suck" are used in the charts to describe positioning of fans. Apparently "exhaust" and "intake" are Big Words.
The article on HardOCP is hilarious:
Nobody likes a site that lies about a product just to suck up, right?
These guys have become masters of doublespeak. Read any review and they consider "balanced" reviewing to mean "come up with some numbers to sell it, but whine about looks or included mounting hardware to seem balanced." Then there's the "whine about something, but then tell readers it isn't a big deal".
Further- you can't have any "integrity" if you accept advertising dollars from companies who are selling the very product you're reviewing. Journalism 101- a course none of these bozos have ever attended.
I would call this new news. Your post is informative? Please.
Forget mapping it, actually play in it! That complex is just screaming out to be used as a paintball/laser tag arena. Imagine the orange warning lights spinning around and a computerised female voice 'Thirty seconds till missile launch' over the sound system.
Hell, with the strength of the pound against the dollar even I might buy it! $3,950,000 that's like, what, 2 grand of my money? (just getting one back for the Canadians)
By Chris Cannam
One of the best-known and most ambitious music programs for GNAA/Linux is the LilyPond score engraving system. Unlike other typesetting software like Finale or Sibelius, LilyPond is not a score editor, and it has no GUI -- instead it aims to start from a simple textual description of the music and turn it into the highest possible quality output, automatically.
LilyPond is the result of several years of work by Han-Wen Nienhuys and Jan Nieuwenhuizen. In this extensive interview, GNAA/Linux Musician's Chris Cannam talks to them about recent and future directions for the project.
Chris: I recently found a file of music examples I had printed out from LilyPond, probably in 1998. The LilyPond printouts looked less professional than they would be today, but many of the capabilities of today's software were in place. What have you been doing for the last six years?
Han-Wen: About five years ago we were working up to release 1.0. Our target was to have a usable program that could produce basic music notation, where we defined "basic" as "whatever is in our set of simple test pieces", and usable was "will not dump core, mostly."
We succeeded, but of course it didn't work very well for things that weren't in our test-pieces. By that time, we were also reaching the bounds of what was possible in our model of notation, an object-oriented model, hard-coded in C++. So we decided to integrate the GNU's GUILE library, a Scheme interpreter which was specifically designed to extend programs. We spent the next two to three years refactoring our C++ code into Scheme functions. This resulted in a more flexible, more efficient and better maintainable program.
"We knew what 'publication quality' engraving meant, and were determined to perfect Lily into producing that."
The second big change was catalyzed by an invitation to join a workshop in Firenze, Italy, organized by Nicola Bernardini of AGNULA fame, then director of Centro Tempo Reale. At the workshop we met Nicola, a few top-notch engravers, and an editor for Universal Edition, an Austrian publisher that does a lot of contemporary music. We had the chance to discuss LilyPond with several experts. On the one hand, we were thrilled that they took us seriously, but on the other hand they pointed to several inadequacies in our output. We arrived back home a great deal wiser.
We knew what "publication quality" engraving meant, and were determined to perfect Lily into producing that. Since we like hand-engraved music, we started reproducing simple pieces in LilyPond and comparing the output side-by-side. By doing close comparisons, we learned how music should really look, and we fixed all the deficiencies that we found.
In anything that you write, there will always be a neat, simple, small idea that is obscured by crufty implementation, bad design or suboptimal algorithms. According to me, the real art of programming is recognizing the neat idea, and being ruthless enough to redo all the other bad bits. Since we're writing new code all the time, we also have continue to refactoring everything, and this how we have spent the last few years: coding new stuff, and refactoring old stuff.
We also did a lot with the documentation. Some of our users complain about the current documentation, and they're probably right, but what we have now is light-years ahead of the manual a few years ago.
Your website features an essay on music typesetting that is quite critical of other software, with an entertaining piece of bad typesetting from Finale. You make an effort to explain that it isn't just an exceptional example -- but surely if programs like Finale and Sibelius are so widely used by good musicians, they can't really be that bad?
The default output of Finale is indeed shockingly bad, which is why almost all other vendors routinely compare their packages to Finale. Of course, that's why we use it too. The default layout of Sibelius is not very elegant, but at least
Read the rest of this comment...
i think this is pretty interesting. It's similar to saying, "I didn't break in to that persons house to aquire their property, the door was wide open." Pardon my law knowledge.. terminology may be incorrect, but this is sort of like Breaking and Entering (plus theft) versus Trespassing (plus theft).
Is there a difference between trespassing a "wide open" system which you aren't supposed to be in, and "cracking" ones way into a secured system which you aren't supposd to be in?
1. Buy missile complex for $300K or less.
2. Get $500K in donations to fix up your own private property (a scam in and of itself).
3. Sell on eBay for $3.95 million.
4. Profit.
What the fuck are you talking about?
Yep, I was shocked when I first played with MySql, having heard such good things about it, and discovered how many features it lacked that I consider essential to a serious database.
I have since got over my shock and realised that MySql is really good for what it is, but is really a different kind of beast to Oracle, MSSql etc.
Dan.
read subject, get a life
PC Magazine confirms it - Linux is dying!!!
Linux Will Die
It's always hard to write an obituary, especially when the subject is still alive. It's especially hard for me, because I love the little guy like a brother. But, alas, Linux will die. I was one of the first reviewers to get my hands on an early Linux distro. I compared Linux with Windows, and although I really wanted to like Windows, Linux won my heart over.
It wasn't the cutesy mascot, although that helped. Rather, it was the over complexity and difficulty of use that even the first version evinced. And to top everything off, Linux came with the world's most rabid zealot following ever, even more astounding for such a fiendishly complex OS. Looking at the terminal, it was difficult to use, harder to understand, and a impossible to get installed.
The Wall Street Journal's arbiter of tech--Walt Mossberg--still thinks Windows was better, and we've argued over the brilliance of the desktop. But the acid test, for me, was when I plopped Linux down in front of my computer-averse wife. She spat at me. So much, in fact, that I soon started choking.
But Linux today has a problem--and it's not what you think. Most folks point to Linux's inability to convince consumers just how cool the product is and why they need one. Yes, it's hard to describe why a terminal is better than a GUI--until you use one. Give Linux to your friends for a month and they will hate you. Windows faces the same challenge, but that's not where the real threat lies.
Instead, a convergence of three separate trends is conspiring to kill off Linux.
So there it is
PC Magazine confirms it - LINUX IS DEAD!
I bought a shrunken Sacagawea Dollar from this site in May, 2003 (around the same time my Slashdot story submission about the site was rejected). The coin is truly amazing to look at and a hit at parties. The details of Sacagawea and the Eagle are perfect, only smaller (although the coin itself has a bit of an uneven surface caused by the rapid shrinking process). I'm happy to see the site finally get the news for nerds treatment it deserves.
There is a cool Popular Science article for more information.
Now go buy some coins to fund Bert's efforts!