Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Munich, Harlan, Alacrity
Please don't link "here": case in point. Kent Brewster writes "As previously mentioned here(1), here(2), and here(3), national treasure Harlan Ellison has been fighting a drawn-out battle with AOL over alt.binaries.e-book. Looks like a settlement has been reached; details (such as they are) are on AOL."
Papa Legba adds a link to an informative page on the suit's progress, with lots of informative links.
The basement dwellers burrow deeper. kevin_conaway writes "Accoring to this article on Tech Target, the DNS outage at Akamai was caused by a massive DDOS attack on Akamai's servers. Akamai Technologies Inc. said a 'sophisticated, large-scale distributed denial of service attack' on its domain name service bogged down several of its clients' Web sites yesterday morning, and that it's investigating the incident with federal authorities."
Time to quit your Winin' marmoset writes "As a followup to this story, Dave Winer has posted information about transitioning weblogs.com sites. Rogers Cadenhead and Steve Kirks pitched in to help. The plan includes a 90-day free evaluation period, during which the affected users will be able to make local copies of their data, sign up for paid hosting, or move to another hosting solution."
Pay up, Pal. ack154 writes "Following up from a previous slashdot story, PayPal may have reached a preliminary settlement in the class action lawsuit brought against them in 2002. The lawsuit was regarding the freezing of suspected fraud accounts and communication of limits on accounts. Limited details are available right now, but the eBay announcement states that anyone who signed up for a PayPal account between Oct 1999 and Jan 2004 may be eligible."
Forkenbrock points to this USAToday today article which says that "Ebay's Paypal will pay a total of 9.25 million dollars to its users (businesses and individuals)."
What about Java vs. T++? Stefan de Bruijn was one of several readers who reacted to the benchmarks cited in the Slashdot post titled 'Java faster than C++'.
He writes "I took the liberty to re-write a major piece of the C++ part of the benchmark. Furthermore, the Intel compiler has been tested as well. The Java code was assumed 'correct.'
The results are quite different than the former posting. Here, C++ appears to be a winner for the vast majority of programs; where Java scored better with (recursive) algorithms and the use of file IO (where it must be remarked that the C++ code uses iostreams)." joekaylor writes "I did a similar study 6-months ago to the study sited recently here on Slashdot, and I did it with java jdk 1.4.x. Java performance has been underestimated for QUITE some time. It's not the best tool every time, but it is not considered often enough and for the wrong reasons."
And an anonymous reader writes "This article by USC graphics researchers surveys a number of good (mostly numeric) benchmarks and then explains the theory of why maybe java should be faster than C++. It also raises the (unanswered) question of why geeks (ostensibly intelligent and scientifically-minded people) continue to believe some ideas (for example, 'garbage collection is slow') despite strong evidence to the contrary that has been available for many years."
Well, it's sort of like a gigabyte. helloanand writes "So, a day after yahoo relaunched their email service with 100 MB space, hotmail also expanded their offering to 25 MB. Just logged into my hotmail account and saw the space bumped up. The thing that I noticed is that MSN/Hotmail didn't make a big splash about it. Its actually a good thing for the users. Gmail started this trend by coming up with 1 GB (yes! gigabyte) worth of space. Then yahoo joined the party with their own 100 MB version and now the latest to join in bill gates & co (aka MSN Hotmail). Lets see what other changes does Gmail stimulate to the email service. Also the thing to note is that Google's gmail is being closely observed by the established players like MSN and Yahoo."
Each city represents a star system; players alternate by country. Wudbaer writes "The Munich city council has finally OK'ed the multi-step 30 Million Euro project to migrate the Munich city council to Linux, as heise news reports (German text). The planned high-profile migration of the administration of one of the largest cities in Germany has already created a lot of interest both in pro and anti-OSS camps, and was rumored to have run into substantial problems at the beginning of the year which might have endangered the council's final OK for the project. But now apparently the road is open for the project. Go Tux !"
Marcus links to this announcement on the city government's web page, and suggests that you put it through Google.
securitas writes "Hot on the heels of Munich's decision to go with Linux, the City of Bergen, Norway will replace its Unix and Windows core infrastructure with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 8. The second part of the implementation will migrate the city's educational network - with 100 schools and 32,000 users - from 100 Windows application servers to 20 Linux IBM eServer BladeCenters. Bergen is Norway's second-largest city. ZDNet UK's Michael Parsons discusses the choice in an interview with Bergen CTO Ole Bjoern Tuftedal."
Making less of a mess. HishamMuhammad writes "The GoboLinux story featured recently on /. got the project some publicity, but again a number of misconceptions showed up, from people who think we are "just another user-friendly distro", because of our verbose pathnames like /System/Settings. Here is an article I wrote in order to explain the principles behind the design of GoboLinux (also in PDF), which tells our side of the story."
Here are my thoughts on the issues. ROR FP.
1) RE: Linux in Munich
I think Linux is great for government. As long as you standardize on something, that's all that counts, whether it's made by professionals at Microsoft or 16-year olds with a SourceForge page.
2) RE: Ellison vs. AOL
Harlan Ellison hasn't written anything significant since Babylon 5, and that was over 10 years ago in 1994. I wish this feud would just stop because it's a waste of Ellison's time, AOL's time, and our time having to read the news about it. Everyone would truly save money if they just bowed out of the fight right now and cut their losses.
3) RE: Hotmail's response to Gmail
Fine, makes sense. Yahoo also has pledged to provide at least 100MB per use. But the big news is that our friends (job stealers? (-;) in India have announced that the Indian site Rediff has announced the launch of Rediffmail 1 GB (gigabyte), giving virtually unlimited storage space of 1 gigabyte to all its free email users in India and worldwide.
Background: 28/M/Bi-Sexual; Owner of a Linux company; MBA Harvard 2003; B.S. Comp Sci MIT 2000
Hotmail users have been finding that gmail invites are getting routed to their spam filters, even when they have the spam filter disabled. What's up with that?
because my hotmail account is still my favorite, except for the space. I dont get any spam at all, because I don't give out my main e-mail to anyone but contacts. hotmail is integrated with Outlook Express, which is real nice.
Perhaps it's just a gimmick. All jokes aside, Hotmail is still part of MickeySoft and them increasing it to 25MB is still a joke in the face of what the other big boys are doing.
/. stories lately.
But, we should still make consideration for the face that hotmail has tons of users. Gmail is new, although there are good minds behind it. Yahoo is looking for any way to make the press. MickeySoft doesn't necessarily need to attract users so much as retain and build upon that retention.
That sounds a bit like Windows Dominance and all the
Yes, I am talking about gmail demise. We all love google and hate yahoo ads, but, with the release date of gmail still uncertain, privacy rumours in everyones mind, the chance of gmail taking a lead might be really slim. It might verywell be a email_SE (read special edition) for the geeks. Nothing more. I wonder how many would trade the superior spam filtering of yahoo for the 900MB extra storage of gmail. (And we all know how to use adblock don't we ? so the yahoo ad problem is not that much of a problem.) There is atleast 6 months before gmail goes public. Yahoo could make a killing in this period. I don't see many yahooligans moving to gmail - i.e. when they get a chance to. Yahoo has done its homework this time. Just a little bit of storage hammer can keep the gmail away.
It's not really Gmail's storage space that most people (myself included) find compelling about Gmail. Other free services like Spymac (http://www.spymac.net/) offer comparable storage amounts also.
Rather, it's the clean user interface, the automatic threading of messages, and the fast searching that most users (myself included) like.
Only if Yahoo, MS, SBC, et al. can replicate that part of the user experience, will Gmail have a viable competitor.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
My Yahoo! storage just went up to 2 GB.
Has anyone else with a premium Yahoo! account (i.e. SBC Yahoo! DSL e-mail) experienced this?
They gave a bunch of programmers some tasks to do. The fastest language was...
perl then java then c then C++.
It had more to do with the perl programmers use of hashes than anything else. Thats the way perl programmer think.
Basically the more difficult you make it to use more efficent data structures the less likely programmers are to use them. C++ even with the STL is non-trivial.
The company I worked for was having trouble with STL three years ago, and only one guy there really knew it well. We were parsing lots of text. Java was easy to use with well documented libraries and surprising fast. And everyone picked up the java programming language quickly.
Will highly optimized C/C++ toast all other languages? Yes, but writting the code is significantly more difficult and time consuming. For many tasks computers are fast enough now where it doesn't matter for many tasks..
GoboLinux seems to be very unique and well thought out. I wouldn't be suprised if this distro gains momentum much like Gentoo has.
One thing I've always come to expect with Windows is that when I install some software, if I go with the default install it will go into C:/Program Files and there I will find almost all the programs installed on my computer. Linux, up until Gobo, has been harder to predict in this sense.
Everytime i open a new hotmail account, it is filled with spam the next day. My yahoo accounts on the other hand get very little even though I use them daily (I don't put them on sign-up forms, but I send and receive email daily) . What's up with this crap? Have spammers hacked Hotmails customer database or what?
I've downloaded a few of these. It was interesting and occasionally useful to have the searchable text of a book I was reading (legal printed edition) to find things. But I can't imagine reading a novel that way. Even if I printed it out, it's much less nice to read than in printed and bound form. With online used books (Amazon has them, many others) you can get most books, except for the very newest, for a couple of dollars, less than it would cost me to print it out, even if my time is free. And my public library has its catalogue online, I can search and find books in any branch, reserve them and pick them up a few days later.
Of course, Baen has been putting the full text of a lot of novels online. It's apparently borne out the belief that it would only encourage the hard copy sales.
Here's my implementation of the Ackermann function in Ruby:Not only is this massively faster (in an interpreted language) than either Java or C++, but it also handles much bigger input arguments, because ruby supports bignums (on my machine, it calculated ack(3,400) pretty much instantaneously.
The link to the paypal announcement leads to an invite to mail them for more information, which I did, and discovered these are the limits to their largesse: If you opened a PayPal account between October 1, 1999 and January 31, 2004, you are a member of the class unless you fit into one of the following exclusions. Excluded from the class are: any judicial officer to whom the lawsuit is assigned; any current or former employee, officer, or director of PayPal; anyone who resides in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, The Netherlands, or United Kingdom; and all persons who timely and validly request exclusion from the class.
A couple of weeks ago, I deleted a whole bunch of emails from Hotmail. The emails are gone, but Hotmail still records the space as taken. Now, with everything deleted from the account (mails, address book, and I have been desparate enough to try this) Hotmail says I am using 1.5M of my available storage. Has this happened to anyone else, and were you able to fix the problem?
Of course, writing to Hotmail got absolutely f-all response apart from a generic auto-reply, and that was after hunting around for ages trying to find an actual address to which I could report the problem.
The only reason I've stuck with Hotmail was that I could download an archive my original emails, headers and all, albeit via a complicated process involving Outlook Express and a dbx to eudora converter program. Now, though, with a 100M Yahoo account and POP access from any platform (not just OE and Windows), I'll be converting by the end of the month. Pity I signed up for Yahoo too late and couldn't get the same user name as my Hotmail account. Oh, and I do have GMail, with just the right login name, but until I can download original emails I won't be using that full time.
It'll be a relief to move away, actually, as Hotmail has been like death from a thousand cuts. Why, oh why, on the same, slow, crappy connection, does Yahoo load up immediately, while Hotmail spins for ever? (BSD versus MS servers?) Oh, and spam in your Junk Mail folder DOES count towards your limit, as when the spam brings your account total over 2M, everything else gets bounced.
I've been intrigued by the suggestion on Slashdot to get myself a free domain name and set up my own mailserver. Sounds interesting, but the main stumbling block for me is getting and paying for a permanent internet connection in my student res, and getting a spare computer to act as the server.
Then there are those who believe in using the right tool for the right job.
The idea that developers should switch easily between development languages is one of the great myths of IT. Languages aren't tools: they are entire workshops. Switching may be possible if you work on many very small and entirely independent projects, but for most developers its just not practical or sensible.
For each language that is used in an organisation there has to be an investment in training and the building up of repositories of re-usable code. The last thing you want is to have two developers who both picked what they thought was the best tool for their part of a job trying to combine bits of PERL and Java, or be unable to use large Java class libraries developed over years because someone decided that it would be neat to code a new project in Lisp.
The only sensible approach is to spend a lot of time researching the benefits of different languages and development tools and then standardise on these.