Oh, and to the poster above who asked if 3rd world countries would want our PC's, the answer is YES. I know this myself, because I have been to those countries. They would be happy to get their hands on any such hardware. Software is a matter of time and learning, which they can handle. When the majority of 3rd world schools don't even have computers anywhere in the school, a simple donation of a 200Mhz PC goes very far. 200Mhz is seriously good enough to browse most useful and educational parts of the internet, and good enough to run a school website server for such countries. And the students, who have never touched a computer at home or anywhere else, would be glad to have it.
Please don't trash your computers. There ARE organizations that will take your PC's. Even if you junk your hard drive for security reasons, or have non-working components, there are community service organizations (read: respectable computer-knowledgeable volunteers who are doing a great service) who need such parts. They do mix and match components and assemble computers. Please find your local organizations who do this and give your PC's to them. Please encourage your employers to do so (they can feel free to remove the hard drives, but please donate the rest). Do the world a service. We really don't need our junkyards filled with things that could be improving the world.
Yes, I go to MIT. I'm all on top of reuse myself and live by it. Half the stuff in my room comes from reuse.
For those of you who know MIT, I'm basically complaining that far too many people at MIT do NOT use reuse. Food goes to waste more often than it shows up on free-food, and computers get trashed more often than show up on reuse. I've found more free 17" LCD's that work (marked "trash" and left in a dumpster) than have ever shown up on reuse. This is the reality. People need to learn about reuse.
Many supervisors complain that it's too much work, not worth it, and try to just trash things. I think it's an absolutely horrible thing to do, especially when so many students will flock to reuse PC's. Dealing with the rubbish pile left behind by reusers is not actually that difficult - you just tell reusers to take it in one piece or not at all.
Not to mention that the Used Computer Factory at MIT, which assembles and gives PC's to needy people, could use those extra sticks of SDRAM and random other things. Throwing away 200mhz's is simply NOT an option.
I mean, give me a break, my 300mhz PC from reuse has been running my website for 4 years now and has survived being slashdotted and dugg and other things. I even have 486's serving as picture frames. Supervisors around MIT often don't realize that students actually have use for this stuff and think a 486 is trash. If it has an LCD, it's not trash as far as I'm concerned - it's another digital picture frame for me!
And really, more stuff gets marked "trash" than gets posted to reuse nowadays. It's sad, and I want to do something about it, but I don't know how. Many professors won't listen to me when I tell them about reuse. They just tell me "who would want *that*? why should I care? it's trash as far as I'm concerned..."
I think it is an absolutely horrid thing of current American society that so many people always run after new stuff and never even bother to think about others when dumping old stuff. I've seen companies trash hundreds of computers (yes, actually trash them... because the HDD has sensitive data and because of taxes). I think that this should somehow be stopped. One way would be to heavily charge for the disposal of things containing lead, and remove all taxes for donations of educational supplies to needy institutions within the US or abroad. That way, companies can do a good zeroing of their hard drive and then send off the PC to an organization that will take it to Africa, India, China, or somewhere else with a shortage of computers. Seriously, kids in Africa who have never touched a computer before would really be able to make use of a lot of thrown-out pentium-1, 90mhz systems. It's not funny that US society just trashes this stuff. It's such a wasteful thing to do in this world.
My supervisor (remaining unnamed) had a laboratory cleanup and hesitated throwing away anything - he almost put a cordless phone in the trash before I had to grab it out of his hands! The thing has lead in it, and for gods sake works! Some poor kid could use that thing in this world, and not everyone is as rich as he is to be throwing away a working phone! They also threw out this giant heavy "Communications Biophysics" plastic poster. I had to yank that out of facilities because it is recyclable. (Welcome to MIT. I wish people recycled more and thought about the world a little more here before they ran around inventing stuff.)
I'm sorry, but I think Google is one of the best businesses I have ever seen. From everything I hear, their work environment is awesome. They have honestly good products (buggy, fine, but much less buggy than M$FT products, so don't complain about the annual bug in Gmail). Google doesn't force things upon users. Google doesn't make secret agreements with other companies to have exclusive control over an aspect of their sales (M$FT does). Google wins by having a good product, not by handwaving and using legalese to trap customers. Google caters to average users as well as advanced users. Google supports the open source community. Google funds a lot of cool projects. Google's projects support and promote the idea of free information and knowledge, and making information more accessible.
What more could you ask for?
And why would Google want or care for a shortage of bandwidth? Shortages of bandwidth are not likely to happen any time soon. While processors are starting to see speed limits before we turn to physicists for help, communication lines are nowhere near the bit rate limits that are possible with current technology. Moore's law will still hold for the coming years in terms of bandwidth, at least.
LaTeX is perfect for this. tables are extremely easy to do, pretty, and easy to make consistent (i.e. no fudging with the tiny margin draggy things to make your table align or fit within one page, LaTeX handles importing vector images VERY well, and text, etc. is extremely easy to do. for someone writing SDS and clueful enough to draw vector images, LaTeX isn't much to learn.
I personally never use any Word equivalents. I don't use Word, I don't use OO, I don't use AbiWord. I just don't see a need for these products.
If it's text, I do it text-only, there's no need for bloat. If it requires basic text formatting, I just create a simple HTML file, it's faster and quicker and more portable. If it's to be a published black and white document, I use LaTeX (don't complain, there _are_ good LaTeX editors around for those that hate coding). This way the fonts and serifs are perfect, increasing readability dramatically. If it's a complex graphic design publication, word-equivalents suck yet again, and I use InkScape or Freehand or something.
I don't see a place for Microsoft Word, OO Writer, or any such products anywhere above.
Could it just be that smart people also eat smart, live well, know how to take care of their bodies, and being smart, make enough money to pay all their medical expenses?
there are so many things wrong with such an analysis. the fact that Nobel prize winners live longer is a correlation, not a cause-and-effect relationship.
You can't immediately blame it on social status. For all we know, it could be because they're being shuttled around the world giving lectures everywhere, such that they get better exercise; it could be that they're being given more money and have a more relaxed personal life to eat better; it could be a lot of other things.
This reminds me of Fear Factor, the TV show that does so many inhumane things to their contestants (like put them among poisonous snakes, thousands of bees, tarantulas, make them eat infectious things that aren't food, and so on).
I can't believe so many people in the world go through so much pain for the money. Either
(1) you are rich and don't need the money and shouldn't be doing that to your body
OR
(2) you are poor, in which case it's such a horrible thing that TV shows put such people through so much torture with a money reward.
It's like saying if you have a 1 in 10 chance of getting shot, and a 9 in 10 chance of winning a million dollars, would you do it? I'm sure some of the sadly half-dead people in Darfur would happily take on that challenge. But at the same time it's inhumane to not just give them $100k each instead of putting them through torture.
Bottom line, I think the radio station is at fault for even having such a competition. Among all the other crappy things this country regulates, why can't it regulate TV and radio shows first, at least to the point where contestants should NEVER be even asked to do anything harmful to their bodies?
well, for sure, it would make creating coin vending machines much easier to implement, mechanically.
once i was in canada and received a coin that looked like this which i initially thought was fake, but believed later after reading online.
any clues on how to fix these terrible fonts? (look at the address bar and the menu bar):
http://dheera.net/wineie.jpg
I've already installed all the MS TrueType fonts. I'd like it to actually use TT fonts for the widgets...
Here's a once-top story on Digg. http://digg.com/offbeat_news/How_much_was_this_che ck_written_for
Google image search will give you tons more examples... not just of checks but people block all kinds of things. Scanned bills, paystubs, etc. and mosaic parts of images.
you can still do this even if your background isn't one solid colour:)
unless of course you're obsessed by the looks of a box over your check online, but i'd be more concerned about my data than how my check looks online.
if you're trying to prove a point, such as winning a million dollars, i think it's less credible if you can so skillfully edit out the numbers to make it look like the rest of the background, than just take a picture and draw a box over what you want to hide, leaving everything else unedited.
not always true. while it's reasonably good today, some day in the future, if we have 16-bit color channel depth ever become a standard (a 16-bit tiff for example), there will be enough data maintained at the edges of the blurred region to reconstruct the data. all you have to do is FFT the region, divide by a gaussian, inverse FFT, then keep repeating for different gaussians - this will basically divide out the system function used for blurring. 8-bit channels of today don't quite make it practical resolution-wise, but just a heads up so you don't get a false sense of security.
the problem is more the fact that so many people on the internet use just a simple mosaic to do blurring. i can cite enough examples from google image search if i wanted to. others resort to applying a motion blur effect just once which can be reversed by deconvolution if it's not blurred enough. if you use the smudge tool, good for you, i don't think there's a good way to reverse that. the problem is that blurring and mosaic techniques are simple, consistent transformations, while smudging is not.
From GPLv3 draft 2: "(For instance, if the work is a DVD player and can play certain DVDs, it must be possible for modified versions to play those DVDs. If the work communicates with an online service, it must be possible for modified versions to communicate with the same online service in the same way such that the service cannot distinguish.)"
bad idea. this means when BluRay comes out, someone cannot take existing DVD-based GPL code and mod it to work with BluRay if it won't also work with DVD.
"This License permits you to make and run privately modified versions of the Program, or have others make and run them on your behalf. However, this permission terminates, as to all such versions, if you bring suit against anyone for patent infringement of any of your essential patent claims in any such version, for making, using, selling or otherwise conveying a work based on the Program in compliance with this License."
i never like the wording of this one this one. (a) "if you bring suit" is not the same as "if you win the suit". and (b) why would a patent suit end said permission? if the patent suit is in one country, development could then just move to another country under which the original patent has no jurisdiction. basically, i'm not in agreement with patent suits winning in ANY case where the patent owner has only created a design but no implementation. if the inventor of an idea does not plan on implementation him/herself in a reasonable time, it is HINDERING THE WORLD to let them have a patent, because all they have done is lock up an idea from being developed. if they want to start a business and implement their idea, however, great.
A 'lakh' just refers to the number 10^5, and 'crore' is 10^7. They don't specifically imply money, but buying something for a 'lakh' obvious means a 10^5 rupees.
By the way, comma separators in India are often written like 3,00,00,000.
Huh? Why would you get sued for using AllofMp3? Why is it hard proof?
When you download from AllOfMp3, you pay for a song and download it. AllOfMp3 pays their royalties.
Mind you, AllOfMp3 is NOT free.
The RIAA only cares because AllOfMp3 doesn't put that stupid digital rights crap that prevents you from sharing the song again or transferring it from iTunes to someone else. AllOfMp3 just gives it to you in the nice, simple, easy to deal with.mp3 format, which RIAA hates right now.
Re:unprecedented evile having its way with US?
on
Giant Ice Shelf Snaps
·
· Score: 1
you might as well try inserting adsense code into your comment while you're at it.
right, but in the initial stages you never put down the money for that kind of datacenter. in the first stages, facebook was probably run out of some kid's college dorm internet connection with a junked old PC, and as it got popular and made revenue in little bits, they upgraded and eventually to the expensive hosting needed.
still, i bet that the hosting costs of facebook are a small fraction of the money it makes in advertising.
point is, you don't have to put down the money for hosting until you already start getting some cash (from advertising) for your popularity. at that point you pay more for hosting, you get more popular, repeat, repeat, repeat. and if you don't get popular, oh well, all you wasted was your programming time and a few initial bucks to try an experiment. and perhaps not even that, if you're a college student running your web 2.0 experiment off a junked PC.
Slashdot Mirror
Good. I honestly respect you for doing that.
Oh, and to the poster above who asked if 3rd world countries would want our PC's, the answer is YES. I know this myself, because I have been to those countries. They would be happy to get their hands on any such hardware. Software is a matter of time and learning, which they can handle. When the majority of 3rd world schools don't even have computers anywhere in the school, a simple donation of a 200Mhz PC goes very far. 200Mhz is seriously good enough to browse most useful and educational parts of the internet, and good enough to run a school website server for such countries. And the students, who have never touched a computer at home or anywhere else, would be glad to have it.
Please don't trash your computers. There ARE organizations that will take your PC's. Even if you junk your hard drive for security reasons, or have non-working components, there are community service organizations (read: respectable computer-knowledgeable volunteers who are doing a great service) who need such parts. They do mix and match components and assemble computers. Please find your local organizations who do this and give your PC's to them. Please encourage your employers to do so (they can feel free to remove the hard drives, but please donate the rest). Do the world a service. We really don't need our junkyards filled with things that could be improving the world.
Yes, I go to MIT. I'm all on top of reuse myself and live by it. Half the stuff in my room comes from reuse.
For those of you who know MIT, I'm basically complaining that far too many people at MIT do NOT use reuse. Food goes to waste more often than it shows up on free-food, and computers get trashed more often than show up on reuse. I've found more free 17" LCD's that work (marked "trash" and left in a dumpster) than have ever shown up on reuse. This is the reality. People need to learn about reuse.
Many supervisors complain that it's too much work, not worth it, and try to just trash things. I think it's an absolutely horrible thing to do, especially when so many students will flock to reuse PC's. Dealing with the rubbish pile left behind by reusers is not actually that difficult - you just tell reusers to take it in one piece or not at all.
Not to mention that the Used Computer Factory at MIT, which assembles and gives PC's to needy people, could use those extra sticks of SDRAM and random other things. Throwing away 200mhz's is simply NOT an option.
I mean, give me a break, my 300mhz PC from reuse has been running my website for 4 years now and has survived being slashdotted and dugg and other things. I even have 486's serving as picture frames. Supervisors around MIT often don't realize that students actually have use for this stuff and think a 486 is trash. If it has an LCD, it's not trash as far as I'm concerned - it's another digital picture frame for me!
And really, more stuff gets marked "trash" than gets posted to reuse nowadays. It's sad, and I want to do something about it, but I don't know how. Many professors won't listen to me when I tell them about reuse. They just tell me "who would want *that*? why should I care? it's trash as far as I'm concerned..."
I think it is an absolutely horrid thing of current American society that so many people always run after new stuff and never even bother to think about others when dumping old stuff. I've seen companies trash hundreds of computers (yes, actually trash them... because the HDD has sensitive data and because of taxes). I think that this should somehow be stopped. One way would be to heavily charge for the disposal of things containing lead, and remove all taxes for donations of educational supplies to needy institutions within the US or abroad.
That way, companies can do a good zeroing of their hard drive and then send off the PC to an organization that will take it to Africa, India, China, or somewhere else with a shortage of computers. Seriously, kids in Africa who have never touched a computer before would really be able to make use of a lot of thrown-out pentium-1, 90mhz systems. It's not funny that US society just trashes this stuff. It's such a wasteful thing to do in this world.
My supervisor (remaining unnamed) had a laboratory cleanup and hesitated throwing away anything - he almost put a cordless phone in the trash before I had to grab it out of his hands! The thing has lead in it, and for gods sake works! Some poor kid could use that thing in this world, and not everyone is as rich as he is to be throwing away a working phone! They also threw out this giant heavy "Communications Biophysics" plastic poster. I had to yank that out of facilities because it is recyclable. (Welcome to MIT. I wish people recycled more and thought about the world a little more here before they ran around inventing stuff.)
I'm sorry, but I think Google is one of the best businesses I have ever seen. From everything I hear, their work environment is awesome. They have honestly good products (buggy, fine, but much less buggy than M$FT products, so don't complain about the annual bug in Gmail). Google doesn't force things upon users. Google doesn't make secret agreements with other companies to have exclusive control over an aspect of their sales (M$FT does). Google wins by having a good product, not by handwaving and using legalese to trap customers. Google caters to average users as well as advanced users. Google supports the open source community. Google funds a lot of cool projects. Google's projects support and promote the idea of free information and knowledge, and making information more accessible.
What more could you ask for?
And why would Google want or care for a shortage of bandwidth? Shortages of bandwidth are not likely to happen any time soon. While processors are starting to see speed limits before we turn to physicists for help, communication lines are nowhere near the bit rate limits that are possible with current technology. Moore's law will still hold for the coming years in terms of bandwidth, at least.
LaTeX is perfect for this. tables are extremely easy to do, pretty, and easy to make consistent (i.e. no fudging with the tiny margin draggy things to make your table align or fit within one page, LaTeX handles importing vector images VERY well, and text, etc. is extremely easy to do. for someone writing SDS and clueful enough to draw vector images, LaTeX isn't much to learn.
I personally never use any Word equivalents. I don't use Word, I don't use OO, I don't use AbiWord. I just don't see a need for these products.
If it's text, I do it text-only, there's no need for bloat.
If it requires basic text formatting, I just create a simple HTML file, it's faster and quicker and more portable.
If it's to be a published black and white document, I use LaTeX (don't complain, there _are_ good LaTeX editors around for those that hate coding). This way the fonts and serifs are perfect, increasing readability dramatically.
If it's a complex graphic design publication, word-equivalents suck yet again, and I use InkScape or Freehand or something.
I don't see a place for Microsoft Word, OO Writer, or any such products anywhere above.
Could it just be that smart people also eat smart, live well, know how to take care of their bodies, and being smart, make enough money to pay all their medical expenses?
there are so many things wrong with such an analysis. the fact that Nobel prize winners live longer is a correlation, not a cause-and-effect relationship.
You can't immediately blame it on social status. For all we know, it could be because they're being shuttled around the world giving lectures everywhere, such that they get better exercise; it could be that they're being given more money and have a more relaxed personal life to eat better; it could be a lot of other things.
This reminds me of Fear Factor, the TV show that does so many inhumane things to their contestants (like put them among poisonous snakes, thousands of bees, tarantulas, make them eat infectious things that aren't food, and so on). I can't believe so many people in the world go through so much pain for the money. Either (1) you are rich and don't need the money and shouldn't be doing that to your body OR (2) you are poor, in which case it's such a horrible thing that TV shows put such people through so much torture with a money reward. It's like saying if you have a 1 in 10 chance of getting shot, and a 9 in 10 chance of winning a million dollars, would you do it? I'm sure some of the sadly half-dead people in Darfur would happily take on that challenge. But at the same time it's inhumane to not just give them $100k each instead of putting them through torture. Bottom line, I think the radio station is at fault for even having such a competition. Among all the other crappy things this country regulates, why can't it regulate TV and radio shows first, at least to the point where contestants should NEVER be even asked to do anything harmful to their bodies?
well, for sure, it would make creating coin vending machines much easier to implement, mechanically. once i was in canada and received a coin that looked like this which i initially thought was fake, but believed later after reading online.
I'm worried about the large screen getting affected by constant pocket rubbing, especially with keys and other things. Where's the flip-up hard cover?
any clues on how to fix these terrible fonts? (look at the address bar and the menu bar): http://dheera.net/wineie.jpg I've already installed all the MS TrueType fonts. I'd like it to actually use TT fonts for the widgets...
Here's a once-top story on Digg.e ck_written_for
http://digg.com/offbeat_news/How_much_was_this_ch
Google image search will give you tons more examples... not just of checks but people block all kinds of things. Scanned bills, paystubs, etc. and mosaic parts of images.
you can still do this even if your background isn't one solid colour :)
unless of course you're obsessed by the looks of a box over your check online, but i'd be more concerned about my data than how my check looks online.
if you're trying to prove a point, such as winning a million dollars, i think it's less credible if you can so skillfully edit out the numbers to make it look like the rest of the background, than just take a picture and draw a box over what you want to hide, leaving everything else unedited.
(see above) http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/07/135 2242&threshold=-1
not always true. while it's reasonably good today, some day in the future, if we have 16-bit color channel depth ever become a standard (a 16-bit tiff for example), there will be enough data maintained at the edges of the blurred region to reconstruct the data. all you have to do is FFT the region, divide by a gaussian, inverse FFT, then keep repeating for different gaussians - this will basically divide out the system function used for blurring. 8-bit channels of today don't quite make it practical resolution-wise, but just a heads up so you don't get a false sense of security.
the problem is more the fact that so many people on the internet use just a simple mosaic to do blurring. i can cite enough examples from google image search if i wanted to. others resort to applying a motion blur effect just once which can be reversed by deconvolution if it's not blurred enough. if you use the smudge tool, good for you, i don't think there's a good way to reverse that. the problem is that blurring and mosaic techniques are simple, consistent transformations, while smudging is not.
...in which case you just set up a portforward with a friend in another country.
From GPLv3 draft 2: "(For instance, if the work is a DVD player and can play certain DVDs, it must be possible for modified versions to play those DVDs. If the work communicates with an online service, it must be possible for modified versions to communicate with the same online service in the same way such that the service cannot distinguish.)"
bad idea. this means when BluRay comes out, someone cannot take existing DVD-based GPL code and mod it to work with BluRay if it won't also work with DVD.
"This License permits you to make and run privately modified versions of the Program, or have others make and run them on your behalf. However, this permission terminates, as to all such versions, if you bring suit against anyone for patent infringement of any of your essential patent claims in any such version, for making, using, selling or otherwise conveying a work based on the Program in compliance with this License."
i never like the wording of this one this one. (a) "if you bring suit" is not the same as "if you win the suit". and (b) why would a patent suit end said permission? if the patent suit is in one country, development could then just move to another country under which the original patent has no jurisdiction. basically, i'm not in agreement with patent suits winning in ANY case where the patent owner has only created a design but no implementation. if the inventor of an idea does not plan on implementation him/herself in a reasonable time, it is HINDERING THE WORLD to let them have a patent, because all they have done is lock up an idea from being developed. if they want to start a business and implement their idea, however, great.
A 'lakh' just refers to the number 10^5, and 'crore' is 10^7. They don't specifically imply money, but buying something for a 'lakh' obvious means a 10^5 rupees.
By the way, comma separators in India are often written like 3,00,00,000.
"reading the internets"? am i missing out on something here? i've only seen one of them.
Neither, you get Microsoft (R) Visual F++.NET (TM)
Huh? Why would you get sued for using AllofMp3? Why is it hard proof?
.mp3 format, which RIAA hates right now.
When you download from AllOfMp3, you pay for a song and download it. AllOfMp3 pays their royalties.
Mind you, AllOfMp3 is NOT free.
The RIAA only cares because AllOfMp3 doesn't put that stupid digital rights crap that prevents you from sharing the song again or transferring it from iTunes to someone else. AllOfMp3 just gives it to you in the nice, simple, easy to deal with
you might as well try inserting adsense code into your comment while you're at it.
right, but in the initial stages you never put down the money for that kind of datacenter. in the first stages, facebook was probably run out of some kid's college dorm internet connection with a junked old PC, and as it got popular and made revenue in little bits, they upgraded and eventually to the expensive hosting needed.
still, i bet that the hosting costs of facebook are a small fraction of the money it makes in advertising.
point is, you don't have to put down the money for hosting until you already start getting some cash (from advertising) for your popularity. at that point you pay more for hosting, you get more popular, repeat, repeat, repeat. and if you don't get popular, oh well, all you wasted was your programming time and a few initial bucks to try an experiment. and perhaps not even that, if you're a college student running your web 2.0 experiment off a junked PC.