Signed up for a free three month trial of netgammon in 1997. Each day I worked an 8 hour day in front of the computer, came home, cooked and ate dinner, then sat in front of the computer and played backgammon till 4 or 5 in the morning. Was very addictive. As one of my first experiences of online culture I really enjoyed being able to chat with ppl from all over the world while playing the game.
When the free three month subscription ran out I was happy to call it a day and go cold turkey on my addiction.
Still love backgammon though. Such a beautiful game. Can't stand chess. Intrigued by go.
Thanks for the headsup on dyne:bolic. Enjoyed reading this part of their little intro -
dyne:bolic is RASTA software released free under the GNU General Public License.
This software is about Digital Resistance ina babylon world which tries to control and make a business out of the way we communicate, we share our interests, informations and knowledge. The roots of the Rastafari movement are in resistance to slavery: this software is one step in the larger struggle for Redemption and Freedom from proprietary and closed-source software. Much blessings in Jah luv to all those who resist. Selah.
RMS as a rastafarian prophet? Now it all makes sense.
A good article covering this that you can point friends and contacts to is at netcraft.
Along with a good brief overview of the security concerns and warnings, it helpfully suggests that one way of getting firefox is off the OpenCD which it then goes on to explain has several other very professional F/OSS packages.
The article then closes with a teaser about moving fully over to GNU/Linux.
I wonder at the emotional energy tied up in railing against less efficient and elegant solutions. Yes, there are always more powerful and efficient ways of thinking about things. However, the majority of people may not be at a level where they can conceptualise in the way required by these higher technique.
An example related to the article is where people mistake the representation of relational databases in 2D tables of rows and columns as their underlying logical structure. It may turn out that conceptualising an N-dimensional logical structure is beyond these people.
However, these people should not then be browbeaten for their less efficient methods. People at whatever level need to work with tools and conceptual models that they can relate to. Thus if people want to use flat databases, let them do so and live by the limitations of that tool.
It is possible to get too stuck on the importance of efficiency and elegance. It is perhaps like some supposed transcendent being who can teleport instantaneously from one place to another pouring scorn on us lower mortals who still rely on physical movement to move about in space. That is our level of accomplishment and it is proper that we work at that level, whatever it's inefficiency.
So in summary, work at whatever level of efficiency and elegance is right for you, but be careful of criticising people who are working at a lower level than you. By being critical, you jeopardise the opportunity of appearing as a model for higher levels of ability when those people are ready to look around for more advanced techniques, and instead your criticism can instead help construct emotional blockages in those people against future progress.
How long is the diagonal of a unit square, if sqrt(2) doesn't exist?
The concept of a square is itself an idealised one, i.e. that all four sides are *exactly* equal. The concept that you can measure something *exactly* is idealised.
In the 'real' world you're never going to have such a thing as a 'square', so you're never going to be physically confronted with square root of 2.
Even the concept that you can count past 1 is an idealised concept as it assumes that you idealise certain objects as essentially the same - i.e. to count 'apples' you have to agree to recognise certain unique objects as 'apples'. Heck, even before that you have to assume the objects are discrete.
The point I'm making is that all maths is idealised from reality. So it's quite possible for someone to say they don't believe in uncountable sets. The whole of mathematics is choosing to believe something or not, on an idealised abstract basis.
P.S. I myself am quite happy to 'believe' in uncountable sets.
Notice also how the reviewer used nested brackets in his review, not once but twice. In my experience, only programmers or mathematicians ever do this with plain english writing.
Thanks for posting those links. While I appreciate how much more significant the move to linux is outside the U.S. those graphics still blew my mind. Seeing a pie chart showing 90% to an OSS solution with microsoft at 7% and dismally trailing out into oblivion makes me delirious with joy.
Unfortunately the country I live in (au) is not quite at this joyous point yet. Oh well, maybe once we disengage from the U.S.'s latest military empire play we can start thinking a bit more independently. I live in hope.
Now, to say that Japan, and its society, resembles
nothing like Western cultures is a massive understatement.
yeah, like they actually employ understatement in communication rather than using the word to simply further inflate content-free rhetoric like the sample of yrs quoted above - (Hey let's bold and italicise my pearls of wisdom just to make sure no-one misses them)
Jameth, I would suggest that the MOD PARENT DOWN comment was an attempt at a humourous play on the previous MOD PARENT UP comment.
From this in his comment This person is obviously writing exceedingly long and informitive posts for karma only suggest the AC is being ironic, i.e. he's suggesting you be punished for writing informative and well-argued comments - as opposed to the many short, opinion comments found on slashdot which have no dialectic backup.
I imagine several ppl found his comment funny enough to think - 'yeah, let's mod this smart guy back into the stone age'
The United States is supposed to be the leader of the free world, the country the rest of the world looks to for morality.
While I generally appreciated your rebuttal, ipfwadm, of the parent's idiotic statements, this bit of yr comment stood out for me. In my experience only Americans believe the rest of the world looks to them as 'the leader of the free world'. It's part of your general delusion. When I hear your leaders talking about 'bringing democracy to the world' I know that they are spouting cynical rhetoric, but I also know that unfortunately a lot of americans will buy it. Most of the world would be really happy if americans gave up this delusion. America, like all countries, has some wonderful ppl, but frankly yr governments fuck up the world no end, and most of us look at U.S. of A. govmnt. machinations with disgust and disbelief.
After doing a little digging for Quandt on the web, I came across this article which paraphrases Quandt at the top like so:
"Users who are technically self-supporting and don't want to pay Red Hat for service and support could deploy Debian", says Open Source Development Lab analyst Stacey Quandt, "and it would lead to greater return on investment."
Perhaps advocacy such as this got her in trouble at OSDL whose members of course include Red Hat.
Yeah, I already found that article and linked to it in another comment under this story. What I was asking you for is information on why she left OSDL, not on her appointment. Real information, not just innuendo.
Quandt appears to no longer work for OSDL as she is credited in the featured article as "Stacey Quandt Industry Analyst, Quandt Analytics". Her bio at the bottom of this newsforge story also describes her as no longer working for OSDL. Would be interesting to know her reasons for leaving.
Slashdot Mirror
Signed up for a free three month trial of netgammon in 1997. Each day I worked an 8 hour day in front of the computer, came home, cooked and ate dinner, then sat in front of the computer and played backgammon till 4 or 5 in the morning. Was very addictive. As one of my first experiences of online culture I really enjoyed being able to chat with ppl from all over the world while playing the game.
When the free three month subscription ran out I was happy to call it a day and go cold turkey on my addiction.
Still love backgammon though. Such a beautiful game. Can't stand chess. Intrigued by go.
RMS as a rastafarian prophet? Now it all makes sense.
Not only do I love google, I love clickable hyperlinks as well.
tomsrtbt
A good article covering this that you can point friends and contacts to is at netcraft.
Along with a good brief overview of the security concerns and warnings, it helpfully suggests that one way of getting firefox is off the OpenCD which it then goes on to explain has several other very professional F/OSS packages.
The article then closes with a teaser about moving fully over to GNU/Linux.
So slashdot sinks to reporting company give-away promotions.
I wonder at the emotional energy tied up in railing against less efficient and elegant solutions. Yes, there are always more powerful and efficient ways of thinking about things. However, the majority of people may not be at a level where they can conceptualise in the way required by these higher technique.
An example related to the article is where people mistake the representation of relational databases in 2D tables of rows and columns as their underlying logical structure. It may turn out that conceptualising an N-dimensional logical structure is beyond these people.
However, these people should not then be browbeaten for their less efficient methods. People at whatever level need to work with tools and conceptual models that they can relate to. Thus if people want to use flat databases, let them do so and live by the limitations of that tool.
It is possible to get too stuck on the importance of efficiency and elegance. It is perhaps like some supposed transcendent being who can teleport instantaneously from one place to another pouring scorn on us lower mortals who still rely on physical movement to move about in space. That is our level of accomplishment and it is proper that we work at that level, whatever it's inefficiency.
So in summary, work at whatever level of efficiency and elegance is right for you, but be careful of criticising people who are working at a lower level than you. By being critical, you jeopardise the opportunity of appearing as a model for higher levels of ability when those people are ready to look around for more advanced techniques, and instead your criticism can instead help construct emotional blockages in those people against future progress.
perfervid was word of the day July 14, 2000
If you'd been reading lwn.net you would have already noticed their link to a Bloomberg article, written in english, which covers this.
Just downloaded 0.9 and fired it up.
The about box describes it as 0.9 and makes no mention of it being a release candidate.
Also the build date is given as 14th June, which is after the final RC was announced IIRC.
Here's the build line from the about box:
Gecko/20040614 Firefox/0.9
So, to me it looks like the official 0.9 is up now, just not linked on the main project page yet.
And yes, it is noticeably faster than 0.8
How long is the diagonal of a unit square, if sqrt(2) doesn't exist?
The concept of a square is itself an idealised one, i.e. that all four sides are *exactly* equal. The concept that you can measure something *exactly* is idealised.
In the 'real' world you're never going to have such a thing as a 'square', so you're never going to be physically confronted with square root of 2.
Even the concept that you can count past 1 is an idealised concept as it assumes that you idealise certain objects as essentially the same - i.e. to count 'apples' you have to agree to recognise certain unique objects as 'apples'. Heck, even before that you have to assume the objects are discrete.
The point I'm making is that all maths is idealised from reality. So it's quite possible for someone to say they don't believe in uncountable sets. The whole of mathematics is choosing to believe something or not, on an idealised abstract basis.
P.S. I myself am quite happy to 'believe' in uncountable sets.
Notice also how the reviewer used nested brackets in his review, not once but twice. In my experience, only programmers or mathematicians ever do this with plain english writing.
From the minutes of the mozilla.org Staff Meeting of Monday 24th May 2004:
*Firefox 0.9*
- Firefox branch tinderbox finally turned green last night
- No automated nightly builds or Tinderboxes for AVIARY_1.0 yet
- 10 bugs left; take about a week to fix
- Release at the end of the 1st week of June
- Asa has update to the primary Mozilla roadmap chart and table
funny?? - explanatory link
Thanks for posting those links. While I appreciate how much more significant the move to linux is outside the U.S. those graphics still blew my mind. Seeing a pie chart showing 90% to an OSS solution with microsoft at 7% and dismally trailing out into oblivion makes me delirious with joy.
Unfortunately the country I live in (au) is not quite at this joyous point yet. Oh well, maybe once we disengage from the U.S.'s latest military empire play we can start thinking a bit more independently. I live in hope.
WARNING! WARNING!
Parent comment several orders of magnitude more intelligent than surrounding conversation. May cause brain shock.
nice comment
yeah, like they actually employ understatement in communication rather than using the word to simply further inflate content-free rhetoric like the sample of yrs quoted above - (Hey let's bold and italicise my pearls of wisdom just to make sure no-one misses them)
Jameth, I would suggest that the MOD PARENT DOWN comment was an attempt at a humourous play on the previous MOD PARENT UP comment.
From this in his comment This person is obviously writing exceedingly long and informitive posts for karma only suggest the AC is being ironic, i.e. he's suggesting you be punished for writing informative and well-argued comments - as opposed to the many short, opinion comments found on slashdot which have no dialectic backup.
I imagine several ppl found his comment funny enough to think - 'yeah, let's mod this smart guy back into the stone age'
While I generally appreciated your rebuttal, ipfwadm, of the parent's idiotic statements, this bit of yr comment stood out for me. In my experience only Americans believe the rest of the world looks to them as 'the leader of the free world'. It's part of your general delusion. When I hear your leaders talking about 'bringing democracy to the world' I know that they are spouting cynical rhetoric, but I also know that unfortunately a lot of americans will buy it. Most of the world would be really happy if americans gave up this delusion. America, like all countries, has some wonderful ppl, but frankly yr governments fuck up the world no end, and most of us look at U.S. of A. govmnt. machinations with disgust and disbelief.
Thanks demachina for taking the time to write such a good comment.
Actually, I was asking for real information on why she left OSDL. Instead you saw fit to contribute only sexist slander and innuendo.
After doing a little digging for Quandt on the web, I came across this article which paraphrases Quandt at the top like so :
Perhaps advocacy such as this got her in trouble at OSDL whose members of course include Red Hat.
Yeah, I already found that article and linked to it in another comment under this story. What I was asking you for is information on why she left OSDL, not on her appointment. Real information, not just innuendo.
Stacey Quandt joined OSDL as principal analyst in September 2003 - press release.
LWN coverage of the appointment.
Quandt appears to no longer work for OSDL as she is credited in the featured article as "Stacey Quandt Industry Analyst, Quandt Analytics". Her bio at the bottom of this newsforge story also describes her as no longer working for OSDL. Would be interesting to know her reasons for leaving.
Care to provide a link? I can find no evidence of this on the web.