I live in an apartment literally one city block from my workplace, so my travel time is about 5 minutes. Why should I get paid less for being at work 8 hours a day than a coworker who lives an hour away? Unless your commute is such that you can actually work while you're traveling, then you're not providing anything of value to the business. The business shouldn't be forced to compensate you for choosing to live further away than other people.
What's with everyone blaming kdawson? I thought it was a scientifically proven fact that KDawson never, ever reads the stories he publishes here, much less writes them.
Most shacks in the woods don't have a municipal sewerage system -- I guess the parent made assumptions about where you live based on the quality of your attempt to be funny and/or clever.
P.S. Congratulations on misspelling "septic" while replying to a post where it was spelt correctly.
Not strongly disagreeing, but I think some people would have an issue that you automatically equate "Free Software" with "hobby development".
It is possible, albeit very unlikely, that "the norm" could become businesses paying for software to meet their needs (whether that's new projects or modifying existing projects to better serve their requirements) and then releasing those changes as Free Software by default. As it is now, most businesses that pay for software keep it locked away by default.
It's not inconceivable that, given a sufficiently large shift in our technological culture, making your software available to others would actually be something of a badge of honor. If you imagine (virtually) every single piece of software being available to everyone, then the few really good projects that gain traction would be a massive publicity boost for the sponsoring organisation(s).
That is to say; there'd be so much software out there that managing to release something of high quality that's actually useful to others (even if only in a niche market) -- something that stands out from the crowd -- would be a great PR exercise.
Probably a pipe dream and maybe it wouldn't work so well in practice, but dreams don't always have to be realistic.
I just looked at our tapes and they're very clearly marked as being 800 GB native, 1.6 TB compressed. Even so, one tape might be able to barely hold one second worth of footage, and it definitely can't write it anywhere near fast enough. Disc bus it is!
LTO4 is only 400 GB native which would be enough for half a second worth of data - you may be get a bit of compression though, but yeah, you'd still be eating one tape every second or so. That doesn't sound very practical. Not to mention its maximum speed is around 120 MB/sec which works out to about 7 GB/sec. If the grandparent's numbers are correct, well... that's slightly short of 1.5 TB/minute best case scenario.
I think you'd have to make do with having a van (or bus) packed full of disc arrays sitting nearby whenever you're filming. One day you might be able to send that kind of traffic over wireless, and you'll be nice and mobile.
I think the interesting / meaningful distinction is that humans design and create things, rather than simply "building" them. While some animals do make use of very basic tools, humans take it to a whole new level. The process for creating a microcomputer, for example, is far removed from actually performing the tasks we use them as tools to accomplish.
Definitely agree with the post above yours though -- intelligence (as we think of it) -- is not necessarily going to be the "final product" of evolution, or even a product at all. This question was posed to Richard Dawkins (in a video series on YouTube, "A conversation with Richard Dawkins"), I think it was essentially "if humans didn't exist or became extinct, would another species evolve our level of intelligence?" and his answer was "almost certainly not", simply based on the slim likelihood of intelligence evolving in the first place.
Also, your suggestion that we should take "communicating with other species on our own planet" as a serious goal is an interesting, and I think, very compelling idea.
Fair enough, clearly there's enough of a gray area that it'd be very difficult to successful prosecute even intentionally malicious behaviour of this sort.
I'm still fairly sure I've seen something along these lines before, but it may have simply been a rule for a job site or something like that.
I can set up fake job interviews with as many people as I want. So can the feds. It's not against the law.
Are you sure? I can't find anything to confirm this but I always thought advertising or offering employment when you actually have no intention to employ anyone was at least a civil offence, if not actually criminal.
On the other hand, I think I've seen pranks and the like that involved fake job interviews, so it may well be perfectly legal. I don't think it should be though. At the very least advertising a non-existent job should be punishable under "false advertising" laws.
I follow your reasoning, but I think there's a flaw.
I think you may be comparing "enterprise class software" - i.e. software products supported by big business, like Windows or IIS or SQL Server or Oracle and so on -- with "small open source projects".
Clearly the big commercial products have viable long term support because they're backed by big companies, but more importantly because these products are very popular. There's a lot of people using them and a lot of incentive for the company to keep supporting them.
But equally, large open source projects aren't going to just dry up overnight. Apache, Linux, PostgreSQL, MySQL, PHP, and so forth -- none of these are going anywhere anytime soon and certainly without as much noise as you'd hear if Oracle decided to shut down their database support business. Even if all the current contributors to Apache decided they'd had enough, other people would take over simply because there's so many people using it.
If you compare smaller OSS projects to smaller commercial projects, then I think you'd find the reliability of the support is about the same, and pretty much dependent on the same thing: how popular it is and how quickly its popularity is growing. Where a business might struggle on and try to keep supporting its failing project that only a handful of people are interested in purely in the hopes of one day turning things around, an OSS developer is just as likely to keep working on their project nobody cares about because they still find it useful/worthwhile. But both kinds of projects are as likely to wither and die as each other -- and a small OSS project at least gives you the possibility of forking and maintaining it yourself.
Yes, forking Apache or OpenOffice would be a nightmare, but you're as unlikely to ever need to as you are to have to maintain your own copy of MS Office. In fact, I'd argue you're even less likely to ever have to maintain your own OOo than your own MS Office, because who knows when Microsoft's business plan is going to shift from selling boxes of software to selling subscriptions to online services?
I think OO.o and Firefox are both bad examples, because they both started life as commercial software, i.e. they came from cathedral-style development. I can't remember if StarOffice was originally "sortof open source" or whether it, like Mozilla, was completely closed but then opened later. Either way, it's not surprising they both look pretty "corporate", because that's where they came from. A more apropos example than Mozilla/Firefox would be KHTML - an open-source project that was good enough that a corporate adopted it and everyone benefited.
Dirac also isn't very typical of OSS, really, and I'm also not yet sure if it actually matters to many people. If you hadn't mentioned the BBC I would've had no idea what you were referring to, and I only recognised that because it was mentioned in an article here somewhat recently.
iiNet was actually named as a bit of a pun on uuNet. It also used to always be pronounced as "eye eye net" too, but a few years ago the few ads I saw or heard had changed it to "eye net".
I would've thought Telstra Bigpond was the largest ISP here, quite an achievement if MM's company has managed to overtake them.
The point made was that, **IF** one actually **FOLLOWS** a **self-set** policy of "always install from the repository using the package manager"... then one's Linux system will not get any malware.
Argue against that point... not some other ramble that you just made up to try to come up with something.
Why argue against that? What point are you trying to make? There's a million ways I can self-cripple my use of the computer to make it perfectly safe no matter how stupid or naive I may be, as a user.
If one actually follows a self-set policy of "always install software from trusted sources and verify your files weren't tampered with" on Windows, then one's Windows system will never get any malware.
Again, who gives a shit? Actual users don't do this because it's too restrictive, or they don't really understand what it means, and they're easily mislead and distracted by the promise of awesome animated cursors or free emoticons or whatever. Nobody targets Linux for malware because virtually the entire userbase is more savvy than "regular users" and won't run some arbitrary attachment in the first place. But claiming this makes Linux immune to this vector of attack is completely missing the point.
Most Windows users nowadays run as an unprivileged account. Malware is still a huge problem for these users because, as it turns out, you can do lots of annoying shit without requiring root or administrator privileges.
The problem with Windows has never been Windows itself. Sure, there are some things Microsoft could have done better in order to make it slightly harder to attack, but ultimately as long as you're letting the user have control of the system it's going to be vulnerable. The kind of user that receives a link for an ePostcard, follows it and then runs the.exe it downloads will do exactly the same thing on Linux or MacOS X or FreeBSD or OpenSolaris. Not letting you execute things by default doesn't matter, because the website will just have instructions for enabling the execute bit and user will follow that in order to view their postcard.
Advocating for a distribution that prevents you from running any programs or scripts which didn't come from an official repository would be a way to solve this problem. It would also severely hamper the usability of the system, especially for "power users" who want to write their own scripts; so you'd have to be able to disable it. Which means Joe User can disable it by following the instructions on the helpful ePostcard website.
The simple fact is that all viruses, malware, spyware and botnet zombie code runs on Windows machines.
Well that's not a fact. This article at a Linux-friendly site has this citation:
There are about 60,000 viruses known for Windows, 40 or so for the Macintosh, about 5 for commercial Unix versions, and perhaps 40 for Linux.
This has nothing to do with obscurity of Linux systems. It has only to do with four things:
(1) Installing Linux software using the package manager requires the local system administration password to be manually entered.
That depends on the configuration. My Gnome desktop on Debian, for example, set up a password database that I unlock once, and I guess due to some choice I made when I first started using it, never again prompts for that session. That session being as long as I'm logged on, which is typically a week or two until Compiz has a spaz. Any program at all could grab the local admin password from the database and do whatever the hell it wanted without me ever knowing about it. Why aren't there any programs to do that? Because there's so few people running this setup that writing the code to do this would be a waste of time, despite how trivial it would be. It's very unlikely to ever end up running on an appropriate machine. That's purely because of obscurity though.
(2) All software in the repositories is "visible" to the developers who put it there, and they use that software themselves (so they are not going to infect their own systems by deliberately putting malware into code they are themselves using).
This is reasonable enough. Do bear in mind however that developers are often running development versions of code, and therefore not quite the same as the binary packages Joe User would be installing from their distro's repository. You're unlikely to have developers deliberating placing malicious code in the repositories, but it's possible their machines could be infected in some way and it could be snuck in.
(3) All software in the repositories is auditable by the 1.5 million + open source programmers of the world, and
True, but it still took a few years for a massive hole in Debian's SSL package to be discovered, which is used by a heck of a lot of people. While flaws in crypto are a particularly extreme case, it still shows that we can't just say "millions of eyeballs" and believe that'll solve all the problems.
(4) Software transferred via the repositories is digitally signed.
Yep, sure.
The main thing is the difference in culture, and most Windows users will be very unhappy at having to restrict themselves to distro-supplied software. I do think this is a better system than "download some exe and run it", but it will take a long time to get that kind of culture shift. Still, Microsoft are working on an online store and I think that, in the very long, in order for Windows to remain a viable platform for the masses it will have to adopt a more modern approach to software management. Once people get used to "search for software, click to install, download, install, run" they'll find the "go to a store and buy a box" or "go to Google and search for stuff and hope you don't get malware" to be vastly inferior.
Even using 100% repository software won't solve the problem, it'll just mean that bugs in software become the usual infection method rather than bugs in human operators.
Lastly, using 100% repository software is often not an option. Especially if by that you mean "official repositories". Media codecs are still quite problematic due to laws restricting their use, and I suspect it's only going to get worse as people increasingly use these laws to help enforce copy protection mechanisms. Then there's software which is unlikely to end up in repositories, such a
Probably because that's incredibly difficult to do.
Even games like Fallout 3, which have an incredible amount of content, will become boring after a while. At most, I can play through the full game and explore everything twice, once with a "good" character and once with an "evil" character. Maybe if you're really dedicated you could do it again as a neutral, and another just being random. Fallout has a lot of gameplay in it, but also cost a mint to create.
A lot of people won't like Fallout or the GTA series (which also have a lot of gametime if you're into that type of game) simply because it's not the kind of game they like. Some of the games I've really enjoyed have been adventure games, and playing through them more than once is generally pretty pointless. That doesn't mean I don't want them to keep making those kinds of games though.
The Hitman series are amongst my favourite games, but there isn't very much replay value there.
Even if you get an endlessly playable game like e.g. a sports title, it will get boring and repetitive after a while.
The only real way to make a game "worth keeping" while also making it "worth playing in the first place" is to keep producing new content and updates for it. But doing that costs money, so it just doesn't work with a "sell it in a box" sales method. This is the World of Warcraft style - you pay a monthly fee and they can use that to keep expanding the game.
I think there's a lot of value in this idea, personally. I also think Spore's "massively singleplayer" concept is a good idea, and actually Fallout 3 would be a good candidate for this kind of service. The game world can be continually expanded by opening up all those barred doors in the cities you can't enter, or just expanding the dimensions of the Wasteland as they find new things to populate it with. Even better: release easy to use editing tools so the players can create content, and then used a paid system to distribute it in an easy way. The value-add to make it worth paying for would be that people at Bethesda would vet the new content for quality and appropriateness, make sure it's properly integrated, and so on. You could reward gamers who are providing good content with free access to the service, but frankly a lot of people would be happy to do it without additional reward, anyway. Creating things is fun, especially if you make it easy to do.
The downside is that would tie up staff who might be more interested in working on the next project than babysitting an old title. But I think this would be a great way of earning residual income from a title that cost so much to develop in the first place, and would help keep it fresh and interesting for your customers. It also has the side-effect of keeping people interested in the "property" and the company in general.
Greece might be significantly different to the US, because most countries use DST during summer (Summer Time and Daylight Saving Time are typically synonyms). Which means the presence or absence of DST has no effect during winter, because winter isn't summer.
As for your other concerns, the paper outlines the data source. Indiana makes an interesting case study because of the various timezones used in different counties and changes that have occurred over the years, allowing them to make the claims they're making about the effect of DST based on a "difference-in-differences estimate... before and after the [DST] policy change" of counties that are in a similar region of the planet but which used different DST rules.
I don't know much (anything) about US geography, but others have suggested that Indiana is a bit of an "extreme state" and is probably using the wrong timezone to begin with, so just how applicable this data is to other states and other countries is of course questionable.
No idea really, I'd guess it's being blocked at some point. Checked your local firewall / router settings etc? It's possible your upstream provider might be filtering out DNS requests to resolvers which aren't theirs, but that seems unlikely. You're not behind a corporate firewall or anything like that?
Could also be worth trying some other resolvers that accept requests from the public. 130.95.128.2 is one that I know of (dns.uwa.edu.au).
Wildcards are expanded by the shell before the program is invoked, so there is absolutely no way du would magically work for dirs with "way too many files" inside and not work for other commands.
Unless perhaps the expansion exceeded the maximum string length rather than the maximum number of arguments, and the other command happened to be longer than "du -sh". But I'm not sure if there is a a maximum string length.
That's because "cd" is (naturally) a shell builtin. Try "help cd", which is how you get information about shell built-ins. Or possibly read the bash manpage.
They dual-license the software under their own license for commerical (non-GPL-compliant use); and under the GPL for free.
Note that this is GPL and not LGPL. Even if they use an unmodified version of Ghostscript, if the voting machines are using the Ghostscript API then the voting software must itself be licensed under the GPL.
Alternatively, they can get a license from Artifex for commercial distribution, which means their application doesn't have to be under the GPL.
Obviously the voting machine software isn't GPLd, therefore they need a commercial license. The existence of this suit suggests Diebold didn't obtain a commercial license, but their distribution doesn't comply with the terms of the GPL.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed, it'd cause way too many problems.
I live in an apartment literally one city block from my workplace, so my travel time is about 5 minutes. Why should I get paid less for being at work 8 hours a day than a coworker who lives an hour away? Unless your commute is such that you can actually work while you're traveling, then you're not providing anything of value to the business. The business shouldn't be forced to compensate you for choosing to live further away than other people.
What's with everyone blaming kdawson? I thought it was a scientifically proven fact that KDawson never, ever reads the stories he publishes here, much less writes them.
Most shacks in the woods don't have a municipal sewerage system -- I guess the parent made assumptions about where you live based on the quality of your attempt to be funny and/or clever.
P.S. Congratulations on misspelling "septic" while replying to a post where it was spelt correctly.
Not strongly disagreeing, but I think some people would have an issue that you automatically equate "Free Software" with "hobby development".
It is possible, albeit very unlikely, that "the norm" could become businesses paying for software to meet their needs (whether that's new projects or modifying existing projects to better serve their requirements) and then releasing those changes as Free Software by default. As it is now, most businesses that pay for software keep it locked away by default.
It's not inconceivable that, given a sufficiently large shift in our technological culture, making your software available to others would actually be something of a badge of honor. If you imagine (virtually) every single piece of software being available to everyone, then the few really good projects that gain traction would be a massive publicity boost for the sponsoring organisation(s).
That is to say; there'd be so much software out there that managing to release something of high quality that's actually useful to others (even if only in a niche market) -- something that stands out from the crowd -- would be a great PR exercise.
Probably a pipe dream and maybe it wouldn't work so well in practice, but dreams don't always have to be realistic.
LTO4 is only 400 GB native
HAHA disregard that I suck cocks.
I just looked at our tapes and they're very clearly marked as being 800 GB native, 1.6 TB compressed. Even so, one tape might be able to barely hold one second worth of footage, and it definitely can't write it anywhere near fast enough. Disc bus it is!
LTO4 is only 400 GB native which would be enough for half a second worth of data - you may be get a bit of compression though, but yeah, you'd still be eating one tape every second or so. That doesn't sound very practical. Not to mention its maximum speed is around 120 MB/sec which works out to about 7 GB/sec. If the grandparent's numbers are correct, well... that's slightly short of 1.5 TB/minute best case scenario.
I think you'd have to make do with having a van (or bus) packed full of disc arrays sitting nearby whenever you're filming. One day you might be able to send that kind of traffic over wireless, and you'll be nice and mobile.
I think the interesting / meaningful distinction is that humans design and create things, rather than simply "building" them. While some animals do make use of very basic tools, humans take it to a whole new level. The process for creating a microcomputer, for example, is far removed from actually performing the tasks we use them as tools to accomplish.
Definitely agree with the post above yours though -- intelligence (as we think of it) -- is not necessarily going to be the "final product" of evolution, or even a product at all. This question was posed to Richard Dawkins (in a video series on YouTube, "A conversation with Richard Dawkins"), I think it was essentially "if humans didn't exist or became extinct, would another species evolve our level of intelligence?" and his answer was "almost certainly not", simply based on the slim likelihood of intelligence evolving in the first place.
Also, your suggestion that we should take "communicating with other species on our own planet" as a serious goal is an interesting, and I think, very compelling idea.
Fair enough, clearly there's enough of a gray area that it'd be very difficult to successful prosecute even intentionally malicious behaviour of this sort.
I'm still fairly sure I've seen something along these lines before, but it may have simply been a rule for a job site or something like that.
I can set up fake job interviews with as many people as I want. So can the feds. It's not against the law.
Are you sure? I can't find anything to confirm this but I always thought advertising or offering employment when you actually have no intention to employ anyone was at least a civil offence, if not actually criminal.
On the other hand, I think I've seen pranks and the like that involved fake job interviews, so it may well be perfectly legal. I don't think it should be though. At the very least advertising a non-existent job should be punishable under "false advertising" laws.
I follow your reasoning, but I think there's a flaw.
I think you may be comparing "enterprise class software" - i.e. software products supported by big business, like Windows or IIS or SQL Server or Oracle and so on -- with "small open source projects".
Clearly the big commercial products have viable long term support because they're backed by big companies, but more importantly because these products are very popular. There's a lot of people using them and a lot of incentive for the company to keep supporting them.
But equally, large open source projects aren't going to just dry up overnight. Apache, Linux, PostgreSQL, MySQL, PHP, and so forth -- none of these are going anywhere anytime soon and certainly without as much noise as you'd hear if Oracle decided to shut down their database support business. Even if all the current contributors to Apache decided they'd had enough, other people would take over simply because there's so many people using it.
If you compare smaller OSS projects to smaller commercial projects, then I think you'd find the reliability of the support is about the same, and pretty much dependent on the same thing: how popular it is and how quickly its popularity is growing. Where a business might struggle on and try to keep supporting its failing project that only a handful of people are interested in purely in the hopes of one day turning things around, an OSS developer is just as likely to keep working on their project nobody cares about because they still find it useful/worthwhile. But both kinds of projects are as likely to wither and die as each other -- and a small OSS project at least gives you the possibility of forking and maintaining it yourself.
Yes, forking Apache or OpenOffice would be a nightmare, but you're as unlikely to ever need to as you are to have to maintain your own copy of MS Office. In fact, I'd argue you're even less likely to ever have to maintain your own OOo than your own MS Office, because who knows when Microsoft's business plan is going to shift from selling boxes of software to selling subscriptions to online services?
I think OO.o and Firefox are both bad examples, because they both started life as commercial software, i.e. they came from cathedral-style development. I can't remember if StarOffice was originally "sortof open source" or whether it, like Mozilla, was completely closed but then opened later. Either way, it's not surprising they both look pretty "corporate", because that's where they came from. A more apropos example than Mozilla/Firefox would be KHTML - an open-source project that was good enough that a corporate adopted it and everyone benefited.
Dirac also isn't very typical of OSS, really, and I'm also not yet sure if it actually matters to many people. If you hadn't mentioned the BBC I would've had no idea what you were referring to, and I only recognised that because it was mentioned in an article here somewhat recently.
Possibly, but it's not redundant. Striping really has no business being a RAID level.
iiNet was actually named as a bit of a pun on uuNet. It also used to always be pronounced as "eye eye net" too, but a few years ago the few ads I saw or heard had changed it to "eye net".
I would've thought Telstra Bigpond was the largest ISP here, quite an achievement if MM's company has managed to overtake them.
The point made was that, **IF** one actually **FOLLOWS** a **self-set** policy of "always install from the repository using the package manager" ... then one's Linux system will not get any malware.
... not some other ramble that you just made up to try to come up with something.
Argue against that point
Why argue against that? What point are you trying to make? There's a million ways I can self-cripple my use of the computer to make it perfectly safe no matter how stupid or naive I may be, as a user.
If one actually follows a self-set policy of "always install software from trusted sources and verify your files weren't tampered with" on Windows, then one's Windows system will never get any malware.
Again, who gives a shit? Actual users don't do this because it's too restrictive, or they don't really understand what it means, and they're easily mislead and distracted by the promise of awesome animated cursors or free emoticons or whatever. Nobody targets Linux for malware because virtually the entire userbase is more savvy than "regular users" and won't run some arbitrary attachment in the first place. But claiming this makes Linux immune to this vector of attack is completely missing the point.
Most Windows users nowadays run as an unprivileged account. Malware is still a huge problem for these users because, as it turns out, you can do lots of annoying shit without requiring root or administrator privileges.
The problem with Windows has never been Windows itself. Sure, there are some things Microsoft could have done better in order to make it slightly harder to attack, but ultimately as long as you're letting the user have control of the system it's going to be vulnerable. The kind of user that receives a link for an ePostcard, follows it and then runs the .exe it downloads will do exactly the same thing on Linux or MacOS X or FreeBSD or OpenSolaris. Not letting you execute things by default doesn't matter, because the website will just have instructions for enabling the execute bit and user will follow that in order to view their postcard.
Advocating for a distribution that prevents you from running any programs or scripts which didn't come from an official repository would be a way to solve this problem. It would also severely hamper the usability of the system, especially for "power users" who want to write their own scripts; so you'd have to be able to disable it. Which means Joe User can disable it by following the instructions on the helpful ePostcard website.
True, but again for story-heavy games that's very very difficult/expensive to achieve.
Not that Epic make story-heavy games...
The simple fact is that all viruses, malware, spyware and botnet zombie code runs on Windows machines.
Well that's not a fact. This article at a Linux-friendly site has this citation:
There are about 60,000 viruses known for Windows, 40 or so for the Macintosh, about 5 for commercial Unix versions, and perhaps 40 for Linux.
This has nothing to do with obscurity of Linux systems. It has only to do with four things:
(1) Installing Linux software using the package manager requires the local system administration password to be manually entered.
That depends on the configuration. My Gnome desktop on Debian, for example, set up a password database that I unlock once, and I guess due to some choice I made when I first started using it, never again prompts for that session. That session being as long as I'm logged on, which is typically a week or two until Compiz has a spaz. Any program at all could grab the local admin password from the database and do whatever the hell it wanted without me ever knowing about it. Why aren't there any programs to do that? Because there's so few people running this setup that writing the code to do this would be a waste of time, despite how trivial it would be. It's very unlikely to ever end up running on an appropriate machine. That's purely because of obscurity though.
(2) All software in the repositories is "visible" to the developers who put it there, and they use that software themselves (so they are not going to infect their own systems by deliberately putting malware into code they are themselves using).
This is reasonable enough. Do bear in mind however that developers are often running development versions of code, and therefore not quite the same as the binary packages Joe User would be installing from their distro's repository. You're unlikely to have developers deliberating placing malicious code in the repositories, but it's possible their machines could be infected in some way and it could be snuck in.
(3) All software in the repositories is auditable by the 1.5 million + open source programmers of the world, and
True, but it still took a few years for a massive hole in Debian's SSL package to be discovered, which is used by a heck of a lot of people. While flaws in crypto are a particularly extreme case, it still shows that we can't just say "millions of eyeballs" and believe that'll solve all the problems.
(4) Software transferred via the repositories is digitally signed.
Yep, sure.
The main thing is the difference in culture, and most Windows users will be very unhappy at having to restrict themselves to distro-supplied software. I do think this is a better system than "download some exe and run it", but it will take a long time to get that kind of culture shift. Still, Microsoft are working on an online store and I think that, in the very long, in order for Windows to remain a viable platform for the masses it will have to adopt a more modern approach to software management. Once people get used to "search for software, click to install, download, install, run" they'll find the "go to a store and buy a box" or "go to Google and search for stuff and hope you don't get malware" to be vastly inferior.
Even using 100% repository software won't solve the problem, it'll just mean that bugs in software become the usual infection method rather than bugs in human operators.
Lastly, using 100% repository software is often not an option. Especially if by that you mean "official repositories". Media codecs are still quite problematic due to laws restricting their use, and I suspect it's only going to get worse as people increasingly use these laws to help enforce copy protection mechanisms. Then there's software which is unlikely to end up in repositories, such a
Probably because that's incredibly difficult to do.
Even games like Fallout 3, which have an incredible amount of content, will become boring after a while. At most, I can play through the full game and explore everything twice, once with a "good" character and once with an "evil" character. Maybe if you're really dedicated you could do it again as a neutral, and another just being random. Fallout has a lot of gameplay in it, but also cost a mint to create.
A lot of people won't like Fallout or the GTA series (which also have a lot of gametime if you're into that type of game) simply because it's not the kind of game they like. Some of the games I've really enjoyed have been adventure games, and playing through them more than once is generally pretty pointless. That doesn't mean I don't want them to keep making those kinds of games though.
The Hitman series are amongst my favourite games, but there isn't very much replay value there.
Even if you get an endlessly playable game like e.g. a sports title, it will get boring and repetitive after a while.
The only real way to make a game "worth keeping" while also making it "worth playing in the first place" is to keep producing new content and updates for it. But doing that costs money, so it just doesn't work with a "sell it in a box" sales method. This is the World of Warcraft style - you pay a monthly fee and they can use that to keep expanding the game.
I think there's a lot of value in this idea, personally. I also think Spore's "massively singleplayer" concept is a good idea, and actually Fallout 3 would be a good candidate for this kind of service. The game world can be continually expanded by opening up all those barred doors in the cities you can't enter, or just expanding the dimensions of the Wasteland as they find new things to populate it with. Even better: release easy to use editing tools so the players can create content, and then used a paid system to distribute it in an easy way. The value-add to make it worth paying for would be that people at Bethesda would vet the new content for quality and appropriateness, make sure it's properly integrated, and so on. You could reward gamers who are providing good content with free access to the service, but frankly a lot of people would be happy to do it without additional reward, anyway. Creating things is fun, especially if you make it easy to do.
The downside is that would tie up staff who might be more interested in working on the next project than babysitting an old title. But I think this would be a great way of earning residual income from a title that cost so much to develop in the first place, and would help keep it fresh and interesting for your customers. It also has the side-effect of keeping people interested in the "property" and the company in general.
Greece might be significantly different to the US, because most countries use DST during summer (Summer Time and Daylight Saving Time are typically synonyms). Which means the presence or absence of DST has no effect during winter, because winter isn't summer.
As for your other concerns, the paper outlines the data source. Indiana makes an interesting case study because of the various timezones used in different counties and changes that have occurred over the years, allowing them to make the claims they're making about the effect of DST based on a "difference-in-differences estimate ... before and after the [DST] policy change" of counties that are in a similar region of the planet but which used different DST rules.
I don't know much (anything) about US geography, but others have suggested that Indiana is a bit of an "extreme state" and is probably using the wrong timezone to begin with, so just how applicable this data is to other states and other countries is of course questionable.
No idea really, I'd guess it's being blocked at some point. Checked your local firewall / router settings etc? It's possible your upstream provider might be filtering out DNS requests to resolvers which aren't theirs, but that seems unlikely. You're not behind a corporate firewall or anything like that?
Could also be worth trying some other resolvers that accept requests from the public. 130.95.128.2 is one that I know of (dns.uwa.edu.au).
Apparently you can opt out of that if you have an account. Not sure on the details as I've never used it.
I often find gq in visual mode to be useful, particularly when replying to emails. It re-wraps the selected text block.
In command mode, press v, then use the cursors to select the area, then enter gq
You can use :set textwidth=68 to set how many columns you want it to wrap to.
Wildcards are expanded by the shell before the program is invoked, so there is absolutely no way du would magically work for dirs with "way too many files" inside and not work for other commands.
Unless perhaps the expansion exceeded the maximum string length rather than the maximum number of arguments, and the other command happened to be longer than "du -sh". But I'm not sure if there is a a maximum string length.
That's because "cd" is (naturally) a shell builtin. Try "help cd", which is how you get information about shell built-ins. Or possibly read the bash manpage.
The Slashdot administration hereby promises to "get rid of Idle" as soon as the existence of God is empirically proven or disproven by Science.
-- TBD, self-appointed ambassador for the administrators of /.
Check out http://www.artifex.com/indexlicense.htm
They dual-license the software under their own license for commerical (non-GPL-compliant use); and under the GPL for free.
Note that this is GPL and not LGPL. Even if they use an unmodified version of Ghostscript, if the voting machines are using the Ghostscript API then the voting software must itself be licensed under the GPL.
Alternatively, they can get a license from Artifex for commercial distribution, which means their application doesn't have to be under the GPL.
Obviously the voting machine software isn't GPLd, therefore they need a commercial license. The existence of this suit suggests Diebold didn't obtain a commercial license, but their distribution doesn't comply with the terms of the GPL.