Description: Dictionary Client
dict is the client that queries the dictd server. Since it is TCP based, it can access servers on the local host, on a local network, or on the Internet.
Also, the syntax for a Google dictionary search is define:atheism
Doesn't seem that clear to cut me, however it seems it can be interpreted either way. I've always thought of atheism as being "there is no God" and agnosticism as being "I don't know".
$ dict atheism
3 definitions found
From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:
Atheism \A"the*ism\, n. [Cf. F. ath['e]isme. See {Atheist}.]
1. The disbelief or denial of the existence of a God, or supreme intelligent Being. [1913 Webster]
2. Godlessness. [1913 Webster]
From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:
atheism
n 1: the doctrine or belief that there is no God [syn: godlessness] [ant: theism]
2: a lack of belief in the existence of God or gods
(The third "definition" was Moby Thesaurus II, which isn't really relevant.)
It might help if you defined what you mean by "do something wrong". Can you give some examples of what you mean?
I do want to like Python, and I went through a period where I used it for everything I would have used Perl for. After a few months I've decided that I really do prefer Perl, and I kind of regret writing these things in Python whenever I need to make changes. Not enough to actually rewrite them in Perl, mind you; they do work, after all.
It may be that I'm approaching Python in the wrong way, and trying to treat it as a "scripting language" (whatever that actually is) as opposed to a "real programming language" (whatever that is). Python seems to sit closer on that continuum to "real" language, but things like it not being able to tell me that I just assigned a value to a variable that doesn't exist make me feel a bit uncomfortable using it in that way. Hell, when I have to write VBScript I always use "option explicit".
As a "scripting language", Perl just seems much more comfortable to me. But, I'm not a programmer and I haven't had to work with a team of others on a large project and deal with their different styles or different levels of proficiency. I may well have a different feeling if I did. As it stands, if I'm doing something quick and dirty I'll use bash; if I'm doing something a bit more complicated I'll use Perl; and if I want to write something serious, I'll use the subset of C++ that doesn't make my head explode. I just don't seem to have a niche for Python to fill.
Re:Sometimes the correct answer is the simplest
on
Why Corporates Hate Perl
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Interesting that you got modded so high, despite failing to understand what the GP was saying.
I'm not positive what that regexp is doing, but the presence of / and../ or./ matches suggests it's manipulating a directory path in some way. After a few tests I think it may be intending to return the filename portion from a path, but if so it's a little buggy (and a good example of why reinventing the wheel isn't a great idea; just use basename).
You do make a point, but I feel your method of comparison is a bit questionable. While Python is a fairly old language, it's only seen general use for a very short period of time compared to Perl. That means that a) there's likely to be a lot more Perl code around than Python code, and b) a lot of the Python code that's around will be of high quality.
The main reason for this is that when a language first begins to be noticed, it's usually going to be embraced by people who want to show how good it is. They'll take extra care to make sure it's well written and easy to understand, because they're evangelizing the language. As a language ages, people will be using it who really don't give a crap about the quality of the code, and that will "pollute" your sample set.
Accessibility will also have a lot to do with it. Even when PHP was a pretty new language, a random sample of code would reveal it to be vastly inferior to just about every other language you could possibly think of. A lot of this is simply because PHP became so widespread that virtually every cheap (and many free) web hosts supported it, so every newbie who wanted to learn to program started with PHP.
A new programmer -- or a bad programmer -- can write terrible Python code just as easily as they can write terrible Perl code. But at least it will have proper indentation. I would be very hesitant to base too much of my assessment of a language on its "newbie safety factor". Else we'd all be using BASIC and Logo.
These stories are common, and my best guess is that they recognise individual people. Or at least, they think they do. I would guess that someone who they thought looked like you was at some stage a threat to them or their nest, maybe throwing rocks or otherwise exhibiting aggressive behaviour. After that, they'll start attacking them on sight to try to keep them away; and since you look similar enough, they treat you the same way. On the other hand, maybe it's even more general than that. Simply a way of walking, or particular shapes, or particularly colour combinations you wear, etc.
A friend of mine with twins has noticed that they will taken an instant liking or dislike to certain people, presumably based purely on how they look or sound. The assumption being that the babies are okay with people who resemble their family members, but get uncomfortable around people that look "strange". Maybe it's something similar to that.
We had magpies around for years because we used to feed them, and they'd nest in our yard sometimes and usually would nest pretty close by. In at least a decade of seeing them every day I've never had a problem with being swooped by them. The closest was one female magpie in particular that got very used to us over the years, and would make a habit of flying uncomfortably close in order to get attention. It was never aggressive though, merely a nuisance - like a dog that keeps hanging around right at your feet so you're always almost stepping on it. (It did that too.)
The cheesiness is part of its appeal; kind of pisstake of how the entertainment industry portrays heroic characters. Duke 3D was actually pretty good, so long as you either enjoyed or ignored the testosterone fest.
It also wasn't entirely 3D, if I recall correctly: the environments were, but the enemies were 2D sprites like in Wolfenstein 3D and Doom.
Hm, I thought the blurb was just a promotion of Hurricane78's journal entry - or did kdawson somehow modify the journal entry as well? Having never used the/. journal (and certainly never gotten it promoted to a story) I don't really know how that works...
I'm wondering if maybe Hurricane78 is a console gamer, and therefore has no knowledge of FPS games on the PC. It's possible people would read "Duke Nukem 3D" and assume it must be the "Forever" game, because that's the only Duke Nukem they're aware of.
After all, generic common-as-muck shooters such as the Halo franchise and Gears of War are elevated to Godlike status by console gamers, and I can only presume it's because they've never actually played shooters before that didn't suck. As far as decent shooters go, consoles don't really have much of a history. There's Goldeneye 007 on the N64, but not much else.
Point being, if you'd never heard of DN3D then you might mistake this announcement as being the final name of the "Duke Nukem Forever" project, in the way that Longhorn became Vista. So maybe that explains the journal entry. kdawson's contribution can be explained by his or her general uselessness as an editor.
It's been a while since I've looked, but the lack of tunnel brokers means that most people using IPv6 are doing so via fairly congested links. So a site that's available via IPv6 as well as IPv4 is in many cases slower over IPv6. I think this is the reason why lots of people who do want to have an IPv6 version available (e.g. Google) are putting it on a different hostname, so it doesn't interfere with their "regular" site.
There may also be other problems, e.g. some operating systems are now configuring IPv6 addresses by default, and if your site has A and AAAA records web browsers and so on will likely try to connect via IPv6 first... even though it's almost certainly not going to get anywhere. That means waiting for the initial connection to time out before it retries on the IPv4 address. The end result is that users who have no idea what IPv6 is may find your site frustratingly slow to access simply because you publish IPv6 address records in addition to IPv4 records.
Wasn't there a big deal made over Vista having IPv6 enabled by default, and one of the common tips for improving (perceived) performance was to disable it?
any business today using network routable addresses internally, well, their incompetence shines through. 10/8, 192.168/16 and others, plenty of space
This is all well and good until you're setting up VPNs with your business partners; and if you're a large business, you not only use a lot of private address space, but you also have a lot of partners.
But that's okay, you can just renumber your entire network every time you find you've chosen the same private addresses as the company you're doing business with. Or you can set up some crazy NAT scheme so you can pretend they're on a different address space, giving you a whole new set of problems.
You're right in that the cost of actually changing to IPv6 right now far outweighs the cost of working around the problems caused by the limited address space, but it sure would've been nice if we'd had longer addresses from the start!
But it is fair to say that our species would probably not exist without rape.
I don't see any evidence to support this, and you haven't provided any. It's possible that the human species may be a much smaller population without rape, but I doubt even that's true.
There's nothing to suggest our species isn't capable of maintaining a sufficient level of voluntary reproduction in the absence of rape, nor that it ever was incapable of it.
At most, particular individuals -- even many individuals from whole bloodlines -- may owe their existence to rape, but certainly not the whole (or even a majority of) the species.
There's nothing to say they're going to drop every other investigative method and rely on this, so most of your rant is pretty pointless. Although I too fail to see how this is "news".
As for the last part, law enforcement rarely has much (if any) say when it comes to deciding what is and isn't a crime and how they should be policed and punished. Most of that is politicians trying to look good by being "tough on" whatever the latest fashionable-to-be-against crime is.
At the end of the day, the cops hassle teenagers who hang out in business areas (because there's nowhere else to hang out) because the business people and shoppers complain to their representatives, who fight to get the police there in order to show how they're listening to the needs of the voting public.
I think there's some good reasons. A lot of serial killers probably have some kind of split personality thing going on; many are considered by those who know them to be very sociable and friendly, for example, which doesn't mesh nicely with being a multiple murderer. To be successful you need to keep your "normal" life completely separate from your "killer" life. I wouldn't pick someone at the local store where I do most of my shopping for example, because then when I go there in future I'll be reminded of the fun I had (assuming killing people causes pleasant feelings in me) and it'll be harder to contain the urge to do it again right now, rather than somewhere safe after careful planning.
Then there's the obvious problems with e.g. murdering your neighbour. Even if you're not a suspect, the police are almost guaranteed to want to interview you in case you heard anything, which means you have to lie about what you were doing at the time of the murder. Even if you're pretty confident that you'll be able to pull it off, that's still a huge risk that's almost certainly not necessary.
The most logical thing to do is to commit the crimes as far away from your home and work as possible. Of course, this causes its own problems: if you're spotted it'll be harder to explain why you were so far from home (especially if you're spotted at multiple locations); and the unfamiliar environment makes it more risky for you.
So even though serial killers may be well aware that they're leaving a bubble around their "normal" life which has the potential to expose them, not doing so is even riskier.
Okay now I see - this actually has nothing to do with VMotion, which deals with migrating guests between hosts while they're running (or while they're stopped, but that's not as cool). Automatically (re)starting guests is managed by the "High Availability" part of VI. I guess you also have a slightly different definition of "outage" to me as well, as I consider turnin a server off and then back on to result in an "outage", albeit a short one.
It's also nothing that can't be done under any other virtualisation system, provided you have shared storage so that another host can actually restart the guest. To me this seems like one of the least amazing parts of VMware's offerings, in that it's an entirely expected thing for the system to be able to do.
First, live migrations are a very big f'ing deal to those who use that feature, not exactly something companies can just brush off easily.
What do you use live migrations for?
I do make use of this feature myself, but it's more a convenience thing than anything else. If a guest really is so important that you can't have maintenance windows for it, then you need to cluster it to provide availability. All the VMotion in the world won't save you from a host failure, after all. Or operator error.
For an "enterprise" configuration the extra cost of VMware is just a drop in the bucket so probably worth paying for to get these "nice to have" features, but it's hard to see its absence as a show-stopper. Then again, you may have a use case I haven't considered.
The basic gist is that VMs aren't running all the time; this is kind of the point of virtualisation w.r.t. server consolidation. Generally this is a good thing, because you can merge a dozen servers that average 5% CPU usage onto a single host. But since the guests are not running all the time, they can't possibly receive every interrupt as it happens. Therefore the hypervisor has to fake them in some manner, and that gets a bit tricky.
What we should be doing is funding micro-lending ventures
On this note, a little plug for Kiva, who do just that. Just in case anyone reads the previous post and wonders how one could go about getting involved in something like that.
I've only been a member for a few months but it all seems legit and works as advertised. The only minor problem is that loan repayments aren't disbursed until they've been fully repaid. This seems like it might be limiting the speed at which funds can circulate within Kiva. Presumably funds in limbo are being used for something useful, so perhaps it doesn't matter.
I think the real reason is market inertia. I have a free email address provided by service provider on my phone, and I also have secure access to my own IMAP mailbox, but I never use them for messaging to/from people's phones for the simple reason that most people don't have email set up on their phone.
Since most people don't have it set up, most people don't think it's useful to have set up, and therefore don't bother with it. It's one of those things where it's only useful if it's widespread.
SMS works everywhere, and so it's useful.
Another issue with email is that it requires maintaining a data connection, and that uses up more battery life than just keeping the regular GSM signal available.
A final issue with email is that most of the built-in email clients in phones are pretty shit. My phone (Nokia N-series) has an IMAP client, but it only lets you see one folder which limits its usefulness. But since most people don't use email there's little incentive for them to spend time creating better ones.
As others have said, it doesn't matter how much you obfuscate the issue, making a copy of copyrighted materials without permission to do so is the problem.
There is a simple way to sidestep that issue though; but it probably requires at least a few more years' advance in technology. (Heck, maybe the current attempts by big ISPs to stamp out P2P is because big media has already seen this solution and wants to prevent it from happening.)
Imagine a P2P network where your client automatically deletes the chunks of data it sends to others. Although technically there's copying happening (into memory buffers, onto the network, etc.) but from a legal point of view, you're simply giving your data to someone else. Just like if you bought a CD, listened to it, then gave it to someone else, they listened to it, passed it on... nobody has made any copies, and it's (currently) perfectly legal. As it should be.
So you want to watch a movie. You set your P2P client to download it, and it grabs all the chunks of data that make up that movie in a particular encoding. You watch the movie, and then when you're done you tell the client you don't need it anymore. Someone else wants it, and they start downloading it from you. Each time their client successfully receives a chunk, your client deletes it from your system.
If you want to watch it again, you just download it again.
This would require one copy to exist for everyone that wanted to watch it at the same time (or everyone who wanted to hold onto a copy). It also leaves an obvious "black hole" problem, i.e. a client that downloads the data (removing a copy from the network) and then never returns it. So you'd need some kind of reputation system in place to ensure people are playing fair.
It seems almost doable, at a technical and a social level. The main problem is ensuring that clients actually remove their copy of each data block when they "give" it to another client.
With some refinement you could even watch the movie while it downloads, and chunks you've watched get sent on to someone else right away. That would be pretty cool. And movies are just an example of course; music would work even better as the small file sizes would make them quicker to transfer around.
In the unlikely event that big media wanted to support such a system, you could have an integrated store where after you've listened to something you can purchase a copy, which entitles you to keep the bits on your hard drive while also allowing your client to upload them to one other. Plus it'd provide fantastic statistics on consumer interest.
The patent covers including things which aren't in the filesystem as part of the tree view. I don't see the relevance of "well UNIX has been placing all devices in the filesystem for decades". What's your point?
Fair enough, I think I didn't notice because your mention of "ads" was so far away (in the text) from where you mentioning the "first link".
I think most of slashdot ignored it because we ignore ads by default. Half the people that tried the search probably didn't even know there were ads, because they automatically ignore the "sponsored links" box. I pretty much ignore all ads unless I'm actually looking to spend money, because it's rare for someone to pay for an ad if they don't expect to sell something by doing so. All three examples - Firefox, Linux and Open Office - were free software, so they definitely fell into the "not expecting to pay anything" category for me.
The rest of the people were commenting on the quality of the actual search results, which you didn't actually make mention of except to imply that they were "horrifically inappropriate". I didn't look any further than the first page for each, but they did seem pretty reasonable.
This might just be coloured by your perspective. As a stereotypical male geek, I too would love it if there were more girls in IT. Or at the very least, in the IT department I work in. I think it's fair to say that girl geeks will be treated as something special by the majority of male geeks, for a variety of reasons (romantic, social, etc).
If you're a male geek, then you're surrounded by other male geeks who collectively put girl geeks on a pedestal, even if you don't. But that's not necessarily the reality for the girl geek, who's primary direction from society will be from her peers, not yours. As another respondent to your post said, girl geeks are probably subjected to much the same negative pressures from their peers as male geeks are. Also remember that society's attitude towards geeks has changed a lot in a fairly short amount of time, so the greater acceptance of girl geeks you're seeing may also be reflecting a greater acceptance of geeks in general. I get a laugh out of our online marketing team who proudly call themselves geeks, but have no idea what the difference between "a website" and "a domain name" is. I think now "faux geek" is something of a counter-culture, a "it's cool to be uncool" thing.
The other issue is that excessive encouragement of girl geeks may actually be received negatively by them, i.e. they're likely to be aware that they're getting special treatment just because they happen to be female. This may be a significant disincentive for some, by making them feel like anything cool/clever that they do or create will always be overshadowed by the fact that they're a woman. After all, a girl who decides to engage in geeky pursuits despite the social disadvantages amongst her peers is almost certainly doing it because she's really in to it. To then be treated with kid gloves by her peers in geekdom probably takes a lot of fun out of it. The girls who enjoy getting special treatment just because they're girls probably wouldn't have gone into tech in the first place, as there are fair easier avenues if you just want attention.
It may be location-specific, but I don't get any links to Microsoft's site as the first results.
The results for the UK seem reasonable, although the first one wasn't what you'd be expecting (e.g. the first result for "open office" was http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/downloads/2128963/openoffice). I changed my browser language preference to English/Australia so I'd get more appropriate results (and deleted the live.com cookies), and I got fairly different results. The first few links for "linux" were to linux.org.au, with linux.org the second last result on the first page.
Interestingly, the search for open office with my language preference set to UK English didn't give me any ads, but with it set to AU English I do get some pretty lame "sponsored links":
Open Office 2008 Download - OpenOffice.2008-Version.com
Latest Version of Open Office Suite. Fast Download - 100% Guaranteed.
OPEN OFFICE 2008 WORD - computers.oztion.com.au
Computer software at bargain prices.
Microsoft Open Office - www.gumtree.com.au
Find amazing bargains for computer software. Browse 100's of ads.
Okay... so what about the US? Interestingly, just setting my language preference to EN-US doesn't work; it decides I'd prefer Australian results. Maybe EN-US is so common Microsoft ignore it and do geo detection instead?
Fortunately I have a server at a US colo facility, so using that as my proxy did the trick. If you're from the US, then search.live.com returns one ad for "getfirefox":
Internet Browser - www.Microsoft.com/Windows
Everyday Web Tasks Are Easier w/ Windows Vista. Get Special Offers.
and one ad for "linux":
Linux - www.Microsoft.com/Windows
Special Offers from Windows Vista® w/ the Purchase of Select Laptops.
The ads are pretty clearly marked as being ads (sorry, "sponsored links") so the GP seems to be trying to grind an axe. However, that kind of advertising is usually reserved for 2-bit companies with no real products trying to dupe naive users, so it's a bit surprising to see a company like Microsoft resorting to such cheap tactics.
Interesting that the sponsored link for "firefox" is actually mozilla.com; only "getfirefox" returns Microsoft's ad. A search for "getfirefox.com" has a sponsored link for another site which appears to be trying to make a few bucks by sending people to Google's download for Firefox.
The difference between spam and DRM is that spam is received from people who you don't want any kind of contact with, and don't even want or need to have them on the network. DRM tries to prevent people from accessing an unencrypted bitstream in order to copy it or convert it to another format, while also requiring that they're able to access the unencrypted bitstream in order to view / run it.
DRM is therefore an unsolvable problem, and the best you can do is raise the bar enough that it becomes too difficult for 99% of the people. You can put all the crypto stuff in hardware so it's hard to get to, and then make the rest of the system require unmodified crypto hardware in order to run - that's what the Trusted Platform thing is all about. It still won't make it impossible for people to crack though, just hard enough that it'd stop casual piracy.
Spam is another matter though. If we required every single email to be signed by its sender, and every single sender's public key had to be verifiable back to a few trusted roots (i.e. how SSL certificate signing on the web works), and these roots actually went to great lengths to verify each sender's identity before signing their key, AND none of them were corrupt (or at least, an oversight committee wasn't and they had the power to revoke their trustpoint) -- then spam would effectively be stopped. Anyone sending spam using their own key would have their key revoked, so their messages would no longer verify and would be turfed before any user saw them; and they'd be banned from obtaining a new one for some time (and probably fines and maybe a prison sentence, too). This would also provide quite the incentive to keep one's certificate secure, as stealing legitimate certificates would become the primary avenue for spammers to be able to send messages.
Such a system would require central trust, so you could count the number of messages sent by each particular user and if it exceeds a threshold blacklist it. This way even stolen certificates could only be used to send a small amount of messages before being useless. If you can only send 100 messages for every key you steal,
However, a lot of people wouldn't go along with a scheme like this - especially for personal email accounts. This would greatly reduce the number of people using the system and therefore its value. It would also leave all users at the mercy of the trusted roots, which will almost certainly end up being a problem in the long term. There'd also be problems with people who do have their certificate stolen being branded as spammers, but if we really wanted to stop spam then that's a price one would be willing to pay. There would be a mechanism to get your "email license" back after that happened, but you'd probably have to prove you know how to keep your computer and certificate secure before being allowed back on to the net.
We might not want to take such drastic measures as this, but spam is fundamentally a different problem to DRM. It's not "cindy wants to prevent joe from seeing bob's content, where joe and bob are the same person" -- it's more like "cindy doesn't want to receive anything from joe". That's doable, if you're willing to make some sacrifices.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not a Google search, it's dict.
Description: Dictionary Client
dict is the client that queries the dictd server. Since it is TCP based, it can access servers on the local host, on a local network, or on the Internet.
Also, the syntax for a Google dictionary search is define:atheism
Doesn't seem that clear to cut me, however it seems it can be interpreted either way. I've always thought of atheism as being "there is no God" and agnosticism as being "I don't know".
$ dict atheism
3 definitions found
From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:
Atheism \A"the*ism\, n. [Cf. F. ath['e]isme. See {Atheist}.]
1. The disbelief or denial of the existence of a God, or supreme intelligent Being. [1913 Webster]
2. Godlessness. [1913 Webster]
From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:
atheism
n 1: the doctrine or belief that there is no God [syn: godlessness] [ant: theism]
2: a lack of belief in the existence of God or gods
(The third "definition" was Moby Thesaurus II, which isn't really relevant.)
It might help if you defined what you mean by "do something wrong". Can you give some examples of what you mean?
I do want to like Python, and I went through a period where I used it for everything I would have used Perl for. After a few months I've decided that I really do prefer Perl, and I kind of regret writing these things in Python whenever I need to make changes. Not enough to actually rewrite them in Perl, mind you; they do work, after all.
It may be that I'm approaching Python in the wrong way, and trying to treat it as a "scripting language" (whatever that actually is) as opposed to a "real programming language" (whatever that is). Python seems to sit closer on that continuum to "real" language, but things like it not being able to tell me that I just assigned a value to a variable that doesn't exist make me feel a bit uncomfortable using it in that way. Hell, when I have to write VBScript I always use "option explicit".
As a "scripting language", Perl just seems much more comfortable to me. But, I'm not a programmer and I haven't had to work with a team of others on a large project and deal with their different styles or different levels of proficiency. I may well have a different feeling if I did. As it stands, if I'm doing something quick and dirty I'll use bash; if I'm doing something a bit more complicated I'll use Perl; and if I want to write something serious, I'll use the subset of C++ that doesn't make my head explode. I just don't seem to have a niche for Python to fill.
Interesting that you got modded so high, despite failing to understand what the GP was saying.
I'm not positive what that regexp is doing, but the presence of / and ../ or ./ matches suggests it's manipulating a directory path in some way. After a few tests I think it may be intending to return the filename portion from a path, but if so it's a little buggy (and a good example of why reinventing the wheel isn't a great idea; just use basename).
You do make a point, but I feel your method of comparison is a bit questionable. While Python is a fairly old language, it's only seen general use for a very short period of time compared to Perl. That means that a) there's likely to be a lot more Perl code around than Python code, and b) a lot of the Python code that's around will be of high quality.
The main reason for this is that when a language first begins to be noticed, it's usually going to be embraced by people who want to show how good it is. They'll take extra care to make sure it's well written and easy to understand, because they're evangelizing the language. As a language ages, people will be using it who really don't give a crap about the quality of the code, and that will "pollute" your sample set.
Accessibility will also have a lot to do with it. Even when PHP was a pretty new language, a random sample of code would reveal it to be vastly inferior to just about every other language you could possibly think of. A lot of this is simply because PHP became so widespread that virtually every cheap (and many free) web hosts supported it, so every newbie who wanted to learn to program started with PHP.
A new programmer -- or a bad programmer -- can write terrible Python code just as easily as they can write terrible Perl code. But at least it will have proper indentation. I would be very hesitant to base too much of my assessment of a language on its "newbie safety factor". Else we'd all be using BASIC and Logo.
These stories are common, and my best guess is that they recognise individual people. Or at least, they think they do. I would guess that someone who they thought looked like you was at some stage a threat to them or their nest, maybe throwing rocks or otherwise exhibiting aggressive behaviour. After that, they'll start attacking them on sight to try to keep them away; and since you look similar enough, they treat you the same way. On the other hand, maybe it's even more general than that. Simply a way of walking, or particular shapes, or particularly colour combinations you wear, etc.
A friend of mine with twins has noticed that they will taken an instant liking or dislike to certain people, presumably based purely on how they look or sound. The assumption being that the babies are okay with people who resemble their family members, but get uncomfortable around people that look "strange". Maybe it's something similar to that.
We had magpies around for years because we used to feed them, and they'd nest in our yard sometimes and usually would nest pretty close by. In at least a decade of seeing them every day I've never had a problem with being swooped by them. The closest was one female magpie in particular that got very used to us over the years, and would make a habit of flying uncomfortably close in order to get attention. It was never aggressive though, merely a nuisance - like a dog that keeps hanging around right at your feet so you're always almost stepping on it. (It did that too.)
The cheesiness is part of its appeal; kind of pisstake of how the entertainment industry portrays heroic characters. Duke 3D was actually pretty good, so long as you either enjoyed or ignored the testosterone fest.
It also wasn't entirely 3D, if I recall correctly: the environments were, but the enemies were 2D sprites like in Wolfenstein 3D and Doom.
Hm, I thought the blurb was just a promotion of Hurricane78's journal entry - or did kdawson somehow modify the journal entry as well? Having never used the /. journal (and certainly never gotten it promoted to a story) I don't really know how that works...
I'm wondering if maybe Hurricane78 is a console gamer, and therefore has no knowledge of FPS games on the PC. It's possible people would read "Duke Nukem 3D" and assume it must be the "Forever" game, because that's the only Duke Nukem they're aware of.
After all, generic common-as-muck shooters such as the Halo franchise and Gears of War are elevated to Godlike status by console gamers, and I can only presume it's because they've never actually played shooters before that didn't suck. As far as decent shooters go, consoles don't really have much of a history. There's Goldeneye 007 on the N64, but not much else.
Point being, if you'd never heard of DN3D then you might mistake this announcement as being the final name of the "Duke Nukem Forever" project, in the way that Longhorn became Vista. So maybe that explains the journal entry. kdawson's contribution can be explained by his or her general uselessness as an editor.
It's been a while since I've looked, but the lack of tunnel brokers means that most people using IPv6 are doing so via fairly congested links. So a site that's available via IPv6 as well as IPv4 is in many cases slower over IPv6. I think this is the reason why lots of people who do want to have an IPv6 version available (e.g. Google) are putting it on a different hostname, so it doesn't interfere with their "regular" site.
There may also be other problems, e.g. some operating systems are now configuring IPv6 addresses by default, and if your site has A and AAAA records web browsers and so on will likely try to connect via IPv6 first... even though it's almost certainly not going to get anywhere. That means waiting for the initial connection to time out before it retries on the IPv4 address. The end result is that users who have no idea what IPv6 is may find your site frustratingly slow to access simply because you publish IPv6 address records in addition to IPv4 records.
Wasn't there a big deal made over Vista having IPv6 enabled by default, and one of the common tips for improving (perceived) performance was to disable it?
any business today using network routable addresses internally, well, their incompetence shines through. 10/8, 192.168/16 and others, plenty of space
This is all well and good until you're setting up VPNs with your business partners; and if you're a large business, you not only use a lot of private address space, but you also have a lot of partners.
But that's okay, you can just renumber your entire network every time you find you've chosen the same private addresses as the company you're doing business with. Or you can set up some crazy NAT scheme so you can pretend they're on a different address space, giving you a whole new set of problems.
You're right in that the cost of actually changing to IPv6 right now far outweighs the cost of working around the problems caused by the limited address space, but it sure would've been nice if we'd had longer addresses from the start!
But it is fair to say that our species would probably not exist without rape.
I don't see any evidence to support this, and you haven't provided any. It's possible that the human species may be a much smaller population without rape, but I doubt even that's true.
There's nothing to suggest our species isn't capable of maintaining a sufficient level of voluntary reproduction in the absence of rape, nor that it ever was incapable of it.
At most, particular individuals -- even many individuals from whole bloodlines -- may owe their existence to rape, but certainly not the whole (or even a majority of) the species.
There's nothing to say they're going to drop every other investigative method and rely on this, so most of your rant is pretty pointless. Although I too fail to see how this is "news".
As for the last part, law enforcement rarely has much (if any) say when it comes to deciding what is and isn't a crime and how they should be policed and punished. Most of that is politicians trying to look good by being "tough on" whatever the latest fashionable-to-be-against crime is.
At the end of the day, the cops hassle teenagers who hang out in business areas (because there's nowhere else to hang out) because the business people and shoppers complain to their representatives, who fight to get the police there in order to show how they're listening to the needs of the voting public.
I think there's some good reasons. A lot of serial killers probably have some kind of split personality thing going on; many are considered by those who know them to be very sociable and friendly, for example, which doesn't mesh nicely with being a multiple murderer. To be successful you need to keep your "normal" life completely separate from your "killer" life. I wouldn't pick someone at the local store where I do most of my shopping for example, because then when I go there in future I'll be reminded of the fun I had (assuming killing people causes pleasant feelings in me) and it'll be harder to contain the urge to do it again right now, rather than somewhere safe after careful planning.
Then there's the obvious problems with e.g. murdering your neighbour. Even if you're not a suspect, the police are almost guaranteed to want to interview you in case you heard anything, which means you have to lie about what you were doing at the time of the murder. Even if you're pretty confident that you'll be able to pull it off, that's still a huge risk that's almost certainly not necessary.
The most logical thing to do is to commit the crimes as far away from your home and work as possible. Of course, this causes its own problems: if you're spotted it'll be harder to explain why you were so far from home (especially if you're spotted at multiple locations); and the unfamiliar environment makes it more risky for you.
So even though serial killers may be well aware that they're leaving a bubble around their "normal" life which has the potential to expose them, not doing so is even riskier.
Okay now I see - this actually has nothing to do with VMotion, which deals with migrating guests between hosts while they're running (or while they're stopped, but that's not as cool). Automatically (re)starting guests is managed by the "High Availability" part of VI. I guess you also have a slightly different definition of "outage" to me as well, as I consider turnin a server off and then back on to result in an "outage", albeit a short one.
It's also nothing that can't be done under any other virtualisation system, provided you have shared storage so that another host can actually restart the guest. To me this seems like one of the least amazing parts of VMware's offerings, in that it's an entirely expected thing for the system to be able to do.
First, live migrations are a very big f'ing deal to those who use that feature, not exactly something companies can just brush off easily.
What do you use live migrations for?
I do make use of this feature myself, but it's more a convenience thing than anything else. If a guest really is so important that you can't have maintenance windows for it, then you need to cluster it to provide availability. All the VMotion in the world won't save you from a host failure, after all. Or operator error.
For an "enterprise" configuration the extra cost of VMware is just a drop in the bucket so probably worth paying for to get these "nice to have" features, but it's hard to see its absence as a show-stopper. Then again, you may have a use case I haven't considered.
It's actually pretty complicated. VMware have a PDF which goes into quite a bit of detail on the subject: https://www.vmware.com/pdf/vmware_timekeeping.pdf
The basic gist is that VMs aren't running all the time; this is kind of the point of virtualisation w.r.t. server consolidation. Generally this is a good thing, because you can merge a dozen servers that average 5% CPU usage onto a single host. But since the guests are not running all the time, they can't possibly receive every interrupt as it happens. Therefore the hypervisor has to fake them in some manner, and that gets a bit tricky.
What we should be doing is funding micro-lending ventures
On this note, a little plug for Kiva, who do just that. Just in case anyone reads the previous post and wonders how one could go about getting involved in something like that.
I've only been a member for a few months but it all seems legit and works as advertised. The only minor problem is that loan repayments aren't disbursed until they've been fully repaid. This seems like it might be limiting the speed at which funds can circulate within Kiva. Presumably funds in limbo are being used for something useful, so perhaps it doesn't matter.
I think the real reason is market inertia. I have a free email address provided by service provider on my phone, and I also have secure access to my own IMAP mailbox, but I never use them for messaging to/from people's phones for the simple reason that most people don't have email set up on their phone.
Since most people don't have it set up, most people don't think it's useful to have set up, and therefore don't bother with it. It's one of those things where it's only useful if it's widespread.
SMS works everywhere, and so it's useful.
Another issue with email is that it requires maintaining a data connection, and that uses up more battery life than just keeping the regular GSM signal available.
A final issue with email is that most of the built-in email clients in phones are pretty shit. My phone (Nokia N-series) has an IMAP client, but it only lets you see one folder which limits its usefulness. But since most people don't use email there's little incentive for them to spend time creating better ones.
As others have said, it doesn't matter how much you obfuscate the issue, making a copy of copyrighted materials without permission to do so is the problem.
There is a simple way to sidestep that issue though; but it probably requires at least a few more years' advance in technology. (Heck, maybe the current attempts by big ISPs to stamp out P2P is because big media has already seen this solution and wants to prevent it from happening.)
Imagine a P2P network where your client automatically deletes the chunks of data it sends to others. Although technically there's copying happening (into memory buffers, onto the network, etc.) but from a legal point of view, you're simply giving your data to someone else. Just like if you bought a CD, listened to it, then gave it to someone else, they listened to it, passed it on... nobody has made any copies, and it's (currently) perfectly legal. As it should be.
So you want to watch a movie. You set your P2P client to download it, and it grabs all the chunks of data that make up that movie in a particular encoding. You watch the movie, and then when you're done you tell the client you don't need it anymore. Someone else wants it, and they start downloading it from you. Each time their client successfully receives a chunk, your client deletes it from your system.
If you want to watch it again, you just download it again.
This would require one copy to exist for everyone that wanted to watch it at the same time (or everyone who wanted to hold onto a copy). It also leaves an obvious "black hole" problem, i.e. a client that downloads the data (removing a copy from the network) and then never returns it. So you'd need some kind of reputation system in place to ensure people are playing fair.
It seems almost doable, at a technical and a social level. The main problem is ensuring that clients actually remove their copy of each data block when they "give" it to another client.
With some refinement you could even watch the movie while it downloads, and chunks you've watched get sent on to someone else right away. That would be pretty cool. And movies are just an example of course; music would work even better as the small file sizes would make them quicker to transfer around.
In the unlikely event that big media wanted to support such a system, you could have an integrated store where after you've listened to something you can purchase a copy, which entitles you to keep the bits on your hard drive while also allowing your client to upload them to one other. Plus it'd provide fantastic statistics on consumer interest.
The patent covers including things which aren't in the filesystem as part of the tree view. I don't see the relevance of "well UNIX has been placing all devices in the filesystem for decades". What's your point?
Fair enough, I think I didn't notice because your mention of "ads" was so far away (in the text) from where you mentioning the "first link".
I think most of slashdot ignored it because we ignore ads by default. Half the people that tried the search probably didn't even know there were ads, because they automatically ignore the "sponsored links" box. I pretty much ignore all ads unless I'm actually looking to spend money, because it's rare for someone to pay for an ad if they don't expect to sell something by doing so. All three examples - Firefox, Linux and Open Office - were free software, so they definitely fell into the "not expecting to pay anything" category for me.
The rest of the people were commenting on the quality of the actual search results, which you didn't actually make mention of except to imply that they were "horrifically inappropriate". I didn't look any further than the first page for each, but they did seem pretty reasonable.
This might just be coloured by your perspective. As a stereotypical male geek, I too would love it if there were more girls in IT. Or at the very least, in the IT department I work in. I think it's fair to say that girl geeks will be treated as something special by the majority of male geeks, for a variety of reasons (romantic, social, etc).
If you're a male geek, then you're surrounded by other male geeks who collectively put girl geeks on a pedestal, even if you don't. But that's not necessarily the reality for the girl geek, who's primary direction from society will be from her peers, not yours. As another respondent to your post said, girl geeks are probably subjected to much the same negative pressures from their peers as male geeks are. Also remember that society's attitude towards geeks has changed a lot in a fairly short amount of time, so the greater acceptance of girl geeks you're seeing may also be reflecting a greater acceptance of geeks in general. I get a laugh out of our online marketing team who proudly call themselves geeks, but have no idea what the difference between "a website" and "a domain name" is. I think now "faux geek" is something of a counter-culture, a "it's cool to be uncool" thing.
The other issue is that excessive encouragement of girl geeks may actually be received negatively by them, i.e. they're likely to be aware that they're getting special treatment just because they happen to be female. This may be a significant disincentive for some, by making them feel like anything cool/clever that they do or create will always be overshadowed by the fact that they're a woman. After all, a girl who decides to engage in geeky pursuits despite the social disadvantages amongst her peers is almost certainly doing it because she's really in to it. To then be treated with kid gloves by her peers in geekdom probably takes a lot of fun out of it. The girls who enjoy getting special treatment just because they're girls probably wouldn't have gone into tech in the first place, as there are fair easier avenues if you just want attention.
It may be location-specific, but I don't get any links to Microsoft's site as the first results.
The results for the UK seem reasonable, although the first one wasn't what you'd be expecting (e.g. the first result for "open office" was http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/downloads/2128963/openoffice). I changed my browser language preference to English/Australia so I'd get more appropriate results (and deleted the live.com cookies), and I got fairly different results. The first few links for "linux" were to linux.org.au, with linux.org the second last result on the first page.
Interestingly, the search for open office with my language preference set to UK English didn't give me any ads, but with it set to AU English I do get some pretty lame "sponsored links":
Open Office 2008 Download - OpenOffice.2008-Version.com
Latest Version of Open Office Suite. Fast Download - 100% Guaranteed.
OPEN OFFICE 2008 WORD - computers.oztion.com.au
Computer software at bargain prices.
Microsoft Open Office - www.gumtree.com.au
Find amazing bargains for computer software. Browse 100's of ads.
Okay... so what about the US? Interestingly, just setting my language preference to EN-US doesn't work; it decides I'd prefer Australian results. Maybe EN-US is so common Microsoft ignore it and do geo detection instead?
Fortunately I have a server at a US colo facility, so using that as my proxy did the trick. If you're from the US, then search.live.com returns one ad for "getfirefox":
Internet Browser - www.Microsoft.com/Windows
Everyday Web Tasks Are Easier w/ Windows Vista. Get Special Offers.
and one ad for "linux":
Linux - www.Microsoft.com/Windows
Special Offers from Windows Vista® w/ the Purchase of Select Laptops.
The ads are pretty clearly marked as being ads (sorry, "sponsored links") so the GP seems to be trying to grind an axe. However, that kind of advertising is usually reserved for 2-bit companies with no real products trying to dupe naive users, so it's a bit surprising to see a company like Microsoft resorting to such cheap tactics.
Interesting that the sponsored link for "firefox" is actually mozilla.com; only "getfirefox" returns Microsoft's ad. A search for "getfirefox.com" has a sponsored link for another site which appears to be trying to make a few bucks by sending people to Google's download for Firefox.
Hey, that actually was pretty funny. Well done!
The difference between spam and DRM is that spam is received from people who you don't want any kind of contact with, and don't even want or need to have them on the network. DRM tries to prevent people from accessing an unencrypted bitstream in order to copy it or convert it to another format, while also requiring that they're able to access the unencrypted bitstream in order to view / run it.
DRM is therefore an unsolvable problem, and the best you can do is raise the bar enough that it becomes too difficult for 99% of the people. You can put all the crypto stuff in hardware so it's hard to get to, and then make the rest of the system require unmodified crypto hardware in order to run - that's what the Trusted Platform thing is all about. It still won't make it impossible for people to crack though, just hard enough that it'd stop casual piracy.
Spam is another matter though. If we required every single email to be signed by its sender, and every single sender's public key had to be verifiable back to a few trusted roots (i.e. how SSL certificate signing on the web works), and these roots actually went to great lengths to verify each sender's identity before signing their key, AND none of them were corrupt (or at least, an oversight committee wasn't and they had the power to revoke their trustpoint) -- then spam would effectively be stopped. Anyone sending spam using their own key would have their key revoked, so their messages would no longer verify and would be turfed before any user saw them; and they'd be banned from obtaining a new one for some time (and probably fines and maybe a prison sentence, too). This would also provide quite the incentive to keep one's certificate secure, as stealing legitimate certificates would become the primary avenue for spammers to be able to send messages.
Such a system would require central trust, so you could count the number of messages sent by each particular user and if it exceeds a threshold blacklist it. This way even stolen certificates could only be used to send a small amount of messages before being useless. If you can only send 100 messages for every key you steal,
However, a lot of people wouldn't go along with a scheme like this - especially for personal email accounts. This would greatly reduce the number of people using the system and therefore its value. It would also leave all users at the mercy of the trusted roots, which will almost certainly end up being a problem in the long term. There'd also be problems with people who do have their certificate stolen being branded as spammers, but if we really wanted to stop spam then that's a price one would be willing to pay. There would be a mechanism to get your "email license" back after that happened, but you'd probably have to prove you know how to keep your computer and certificate secure before being allowed back on to the net.
We might not want to take such drastic measures as this, but spam is fundamentally a different problem to DRM. It's not "cindy wants to prevent joe from seeing bob's content, where joe and bob are the same person" -- it's more like "cindy doesn't want to receive anything from joe". That's doable, if you're willing to make some sacrifices.