Why do people write software to give away free (gratis & libre), even very good quality software? Well, there are a range of answers, but I am always most impressed by that given by the Stone Soup Group:
"Don't want money. Got money. Want admiration."
The Stone Soup Group in the late 1980s to early 1990s created Fractint, which was computationally a very efficient fractal generator and which could exploit irregular tweaks on all sorts of graphic cards.
Google doesn't agree:
1.0 mpg = 86 furlongs per firkin
Sometimes, Google gets it wrong, and it did so in this case. Both the gallon and the firkin are defined differently in US and imperial units. I explicitly said US gallons and US firkins, and supplied a link where the unit definitions could be found. A US firkin contains 7.875 US gallons (29.81 L). An imperial firkin contains 9 imperial gallons (40.91 L). Here are the conversions including mixed units:
1 mile per gallon (US) = 63 furlongs per firkin (US)
1 mile per gallon (US) = 86.46 furlongs per firkin (imp)
1 mile per gallon (imp) = 59.95 furlongs per firkin (US)
1 mile per gallon (imp) = 72 furlongs per firkin (imp)
So Google was apparently using US gallons and imperial firkins - a real screw-up and an astonishing inconsistency! It's worth checking up on Google's answers, rather than blindly accepting them.
To be absolutely pedantic, of course, we must note that these calculations use US liquid gallons, not the smaller US dry gallons, and that the US firkin is a quarter of a standard US barrel, not the very slightly smaller beer barrel or the rather larger oil barrel (neither of which would result in the 86 figure, anyway).
Miles per acre? What's that in rods per hogsheads?
Miles per acre ca't be converted into rods per hogshead. However, you may find the following conversions useful:
1 mile per acre is exactly 80 rods per rood.
1 mile per gallon (US) is exactly 63 furlongs per firkin (US)
Anything else you need can be computed from information at http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/index.html
relevance through putting mannequin arms in toilets bowls
Apply for a grant or other financial support from the Arts Council, or whatever your local tax-wasting equivalent is. That idea just might fly, if you write a bit more toad-screed around it...
Pedantry: you left out Windows 1.0, 2.0, 286, 386, 3.0, 3.1, and WfW 3.11. That would make the total 15. BTW, the shareware Aporia for Windows 386 gave the sort of object-oriented shell in the late 1980s that Windows 95/98 pretended to have almost a decade later.
I also used DOS 1.0 and Windows 1.0 and both sucked rocks. But then, I had used real operating systems for years beforehand (MS/8, OS/360, TOPS-20, RSX-11, etc.). The PC did not get a real operating system until OS/2 2.1 or Windows NT 3.5, IMHO.
Funny thing is, if you do a favor for someone you don't even get thanked, but screw it up even a bit and you get slapped with a lawsuit.
Even if you don't screw up, the recipients of your favours will probably be outraged if they find out. If they've got a bot-ridden unpatched box connected to the net, they're quite likely to be assholes in other ways also.
To fight an asshole, you must be an asshole. The researchers should first provision a "legal fund" by milking the financial data they apparently recovered. Then launch lawsuits against the dummies whose PCs were participating in the botnet as accomplices to said financial crime (e.g. accuse them of attempting to defraud their financial institutions, etc.). Is there such a thing as a reverse-class-action lawsuit, where you can sue a whole class of assholes all at once?
Assholes should not be connected to the internet. Especially if they're exposing goatse-sized vulnerabilities.
Four words for you: Resolution, Resolution, Resolution, Resolution [you can visualize a monkey-dance here if you like]
The lousy 800x600 greyscale that most ebook readers have makes a mockery of any attempt to render equations or scientific illustrations. For equations, you need higher resolution, unless you are happy with a single equation with a few sub/super scripts filling the screen by itself. For informative diagrams, you need color and resolution. I'll skip ebook readers for a while longer.
Did, you mean.
Back when people still used flobby disks...
Actually, some digital SLRs use variants of the TIFF format to store their "raw" files. They may muck about with the headers and you need to know the RGB response curves to make proper use of the data, but underneath, it's still a TIFF. The Pentax PEF format as produced by the istD family of DSLRs can be rendered by TIFF readers which ignore certain "irregularities" in the header, for instance.
Nutrition is a great thing. But the rest of medicine has made some pretty damn big contradictions that you are too quick to discount.
But the health and longevity benefits from medicine are also dwarfed by those from civil engineering - potable water, plumbing, sewers, sewage treatment.
Youtube sucks just as much as Hulu sometimes: This video is not available in your country
That was for "The Outer Limits", "Married with Children", "The Addams family", and "Terry Jones' Medieval Lives". There may be some shows available in my country, but I gave up trying at that point.
How do they come up with these numbers anyway? The jump from 0.90 to 1.02 is relatively large, as was the drop from 0.91 to 0.71 a few months ago. Do they have uncertainty estimates? Inquiring minds want to know.
I forgot to mention that Wikipedia is your friend: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_cipher_modes_of_operation has a good example of the weakness of ECB relative to CBC etc. and shows exactly the kinds of pattern visible in ECB ciphertext of patterned plaintext.
It works by detecting hidden patterns that don't exist in a random file.
I should first say that I'm rather ignorant about encryption but I hope someone will be able to explain this. I was under the impression that any sort of good-quality encrypted data is indistinguishable from completely random data. That seems to directly contradict the ability to determine whether a volume contains encrypted data by means of locating patterns. Is this really a contradiction?
It rather depends on the encryption algorithm. ECB is fast, and much favoured where performance is critical (maybe a file system counts). However, it merely transforms the patterns in the cleartext data into other patterns, and a periodicity based on key length may also be discernible if the key length is only a small fraction of the data length (as is usually the case).
On the other hand, if a better algorithm is used, such as CBC or cypher streaming with unique initial states, then there is no periodicity for any nontrivial key, and the encrypted data is essentially random (unless it repeats in a pattern related to the key). Unfortunately these methods require decryption of all preceding data in a file just to read a single byte, so there can be a significant performance hit.
Bids in Ostmarks only, please, to reflect the unique value of this offering.
In special circumstances, we may accept bids in Zimbabwe dollars (small denominations only).
The students cannot fake it, if the teacher cares about them learning.
Many many many moons ago, I was a Chem. Eng. grad student. This was before the internet existed, and before my beard had turned gray. One of my duties to pay my way was supervising a lab course for undergrads, and marking the students' lab reports (they were expected to produce about 20 pages per week just on this one lab course). I insisted on interviewing them individually on their reports, where they had to explain their results and conclusions. Nobody tried faking anything twice, because it was caught immediately; they had to read up and understand the background, or they were in deep shit. That class got the highest average mark ever in the year-end exam on the associated theory (the professor was pleasantly surprised).
I'm pretty sure that if you work at Microsoft and were capable of getting Vista running on a 400MHz ARM board with 64MB of RAM, they would either promote you to "Emperor of Microsoft" or bury you in a shallow grave outside of town.
Most home NAS devices are headless linux servers, and many of them support taking over a torrent download when you shut down your PC. Or you can start a torrent/ftp/whatever download directly onto it in the first place. Maybe a home NAS uses more power than a USB stick, but much less than a typical PC or even a laptop. They also often have a full LAMP stack and much more storage than a USB stick thingy.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do people write software to give away free (gratis & libre), even very good quality software? Well, there are a range of answers, but I am always most impressed by that given by the Stone Soup Group:
"Don't want money. Got money. Want admiration."
The Stone Soup Group in the late 1980s to early 1990s created Fractint, which was computationally a very efficient fractal generator and which could exploit irregular tweaks on all sorts of graphic cards.
intelligent Glaswegian comedian
Multiple contradictions!
woman with 6 kids from 8 different child-support paying fathers
Please explain...
I want to find some that are big enough to make a decent burger
How about a quarter-pounder? A single goliath bird-eating spider can exceed 4 ounces. Just add a bun and some garnish.
"The goliath bird eater is something of a delicacy among certain Native American tribes" -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliath_birdeater
1 mile per gallon (imp) = 59.95 furlongs per firkin (US)
should be:
1 mile per gallon (imp) = 52.46 furlongs per firkin (US)
if it actually matters to anyone, that is...
Google doesn't agree:
1.0 mpg = 86 furlongs per firkin
Sometimes, Google gets it wrong, and it did so in this case. Both the gallon and the firkin are defined differently in US and imperial units. I explicitly said US gallons and US firkins, and supplied a link where the unit definitions could be found. A US firkin contains 7.875 US gallons (29.81 L). An imperial firkin contains 9 imperial gallons (40.91 L). Here are the conversions including mixed units:
1 mile per gallon (US) = 63 furlongs per firkin (US)
1 mile per gallon (US) = 86.46 furlongs per firkin (imp)
1 mile per gallon (imp) = 59.95 furlongs per firkin (US)
1 mile per gallon (imp) = 72 furlongs per firkin (imp)
So Google was apparently using US gallons and imperial firkins - a real screw-up and an astonishing inconsistency! It's worth checking up on Google's answers, rather than blindly accepting them.
To be absolutely pedantic, of course, we must note that these calculations use US liquid gallons, not the smaller US dry gallons, and that the US firkin is a quarter of a standard US barrel, not the very slightly smaller beer barrel or the rather larger oil barrel (neither of which would result in the 86 figure, anyway).
Miles per acre? What's that in rods per hogsheads?
Miles per acre ca't be converted into rods per hogshead. However, you may find the following conversions useful:
1 mile per acre is exactly 80 rods per rood.
1 mile per gallon (US) is exactly 63 furlongs per firkin (US)
Anything else you need can be computed from information at http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/index.html
relevance through putting mannequin arms in toilets bowls
Apply for a grant or other financial support from the Arts Council, or whatever your local tax-wasting equivalent is. That idea just might fly, if you write a bit more toad-screed around it...
Robots have gone down the stairs
Only when as drunk as their makers.
I have no problem with allowing ICANN to be controlled by a group of nations which all have a constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech.
Heh! And how many of them are there?
8 because - Win95, NT4.0, Win98, WinME, Win2K, WinXP, WinVista, Win7
Pedantry: you left out Windows 1.0, 2.0, 286, 386, 3.0, 3.1, and WfW 3.11. That would make the total 15. BTW, the shareware Aporia for Windows 386 gave the sort of object-oriented shell in the late 1980s that Windows 95/98 pretended to have almost a decade later.
I also used DOS 1.0 and Windows 1.0 and both sucked rocks. But then, I had used real operating systems for years beforehand (MS/8, OS/360, TOPS-20, RSX-11, etc.). The PC did not get a real operating system until OS/2 2.1 or Windows NT 3.5, IMHO.
Funny thing is, if you do a favor for someone you don't even get thanked, but screw it up even a bit and you get slapped with a lawsuit.
Even if you don't screw up, the recipients of your favours will probably be outraged if they find out. If they've got a bot-ridden unpatched box connected to the net, they're quite likely to be assholes in other ways also.
To fight an asshole, you must be an asshole. The researchers should first provision a "legal fund" by milking the financial data they apparently recovered. Then launch lawsuits against the dummies whose PCs were participating in the botnet as accomplices to said financial crime (e.g. accuse them of attempting to defraud their financial institutions, etc.). Is there such a thing as a reverse-class-action lawsuit, where you can sue a whole class of assholes all at once?
Assholes should not be connected to the internet. Especially if they're exposing goatse-sized vulnerabilities.
Four words for you: Resolution, Resolution, Resolution, Resolution [you can visualize a monkey-dance here if you like]
The lousy 800x600 greyscale that most ebook readers have makes a mockery of any attempt to render equations or scientific illustrations. For equations, you need higher resolution, unless you are happy with a single equation with a few sub/super scripts filling the screen by itself. For informative diagrams, you need color and resolution. I'll skip ebook readers for a while longer.
Did, you mean. Back when people still used flobby disks...
Actually, some digital SLRs use variants of the TIFF format to store their "raw" files. They may muck about with the headers and you need to know the RGB response curves to make proper use of the data, but underneath, it's still a TIFF. The Pentax PEF format as produced by the istD family of DSLRs can be rendered by TIFF readers which ignore certain "irregularities" in the header, for instance.
Nutrition is a great thing. But the rest of medicine has made some pretty damn big contradictions that you are too quick to discount.
But the health and longevity benefits from medicine are also dwarfed by those from civil engineering - potable water, plumbing, sewers, sewage treatment.
http://www.youtube.com/shows http://www.youtube.com/movies
Youtube sucks just as much as Hulu sometimes:
This video is not available in your country
That was for "The Outer Limits", "Married with Children", "The Addams family", and "Terry Jones' Medieval Lives". There may be some shows available in my country, but I gave up trying at that point.
How do they come up with these numbers anyway? The jump from 0.90 to 1.02 is relatively large, as was the drop from 0.91 to 0.71 a few months ago. Do they have uncertainty estimates? Inquiring minds want to know.
I forgot to mention that Wikipedia is your friend: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_cipher_modes_of_operation has a good example of the weakness of ECB relative to CBC etc. and shows exactly the kinds of pattern visible in ECB ciphertext of patterned plaintext.
It works by detecting hidden patterns that don't exist in a random file.
I should first say that I'm rather ignorant about encryption but I hope someone will be able to explain this. I was under the impression that any sort of good-quality encrypted data is indistinguishable from completely random data. That seems to directly contradict the ability to determine whether a volume contains encrypted data by means of locating patterns. Is this really a contradiction?
It rather depends on the encryption algorithm. ECB is fast, and much favoured where performance is critical (maybe a file system counts). However, it merely transforms the patterns in the cleartext data into other patterns, and a periodicity based on key length may also be discernible if the key length is only a small fraction of the data length (as is usually the case).
On the other hand, if a better algorithm is used, such as CBC or cypher streaming with unique initial states, then there is no periodicity for any nontrivial key, and the encrypted data is essentially random (unless it repeats in a pattern related to the key). Unfortunately these methods require decryption of all preceding data in a file just to read a single byte, so there can be a significant performance hit.
Bids in Ostmarks only, please, to reflect the unique value of this offering.
In special circumstances, we may accept bids in Zimbabwe dollars (small denominations only).
THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE.
...and it's AK-HI-FL!
[I'm not shouting, but I am quoting someone who's shouting. Someone please tell the lameness filter.]
The students cannot fake it, if the teacher cares about them learning.
Many many many moons ago, I was a Chem. Eng. grad student. This was before the internet existed, and before my beard had turned gray. One of my duties to pay my way was supervising a lab course for undergrads, and marking the students' lab reports (they were expected to produce about 20 pages per week just on this one lab course). I insisted on interviewing them individually on their reports, where they had to explain their results and conclusions. Nobody tried faking anything twice, because it was caught immediately; they had to read up and understand the background, or they were in deep shit. That class got the highest average mark ever in the year-end exam on the associated theory (the professor was pleasantly surprised).
I'm pretty sure that if you work at Microsoft and were capable of getting Vista running on a 400MHz ARM board with 64MB of RAM, they would either promote you to "Emperor of Microsoft" or bury you in a shallow grave outside of town.
C'mon man, this is Microsoft. They will do both.
...and in the wrong order.
Most home NAS devices are headless linux servers, and many of them support taking over a torrent download when you shut down your PC. Or you can start a torrent/ftp/whatever download directly onto it in the first place. Maybe a home NAS uses more power than a USB stick, but much less than a typical PC or even a laptop. They also often have a full LAMP stack and much more storage than a USB stick thingy.
Patch cables - buy 'em cheap in bulk.
Yep, we've got almost a dozen cat6 patch cables left over (mix of 50cm, 100cm and 200cm) on a shelf.
Sounds like you have a good install - the hand terminated stuff is in the wall where it's supposed to be, unlikely to get damaged.
That was exactly my reasoning. There is also a small loop of slack cable inside the wall at each end, just in case a socket has to be moved later.