Perhaps you would need an electric discharge to start life from the begining. Molecules or spores/seeds could have fallen from a comet passing by -- this theory is called panspermia. ETs could have landed there and cultived life forms, who knows?
There's a joke that goes like this: in the cold war both the US and USSR sent missions to the moon, at the same time. The US astronauts arrived at the moon first, and started picking up rocks, etc. Then came the russians, and they started painting the moon red.
The american astronauts thought it was better to call NASA: "Hey, Houston, the russians are painting the moon red", they said. "It's OK, just let them", was the answer they got from NASA, "just tell us when they're finished".
So the russians painted the moon red, went back to their spaceship, and back to Earth. The american astronauts called NASA again: "OK, they've finished -- what now? Do we clean it all?", they asked.
You could send a message by posting in slashdot. Trolling would be a bit, off-topic posts would another, etc. So if you troll, make a funny post, and talk about Natalie Portman, that could be a message.
Actually, I live in China, and this is what I am doing right now. I need this post to be moderated to +5, Funny, in order to the message "abandon your house now" be posted correctly. Otherwise, the message will mean "stay at home, everything is fine", and my friends life will be in danger.:)
So what? The pages were last modified in June 26, they could be there for years! And he could have heard about the soccer team just yesterday -- did you ever hear about it until today?
Sorry for the rant but I get p***ed off whenever brazilian companies register dotcoms "just to be cool"... Well they can just "tomar no cÃ"!
That should be "tomar no cu", or "take it in the ass". It's not "tomar no cÃ" or neither "tomar no cú".
They already have http://www.corinthians.com.br/ in BRAZIL now they also want it under the infamous dotcom? Damn, why don't they go all the f**kin way and register under ALL the other TLD in ALL the other countries?
Why don't US companies register their domains in the ".us" TLD? Because the internet is dotcom, everything else, such as ".com.br" is in a lower level. That's why they want to register "www.corinthians.com".
But... I'm not saying they're right. I think that they have no rights over the name, and the guy was using it for a good reason. If at least we where talking about a great soccer team...:)
I constantly rue the fact that the "www.blahblah.com" convention won out over "web.blahblah.com". The amount of time I waste saying and listening to "Double-Yew Double-Yew Double-Yew" instead of the one syllable "Web" is enough to take an extra week of vacation every year. (thank the gods radio announcers have at least stopped saying "forward slash forward slash")
You know, WWW is the only acronym that has more syllables than the whole name (i.e., world wide web).
The typical requirements of a typical home/office user.
Ok, here's the poor programmer's office suite.
A word processor with standard features such as the ability to select fonts, a spelling and grammar checker, table generation, minimal ability to embed objects (images, etc.) and a UI to die for (none of this adding of every possible button and tray everywhere nonsense).
Use LaTeX and ispell for that. If you need a UI, try LyX, a WYSIWYG frontend to TeX/LaTeX. If you want to write a quick letter, go to vi/jed/joe, make it a postcript file and print it.
A money managment app.
Ok, as every/.er know, we now have GnuCash for that.
A schedule app. Because being late (or worse: forgetting completely!) is bad.
Use at and cron; you can have your todo's sent to your mailbox.
MAYBE a presentation program. This is something that a corporate user would need more than anyone else.
You can use XV for this. Make the presentation using the image editors below, and show it as slides with XV (or any other similar program).
A simple bitmap editing program. Perhaps a vector drawing program instead (Print quality higher per size/complexity ratio).
Try the GIMP for pixel manipulation and/or xfig for vector drawing.
The ability to share files and parts of files seamlessly within the app set.
Isn't this what stdin/stdout are for?:)
A spreadsheet/database program. (Personally, I would leave this out as I have no use for it, and most people don't either.)
Use MySQL, and access it through your browser using your http server. This way you can even customize the UI!
OCR software is a niche software market, and you either get free, dissapointing software with your scanner, or you pay big money for something that does a decent job. Just like everything else in life.
Yeah, just like, say, Linux and Windows.
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Re:this would save me seconds a week!
on
Linux BIOS
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· Score: 1
What is your problem with it? People pay for electricity; they are not given it for free. Those fees pay for the power plants, pay for the engineers, pay for the secretaries and everything else. If anything, electricity rates are too high due to the power monopolies. Or perhaps you are bitter because Americans have enough disposable income to pay for electricity...
The problem is that you never pay for the value of natural resources, only their cost. You're throwing old mother Earth away by doing this...
...Americans exhaust themselves at work, then have no energy for anything else. Ditto here in Canada. I hear it's the same way in Japan and Germany, and in all of the countries with the highest productivities.
Do you think that people don't exhaust themselves in the 3rd world countries like Brazil (where I am from)? Lots of people start working here at a age of 6, and usually for US$ 2.00 per day! That's why we don't get longer lifespans.
If you had some "cultural and philosophical awareness", you would know that your good life in your 1st world country is sustained by the misery of other people in the rest of the world -- forced by your superior military, intelectual and financial power.
If you told me they had a higher percentage of scientific literacy, I might think they were on to something, but culture is idle amusement and philosophy is masturbation; a bit of either is acceptable, even beneficial, but when they start cutting into your working hours, it is decadence.
What the guy said is that the average latin american is more intelligent than an average united-stater. It is. I lived 2 years in the US, and I've seen it, I've read it. But you have more money and more technology, so it's easy to see who has the best scientists or the longer lifespan.
Quoting someone, we all enjoy mocking our homelands, but confusing strength and weakness too often makes your brain soft.
What happens if I write a program that outputs its own source code? I could distribute it only as binary, and people would still be able to get the source code...
Earlier today I was sitting here thinking about some stuff and it dawned on me that I had never ever seen a "Windows to Linux" guide for newbies.
You have the From DOS/Windows to Linux HOWTO -- my first reading when switching to Linux. Great from begginers moving, as the name says, from DOS/Windows to Linux.
Another point could be the directory names, what they mean and how they work in relation to the OS and other programs. It can seem a bit intimidating at first ("What the &*$# is a/var?/proc? didn't I already see that doctor?) I know that you couldn't just go and change them, but maybe in the newbie version there could be symlinks to them? This may not be an issue for some people but I know it was for me the first time I saw unix.
I think that C: isn't very intuitive, and people learned how to use Windows after all. Come on, the problem with these guys is that Linux is different, and they don't want to learn something new.
Well, this is my opinion. People usually don't like new stuff (except for geeks, but that's how we learned).
Slashdot Mirror
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There's a joke that goes like this: in the cold war both the US and USSR sent missions to the moon, at the same time. The US astronauts arrived at the moon first, and started picking up rocks, etc. Then came the russians, and they started painting the moon red.
The american astronauts thought it was better to call NASA: "Hey, Houston, the russians are painting the moon red", they said. "It's OK, just let them", was the answer they got from NASA, "just tell us when they're finished".
So the russians painted the moon red, went back to their spaceship, and back to Earth. The american astronauts called NASA again: "OK, they've finished -- what now? Do we clean it all?", they asked.
"No... just paint the Coca-Cola logo on it".
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(at least here in Brazil this would be funny :) )
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You could send a message by posting in slashdot. Trolling would be a bit, off-topic posts would another, etc. So if you troll, make a funny post, and talk about Natalie Portman, that could be a message.
Actually, I live in China, and this is what I am doing right now. I need this post to be moderated to +5, Funny, in order to the message "abandon your house now" be posted correctly. Otherwise, the message will mean "stay at home, everything is fine", and my friends life will be in danger. :)
--
Here's a AVI version of a new IBM commercial about it's support for Linux:
http://www-4.ibm.c om/software/is/mp/linux/audio/ibm_linux-02.avi
(Thanks to Nanux for pointing this link in the Slackware forum)
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Sorry for the rant but I get p***ed off whenever brazilian companies register dotcoms "just to be cool"... Well they can just "tomar no cÃ"!
That should be "tomar no cu", or "take it in the ass". It's not "tomar no cÃ" or neither "tomar no cú".
They already have http://www.corinthians.com.br/ in BRAZIL now they also want it under the infamous dotcom? Damn, why don't they go all the f**kin way and register under ALL the other TLD in ALL the other countries?
Why don't US companies register their domains in the ".us" TLD? Because the internet is dotcom, everything else, such as ".com.br" is in a lower level. That's why they want to register "www.corinthians.com".
But... I'm not saying they're right. I think that they have no rights over the name, and the guy was using it for a good reason. If at least we where talking about a great soccer team... :)
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...someone just typed by accident:
root@quova:~$ ping *.*.*.*
root@quova:~$ traceroute *.*.*.*
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I constantly rue the fact that the "www.blahblah.com" convention won out over "web.blahblah.com". The amount of time I waste saying and listening to "Double-Yew Double-Yew Double-Yew" instead of the one syllable "Web" is enough to take an extra week of vacation every year. (thank the gods radio announcers have at least stopped saying "forward slash forward slash")
You know, WWW is the only acronym that has more syllables than the whole name (i.e., world wide web).
--
The typical requirements of a typical home/office user.
Ok, here's the poor programmer's office suite.
A word processor with standard features such as the ability to select fonts, a spelling and grammar checker, table generation, minimal ability to embed objects (images, etc.) and a UI to die for (none of this adding of every possible button and tray everywhere nonsense).
Use LaTeX and ispell for that. If you need a UI, try LyX, a WYSIWYG frontend to TeX/LaTeX. If you want to write a quick letter, go to vi/jed/joe, make it a postcript file and print it.
A money managment app.
Ok, as every /.er know, we now have GnuCash for that.
A schedule app. Because being late (or worse: forgetting completely!) is bad.
Use at and cron; you can have your todo's sent to your mailbox.
MAYBE a presentation program. This is something that a corporate user would need more than anyone else.
You can use XV for this. Make the presentation using the image editors below, and show it as slides with XV (or any other similar program).
A simple bitmap editing program. Perhaps a vector drawing program instead (Print quality higher per size/complexity ratio).
Try the GIMP for pixel manipulation and/or xfig for vector drawing.
The ability to share files and parts of files seamlessly within the app set.
Isn't this what stdin/stdout are for? :)
A spreadsheet/database program. (Personally, I would leave this out as I have no use for it, and most people don't either.)
Use MySQL, and access it through your browser using your http server. This way you can even customize the UI!
Anything beyond this is frivolous.
I agree 100%.
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OCR software is a niche software market, and you either get free, dissapointing software with your scanner, or you pay big money for something that does a decent job. Just like everything else in life.
Yeah, just like, say, Linux and Windows.
--
What is your problem with it? People pay for electricity; they are not given it for free. Those fees pay for the power plants, pay for the engineers, pay for the secretaries and everything else. If anything, electricity rates are too high due to the power monopolies. Or perhaps you are bitter because Americans have enough disposable income to pay for electricity...
The problem is that you never pay for the value of natural resources, only their cost. You're throwing old mother Earth away by doing this...
--
Do you think that people don't exhaust themselves in the 3rd world countries like Brazil (where I am from)? Lots of people start working here at a age of 6, and usually for US$ 2.00 per day! That's why we don't get longer lifespans.
If you had some "cultural and philosophical awareness", you would know that your good life in your 1st world country is sustained by the misery of other people in the rest of the world -- forced by your superior military, intelectual and financial power.
If you told me they had a higher percentage of scientific literacy, I might think they were on to something, but culture is idle amusement and philosophy is masturbation; a bit of either is acceptable, even beneficial, but when they start cutting into your working hours, it is decadence.
What the guy said is that the average latin american is more intelligent than an average united-stater. It is. I lived 2 years in the US, and I've seen it, I've read it. But you have more money and more technology, so it's easy to see who has the best scientists or the longer lifespan.
Quoting someone, we all enjoy mocking our homelands, but confusing strength and weakness too often makes your brain soft.
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Just use "dd" to append a single bit to the end of the mp3. The MD5 sum will still be completely different.
Even better: use steganography and write "Metallica sucks!" in the beggining of the MP3.
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Do this:
There you go... :)
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What happens if I write a program that outputs its own source code? I could distribute it only as binary, and people would still be able to get the source code...
--
In the US, the FBI has a huge database with pictures from almost 90% of the population.
The Big Brother is coming.
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Earlier today I was sitting here thinking about some stuff and it dawned on me that I had never ever seen a "Windows to Linux" guide for newbies.
You have the From DOS/Windows to Linux HOWTO -- my first reading when switching to Linux. Great from begginers moving, as the name says, from DOS/Windows to Linux.
--
Another point could be the directory names, what they mean and how they work in relation to the OS and other programs. It can seem a bit intimidating at first ("What the &*$# is a /var? /proc? didn't I already see that doctor?) I know that you couldn't just go and change them, but maybe in the newbie version there could be symlinks to them? This may not be an issue for some people but I know it was for me the first time I saw unix.
I think that C: isn't very intuitive, and people learned how to use Windows after all. Come on, the problem with these guys is that Linux is different, and they don't want to learn something new.
Well, this is my opinion. People usually don't like new stuff (except for geeks, but that's how we learned).
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