I use the Bank of Montreal. They work with NS on Linux, but they do insist on doing lots of stuff
with Java. (sigh), so there is a risk that the same problem could crop up here, as well.
It just hasn't... so far (knock on fake wood laminate). `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Having spent the time trying to clean up the ctrans version (of course, knowing almost no German doesn't help much), I'd say it's a lack of manpower. If you want to do the translations in your spare time and for free, (and it's good quality), I figure that they'd be happy to do an english version.
Also: Dutch is pretty close to German. If it weren't for the fact that some Dutch have a
residual resentment over the German invasion in
World War II, they could probably recognize
quite a bit in common with each other.
In any case, translating between the two languages is apparently much easier than translating between English and German.
Something else to consider is the english magazine market
is already near saturation. There is less likely
to be a lot of competition in the dutch market. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
I've tried to clean up the systrans translation. In the mean time, I think I've come up with some slightly different interpretations of some of the text, most notably:
Torvalds: One fundamental difficulty is not at all technical, but comes from the fact that most people do not want to beta test
a new Kernel. If they abandon
Kernel 2.2, it could end up causing new problems.))
Why should they try a test kernel out?
was: They are not content with the Kernel 2,2, have
their own problems. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Actually, I think that there is a possible reason why linux users are less interested in Beta testing a new kernel than Windows users might be.
Unlike Windows, most people running linux find it quite stable and usable. Unless you want to do things like USB or firewire (for which there are patches for 2.2, anyways), there's no real NEED to move over.
People running windows will often move to the newest beta in hopes that it will actually work.
With Linux, there's no such need. You have to really want to test the new system.
I have two systems at home, but one is used by my roommates, and me, on a regular basis (including as a sound source (MP3) for the stereo). (Un)fortunately, we have ADSL, so I also have a Web page on it, and we dual boot over to windows way too often for game playing.
As a result, I'm transitioning my second box to serve the web page so that I don't have to worry about it being unavailable. In other words, I have two machines that I just don't want going down for random reasons. If I get a third box (quite likely), I'll dedicate it to testing the new kernel and things like that.
It's not that I don't trust the new kernel to be at least as stable as your average Wintendos box (kof, kof). I don't trust me. This really is just for testng. I don't want to find that I'm spending a week trying to repeat a wierd problem -- with my roommates wanting to listen to their music or people wondering why my web page is down. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Looks like it's slashdotted. Probably can't handle more than a handfull of users at a time. (It looks like this was meant as a research project, not a production server). `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
The electoral system makes it difficult, but not impossible (in most states), for third party candidates to get on the ballot
Our mass media make it harder by basically ignoring the third party candidates.
The voters make it impossible by not voting for them (possibly because they listen to the mass media rants about how it's impossible to win).
I've said it once, and I'll say it again: If everybody who didn't vote in the last few elections came out and voted for a "third-party, can't win" candidate, The republicans and democrats would be out of power!
In 1856, the Republicans became a national party when John C. Fremont was nominated for President [....]. Even though they were considered a "third party" because the Democrats and
Whigs represented the two-party system at the time, Fremont received 33% of the vote.
Four years later, Abraham Lincoln
became the first Republican to win the White House.
Voting for Nader (or any other 3rd party candidate) is not a vote for Bush -- especially if you wouldn't have otherwise voted. Best case is -- if you get enough of your friends out to vote too -- you could actually elect a third party candidate and turn the political system on it's head for a while. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
With 60% non-voting, if everybody who doesn't vote 'wasted' their vote, we'd get both the Democrats and the Republicans out of office (or at least scare the bejesis out of them). `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
I think that I can accept the story that Gore didn't claim to have invented the internet. He claimed to have taken the initiative as an elected representative in promoting the creation of the public internet as we now know it.
This is quite distinct from being a technical leader in the creation of the protocols, etc. of the internet. It also occurred after the internet already existed as a research/military network.
(ah, the good old days -- pre spam, pre-adds, pre-slashdot... Aye, there's the rub). `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
If you don't vote, you're statistically voting for the default result. You might as well get your $.02 in. If it's a 'protest' vote, all the better. Let the power mongers know that you're looking for something different.
If you want to make a bigger difference, work on someone's campaign. It'll not only affect the election more, it will give you access to the insides of the power structures that will be shaping our future in the years to come. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
OK: Somebody rate him up as funny! (you never have the points when you really want them)
It does, however make some sense of SUN's naming of their (then) new OS when they switched from a BSD based SUN-OS to a SYSV based Solaris.
For long-time SUN-OS/BSD users it was going to be a new world... somewhat like the old one, but with underlying differences that sometimes made it outright strange to comprehend -- on top of which was grafted the vestiges of the old, reliable world. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
I think that this bodes ill for the long-term future of Xerox. PARC has been their premiere research facility for a long time. It does a lot of the basic research that they've used to keep themselves competetive over time.
I think that this is a death-gasp.
Without Palo Alto, I fear that Xerox is going to die a slow death over time, as it looses what competitive edge it has left. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
The 9700 was probably an early proof-by-counterexample of the value of open source.
When the 9700 first came out, the University of Alberta bought one. Xerox had boasted of how the printer could do 120page/minute double sided printing, with 300 DPI bit-mapped graphics, variable fonts and variable-width printing etc. etc. etc...
The machine was about the size of a thin station wagon, with a PDP-11 (minicomputer) rasterizer engine.
What they didn't bother to mention is that you couldn't do it all at the same time. The U of A was also developing a text processing language called Textform. Textform was pretty much a programming language wrapped around a text processing system (think Algol-like programming structures, HTML-like syntax and NROFF-like device independence).
Once they got an understanding of how to use the printer many people started to use it as a cheap phototypesetter.
As soon as the printer arrived, we started beating the thing to death. The printer would dump core on an almost regular basis. The university started pestering Xerox for a bug list for the printer. In the mean time, we slowly gathered a bug-list of what sorts of combinations of actions could kill the printer (e.g. double sided printing with more than 9 different fonts in a 6 page window, more than 4000 characters on a page (a BIG problem with bit=mapped graphics, since it was based on big-mapped characters). etc. etc. etc.
By the time Xerox got around to delivering a bug list to the university, the university's bug list was about twice the size of Xerox's.
nostalgia city: The university computer, at that point was an Amdahl V/8 with 32M RAM and an 18MIPS (dhrystones) CPU -- a killer deal for it's time at about $6Million. Using MTS (Michigan Terminal System) instead of an IBM OS, they could handle up to 700 simultaneous users. My home box, today, has 256M of ram, 800 MIPS (dhrystones) (P3/450) and can 'easily' handle a single user.
  But eating meat is a part of almost every human
culture.
Our digestive system is not that of a carnivore that needs meat. We have the digestive system of an omnivore that can eat almost everything, but eats mostly a vegetarian diet.
In most societies, eating meat is a rarity. Even in western society, eating meat used to be a rarity, limited mostly to special occaisions. Historically, however, it was found that sub groups which consciously decided to go with a pure vegetarian diet have tended to live longer than their more carniverous relatives.
_______
The process that got me to go from carnivore to vegetarian was an understanding of how much resources it takes to create meat. With the resources devoted to a heavily carniverous diet, we could probably feed a dozen vegetarians quite well.
Once I switched to a vegetarian diet, I also found that my digestive system would be generally stressed when I ate meat -- although there is some reason to believe that much of that stress may due to the heavily chemical upbringing of farmed meat. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
The slashdot post made it look like QNX was developed by 3-Com. The referenced article made it clear that QNX is a separate, Canadian company.
I remember when QNX came out, I remember a few people raving about it, and I don't remember ever hearing anybody say anything nasty about it, so It's good to see a nice company start to get some real attention (now, if we could only get them to release their source...). `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
According to the BBC article, the stolen enigma had a serial number of 312. The pictures on E-bay seem to indicate a serial number of 772. My guess is that the E-Bay seller is simply trying to take advantage of the publicity around the stolen machine and hoping that the publicity will garner a higher price.
If so, the return of the stolen unit will probably resolve any possible buyer fears that they're bidding for a 'hot' machine. This might be good news (price-wise) for the seller of the swiss machine on E-bay. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
The 'intrinsic' value of gold comes from the relatively limited supply of it, and the relatively fixed nature of the supply. As was pointed out in the titanium discussion, Aluminum used to be considered more valuable than platinum or gold, until we came out with a cheap way of refining the vast quantities of bauxite (aluminum oxide).
That's unlikely to happen with Gold, since gold is simply hard to find. Although it's possible to go off of the gold standard, it requires a conscious effort, rather than simple stupidity.
There is, however, at least one counter-example which almost proves the point. History records A gold-standard inflation problem which occurred when Europe found, and plundered, the New World. Europe's supply of gold expanded massively. Those countries which were not in on the plunder suffered from the sudden shift in the supply/demand curve of gold.
The extra supply, however, consisted of thousands of years worth of americas' gold mining.
Once the plunder was complete, things settled down again. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
perfect convexification of a polygon would produce a reasonable estimation of a circle. A circle is the maximal area with a given length of edge.
A fractal surface is a way of generating an infinite edge length with a finite area. If you were to convexify such a fractalized area, you would end up with a potentially infinite circumference circle generated from a fractal of area 1 (or any other number you might want to choose.).
For a simple counter-example, consider a star. Convexified to a 'circular' polygon, it would be a roughly circular polygon capable of containing the original star. q.e.d. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
That thread went back to the early/mid 80s -- and even then it was old. Of course, back then they were talking about usenet (the internet was then known as ARPAnet, and was limited to defence groupies). `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Humor is quite appropriate for this article. Although we can affect things like global warming and biotech meltdown, for most of these events, it's not like the end of the world is the kinda thing we can do much about.
Oh my god, we've got a mini-black hole (patent pending) heading for the earth! What do we do?
I just sent Superman(tm) to push it away. There he is now!.
Uh-oh. It looks like he just got sucked in.
[Silence.]
I think I'm going to go home and spend the next month in bed with my girlfriend.
Slashdot Mirror
It just hasn't ... so far (knock on fake wood laminate).
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Wintendos does not mutate.
It has multiple evolutionary paths.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Also: Dutch is pretty close to German. If it weren't for the fact that some Dutch have a residual resentment over the German invasion in World War II, they could probably recognize quite a bit in common with each other. In any case, translating between the two languages is apparently much easier than translating between English and German.
Something else to consider is the english magazine market is already near saturation. There is less likely to be a lot of competition in the dutch market.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Torvalds: One fundamental difficulty is not at all technical, but comes from the fact that most people do not want to beta test a new Kernel. If they abandon Kernel 2.2, it could end up causing new problems.)) Why should they try a test kernel out?
was: They are not content with the Kernel 2,2, have their own problems.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Unlike Windows, most people running linux find it quite stable and usable. Unless you want to do things like USB or firewire (for which there are patches for 2.2, anyways), there's no real NEED to move over. People running windows will often move to the newest beta in hopes that it will actually work. With Linux, there's no such need. You have to really want to test the new system.
I have two systems at home, but one is used by my roommates, and me, on a regular basis (including as a sound source (MP3) for the stereo). (Un)fortunately, we have ADSL, so I also have a Web page on it, and we dual boot over to windows way too often for game playing. As a result, I'm transitioning my second box to serve the web page so that I don't have to worry about it being unavailable. In other words, I have two machines that I just don't want going down for random reasons. If I get a third box (quite likely), I'll dedicate it to testing the new kernel and things like that.
It's not that I don't trust the new kernel to be at least as stable as your average Wintendos box (kof, kof). I don't trust me. This really is just for testng. I don't want to find that I'm spending a week trying to repeat a wierd problem -- with my roommates wanting to listen to their music or people wondering why my web page is down.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
When I get the second half translated, I'll put it up here (there's a [currently broken] link at the end of the first page)
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Looks like it's slashdotted. Probably can't handle more than a handfull of users at a time. (It looks like this was meant as a research project, not a production server).
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Our mass media make it harder by basically ignoring the third party candidates.
The voters make it impossible by not voting for them (possibly because they listen to the mass media rants about how it's impossible to win).
I've said it once, and I'll say it again: If everybody who didn't vote in the last few elections came out and voted for a "third-party, can't win" candidate, The republicans and democrats would be out of power!
The Republican Party started out as a third party that people said couldn't possibly win. As their history document points out:
Voting for Nader (or any other 3rd party candidate) is not a vote for Bush -- especially if you wouldn't have otherwise voted. Best case is -- if you get enough of your friends out to vote too -- you could actually elect a third party candidate and turn the political system on it's head for a while.`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Direct Democracy is the principle that people should have a more direct handle on what goes into law.
Excuse the fact that these are Canadian-oriented sites.. that's where I'm from.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Guess which one gets interviewed on CNN?
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
With 60% non-voting, if everybody who doesn't vote 'wasted' their vote, we'd get both the Democrats and the Republicans out of office (or at least scare the bejesis out of them).
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
This is quite distinct from being a technical leader in the creation of the protocols, etc. of the internet. It also occurred after the internet already existed as a research/military network.
(ah, the good old days -- pre spam, pre-adds, pre-slashdot ...
Aye, there's the rub).
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
If you want to make a bigger difference, work on someone's campaign. It'll not only affect the election more, it will give you access to the insides of the power structures that will be shaping our future in the years to come.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
It does, however make some sense of SUN's naming of their (then) new OS when they switched from a BSD based SUN-OS to a SYSV based Solaris.
For long-time SUN-OS/BSD users it was going to be a new world... somewhat like the old one, but with underlying differences that sometimes made it outright strange to comprehend -- on top of which was grafted the vestiges of the old, reliable world.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
I think that this is a death-gasp. Without Palo Alto, I fear that Xerox is going to die a slow death over time, as it looses what competitive edge it has left.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
The 9700 was probably an early proof-by-counterexample of the value of open source.
When the 9700 first came out, the University of Alberta bought one. Xerox had boasted of how the printer could do 120page/minute double sided printing, with 300 DPI bit-mapped graphics, variable fonts and variable-width printing etc. etc. etc...
The machine was about the size of a thin station wagon, with a PDP-11 (minicomputer) rasterizer engine.
What they didn't bother to mention is that you couldn't do it all at the same time. The U of A was also developing a text processing language called Textform. Textform was pretty much a programming language wrapped around a text processing system (think Algol-like programming structures, HTML-like syntax and NROFF-like device independence). Once they got an understanding of how to use the printer many people started to use it as a cheap phototypesetter.
As soon as the printer arrived, we started beating the thing to death. The printer would dump core on an almost regular basis. The university started pestering Xerox for a bug list for the printer. In the mean time, we slowly gathered a bug-list of what sorts of combinations of actions could kill the printer (e.g. double sided printing with more than 9 different fonts in a 6 page window, more than 4000 characters on a page (a BIG problem with bit=mapped graphics, since it was based on big-mapped characters). etc. etc. etc.
By the time Xerox got around to delivering a bug list to the university, the university's bug list was about twice the size of Xerox's.
nostalgia city:
The university computer, at that point was an Amdahl V/8 with 32M RAM and an 18MIPS (dhrystones) CPU -- a killer deal for it's time at about $6Million. Using MTS (Michigan Terminal System) instead of an IBM OS, they could handle up to 700 simultaneous users. My home box, today, has 256M of ram, 800 MIPS (dhrystones) (P3/450) and can 'easily' handle a single user.
Now I feel spoiled.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Our digestive system is not that of a carnivore that needs meat. We have the digestive system of an omnivore that can eat almost everything, but eats mostly a vegetarian diet.
In most societies, eating meat is a rarity. Even in western society, eating meat used to be a rarity, limited mostly to special occaisions. Historically, however, it was found that sub groups which consciously decided to go with a pure vegetarian diet have tended to live longer than their more carniverous relatives.
_______
The process that got me to go from carnivore to vegetarian was an understanding of how much resources it takes to create meat. With the resources devoted to a heavily carniverous diet, we could probably feed a dozen vegetarians quite well.
Once I switched to a vegetarian diet, I also found that my digestive system would be generally stressed when I ate meat -- although there is some reason to believe that much of that stress may due to the heavily chemical upbringing of farmed meat.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
I remember when QNX came out, I remember a few people raving about it, and I don't remember ever hearing anybody say anything nasty about it, so It's good to see a nice company start to get some real attention (now, if we could only get them to release their source...).
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Either that, or he figured out that his posting was going to be sid#25, and put in the link manually
Bad slashbot. Bad. Sit! Giggle!
Read the rest of this comment...
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
If so, the return of the stolen unit will probably resolve any possible buyer fears that they're bidding for a 'hot' machine. This might be good news (price-wise) for the seller of the swiss machine on E-bay.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
That's unlikely to happen with Gold, since gold is simply hard to find. Although it's possible to go off of the gold standard, it requires a conscious effort, rather than simple stupidity.
There is, however, at least one counter-example which almost proves the point. History records A gold-standard inflation problem which occurred when Europe found, and plundered, the New World. Europe's supply of gold expanded massively. Those countries which were not in on the plunder suffered from the sudden shift in the supply/demand curve of gold.
The extra supply, however, consisted of thousands of years worth of americas' gold mining. Once the plunder was complete, things settled down again.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
perfect convexification of a polygon would produce a reasonable estimation of a circle. A circle is the maximal area with a given length of edge.
A fractal surface is a way of generating an infinite edge length with a finite area. If you were to convexify such a fractalized area, you would end up with a potentially infinite circumference circle generated from a fractal of area 1 (or any other number you might want to choose.).
For a simple counter-example, consider a star. Convexified to a 'circular' polygon, it would be a roughly circular polygon capable of containing the original star. q.e.d.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
So really -- what's the difference between this and a cheap, headless Linux box?
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
That thread went back to the early/mid 80s -- and even then it was old. Of course, back then they were talking about usenet (the internet was then known as ARPAnet, and was limited to defence groupies).
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Humor is quite appropriate for this article. Although we can affect things like global warming and biotech meltdown, for most of these events, it's not like the end of the world is the kinda thing we can do much about.
Rule 10: You take life too seriously.`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!