It's incredibly easy to draw the line. Their is no place for religion in modern society. Nobody should expect their irrational fantasies to be taken seriously. Dressing up a bunch of myths and calling them religion does not make them valid. To see blind faith as a virtue is insane. Religious faith should be viewed as evidence of an inability to reason.
Also, Red Hat has by allowing Cent OS has gained much more respect as a business
I'm not sure what you mean by "allowing". The license allows Cent OS to do what they do, not Red Hat. This is a triumph for the whole OS system, not one particular company.
From TFA:
With no firewall, databases are exposed to hackers, putting corporate data at risk. How does he draw the conclusion that these are corporate databases? Nothing in the methodology provides this insight. I would expect that the majority of these are owned by kids and hobbiests, which would help to explain the preponderance of MS SQL servers over Oracle.
Also, the sample of 1 million is very small to be drawing these conclusions.
In short, "Nothing to see here - move along."
Is anyone else reminded of Hitchhikers?
It is interesting to note that a later and wilier editor sent the book backwards in time through a temporal warp and then successfully sued the breakfast cereal company for infringement of the same laws.
Determining usage statistics from user agent strings is perilous at best. Distros and manufacturers are free to put pretty much anything they like into the string. Historically, various browsers have chosen to lie in order to be able to actually gain access to sites that would otherwise kick them out. Internet Explorer actually identifies itself as Mozilla, though it does not mean that "Mozilla".
What annoys me here is that the BBC has admitted it has got it wrong, but is utterly unapologetic.
As a publicly funded organisation, they should have a duty to make their technology decisions in an open and transparent manner. Instead we get this bluster about numbers of users and different calculations. Tell us how you calculated the numbers. We are technically savvy. We can then decide for ourselves if you are making sense, or just a useless bunch of muppets wasting a massive budget.
I'm afraid I had never heard of "Citizendium" until I RTFA. And that, it seems to me is the biggest problem that it faces: Wikipedia is ubiquitous, whilst Citizendium is obscure.
In addition, Wikipedia now has enormous scope. On almost any topic, I can feel confident that Wikipedia will have something to say. In spite of what many detractors will say, Wikipedia is usually informative and reasonably accurate. It should not be= seen as definitive, but it ia frequently a useful starting point.
Citizendium has a long way to go before it can make such claims.
Whilst writing this, I could not help thinking about the fictional comparison between the entries for alcohol in the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and the Encyclopedia Galactica. That led me to check what each of the sources had to say about Hitchhikers itself. See for yourself:
I think we have a clear winner!
Don't get me wrong. Citizendium sounds like a great idea and I hope it is successful. It may be that they would be better off not trying to compete so directly with Wikipedia and to aim for a different niche. In that case, I think it's a shame that the article spent so much time addressing the inevitable comparisons.
I'm no advocate of Apple. I generally think that people who buy there products value style over substance, but if NBC are whining about them, they must be doing something right.
Similarly, use of odour in entertainment is way behind the more "mainstream" senses. There are a few museums that have used smell as part of there displays - The Imperial War Museum in London is a good example. The 1st World War trench exhibition uses artificial smells to bring you that delightful blend of excrement and cordite.
However, in general films and games have steered clear of the sense of smell. In gaming, visuals and sound are a given. Vibrating controllers try to deal with the sense of touch. Smell (and taste) have been ignored. As usual, it will probably be porn that leads the way - just think of the possibilities!
The low cost Airlines are actually being taken to task for the lack of transparency in this approach. The problem is that they are advertising flights at a specific price point, but it is never possible to actually travel for that price.
I was particularly annoyed by a recent Ryanair flight.
Checking in each item of luggage cost an extra 10GBP, so the wife and I thought we would save a tenner by sharing a single case. As it turned out, for checking in without a case, there was still a charge of 4GBP. So the advertised price was not a real price at all. In order to get on the plane you had to pay at least 4GBP over the advertised price, before you even start to talk about airport taxes and fuel surcharges.
I can see no point at all in having a price that does not include check-in, as check-in is compulsory. It's just a marketing game.
To make things worse, our shared case was overweight, so we ended up paying 25GBP excess baggage - teach me to be a skinflint.
That varies widely from provider to provider. A typical ISP, if they bother to offer a Usenet server at all, may retain binary content for just a few days. On the other hand, some of the commercial news servers have much longer retention periods. GigaNews, for instance, now boasts a binary retention period of 200 days.
I doubt if that helps.
I assume they will be checking the country of the credit card used to .
Most credit cards now support the Address Verification System(AVS) which allows numeric parts of the billing address to be checked as part of the transaction. If you use a false ZIP Code, the credit card authorisation may fail.
I just tried a new purchase on Amazon and was rejected with the following message:
We are sorry...
We could not process your order because of geographical restrictions on the product which you were attempting to purchase. Please refer to the terms of use for this product to determine the geographical restrictions.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. This, in spite of the fact that I have previously made purchases with a false address in CA 90210! They've obviously tightened up the rules. How depressing! No doubt, downloads will cost 1GBP, rather than 1USD, when they finally make it to the UK.
Excuse my ignorance of iTunes, but are the DRM free versions in a widely-used format, like MP3 or still essentially tied to the iPod by using an obscure codec?
Amazon does not work well on Linux, though they do promise that a linux version of there MP3 downloader is coming.
At the moment, linux users can only get single tracks, which is more costly than the whole album. I am struggling to understand the need for a specific piece of software for albums. Why not just sell albums as an archive (Zip perhaps, to be Windows friendly) of all the MP3 files? That's what Radiohead did.
Also, the Amazon service is still (at least nominally) available to people with US addresses.
At risk of starting a religious flame war, software engineers like to think that they design software. Evolution, as we know, requires no designer, but simply proceeds by trial and error.
When performance testing web applications, I typically find that latency does indeed have a very significant impact.
Obviously some types of application are more susceptible than others. Bandwidth is critical in data intensive applications.
Latency is much more important in highly interactive applications. Rich Web 2 applications, making lots of (Ajax) calls to the server for small amounts of supplementary data are badly hit by latency problems.
I always find the popularity of these Country acts genuinely amazing. Coming from the UK, it seems inconceivable that an artist like Garth Brooks should be the 3rd best selling artist of all time. Just shows how much taste varies geographically.
Mind you, there must be some Bollywood stars that sell a few recordings. They have a very big audience.
I am from the UK and I used to use JANET, but I think the Americans do have far more claim to having invented the internet than anyone else. JANET was X25 based. ARPANET used TCP/IP. The WWW (HTTP and HTML) came out of CERN, but that is not the internet.
In the last few weeks we have seen a number of advances in the world of DRM. This article is an excellent and eloquent statement of what a nonsense DRM really is. Critically, it is written by a guy in a very influential position.
Coupled with the launch of Amazon's MP3 service (sadly only in the US, at least nominally) and the continuing deluge of bad publicity for DRM, the labels will eventually have to see sense.
Oh, they won't just crumble overnight. There will continue to be a spate of ugly trials and the RIAA will even win some (especially when the defendants are stupid enough to lie in court), but actually all that achieves is more bad publicity for them. They'll cling on to their outmoded business model for as long as they can, but it can't and wont last.
It's about time!
Slashdot Mirror
It's incredibly easy to draw the line. Their is no place for religion in modern society. Nobody should expect their irrational fantasies to be taken seriously. Dressing up a bunch of myths and calling them religion does not make them valid. To see blind faith as a virtue is insane. Religious faith should be viewed as evidence of an inability to reason.
For those of you, like me, who did not immediately recognise this TLA, it stands for Search Engine Optimization.
I'm not sure what you mean by "allowing". The license allows Cent OS to do what they do, not Red Hat. This is a triumph for the whole OS system, not one particular company.
With no firewall, databases are exposed to hackers, putting corporate data at risk. How does he draw the conclusion that these are corporate databases? Nothing in the methodology provides this insight. I would expect that the majority of these are owned by kids and hobbiests, which would help to explain the preponderance of MS SQL servers over Oracle.
Also, the sample of 1 million is very small to be drawing these conclusions.
In short, "Nothing to see here - move along."
It is interesting to note that a later and wilier editor sent the book backwards in time through a temporal warp and then successfully sued the breakfast cereal company for infringement of the same laws.
Determining usage statistics from user agent strings is perilous at best. Distros and manufacturers are free to put pretty much anything they like into the string. Historically, various browsers have chosen to lie in order to be able to actually gain access to sites that would otherwise kick them out. Internet Explorer actually identifies itself as Mozilla, though it does not mean that "Mozilla".
What annoys me here is that the BBC has admitted it has got it wrong, but is utterly unapologetic.
As a publicly funded organisation, they should have a duty to make their technology decisions in an open and transparent manner. Instead we get this bluster about numbers of users and different calculations. Tell us how you calculated the numbers. We are technically savvy. We can then decide for ourselves if you are making sense, or just a useless bunch of muppets wasting a massive budget.
In addition, Wikipedia now has enormous scope. On almost any topic, I can feel confident that Wikipedia will have something to say. In spite of what many detractors will say, Wikipedia is usually informative and reasonably accurate. It should not be= seen as definitive, but it ia frequently a useful starting point. Citizendium has a long way to go before it can make such claims.
Whilst writing this, I could not help thinking about the fictional comparison between the entries for alcohol in the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and the Encyclopedia Galactica. That led me to check what each of the sources had to say about Hitchhikers itself. See for yourself:
- Wikipedia on The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
- Citizendium on The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
I think we have a clear winner!Don't get me wrong. Citizendium sounds like a great idea and I hope it is successful. It may be that they would be better off not trying to compete so directly with Wikipedia and to aim for a different niche. In that case, I think it's a shame that the article spent so much time addressing the inevitable comparisons.
I'm no advocate of Apple. I generally think that people who buy there products value style over substance, but if NBC are whining about them, they must be doing something right.
It's over there. SPLITTER!
Similarly, use of odour in entertainment is way behind the more "mainstream" senses. There are a few museums that have used smell as part of there displays - The Imperial War Museum in London is a good example. The 1st World War trench exhibition uses artificial smells to bring you that delightful blend of excrement and cordite.
However, in general films and games have steered clear of the sense of smell. In gaming, visuals and sound are a given. Vibrating controllers try to deal with the sense of touch. Smell (and taste) have been ignored. As usual, it will probably be porn that leads the way - just think of the possibilities!
The low cost Airlines are actually being taken to task for the lack of transparency in this approach. The problem is that they are advertising flights at a specific price point, but it is never possible to actually travel for that price. I was particularly annoyed by a recent Ryanair flight. Checking in each item of luggage cost an extra 10GBP, so the wife and I thought we would save a tenner by sharing a single case. As it turned out, for checking in without a case, there was still a charge of 4GBP. So the advertised price was not a real price at all. In order to get on the plane you had to pay at least 4GBP over the advertised price, before you even start to talk about airport taxes and fuel surcharges. I can see no point at all in having a price that does not include check-in, as check-in is compulsory. It's just a marketing game.
To make things worse, our shared case was overweight, so we ended up paying 25GBP excess baggage - teach me to be a skinflint.
That varies widely from provider to provider. A typical ISP, if they bother to offer a Usenet server at all, may retain binary content for just a few days. On the other hand, some of the commercial news servers have much longer retention periods. GigaNews, for instance, now boasts a binary retention period of 200 days.
I doubt if that helps. I assume they will be checking the country of the credit card used to . Most credit cards now support the Address Verification System(AVS) which allows numeric parts of the billing address to be checked as part of the transaction. If you use a false ZIP Code, the credit card authorisation may fail.
We could not process your order because of geographical restrictions on the product which you were attempting to purchase. Please refer to the terms of use for this product to determine the geographical restrictions.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. This, in spite of the fact that I have previously made purchases with a false address in CA 90210! They've obviously tightened up the rules. How depressing! No doubt, downloads will cost 1GBP, rather than 1USD, when they finally make it to the UK.
Conversion of lossy formats is rarely desirable.
Excuse my ignorance of iTunes, but are the DRM free versions in a widely-used format, like MP3 or still essentially tied to the iPod by using an obscure codec?
Amazon does not work well on Linux, though they do promise that a linux version of there MP3 downloader is coming. At the moment, linux users can only get single tracks, which is more costly than the whole album. I am struggling to understand the need for a specific piece of software for albums. Why not just sell albums as an archive (Zip perhaps, to be Windows friendly) of all the MP3 files? That's what Radiohead did. Also, the Amazon service is still (at least nominally) available to people with US addresses.
At risk of starting a religious flame war, software engineers like to think that they design software. Evolution, as we know, requires no designer, but simply proceeds by trial and error.
Thanks for all those "layman's terms", like UMTS and HDSPA.
When performance testing web applications, I typically find that latency does indeed have a very significant impact. Obviously some types of application are more susceptible than others. Bandwidth is critical in data intensive applications. Latency is much more important in highly interactive applications. Rich Web 2 applications, making lots of (Ajax) calls to the server for small amounts of supplementary data are badly hit by latency problems.
I always find the popularity of these Country acts genuinely amazing. Coming from the UK, it seems inconceivable that an artist like Garth Brooks should be the 3rd best selling artist of all time. Just shows how much taste varies geographically. Mind you, there must be some Bollywood stars that sell a few recordings. They have a very big audience.
I am from the UK and I used to use JANET, but I think the Americans do have far more claim to having invented the internet than anyone else. JANET was X25 based. ARPANET used TCP/IP. The WWW (HTTP and HTML) came out of CERN, but that is not the internet.
Wow! An original idea. It might even be a good idea. Microsoft et al, please note: this is what the patent system is all about.
In the last few weeks we have seen a number of advances in the world of DRM. This article is an excellent and eloquent statement of what a nonsense DRM really is. Critically, it is written by a guy in a very influential position. Coupled with the launch of Amazon's MP3 service (sadly only in the US, at least nominally) and the continuing deluge of bad publicity for DRM, the labels will eventually have to see sense. Oh, they won't just crumble overnight. There will continue to be a spate of ugly trials and the RIAA will even win some (especially when the defendants are stupid enough to lie in court), but actually all that achieves is more bad publicity for them. They'll cling on to their outmoded business model for as long as they can, but it can't and wont last. It's about time!