Nah, it's still pretty "beta." But the important point is that (a) D3D development is active and enthusiastic (b) reported bugs will actually get looked at by a relevant developer in the foreseeable future (as opposed to never). So it's worth reporting new broken stuff, they do actually care.
WWN isn't updated at present. Skim the developers' mailing list. Wine is very much a beta, but the D3D support is in active and enthusiastic development; you'll have no trouble finding bugs, but you can also be confident that reported bugs will actually be worked on in the foreseeable future.
I'm a Unix sysadmin. I got a new work laptop today, still on XP. I asked the IT guys if we were in any danger of Vista. They said "XP is supported for years yet!" And we all exhaled.
We have worked out that if we are ever threatened with Vista, we promptly (a) pump up the Gutmann (b) write a whole pile of in-house apps for ourselves that only work on XP. The latter already worked wonderfully for us in making an instant business case for staying on Firefox — make sure your in-house web apps are written for Firefox and SeaMonkey, and specifically break in IE. (This is easy: just write to standards).
So: to stay off Vista, stock up on in-house apps that don't work on it. Then you have the business case you need.
REDMOND, Seattle, Wednesday (UnGadget) -- Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer today announced a new era at the Seattle software company, announcing their entry six nine twelve months hence into the cell phone market with the exciting new Zune Z-Phone, to finally get the company properly into the rapidly changing digital media landscape.
Ballmer, speaking to a group of trained-monkey analysts and cynical bloggers at the company headquarters today, unveiled mockups prototypes of the Zune-Phone, which combines the Zune music player (with wifi for "squirting" songs), a CDMA cell phone, a PDA, an eight gigabyte hard disk, a camera, a laser pointer and a bottle opener into one semi-portable device. It will also allow you to "squirt" music to and from your Windows Vista Service Pack 1^W2 Media Center computer.
The product underscores the shift the company has attempted to make in recent years from an office supply company to a consumer electronics darling as it aims not to become utterly obsolete in the digital future. "And even Linux fanboys admit our hardware is pretty nice," Ballmer said before the somewhat sullen and cynical crowd. "It's definitely the best music player we've ever made."
Ballmer called the Z-Phone a revolutionary device that will leapfrog current technology. He said the company expects to sell about 100 million of them next year. "Maybe two hundred million. This is so the coolest music player ever." Unlike the MP3 player market, which the iPod has dominated even with the entrance of Microsoft's Zune two months ago, the cell phone market is much more fragmented. "There is not one device that everyone buys," said completely independent analyst Rob Enderle, "but this fabulous device should trounce all comers. I've ordered three already in anticipation."
Weighing in at only 15 ounces (425 grams), with a 5-inch 640-by-480 pixel screen, the $498 (with three-year $80/month contract) Z-Phone, a rebadged version of the LG Smart Display from 2003 with new firmware, looks like a Classic Brown Zune (to come in mission, chocolate, corduroy and meconium) with a phone touchpad in place of its imitation scroll wheel. It runs Windows Mobile, Pocket Internet Explorer, Pocket Microsoft Office, Pocket Solitaire and Pocket Pool. MSN will supply e-mail, mapping, search and other Internet services to the Z-Phone. It also features an amazing 1.3 megapixel (300,000 pixels interpolated) black and white camera. Battery life is estimated at up to four hours in Microsoft tests.
To better work with its content partners and ensure that you, the user, can rest safe in the knowledge that the artists and their representatives have been paid properly for all their hard work, Microsoft has limited "squirtable" songs to encrypted WMA files purchased from the Zune Music Store, which can be listened to three times or within three days before automatically being deleted from both the Z-Phone and the Media Center computer. Songs may also be "squirted" between two Z-Phones (though not the original Zune) if both are registered with Microsoft as being linked to that installation of Media Center. Users are advised to purchase Microsoft Zune Secure Headphones ($129), which encrypt the signal between the Z-Phone and your ears, as playback quality is degraded on conventional "analog hole" earphones or when playing back unencrypted MP3 files. Phone calls may be made to or received from any number on the network carrier you bought the Z-Phone from, with only a 99-cent charge for humming a song to someone you call or are called by on the phone or ten cents per use of the camera, laser pointer or bottle opener. Microsoft will also pay $20 from each Z-Phone sold to Universal Music. In addition to the ability to "squirt" songs, the user may "squirt" his calls, which are stored on Microsoft Zune Live servers and cost $40 per month to access.
In other news, Ballmer said that Microsoft had reached over 600 music downloads since intro
OAHU, Hawaii, Thursday -- Laid-back surfer dude Garrett Lisi is wowing the world of theoretical physics with his new paper "An Exceptionally Simple Theory Of Everything," reducing all fundamental physical forces to a single mathematical construct, the E8 Lie group.
Like many an unsung genius, Dr Lisi has failed to turn his theory into bucks. "Being poor sucks. It's hard to figure out the secrets of the universe when you're trying to figure out where you and your girlfriend are going to sleep next month."
Physicists worldwide were agog at the news of Dr Lisi's discovery. "Dude," said Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, "did you hear that? He has a girlfriend. He -- has -- a -- GIRLFRIEND. Duuude!"
Dr Lisi's theory is "so simple a string theorist could grasp it. I was out surfing, the equation floated into my head, and I went 'Holy crap, that's it!'"
Dr Lisi's theory notably bypasses problems with string theory, presently popular in the world of physics. "String theory is something that doesn't work, for guys without charm or a personality. No woman worth talking to will take a string theorist seriously. Even on bikinis it's just for decoration -- any serious surfin' girl knows to wear a one-piece.
"String theorists are the sort of pain-in-the-ass nerds who hassle anyone with a female name showing up on IRC. Can you imagine those dweebs even being in the presence of a female without peeing themselves? Hahahahaha!"
[Picture] A representation of E8, assembled by Dr Lisi one evening after scoring a particularly mellow sample. The white dots are girlfriends worth knowing, the green dots are sexy but crazy. A macho hunk of physicist who can negotiate their way through the 58-dimensional 240-node construct here illustrated can talk their way out of anything. In bed.
[Picture] Dr Lisi with 222 very close personal friends, each corresponding to one of the 240 roots of E8. If his next 18 very close personal friends match the theory, it will be proven. "It's not finished yet, of course," he says. "I did have to establish the angle of the right eyebrow empirically."
Czech mad scientist Dr Lubos Davros-Motl pooh-poohed Dr Lisi's theory. "Dr Lisi's theory is pooh-pooh," he said from his fourteenth-century castle high on a crag in Transylvania. "It is typical of anti-string crackpots with IQ below 100 who control academia. Crackpot Garrett Lisi does not understand the difference between fermions and bosons! Cranks with their "theories of everything" who know less than 1% what I do and whose IQ is 45 below mine! Literally an inferior species! Standard Model has been proven to be a consequence of compactified heterotic string theory back in 1985! Lisi and Smith and Sheppeard and Hossenfelder will NEVER get onto hep-th on arXiv! 4 simultaneous 24 hour Days within only 1 rotation of 4 quadrant Earth! They are EDUCATED EVIL and STUPID! STUPID STUPID!" Dr Davros' henchmen then started waving large clubs with spikes in the direction of our reporter, signaling the end of the interview.
Dr Lisi is not fazed. "String theory is a dying field," he said. "I mean, it's not like they're going to reproduce."
This actually happens way too often in journalism - someone puts a press reference into a Wikipedia article, someone else tracks it down, the reporter then confesses to having obtained the factoid from Wikipedia a few years previously. All die. Oh, the embarrassment!
There is actually a bot on Wikipedia that runs Google checks on all new articles and marks any text it finds elsewhere for speedy zapping. This turns up more than a few false positives, but mostly huge amounts of copyright violations that then get quickly zapped.
Wikipedia remains the only "Web 2.0" project that proactively gives a damn about copyright.
It would be sad indeed if Citizendium were to end up adopting a non-free license after having promised a free license for so long. "Non-commercial" licenses are not free licenses because they restrict reusers on the purpose for which they use things.
My user name on Wikipedia (and Citizendium) is my real name. My first edits to Wikipedia were on neo-Nazis and Scientology. Somehow I remain employed. I wonder how that is.
People do write for Wine - or, rather, most open-source Windows software treats Wine as a supported platform if its users ask nicely, report bugs, etc. Fixing them usually takes tweaks to both the application and to Wine. Everyone wins.
I'd like to see everyone who complains about deletion on Wikipedia to first read 24 hours' worth of [[Special:Newpages]]. I consider myself broadly inclusionist, but sipping from the firehose of sewage really brings home to me the necessity to go mad with a fucking flamethrower as a routine part of Wikipedia maintenance.
True, but somehow Ubuntu on the same machine with the same DVD burner with the same disks does much better. The only difference is the operating system.
I've actually found it vastly useful to have an Ubuntu partition on my Mac G4. One, for burning DVDs - Mac OS X's "burn folders" are completely unreliable rubbish and a coaster factory. Two, for recovering data from the hard disks of dead Linux laptops. Three, for hardware Mac OS X doesn't support but Linux does.
Linux can read and write HFS+ disks fine. So if you reserve a gig or two for Linux, it's good to keep on hand.
Well, yeah. But I think PHP could certainly do with quite a bit of time in maintenance, for instance... the example I was thinking of was Wikimedia and PHP. MediaWiki is unlikely to be rewritten in anything else any time soon - MediaWiki syntax is mathematically impossible to put into EBNF, and the definition is actually the code of parser.php. Multiply that by all the organisations and projects that use PHP, and you have something like the way Apache formed from maintenance on NCSAhttpd.
Slashdot Mirror
You still haven't answered what your standing is to reject a GFDL whose text is the CC-by-sa. Remember that "or later"?
As I asked on the list, and which you didn't answer there - what the hell were you thinking each and every time you clicked to agree with "or later"?
Amazon is touting this as the iPod of e-book readers ... it's actually the Zune of e-book readers.
Nah, it's still pretty "beta." But the important point is that (a) D3D development is active and enthusiastic (b) reported bugs will actually get looked at by a relevant developer in the foreseeable future (as opposed to never). So it's worth reporting new broken stuff, they do actually care.
WWN isn't updated at present. Skim the developers' mailing list. Wine is very much a beta, but the D3D support is in active and enthusiastic development; you'll have no trouble finding bugs, but you can also be confident that reported bugs will actually be worked on in the foreseeable future.
I strongly suggest to you the modest proposal that worked for us to keep Firefox as "standard."
I'm a Unix sysadmin. I got a new work laptop today, still on XP. I asked the IT guys if we were in any danger of Vista. They said "XP is supported for years yet!" And we all exhaled.
We have worked out that if we are ever threatened with Vista, we promptly (a) pump up the Gutmann (b) write a whole pile of in-house apps for ourselves that only work on XP. The latter already worked wonderfully for us in making an instant business case for staying on Firefox — make sure your in-house web apps are written for Firefox and SeaMonkey, and specifically break in IE. (This is easy: just write to standards).
So: to stay off Vista, stock up on in-house apps that don't work on it. Then you have the business case you need.
WP-Cache is just the thing to avoid massive PHP and MySQL overload.
REDMOND, Seattle, Wednesday (UnGadget) -- Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer today announced a new era at the Seattle software company, announcing their entry six nine twelve months hence into the cell phone market with the exciting new Zune Z-Phone, to finally get the company properly into the rapidly changing digital media landscape.
Ballmer, speaking to a group of trained-monkey analysts and cynical bloggers at the company headquarters today, unveiled mockups prototypes of the Zune-Phone, which combines the Zune music player (with wifi for "squirting" songs), a CDMA cell phone, a PDA, an eight gigabyte hard disk, a camera, a laser pointer and a bottle opener into one semi-portable device. It will also allow you to "squirt" music to and from your Windows Vista Service Pack 1^W2 Media Center computer.
The product underscores the shift the company has attempted to make in recent years from an office supply company to a consumer electronics darling as it aims not to become utterly obsolete in the digital future. "And even Linux fanboys admit our hardware is pretty nice," Ballmer said before the somewhat sullen and cynical crowd. "It's definitely the best music player we've ever made."
Ballmer called the Z-Phone a revolutionary device that will leapfrog current technology. He said the company expects to sell about 100 million of them next year. "Maybe two hundred million. This is so the coolest music player ever." Unlike the MP3 player market, which the iPod has dominated even with the entrance of Microsoft's Zune two months ago, the cell phone market is much more fragmented. "There is not one device that everyone buys," said completely independent analyst Rob Enderle, "but this fabulous device should trounce all comers. I've ordered three already in anticipation."
Weighing in at only 15 ounces (425 grams), with a 5-inch 640-by-480 pixel screen, the $498 (with three-year $80/month contract) Z-Phone, a rebadged version of the LG Smart Display from 2003 with new firmware, looks like a Classic Brown Zune (to come in mission, chocolate, corduroy and meconium) with a phone touchpad in place of its imitation scroll wheel. It runs Windows Mobile, Pocket Internet Explorer, Pocket Microsoft Office, Pocket Solitaire and Pocket Pool. MSN will supply e-mail, mapping, search and other Internet services to the Z-Phone. It also features an amazing 1.3 megapixel (300,000 pixels interpolated) black and white camera. Battery life is estimated at up to four hours in Microsoft tests.
To better work with its content partners and ensure that you, the user, can rest safe in the knowledge that the artists and their representatives have been paid properly for all their hard work, Microsoft has limited "squirtable" songs to encrypted WMA files purchased from the Zune Music Store, which can be listened to three times or within three days before automatically being deleted from both the Z-Phone and the Media Center computer. Songs may also be "squirted" between two Z-Phones (though not the original Zune) if both are registered with Microsoft as being linked to that installation of Media Center. Users are advised to purchase Microsoft Zune Secure Headphones ($129), which encrypt the signal between the Z-Phone and your ears, as playback quality is degraded on conventional "analog hole" earphones or when playing back unencrypted MP3 files. Phone calls may be made to or received from any number on the network carrier you bought the Z-Phone from, with only a 99-cent charge for humming a song to someone you call or are called by on the phone or ten cents per use of the camera, laser pointer or bottle opener. Microsoft will also pay $20 from each Z-Phone sold to Universal Music. In addition to the ability to "squirt" songs, the user may "squirt" his calls, which are stored on Microsoft Zune Live servers and cost $40 per month to access.
In other news, Ballmer said that Microsoft had reached over 600 music downloads since intro
OAHU, Hawaii, Thursday -- Laid-back surfer dude Garrett Lisi is wowing the world of theoretical physics with his new paper "An Exceptionally Simple Theory Of Everything," reducing all fundamental physical forces to a single mathematical construct, the E8 Lie group.
Like many an unsung genius, Dr Lisi has failed to turn his theory into bucks. "Being poor sucks. It's hard to figure out the secrets of the universe when you're trying to figure out where you and your girlfriend are going to sleep next month."
Physicists worldwide were agog at the news of Dr Lisi's discovery. "Dude," said Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, "did you hear that? He has a girlfriend. He -- has -- a -- GIRLFRIEND. Duuude!"
Dr Lisi's theory is "so simple a string theorist could grasp it. I was out surfing, the equation floated into my head, and I went 'Holy crap, that's it!'"
Dr Lisi's theory notably bypasses problems with string theory, presently popular in the world of physics. "String theory is something that doesn't work, for guys without charm or a personality. No woman worth talking to will take a string theorist seriously. Even on bikinis it's just for decoration -- any serious surfin' girl knows to wear a one-piece.
"String theorists are the sort of pain-in-the-ass nerds who hassle anyone with a female name showing up on IRC. Can you imagine those dweebs even being in the presence of a female without peeing themselves? Hahahahaha!"
[Picture] A representation of E8, assembled by Dr Lisi one evening after scoring a particularly mellow sample. The white dots are girlfriends worth knowing, the green dots are sexy but crazy. A macho hunk of physicist who can negotiate their way through the 58-dimensional 240-node construct here illustrated can talk their way out of anything. In bed.
[Picture] Dr Lisi with 222 very close personal friends, each corresponding to one of the 240 roots of E8. If his next 18 very close personal friends match the theory, it will be proven. "It's not finished yet, of course," he says. "I did have to establish the angle of the right eyebrow empirically."
Czech mad scientist Dr Lubos Davros-Motl pooh-poohed Dr Lisi's theory. "Dr Lisi's theory is pooh-pooh," he said from his fourteenth-century castle high on a crag in Transylvania. "It is typical of anti-string crackpots with IQ below 100 who control academia. Crackpot Garrett Lisi does not understand the difference between fermions and bosons! Cranks with their "theories of everything" who know less than 1% what I do and whose IQ is 45 below mine! Literally an inferior species! Standard Model has been proven to be a consequence of compactified heterotic string theory back in 1985! Lisi and Smith and Sheppeard and Hossenfelder will NEVER get onto hep-th on arXiv! 4 simultaneous 24 hour Days within only 1 rotation of 4 quadrant Earth! They are EDUCATED EVIL and STUPID! STUPID STUPID!" Dr Davros' henchmen then started waving large clubs with spikes in the direction of our reporter, signaling the end of the interview.
Dr Lisi is not fazed. "String theory is a dying field," he said. "I mean, it's not like they're going to reproduce."
This actually happens way too often in journalism - someone puts a press reference into a Wikipedia article, someone else tracks it down, the reporter then confesses to having obtained the factoid from Wikipedia a few years previously. All die. Oh, the embarrassment!
There is actually a bot on Wikipedia that runs Google checks on all new articles and marks any text it finds elsewhere for speedy zapping. This turns up more than a few false positives, but mostly huge amounts of copyright violations that then get quickly zapped.
Wikipedia remains the only "Web 2.0" project that proactively gives a damn about copyright.
I wasn't going to, since I've made, er, all of two edits to CZ, so am not a contributor so much as a general well-wisher ... but I will then :-)
Drive-by anonymous contributors are indeed of tremendous value on Wikipedia. No-one wants to create yet another web page login.
It would be sad indeed if Citizendium were to end up adopting a non-free license after having promised a free license for so long. "Non-commercial" licenses are not free licenses because they restrict reusers on the purpose for which they use things.
You realise of course that plenty of critics of Scientology, e.g. me, write under their real names.
My user name on Wikipedia (and Citizendium) is my real name. My first edits to Wikipedia were on neo-Nazis and Scientology. Somehow I remain employed. I wonder how that is.
People do write for Wine - or, rather, most open-source Windows software treats Wine as a supported platform if its users ask nicely, report bugs, etc. Fixing them usually takes tweaks to both the application and to Wine. Everyone wins.
I'd like to see everyone who complains about deletion on Wikipedia to first read 24 hours' worth of [[Special:Newpages]]. I consider myself broadly inclusionist, but sipping from the firehose of sewage really brings home to me the necessity to go mad with a fucking flamethrower as a routine part of Wikipedia maintenance.
True, but somehow Ubuntu on the same machine with the same DVD burner with the same disks does much better. The only difference is the operating system.
Depends how nuclear they want to go. Microsoft can't sue IBM back because of their deal.
A patent troll uses computers, which use software. Does any of that software violate software patents? Perhaps ones held by IBM?
"It's easy to protect yourself. Just use software patented by OIN members. We have a deal with them."
I've actually found it vastly useful to have an Ubuntu partition on my Mac G4. One, for burning DVDs - Mac OS X's "burn folders" are completely unreliable rubbish and a coaster factory. Two, for recovering data from the hard disks of dead Linux laptops. Three, for hardware Mac OS X doesn't support but Linux does.
Linux can read and write HFS+ disks fine. So if you reserve a gig or two for Linux, it's good to keep on hand.
Well, yeah. But I think PHP could certainly do with quite a bit of time in maintenance, for instance ... the example I was thinking of was Wikimedia and PHP. MediaWiki is unlikely to be rewritten in anything else any time soon - MediaWiki syntax is mathematically impossible to put into EBNF, and the definition is actually the code of parser.php. Multiply that by all the organisations and projects that use PHP, and you have something like the way Apache formed from maintenance on NCSAhttpd.
The most recent version will remain debugged and maintained by the interested parties using it already.