Of the 7 million WOW account holders, I would bet that 6.999 million don't even know about Warden.
Yep. That's me.
And I'd bet that same number, if you made them aware, still wouldn't give a toss.
Yep. That's me too.
The thing is, since starting to play WoW my life has descended into a meaningless treadmill of levelling and grinding. There's no longer anything of interest about me that's worth stealing.
I also hope that people note the fact that the public has not been flocking to smartphones of any sort.
He needs to read this story. This all happened in a country where previously nobody ever paid for a phone (the phones are generally bundled with the contract).
The Finder is not open source and the problem is in the Finder.
FYI the kernel has a syscall called rename which only works if both source and destination are on the same file system. If they are not, it fails and sets errno to EXDEV. Moves between file systems are simulated by userland programs doing a copy then a delete. I'm pretty sure that cp issues a rename and then falls back to copy-delete if it gets EXDEV back. The Finder must already know that the destination is on a different file system because default behaviour is to copy when a file is dragged onto a different file system and move iif it is dragged onto the same file system.
I don't know what your definition of free software is, but neither Unix (which is not Free in the Gnu sense) nor POSIX which is not software (it's an API specification) count.
It's a contractual thing. Broadcast over satellite, cable or terrestrial TV is treated as a separate thing to making content available on the Internet and the terms and conditions are different for each. I doubt that a contract being nonsense from a technology point of view would be a successful defence in a law suit.
I can understand that they won't do that, but don't give me this bullshit about minimum cost. It's about maximum control. Even with the BBC, the only entity that has absolutely no reason for it.
Even the BBC has every reason for it. Most of the programmes broadcast on the BBC are not made by the BBC. A lot of their own content is made by independent production companies. They do not have the right to post these programmes up on the Internet for anybody to see without restriction.
No. If I type a "less than" sign in a POT message I would expect the Slash software to replace it with the HTML code that would cause my browser to render it as a "less than" sign. It's fairly basic and the function probably already exists in Perl.
You are absolutely right. There are situations where being able to see through a layer is a good thing. But this is not true in general. For example, I'm typing this in a text box on my browser. Behind the browser is an RSS reader, an Eclipse session, another browser window containing the BBC radio player, several Finder windows, an Excel spreadsheet, a Word document, a terminal window and the desktop background consisting of a Dilbert cartoon. If this window were translucent to any degree, I'd not be able to read the text in it.
What most people call maths isn't really. For example, using trig to find out what shape a piece of metal should be is really arithmetic. Maths is finding out why trig works. Using The Formula to find the roots of a quadratic equation is something almost anybody can do if they can follow instructions and are prepared to learn the notation. Proving that it is true is probably beyond almost everybody (until they've been shown the proof by their maths teacher: following a proof is a lot easier than thinking it up in the first place).
Am I the only person who who can't avoid reading "POS" as "pile of shit"?
"Hi I'm developing an open source pile of shit".
"Really? I sold my soul to the devil and I'm developing a proprietary pile of shit."
Coincidentally, a pile of shit is what you'll end up with if you think you can develop a POS (point of sale) system for $2K - $5K. I realise you haven't actually said that, perhaps you think it's worth spending a little more to get a POS system that is open source i.e. you are not averse to investing into the open source community. This is a commendable motive, but unless you are filthy rich, I'd advise against it,
I'm a bit out of touch with contractor rates in the US but $5K would get you less than two weeks of a half way decent programmer in the UK. Do you think you can build the whole system in two weeks? I don't. I think you'll be lucky if you have an agreed functional specification after two weeks. The actual programming and testing is going to take much longer. That's right, testing. It'll probably take about two weeks to write the test plan and test cases before you even start the testing and fixing the bugs you find. But that's definitely not something you can skimp on. I mean, a POS system that randomly forgets about sales tax (for instance) could probably land you in prison.
Then there's the credit card readers. I can't imagine that Mastercard is going to just let you connect a credit card reader to a PC running some random software that you wrote. There's got to be some sort of certification process which will likely cost you some money.
Any time that you write software that deals with money, you are in for a world of pain. I think $5000 is a bargain considering POS is relatively specialised.
I know there are loads of open source projects out there that are far more complex than POS (e.g. Linux, Apache, all the GNU stuff). The thing is that the people who work on them are volunteers and do the work for nothing. They actually like contributing to the project because they are interested. There may well be people out there interested in writing POS software that you could take advantage of and pay them nothing to save you $2K. However, because they are interested, those people have probably already written the POS system so your best bet is to find an existing OSS POS system and use that, as others have suggested. Or you could stump up the cash for a commercial system. In your position I'd go for an out of the box commercial solution with hardware and everything. Starting up a new business is hard enough without worying about whether you can reliably take cash from your customers.
I disagree. 2nd Timothy 3:16 states: "All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness." My faith is that the scribes who put pen to paper were divinely inspired by God as to what to write. As for the "specific humans" who taught me, they were able to point me to scriptures that back up their teachings.
It's widely accepted by Biblical scholars that 2 Timothy was not written by its purported author viz St Paul. I find it somewhat ironic that this quotation that literalists like to use a lot comes from a probable forgery.
here's about 5600 copies of the Biblical manuscripts and of those manuscripts, they are 99.5% consistent.
That's a statistic that fundamentalists like to use. Unfortunately, it is a lie. There are actually only around 60 complete manuscripts of the whole New Testament. The 5000 number was arrived at by adding up all of the manuscripts of all of the books. For example there are about 600 manuscripts of the book "Acts of the Apostles" and 300 of Revelations. Under fundamentalist logic that's 900 manuscript copies of the whole New Testament already. For comparison, we have about 650 copies of the Iliad.
I don't know where the 99.5% consistency statistic comes from. I can't see how it could possibly be true given that textual criticism of the Bible exists and is giving people plenty to do. One estimate suggests that there are variants in as much as 45% of the verses in the Gospels and 37% in the NT as a whole.
I have a brother in law who bought music and now wants a different device, he can't trade it over and basically lost all his music
I bought a DVD player and threw out my VHS video player. Now all my old tapes won't play, I was ripped off. At least with iTunes you have the option to burn your tracks to non DRM CDs.
a guy I work with in IT of all things, bought videos off of iTunes and had to fix or reformat his computer, and he can't use those purchased videos anymore
He just needs to reauthorise his computer and restore his backups.
The onus in the UK in a civil case (as opposed to in a criminal case) is on the person saying something to show it to be true (in a criminal case the onus is on the prosecution), and the standard of proof is generally lower than the "beyond reasonable doubt" needed in a criminal case.
Yes it is, but if somebody is sueing you for libel, what they are saying is "This statement you made has damaged my character or my business or whatever". They do not have to show that the statement is true but they do have to show there is some sort of damage resulting. If you are going to use the fact that the statement is true as a defence, you do have to show that it is true.
As an example, let's say I make the statement "Tyrannosaurs eat Triceratopses for breakfast". You could sue me for defamation. Maybe respected herbivors stopped inviting you round for dinner or something. Under UK law if I'm going to use the "but it's true" defence, I would have to prove that Tyrannosaurs do eat Triceratopses. There is no requirement for you to prove the statement false.
He's still relevant because out of all the engineers who've ever done anything, Woz is very arguably in the top 10, period, of all time, end of story (which makes him one of the few, if any, who are still alive)
Archimedes, Telford, Brunel, Stephenson, James Watt, John Von Neumann, Wilbur and Orville Wright, Tommy Flowers, Rudolf Diesel, Edgar Djikstra, Tesla, Edison, Knuth, Denis Thompson, Linus Torvalds. That list took me five minutes to come up with. I only had to resort to Wikipedia once - to figure out how to spell Djikstra. Give me an hour and I could come up with 50 engineers who are more important than Woz.
Wozniak designed a microcomputer. It happened to be the best around at the time, but it was hardly unique.
He's he first man who built modern computer hardware
Not remotely true. Microcomputers in the days of the Apple II were unbelievably primitive compared with the minicomputers and mainframes of the day.
I fail to see how being proprietary necessarily makes code horrible. I've seen good and bad open source code and good and bad proprietary code. I think the quality of the code is more a function of how well the project is run than whether it is proprietary or not.
No. Not every point of view is valid. My point of view that the Moon is made of extra thick scotch porridge is obviously totally invalid, as is the view that the Earth was made in six days 6,000 years ago.
When it comes to finding out the way the World is, beliefs are worth nothing without facts to back them up. The facts directly contradict the belief that Genesis got it right. That belief is wrong.
The GPL is a source code licence. If I developed the software I can distribute the binaries under any licence I like. If I choose to also distribute the source code and I choose the GPL then I theoretically do not have to abide by its terms myself but since I have given you the source code I have complied by default.
If I am redistributing GPL software commercially then I must obviously abide by the terms of the licence. For instance if I sell binary copies of gcc I must either include the source code or provide a written offer to give you - or anybody - the source code at a price that covers only the costs of distribution. What I cannot do is merely give you the URL to the gcc distro on the Free Software Foundation's FTP server.
MS Office is another good example. Office 2004 for Mac is REALLY slow on my Intel iMac since it is PPC only and runs in Rosetta. I was trying to edit a SIMPLE one page MS Word doc in Office 2004 and my CPU kept jumping and the document would flash and redraw every 2-3 seconds. MS isn't updated Office 2004 to be Universal, so as usual any non-MS user has to wait.
It runs perfectly acceptably on my 1st gen MacBook Pro with 1Gb RAM. In fact with the speed hike compared to my previous G4 Powerbook, it doesn't feel much slower - subjectively.
The Mac version of RDC works just as well for me on Intel as it did on PPC, but admittedly it was pretty crap to start with.
Slashdot Mirror
Our government just gives out everybody's personal details.
Wow. Excel must have improved - last time I tried to import a large text file into Excel, it gave up when it got to 8192 rows.
Yes.
The British Prime Minister has a child under 16. So one of the 25 million lost records is that of Gordon Brown.
Not Enigma.
They used bombes to crack Enigma. Colossus was for a completely different cipher called Lorenz
http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/content/machines.rhtm
The thing is, since starting to play WoW my life has descended into a meaningless treadmill of levelling and grinding. There's no longer anything of interest about me that's worth stealing.
The Finder is not open source and the problem is in the Finder.
FYI the kernel has a syscall called rename which only works if both source and destination are on the same file system. If they are not, it fails and sets errno to EXDEV. Moves between file systems are simulated by userland programs doing a copy then a delete. I'm pretty sure that cp issues a rename and then falls back to copy-delete if it gets EXDEV back. The Finder must already know that the destination is on a different file system because default behaviour is to copy when a file is dragged onto a different file system and move iif it is dragged onto the same file system.
I don't know what your definition of free software is, but neither Unix (which is not Free in the Gnu sense) nor POSIX which is not software (it's an API specification) count.
It's a contractual thing. Broadcast over satellite, cable or terrestrial TV is treated as a separate thing to making content available on the Internet and the terms and conditions are different for each. I doubt that a contract being nonsense from a technology point of view would be a successful defence in a law suit.
No. If I type a "less than" sign in a POT message I would expect the Slash software to replace it with the HTML code that would cause my browser to render it as a "less than" sign. It's fairly basic and the function probably already exists in Perl.
You are absolutely right. There are situations where being able to see through a layer is a good thing. But this is not true in general. For example, I'm typing this in a text box on my browser. Behind the browser is an RSS reader, an Eclipse session, another browser window containing the BBC radio player, several Finder windows, an Excel spreadsheet, a Word document, a terminal window and the desktop background consisting of a Dilbert cartoon. If this window were translucent to any degree, I'd not be able to read the text in it.
No. Maths is hard.
What most people call maths isn't really. For example, using trig to find out what shape a piece of metal should be is really arithmetic. Maths is finding out why trig works. Using The Formula to find the roots of a quadratic equation is something almost anybody can do if they can follow instructions and are prepared to learn the notation. Proving that it is true is probably beyond almost everybody (until they've been shown the proof by their maths teacher: following a proof is a lot easier than thinking it up in the first place).
I think kdawson needs to find a better news source. The BBC reported this story more than a month ago.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6978384.stm
My British passport tells me I am a citizen of the UK.
Am I the only person who who can't avoid reading "POS" as "pile of shit"?
"Hi I'm developing an open source pile of shit".
"Really? I sold my soul to the devil and I'm developing a proprietary pile of shit."
Coincidentally, a pile of shit is what you'll end up with if you think you can develop a POS (point of sale) system for $2K - $5K. I realise you haven't actually said that, perhaps you think it's worth spending a little more to get a POS system that is open source i.e. you are not averse to investing into the open source community. This is a commendable motive, but unless you are filthy rich, I'd advise against it,
I'm a bit out of touch with contractor rates in the US but $5K would get you less than two weeks of a half way decent programmer in the UK. Do you think you can build the whole system in two weeks? I don't. I think you'll be lucky if you have an agreed functional specification after two weeks. The actual programming and testing is going to take much longer. That's right, testing. It'll probably take about two weeks to write the test plan and test cases before you even start the testing and fixing the bugs you find. But that's definitely not something you can skimp on. I mean, a POS system that randomly forgets about sales tax (for instance) could probably land you in prison.
Then there's the credit card readers. I can't imagine that Mastercard is going to just let you connect a credit card reader to a PC running some random software that you wrote. There's got to be some sort of certification process which will likely cost you some money.
Any time that you write software that deals with money, you are in for a world of pain. I think $5000 is a bargain considering POS is relatively specialised.
I know there are loads of open source projects out there that are far more complex than POS (e.g. Linux, Apache, all the GNU stuff). The thing is that the people who work on them are volunteers and do the work for nothing. They actually like contributing to the project because they are interested. There may well be people out there interested in writing POS software that you could take advantage of and pay them nothing to save you $2K. However, because they are interested, those people have probably already written the POS system so your best bet is to find an existing OSS POS system and use that, as others have suggested. Or you could stump up the cash for a commercial system. In your position I'd go for an out of the box commercial solution with hardware and everything. Starting up a new business is hard enough without worying about whether you can reliably take cash from your customers.
EMACS is a great operating system. The only bit that really sucks is the editor.
That's a statistic that fundamentalists like to use. Unfortunately, it is a lie. There are actually only around 60 complete manuscripts of the whole New Testament. The 5000 number was arrived at by adding up all of the manuscripts of all of the books. For example there are about 600 manuscripts of the book "Acts of the Apostles" and 300 of Revelations. Under fundamentalist logic that's 900 manuscript copies of the whole New Testament already. For comparison, we have about 650 copies of the Iliad.
I don't know where the 99.5% consistency statistic comes from. I can't see how it could possibly be true given that textual criticism of the Bible exists and is giving people plenty to do. One estimate suggests that there are variants in as much as 45% of the verses in the Gospels and 37% in the NT as a whole.
I bought a DVD player and threw out my VHS video player. Now all my old tapes won't play, I was ripped off. At least with iTunes you have the option to burn your tracks to non DRM CDs.
He just needs to reauthorise his computer and restore his backups.
Yes it is, but if somebody is sueing you for libel, what they are saying is "This statement you made has damaged my character or my business or whatever". They do not have to show that the statement is true but they do have to show there is some sort of damage resulting. If you are going to use the fact that the statement is true as a defence, you do have to show that it is true.
As an example, let's say I make the statement "Tyrannosaurs eat Triceratopses for breakfast". You could sue me for defamation. Maybe respected herbivors stopped inviting you round for dinner or something. Under UK law if I'm going to use the "but it's true" defence, I would have to prove that Tyrannosaurs do eat Triceratopses. There is no requirement for you to prove the statement false.
Archimedes, Telford, Brunel, Stephenson, James Watt, John Von Neumann, Wilbur and Orville Wright, Tommy Flowers, Rudolf Diesel, Edgar Djikstra, Tesla, Edison, Knuth, Denis Thompson, Linus Torvalds. That list took me five minutes to come up with. I only had to resort to Wikipedia once - to figure out how to spell Djikstra. Give me an hour and I could come up with 50 engineers who are more important than Woz.
Wozniak designed a microcomputer. It happened to be the best around at the time, but it was hardly unique.
Not remotely true. Microcomputers in the days of the Apple II were unbelievably primitive compared with the minicomputers and mainframes of the day.
I fail to see how being proprietary necessarily makes code horrible. I've seen good and bad open source code and good and bad proprietary code. I think the quality of the code is more a function of how well the project is run than whether it is proprietary or not.
No. Not every point of view is valid. My point of view that the Moon is made of extra thick scotch porridge is obviously totally invalid, as is the view that the Earth was made in six days 6,000 years ago.
When it comes to finding out the way the World is, beliefs are worth nothing without facts to back them up. The facts directly contradict the belief that Genesis got it right. That belief is wrong.
The GPL is a source code licence. If I developed the software I can distribute the binaries under any licence I like. If I choose to also distribute the source code and I choose the GPL then I theoretically do not have to abide by its terms myself but since I have given you the source code I have complied by default.
If I am redistributing GPL software commercially then I must obviously abide by the terms of the licence. For instance if I sell binary copies of gcc I must either include the source code or provide a written offer to give you - or anybody - the source code at a price that covers only the costs of distribution. What I cannot do is merely give you the URL to the gcc distro on the Free Software Foundation's FTP server.
It runs perfectly acceptably on my 1st gen MacBook Pro with 1Gb RAM. In fact with the speed hike compared to my previous G4 Powerbook, it doesn't feel much slower - subjectively.
The Mac version of RDC works just as well for me on Intel as it did on PPC, but admittedly it was pretty crap to start with.