From what I gather, they only tested the first stage of the engine, 30kW out of total 200. And they already have working models for a total of 100kW. I realize that it's probably not trivial to double the power, but is this really such a big deal?
And is there any news on the energy efficiency? The Wikipedia page suggests that the efficiency of the previous prototype was 72%, compared to 80% for working classical ion propulsion engines?
Exactly. It's easy to be cool-headed and heroic on Slashdot, but facing a terrorist in real life is something else. Holocaust victims are a classic example, when taken away they were perfectly aware they're going to get killed yet virtually none of them offered any resistance at all.
No, no, you got it wrong
on
Web Singletons?
·
· Score: 5, Funny
It's "fool me once, shame on... shame on you; fool me you can't get fooled again".
Basically, once the appeals court overturned the antitrust decision, it was pretty much game over. Microsoft has had virtually no need to improve on IE, because most users are not technical, they just understand that they click on the "Internet" icon and they're "on the Internet", for whatever that means. More than once I've had people panic because "their Internet has changed" - i.e. after they somehow click the "upgrade" button and got IE7 instead. The comforting Microsoft messages upon IE7 installation did little to help, considering I live in a non-English speaking country.
Until something finally kills off Windows, or the new generation who's grown up with computers comes up, I don't see how it's going to change.
On that day I will download a photo of Gates, print it out on photo paper, burn it and celebrate. In the meantime I just try to make my pages W3C compliant and display their banner.
Since you're bickering about HTML in the PHP code I gather you would rather build a templating system on top of PHP - which is so pointless, it's silly, as PHP itself *is* a templating language
If I only had a dollar for each XSS vulnerability introduced by the lack of escaping template values automatically. I've been guilty of that myself, more than once.
A Web-CMS and/or Framework is there to take the gruntwork away, and if you pick a current day CMS that has 5+ years with 30+ coredevs on its history and don't like the code, chances are you haven't understood it and what it is meant to do in context of the entire stack.
I envy you. I take it you've never seen Joomla code?
While reinventing the wheel is generally not a particularly wise thing to do, building a new CMS is often one thing where it makes sense.
I have a friend who owns a company specialized in customizing Joomla (a fork of Mambo), and I occassionally do some work for him. His clients are abound. People are often lured by the seemingly low price of a Joomla deployment. PHP/MySQL hosting is everywhere and it's cheap. Joomla itself is free, and it has a huge number of extensions (or "components" in parlance) for different tasks. But most often, these things don't do exactly what the client wants.
And that's where it starts to get ridiculous. The Joomla code itself is, as you point out, nothing short of horrible, and attempting to extend it is a nightmare. The quality of components is generally not much better, and they often step on each other toes. And finally, leveraging a framework tends to be difficult when you have Joomla running, so you have to write most custom code in vanilla PHP. In the end, the time and necessary costs amount to more than a custom-built CMS sitting on top of, say, Django or Rails or Turbogears - usually for a (technically) much worse website
It's really preposterous that you're prompt to make condescending remarks such as the one I quoted in the first paragraph of my post, yet obviously have never heard of TLS-PSK
I am sure that you felt that your suggestions were good when you made them, but it is important to understand that you don't understand encryption well enough to make good suggestions.
Encrypting everything with asymmetric encryption would be idiotic. SSL/TLS designers are not idiots. SSL only uses asymmetric encryption for the key exchange, though other methods can be used as well. After that, it switches to one of the symmetric algos.
SSH is not dependent on SSL/TLS - it's just that one particular implementation of SSH (OpenSSH) is dependant on the OpenSSL library for its cryptographic primitives.
UPDATE: After FOX News published its story, a World Bank spokesman issued the following statement: "The Fox News story is wrong and is riddled with falsehoods and errors. The story cites misinformation from unattributed sources and leaked emails that are taken out of context.
"Taken out of context" by definition means "it happened and we can't deny it, but we're not crazy to confirm it".
I don't know why would Skype be installed, but you should read the memo a bit more thoroughly before making "bogus" claims.
Nowhere does the it say that a Lotus Notes Admin account has been compromised. It says that the Notes Server sent a notification triggered by an attempt to access the mail inbox for a (compromised) sysadm account of some guy who was on vacation.
And nowhere does it say that Microsoft was doing the forensics, it says that "Microsoft forencsics is being worked on by Charles team". Since the server they mention is a Domain controller, it would make sense that they're running some M$ software on it, wouldn't it?
I'm not saying the memo is for real, but you need to work a bit harder than that to discredit it
We offer OEM mod POINTS at low prices, from Adobe, Microsoft, Mac, ETC!
We also sell high-quality SLASHDOT THREE and FOUR DIGIT ID replicas! Go to that cocktail party with this ID, and be sure to catch people's attention. You'll have ALL the class, and still have all your MONEY.
Wow, my head is spinning now. After reading your post, my first thought was "but if no outside observer - including an imagined one who exists until the end of the Universe - can see you actually crossing into the black hole, doesn't that mean that you never really enter the hole?".
But then how the heck would the existing black holes form in the first place?
Oh, I have my Atheros card working just fine. They do have a fairly capable Linux driver, called Madwifi - it worked pretty much out of the box for me (well after the compile - of the SVN version, the last stable doesn't seem to work with the latest kernel), is your friends' card not supported by it? But anyhow, its HAL is not FOSS. Hence it doesn't get included in Fedora. The good news is that they have actually just recently open sourced a HAL. Props for that, but, for whatever reason, it's NOT the same HAL that was used in Madwifi. Go figure.
Back on topic, I don't agree that most of the stuff I mention has been sorted out in major distros. AFAIK, Fedora doesn't ship *any* non-free software in any of their official repos - so no proprietary codecs, drivers, etc (yes there are unofficial repos, but that's beside the point, we're talking about an average desktop user). My experience with Intel and XV playback was on the latest Ubuntu, Hardy Heron. They patch their driver to use the old XAA rendering by default, which is faster for compositing but for some reason messes up XV. I was on Hardy until a few weeks ago, and stopped because the KDE4 they shipped was... not so great. I'm sorry, but I can't use GNOME - it'd be almost as bad as using Emacs:P I'm not sure about NetworkManager though, I don't even bother trying it out these days, wicd works great for me.
OpenSuSE, from what I remember, also didn't have the Atheros drivers. Don't know what's their policy now.
I'm on Arch now, and I like it a lot - it's like Slack with dependencies. I haven't used Gentoo though. Where do I hand in my geek card?:)
You give me my point? I wasn't trying to make a point at all, just stating the simple fact that the current (=stable) version of OpenOffice doesn't support.docx out of the box. I know very well that Office 2k3 doesn't support it either.
But if you insist on me trying to make a point, I can restate my personal experience that I haven't been able to get the official conversion tool up and running - though admittedly I haven't spent much time with it, and it's probably just a hickup in the (unofficial) Arch package and big distros such as Ubuntu probably pack their own (working) binaries.
OK, so now you've got me to rant. Look, I've been using Linux since 1995. I like it and it fits my needs very well - I haven't booted Windows on my main machine for about a year now, except for a VirtualBox XP image I use to check whether my Javascript works under IE. But from an average desktop user POV I wouldn't say Linux is still up to shape when compared to Windows. It's much better than a few years ago, but still not great.
Drivers. What can I say, we've all been there. I have an Atheros wireless card, and if I were an average user on a Fedora I'd be screwed. I'm also screwed on Arch because the driver for my TI card reader doesn't read XD cards. Both are very common in laptops. Guess I'm lucky because I own an Intel video card. Worked great under Ubuntu, Compiz and all that - until you discover that XV video doesn't play all that great. But you can fix it, if you switch to the EXA rendering mode instead of XAA and use a greedy migration heuristic. Simple, huh?
Codecs. People would kinda like to play their DVDs and stuff occassionally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Add an additional repo and download it. Doesn't work.
Visual impression. I agree that it's much improved now - when I just think of fonts from say, Fedora Core 4... oh boy (and that wasn't too long ago). KDE looks pretty good now, Crystal Clear is nice, and KDE4 is a hot mamma (a buggy hot mamma, but still a hot mamma). Still the quality of the interface is not consistent accross apps.
Category: misc stuff. My big personal gripe is the NetworkManager - that thing has a mind of its own. Not to mention that the last time I used it, you couldn't even disconnect from a network with it. Why why why why don't distros replace it with wicd or any other sane alternative?
And finally, there is the point of niche apps that has been raised in this thread. CAD users, video artists, music artists. I'm a hobby musician, and Linux doesn't cut it - my $400 M-Audio rig only works with Windows and Mac, sorry. I have to keep a separate box for that.
So anyhow, I'm not just sure about the year of the Linux desktop. I don't know if it's ever going to happen. It might be an evolution rather than a revolution, as Linux gets gradually better and more user-friendly - Shuttleworths recent efforts are surely to be applauded. But somehow I feel that it's just going to be about marketing - you know, an iLinux or something.
Why the heck am I getting into these discussions and rehashing something that's been said a million times by others, I don't know. Please mod me down into oblivion and make me come to my senses
Slashdot Mirror
It has a "pyrotechnic initiation unit"? What is that used for? Were they planning some fireworks to celebrate? Do Martians like fireworks? :)
(I'm kinda curious to know what #2 is, though)
Why, it's ??? of course.
From what I gather, they only tested the first stage of the engine, 30kW out of total 200. And they already have working models for a total of 100kW. I realize that it's probably not trivial to double the power, but is this really such a big deal?
And is there any news on the energy efficiency? The Wikipedia page suggests that the efficiency of the previous prototype was 72%, compared to 80% for working classical ion propulsion engines?
(OK, not correct SQL, but it's funny! Funny, I tell you!)
You didn't get your shipment of friggin sharks with friggin lasers attached either? Meh. Tough times.
And they have some of the easiest Linux support.
That surely explains their 60% market share
Exactly. It's easy to be cool-headed and heroic on Slashdot, but facing a terrorist in real life is something else. Holocaust victims are a classic example, when taken away they were perfectly aware they're going to get killed yet virtually none of them offered any resistance at all.
It's "fool me once, shame on... shame on you; fool me you can't get fooled again".
Basically, once the appeals court overturned the antitrust decision, it was pretty much game over. Microsoft has had virtually no need to improve on IE, because most users are not technical, they just understand that they click on the "Internet" icon and they're "on the Internet", for whatever that means. More than once I've had people panic because "their Internet has changed" - i.e. after they somehow click the "upgrade" button and got IE7 instead. The comforting Microsoft messages upon IE7 installation did little to help, considering I live in a non-English speaking country.
Until something finally kills off Windows, or the new generation who's grown up with computers comes up, I don't see how it's going to change.
On that day I will download a photo of Gates, print it out on photo paper, burn it and celebrate. In the meantime I just try to make my pages W3C compliant and display their banner.
Since you're bickering about HTML in the PHP code I gather you would rather build a templating system on top of PHP - which is so pointless, it's silly, as PHP itself *is* a templating language
If I only had a dollar for each XSS vulnerability introduced by the lack of escaping template values automatically. I've been guilty of that myself, more than once.
A Web-CMS and/or Framework is there to take the gruntwork away, and if you pick a current day CMS that has 5+ years with 30+ coredevs on its history and don't like the code, chances are you haven't understood it and what it is meant to do in context of the entire stack.
I envy you. I take it you've never seen Joomla code?
While reinventing the wheel is generally not a particularly wise thing to do, building a new CMS is often one thing where it makes sense.
I have a friend who owns a company specialized in customizing Joomla (a fork of Mambo), and I occassionally do some work for him. His clients are abound. People are often lured by the seemingly low price of a Joomla deployment. PHP/MySQL hosting is everywhere and it's cheap. Joomla itself is free, and it has a huge number of extensions (or "components" in parlance) for different tasks. But most often, these things don't do exactly what the client wants.
And that's where it starts to get ridiculous. The Joomla code itself is, as you point out, nothing short of horrible, and attempting to extend it is a nightmare. The quality of components is generally not much better, and they often step on each other toes. And finally, leveraging a framework tends to be difficult when you have Joomla running, so you have to write most custom code in vanilla PHP. In the end, the time and necessary costs amount to more than a custom-built CMS sitting on top of, say, Django or Rails or Turbogears - usually for a (technically) much worse website
It's really preposterous that you're prompt to make condescending remarks such as the one I quoted in the first paragraph of my post, yet obviously have never heard of TLS-PSK
.
I am sure that you felt that your suggestions were good when you made them, but it is important to understand that you don't understand encryption well enough to make good suggestions.
Encrypting everything with asymmetric encryption would be idiotic. SSL/TLS designers are not idiots. SSL only uses asymmetric encryption for the key exchange, though other methods can be used as well. After that, it switches to one of the symmetric algos.
SSH is not dependent on SSL/TLS - it's just that one particular implementation of SSH (OpenSSH) is dependant on the OpenSSL library for its cryptographic primitives.
More details
UPDATE: After FOX News published its story, a World Bank spokesman issued the following statement: "The Fox News story is wrong and is riddled with falsehoods and errors. The story cites misinformation from unattributed sources and leaked emails that are taken out of context.
"Taken out of context" by definition means "it happened and we can't deny it, but we're not crazy to confirm it".
I don't know why would Skype be installed, but you should read the memo a bit more thoroughly before making "bogus" claims.
Nowhere does the it say that a Lotus Notes Admin account has been compromised. It says that the Notes Server sent a notification triggered by an attempt to access the mail inbox for a (compromised) sysadm account of some guy who was on vacation.
And nowhere does it say that Microsoft was doing the forensics, it says that "Microsoft forencsics is being worked on by Charles team". Since the server they mention is a Domain controller, it would make sense that they're running some M$ software on it, wouldn't it?
I'm not saying the memo is for real, but you need to work a bit harder than that to discredit it
We offer OEM mod POINTS at low prices, from Adobe, Microsoft, Mac, ETC!
We also sell high-quality SLASHDOT THREE and FOUR DIGIT ID replicas! Go to that cocktail party with this ID, and be sure to catch people's attention. You'll have ALL the class, and still have all your MONEY.
The Android!
cat /dev/null
Bet Sarah Palin would love to have the system installed in the US though.
4 replies later, and nobody notices that he's using r^2 in a *volume* formula? Yes, yes, in 3 dimensions?
No, he is new here.
Wow, my head is spinning now. After reading your post, my first thought was "but if no outside observer - including an imagined one who exists until the end of the Universe - can see you actually crossing into the black hole, doesn't that mean that you never really enter the hole?". But then how the heck would the existing black holes form in the first place?
That has to be one of the finest examples of gangsta-geek humor since the dawn of Mc Hawking.
If they can have an October revolution in November, we can have your September birthday in October, damn it!
Oh, I have my Atheros card working just fine. They do have a fairly capable Linux driver, called Madwifi - it worked pretty much out of the box for me (well after the compile - of the SVN version, the last stable doesn't seem to work with the latest kernel), is your friends' card not supported by it? But anyhow, its HAL is not FOSS. Hence it doesn't get included in Fedora. The good news is that they have actually just recently open sourced a HAL. Props for that, but, for whatever reason, it's NOT the same HAL that was used in Madwifi. Go figure.
Back on topic, I don't agree that most of the stuff I mention has been sorted out in major distros. AFAIK, Fedora doesn't ship *any* non-free software in any of their official repos - so no proprietary codecs, drivers, etc (yes there are unofficial repos, but that's beside the point, we're talking about an average desktop user). My experience with Intel and XV playback was on the latest Ubuntu, Hardy Heron. They patch their driver to use the old XAA rendering by default, which is faster for compositing but for some reason messes up XV. I was on Hardy until a few weeks ago, and stopped because the KDE4 they shipped was... not so great. I'm sorry, but I can't use GNOME - it'd be almost as bad as using Emacs :P I'm not sure about NetworkManager though, I don't even bother trying it out these days, wicd works great for me.
OpenSuSE, from what I remember, also didn't have the Atheros drivers. Don't know what's their policy now.
I'm on Arch now, and I like it a lot - it's like Slack with dependencies. I haven't used Gentoo though. Where do I hand in my geek card? :)
You give me my point? I wasn't trying to make a point at all, just stating the simple fact that the current (=stable) version of OpenOffice doesn't support .docx out of the box. I know very well that Office 2k3 doesn't support it either.
But if you insist on me trying to make a point, I can restate my personal experience that I haven't been able to get the official conversion tool up and running - though admittedly I haven't spent much time with it, and it's probably just a hickup in the (unofficial) Arch package and big distros such as Ubuntu probably pack their own (working) binaries.
OK, so now you've got me to rant. Look, I've been using Linux since 1995. I like it and it fits my needs very well - I haven't booted Windows on my main machine for about a year now, except for a VirtualBox XP image I use to check whether my Javascript works under IE. But from an average desktop user POV I wouldn't say Linux is still up to shape when compared to Windows. It's much better than a few years ago, but still not great.
Drivers. What can I say, we've all been there. I have an Atheros wireless card, and if I were an average user on a Fedora I'd be screwed. I'm also screwed on Arch because the driver for my TI card reader doesn't read XD cards. Both are very common in laptops. Guess I'm lucky because I own an Intel video card. Worked great under Ubuntu, Compiz and all that - until you discover that XV video doesn't play all that great. But you can fix it, if you switch to the EXA rendering mode instead of XAA and use a greedy migration heuristic. Simple, huh?
Codecs. People would kinda like to play their DVDs and stuff occassionally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Add an additional repo and download it. Doesn't work.
Visual impression. I agree that it's much improved now - when I just think of fonts from say, Fedora Core 4... oh boy (and that wasn't too long ago). KDE looks pretty good now, Crystal Clear is nice, and KDE4 is a hot mamma (a buggy hot mamma, but still a hot mamma). Still the quality of the interface is not consistent accross apps.
Category: misc stuff. My big personal gripe is the NetworkManager - that thing has a mind of its own. Not to mention that the last time I used it, you couldn't even disconnect from a network with it. Why why why why don't distros replace it with wicd or any other sane alternative?
And finally, there is the point of niche apps that has been raised in this thread. CAD users, video artists, music artists. I'm a hobby musician, and Linux doesn't cut it - my $400 M-Audio rig only works with Windows and Mac, sorry. I have to keep a separate box for that.
So anyhow, I'm not just sure about the year of the Linux desktop. I don't know if it's ever going to happen. It might be an evolution rather than a revolution, as Linux gets gradually better and more user-friendly - Shuttleworths recent efforts are surely to be applauded. But somehow I feel that it's just going to be about marketing - you know, an iLinux or something.
Why the heck am I getting into these discussions and rehashing something that's been said a million times by others, I don't know. Please mod me down into oblivion and make me come to my senses