What use is an encyclopedia when literacy rates among a language's speakers approach zero? (This is not a problem for Swahili.) And who should control the content in a local language if not enough native speakers are inclined, or able, to contribute? If it had been native speakers only who contributed to the Swahili version, that Wikipedia might not exist at all.
I'm not a native english speaker. Yet I contribute to the english wikipedia, because I feel I master the language. If people feel they master swahili, why should they not be free to contribute? It can be used as a starting point, as literacy rates increase. If people is to learn to read, they need something to read. Free content/knowledge is important, since it can reduce costs in schools and such.
So in my eyes, the most important thing is to make a wikipedia with some basic content, and a lot of stubs, and let people contribute to these as they become literate. It *can* be a valueable tool, and we should do what we can do! Let us improve the free media availvable, and work for translation of it.
If we could get a government institution to recognize wikipedia in their local language, we could bring it a long way forward in that language, and naturally ensure that the history of the country gets written down - in a open content.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that the electrons at one end of the wire eventually kick the other electrons down out of the way, or flow past them, or however the physics of DC current actually work, whereas with AC power, they just stay in the same basic area, and wiggle, with their neighbors causing them to wiggle, and their neighbors working on them, and so on.
Think of it as a waterhose, filled with balls (electrons). If you push in another electron, one must fall out in the other end if the hose is saturated (a cable *is* saturated). AC vs DC has nothing to do with resistance directly... In a purely resistive load, ac and dc provides exactly the same power vs current. In a capacitive load, ac will leak to ground, whilst dc will not...
You've got the very abstract tehory right, but reality is not quite like that.
DC and AC both have their place. DC is good for short-haul power distribution, but if you short out the lines you'll destroy the entire power run. AC doesn't do that anywhere near as bad- which is why electric power is distributed as AC- it doesn't have the same safety issues and it can be transmitted long distances without major losses as it's being transmitted down the wire, not conducted.
You've got the facts seriously mixed up. Both is contucted down the wire. The difference is that a transformer is cheap, has excisted as long as AC, and can transform voltage. Higher voltage equals more power for the same current, which means thinner cables can be used. In fact, AC is bad for long transmission lines, due to capacitance leaks to ground. For longhaul-lines, high voltage DC is used instead of AC.
Will anyone do tech support for free? Sure, I might reply in irc channels and mailing lists, but not in Instant Messaging. The thing with irc and mailing lists is that there is a chance that other people will get the answer, and look at it, and learn. By using a closed, 1-to-1 protocol like IM, you offset this. I think it is better to let people write good documentation for a product, than to let others provide tech support.
Tech support is mostly called by idiots anyway, and I'd not manage to answer politely to stupid questions.
...or was the article lacking any significant text? It gave me no clue of what he have done, expcet for hollowing out a old MAC, adding an amplifier and such. What amplifier? How did he interface to the iPod? Does the thing control the iPod, or just output the sound?
I guess the latter, that it is just a fancy set of speakers with a 3.5mm jack to connect it to any portable equipment with a headset output. It's not really innovative even. What would have been innovative was if he'd made a interface to control the iPod. As far as I know, that is not so straight forward, and you'll need a bit of electronics skills, and you'll probably have to write a program for a microcontroller to do the communication...
But as he have done it? Worthless. And TFA gives little or no information on it.
...or it will be spamridden. We have tucows, which was useable, but only had windows software. We have freshmeat, which is useable, but mostly free software. We have sourceforge, which hosts free software. Point is, all those software catalogs is either narrow in scope, requires registration from the individual software project, is spam ridden, or disappears.
And how would you rate programs? Ensure that links works? Whom should you credit for the programs? What if the homepage moves? Sounds like a lot of if's without good answers.
And if they are submission-based, how many will bother? How many dupes will there be? Is MS Office 2003 seperate program from MS Office 2004 for MAC? Is Firefox and mozilla discrete apps? What about the different parts of the KDE suite?
Not sure why exactly they would want to encrypt the scores as they flew over the network though. The scores are public knowledge...who cares if they are sniffed? Technology demonstration? Wanted to use the 'encryption' buzzword perhaps?
To force people interested in live stats either to view their website (=ad revenue) or watch their tv broadcast (=ad revenue). 3rd party apps accessing the information means less ad revenue. Simple as that.
If you read the article, you'll see that he found the key in the flash applet that presented the data to the website visitors. So even if they used a truly random key, it would be worth no more, since the client could just read the flash file (de-assemblers for flash is out there. Search on google.), and get the key. So really, there is no point of better encryption, because the determined people will get the key anyway.
Remember that flash runs on your computer. Thus, the encryption key has to be on your computer so the flash application can decode the XML file and show you the results. As long as Trusted Computing does not excist, there is no way to stop a determined person from getting the key. Thus, using a stronger key would not make it more difficult. It is not like the key was discovered by accident. The writer of TFA was looking for the key in the flash file...
One of the things I was taught when I learned how to swim as a child was that a drowning person tends to panic and flail around and fleetingly grab at everything and anything without rational thought. They'll even drag down their own potential rescuer. They can't help it.
Still flawed. MSN Messenger is not sinking, nor drowning. It is quite well afloat, more so in Europe than in USA, but still, no reason to panic over this particular product for MS. What's important for them is that their official client is better than the unofficial clients, like gaim and amsn, so that people use the official version, and MS gets their ad revenue. So actually, through competition, aMSN forces MS to introduce new features.
The downside is that those features is properitary, so the 3rd party clients have to reverse engineer them
Anyway, the point is that even if this meteor was "substantially bigger" than the 200-pound record holder, I find it extremely hard to believe that it would do even a miniscule fraction of the what the A-bomb did.
Let's do some easy math: E=1/2mv^2 where v is 50000m/sec, m is 100kg. You get quite a lot of energy. Some of it will make heat by friction, but parts of will vapourize stone...
It goes like this: Many people in the country feel that exposure to sex harms their children. (I know, I know, but it's their belief and I don't tell people what to believe.) Thus, Rockstar did the equivalent of putting "peanut free" on a jar of peanuts and feeding it to someone who is allergic.
no, you can not compare it. The scens was there, but disabled. You had to activly install a patch to view them. That is, you, as a consumer, had to deliberately want to view them. Which would mean that you dipped your own candy in peatnuts...
" Let's just say a Linux server has 24 hours of downtime a year (higher than the "survey" says). That leaves 364 days of uptime in a year, 365 days in a leap year.
Implied in the article then, a Windows 2003 server would have to be "up" approximately 20% more to satisfy the "claim". Now, I am not a calendar "expert", but I'm having a difficult time believing that Windows 2003 server is up an average of 364 * 1.2, or 436.8 days a year. If it is, I'm buying.
sighYou don't know what percent is. It is a relation. If a Win2k3 server is down 10 hours, and the Linux server down 20% more, then it is 10hrs*1.2=12hrs. Which makes sense.
So the linux server has 20% more downtime, not 20% of the total year, which you calculated.
We'll see lots of defensiveness over this study in the comments, although if the conclusions were different, it would be cheered. Why not accept it and fix the documentation issue?
Because there are no documentation problems. Do you find an OS with a more well documentet API than Linux? More documentation than Gentoo has? The problem is that they have not studied what I'd dare say is the serious users, they've studied those without in-house competence on Linux.
*NIX-admins are probably more expensive than windows-admins, since there is fewer of them. Those organizations running old UNIX's typically have quite competent admins in-house, and quite different hardware. Windows and linux often runs on off-the-shelf hardware, which I guess explains why UNIX beats both of them
With Linux, the effect is double. A lot of companies have windows admins with some level of degree, but those who know unix, works in the serious business with big unix-machines. Those who adopt Linux have typically not used Unix before I guestimate.
What would be interesting would be to see a study between HP's Windows and Linux servers, since they provide the hardware themself, and should have in-house competance on both OS's.
Compare real things, do not compare different things. Anyone remember Microsoft UK's ad? I think it was along the lines of a x86 off-the-shelf with mssql and win2k compared to a IBM POWER machine. Of course, the ad proved that Linux was more expensive.... This reminds me of that.
Anytime I hear people talk about MS and open source, they speak of it as one vs the other, when in fact there is a lot of good open source written for MS platforms. Two of my favorites (both are BSD licensed) are:
You forget one thing: This piece of software depends on non-free software, which means you have a vendor-tie-in. I can not use this product without MS software. That means the software is useless in a free-software world. Read RMS' thoughts on java, Free But Shackled - The Java Trap for more thoughts on this. I agree with Stallman on this topic; a free software world requires all software to be free, and producing fsf-stuff designed to only run on windows harms the over all progress. Portable software is ok, but software dependent on properitary software is IMHO evil.
--- malin.vidarlo.net ping statistics ---
15 packets transmitted, 15 received, 0% packet loss, time 14003ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.310/0.347/0.375/0.019 ms
2 hops, over 100Mb ethernet with a cheapass switch (8 port unmanaged hp).
Seems like he got no grip on numbers...
"I wrote a tiny Perl script that tied together other people's programs that search for blank passwords, so you could scan 65,000 machines in just over eight minutes."
65000/8 = 8125 per min.
8125/60 = 135 per sec.
Dunno about that. Just the time it takes to bring up a socket and get some syn/ack going chews up a good portion of a second. Maybe he was searching a local password database.
In the TFA he says he was on a 56K dial-up link...Say each machine sends a 25 byte login string, you send a 20byte login credentials, they send 50 byte denials. That is around 100 bytes pr machine, in a theoretical minimum (overhead for TCP/IP - telnet handshakes and such makes it probably three times as much). So 135 machines would mean 135*100bytes=13.5kB/sec. 56K modem has 33.6kb upload speed, so he could send 4kB/sec at optimal. So he is clearly a nutjob.
I thought there was something named fair use? Which translated into common sense?
This sounds like complete crap. Such an logo will increase peoples knowledge about the artist, and thus increase the popularity of the artist, and make images more worth. I doubt anyone would tear down their Miro paintings and put up a print of the google logo instead...
The copyright holders should see that google links this to a search on the artist, which probably generates more knowledge about the artist, and more interest for his works. I'd guess there where firms that would pay millions to have their style on the google logo, and a link from the logo to a search of their company name...
And why? Because the optics still sucks. I guess there ain't enough space for a good camera inside a phone, because the optics ain't small enough. While the ccd or cmos sensor is small enough, it needs good optics to give good quality.
Say you've got the good optics, and a decent sensor... A ccd uses more power than a cmos, and needs more light. A cmos however, gives lots of artifacts (noise) in the picture, but performs better in low-ligt conditions, and needs less power.
CMOS sensor - low power, low light level needed, but artifacts (noise) in the picture
CCD sensor - powerhungry, needs good lgiht, good quality
Ok, so we go for a ccd. Then we need a good flash, which takes even more power. Power which has to come from a capacitor since a battery can't deliver high enough voltage and enough current fast enough. A capacitor and flash takes up space.
In short, if we want small phones, we won't get decent image quality. If we can accept a phone twice as big as the ones we have, we can just bundle together a normal compact camera and a phone...
Slashdot is always like this. Instead of doing one, subtle april fool story, they post nothing but april fool stories. IMO, it is damn stupid, since almost noone reads slashdot that day anyhow.
I think it'd be better to try to actually fool someone, with a story so subtle that it would look plauseable... None of the stories the last 24h looks remotely likely.
2.2x-ish MHz is a significant frequency because it is a resonant frequency of water
That is absolute bullshit. It works because 2.4GHz is reasonably well stopped by water, and thus energy absorbed by water. It has nothing with resonant frequency to do. Try heating oil or fat in a microwave oven.
Besides, a few paragraphs would do nice in your comment; it is unreadable as one huge textblock.
Obviosly you've heard some myths, read something, but you don't have a definite knowledge of the area. Please, link your sources?
Wouldn't Mozilla be considered an executable? Thus reinforcing the parent's point and making you look like a boob for jumping on him?
Read the post. He clearly said that only executables can carry malicious codes. No, a png can carry malicious code, which it can fool mozilla into executing. Read before you judge.
>allowing a png image rendered in mozilla to execute code
so come on what does this.png image look like?
i think i know.
URL:http://photobucket.com/albums/f173/fooded/?act ion=view¤t=unix-insecure.png?
Troll. Go away.
Chances for buffer overflow excist in linux, as they do in windows, or any OS. libpng was a realistic example (there has been buffer overflows before), but it could be in a handler in gaim, a function in openoffice overwriting other memory, you name it.
Please mod parent down.
Besides, as in unix only exectuable files can be a source of infection, rather than screwed up images and office files, I can safely copy away anything I want.
So a libpng buffer overflow, allowing a png image rendered in mozilla to execute code can't be harmfull? Sorry pal, but this is not a problem with the OS, but the applications and libraries.
Slashdot Mirror
Will anyone do tech support for free? Sure, I might reply in irc channels and mailing lists, but not in Instant Messaging. The thing with irc and mailing lists is that there is a chance that other people will get the answer, and look at it, and learn. By using a closed, 1-to-1 protocol like IM, you offset this. I think it is better to let people write good documentation for a product, than to let others provide tech support.
Tech support is mostly called by idiots anyway, and I'd not manage to answer politely to stupid questions.
...or was the article lacking any significant text? It gave me no clue of what he have done, expcet for hollowing out a old MAC, adding an amplifier and such. What amplifier? How did he interface to the iPod? Does the thing control the iPod, or just output the sound?
I guess the latter, that it is just a fancy set of speakers with a 3.5mm jack to connect it to any portable equipment with a headset output. It's not really innovative even. What would have been innovative was if he'd made a interface to control the iPod. As far as I know, that is not so straight forward, and you'll need a bit of electronics skills, and you'll probably have to write a program for a microcontroller to do the communication...
But as he have done it? Worthless. And TFA gives little or no information on it.
...or it will be spamridden. We have tucows, which was useable, but only had windows software. We have freshmeat, which is useable, but mostly free software. We have sourceforge, which hosts free software. Point is, all those software catalogs is either narrow in scope, requires registration from the individual software project, is spam ridden, or disappears.
And how would you rate programs? Ensure that links works? Whom should you credit for the programs? What if the homepage moves? Sounds like a lot of if's without good answers.
And if they are submission-based, how many will bother? How many dupes will there be? Is MS Office 2003 seperate program from MS Office 2004 for MAC? Is Firefox and mozilla discrete apps? What about the different parts of the KDE suite?
To force people interested in live stats either to view their website (=ad revenue) or watch their tv broadcast (=ad revenue). 3rd party apps accessing the information means less ad revenue. Simple as that.
If you read the article, you'll see that he found the key in the flash applet that presented the data to the website visitors. So even if they used a truly random key, it would be worth no more, since the client could just read the flash file (de-assemblers for flash is out there. Search on google.), and get the key. So really, there is no point of better encryption, because the determined people will get the key anyway.
Remember that flash runs on your computer. Thus, the encryption key has to be on your computer so the flash application can decode the XML file and show you the results. As long as Trusted Computing does not excist, there is no way to stop a determined person from getting the key. Thus, using a stronger key would not make it more difficult. It is not like the key was discovered by accident. The writer of TFA was looking for the key in the flash file...
Nothing here to see, please move along!
Still flawed. MSN Messenger is not sinking, nor drowning. It is quite well afloat, more so in Europe than in USA, but still, no reason to panic over this particular product for MS. What's important for them is that their official client is better than the unofficial clients, like gaim and amsn, so that people use the official version, and MS gets their ad revenue. So actually, through competition, aMSN forces MS to introduce new features.
The downside is that those features is properitary, so the 3rd party clients have to reverse engineer them
Mind you, voice chat is not a buzzword. However, VOiP is a buzzword and is used in marketing. So therefor they rename it.
Let's do some easy math: E=1/2mv^2 where v is 50000m/sec, m is 100kg. You get quite a lot of energy. Some of it will make heat by friction, but parts of will vapourize stone...
no, you can not compare it. The scens was there, but disabled. You had to activly install a patch to view them. That is, you, as a consumer, had to deliberately want to view them. Which would mean that you dipped your own candy in peatnuts...
sighYou don't know what percent is. It is a relation. If a Win2k3 server is down 10 hours, and the Linux server down 20% more, then it is 10hrs*1.2=12hrs. Which makes sense.
So the linux server has 20% more downtime, not 20% of the total year, which you calculated.
Because there are no documentation problems. Do you find an OS with a more well documentet API than Linux? More documentation than Gentoo has? The problem is that they have not studied what I'd dare say is the serious users, they've studied those without in-house competence on Linux.
*NIX-admins are probably more expensive than windows-admins, since there is fewer of them. Those organizations running old UNIX's typically have quite competent admins in-house, and quite different hardware. Windows and linux often runs on off-the-shelf hardware, which I guess explains why UNIX beats both of them
With Linux, the effect is double. A lot of companies have windows admins with some level of degree, but those who know unix, works in the serious business with big unix-machines. Those who adopt Linux have typically not used Unix before I guestimate.
What would be interesting would be to see a study between HP's Windows and Linux servers, since they provide the hardware themself, and should have in-house competance on both OS's.
Compare real things, do not compare different things. Anyone remember Microsoft UK's ad? I think it was along the lines of a x86 off-the-shelf with mssql and win2k compared to a IBM POWER machine. Of course, the ad proved that Linux was more expensive.... This reminds me of that.
You forget one thing: This piece of software depends on non-free software, which means you have a vendor-tie-in. I can not use this product without MS software. That means the software is useless in a free-software world. Read RMS' thoughts on java, Free But Shackled - The Java Trap for more thoughts on this. I agree with Stallman on this topic; a free software world requires all software to be free, and producing fsf-stuff designed to only run on windows harms the over all progress. Portable software is ok, but software dependent on properitary software is IMHO evil.
--- malin.vidarlo.net ping statistics --- 15 packets transmitted, 15 received, 0% packet loss, time 14003ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.310/0.347/0.375/0.019 ms 2 hops, over 100Mb ethernet with a cheapass switch (8 port unmanaged hp). Seems like he got no grip on numbers...
In the TFA he says he was on a 56K dial-up link...Say each machine sends a 25 byte login string, you send a 20byte login credentials, they send 50 byte denials. That is around 100 bytes pr machine, in a theoretical minimum (overhead for TCP/IP - telnet handshakes and such makes it probably three times as much). So 135 machines would mean 135*100bytes=13.5kB/sec. 56K modem has 33.6kb upload speed, so he could send 4kB/sec at optimal. So he is clearly a nutjob.
This sounds like complete crap. Such an logo will increase peoples knowledge about the artist, and thus increase the popularity of the artist, and make images more worth. I doubt anyone would tear down their Miro paintings and put up a print of the google logo instead...
The copyright holders should see that google links this to a search on the artist, which probably generates more knowledge about the artist, and more interest for his works. I'd guess there where firms that would pay millions to have their style on the google logo, and a link from the logo to a search of their company name...
Tools->Adblock->Adblock prefcerences and select hide ads at the bottom. Ads will be downloaded, but you won't see them. Presto!
And why? Because the optics still sucks. I guess there ain't enough space for a good camera inside a phone, because the optics ain't small enough. While the ccd or cmos sensor is small enough, it needs good optics to give good quality.
Say you've got the good optics, and a decent sensor... A ccd uses more power than a cmos, and needs more light. A cmos however, gives lots of artifacts (noise) in the picture, but performs better in low-ligt conditions, and needs less power.
Ok, so we go for a ccd. Then we need a good flash, which takes even more power. Power which has to come from a capacitor since a battery can't deliver high enough voltage and enough current fast enough. A capacitor and flash takes up space.
In short, if we want small phones, we won't get decent image quality. If we can accept a phone twice as big as the ones we have, we can just bundle together a normal compact camera and a phone...
Slashdot is always like this. Instead of doing one, subtle april fool story, they post nothing but april fool stories. IMO, it is damn stupid, since almost noone reads slashdot that day anyhow.
I think it'd be better to try to actually fool someone, with a story so subtle that it would look plauseable... None of the stories the last 24h looks remotely likely.
That is absolute bullshit. It works because 2.4GHz is reasonably well stopped by water, and thus energy absorbed by water. It has nothing with resonant frequency to do. Try heating oil or fat in a microwave oven.
Besides, a few paragraphs would do nice in your comment; it is unreadable as one huge textblock.
Obviosly you've heard some myths, read something, but you don't have a definite knowledge of the area. Please, link your sources?
Read the post. He clearly said that only executables can carry malicious codes. No, a png can carry malicious code, which it can fool mozilla into executing. Read before you judge.
Troll. Go away.
Chances for buffer overflow excist in linux, as they do in windows, or any OS. libpng was a realistic example (there has been buffer overflows before), but it could be in a handler in gaim, a function in openoffice overwriting other memory, you name it. Please mod parent down.
So a libpng buffer overflow, allowing a png image rendered in mozilla to execute code can't be harmfull? Sorry pal, but this is not a problem with the OS, but the applications and libraries.