Reduce the size by half and arrange the pages side-by-side and print duplex. It doesn't take much paper, the batteries never run out, and it is more portable (in the case of up to a few books).
If you live in the West, ask your local library what book binding equipment they have. Often, libraries bind books since the covers wear down over the years. If you can get your book bound, the result is, well, like a library book! Some countries even have shops that will do this for you for a few US dollars per book. Here in Thailand, getting eBooks printed is one of my favorite activities.
(Shameless plug!) Recently, to teach myself Rails, I made a site (from 100% free software) offering convenient eBook printing and delivery: Siam eBook Printers. We discount books about open source too. It doesn't make much money, but it was possibly the most fun project I've ever done. Contact me if you want to know how it works!
Obviously, you've never been to Thailand. Nobody codes for fun. If you go back and look at all the articles about the low open source participation from India, it is exactly the same here. But Thailand has only a small fraction of the educated population of India and a very tiny fraction of its technical expertise. In four years of heavy open source work, I have met three people who code for their own pleasure.
Technical jobs in Thailand are much more just something people do to get better pay. One benefit from that is the large proportion of women engineers in IT (I have seen well over 50% representation in the telecom sector). Westerners are fortunate to live at the tippy-top of Maslow's hierarchy, but ample free time and personal satisfaction is a luxury most people in the world can't afford.
(Anyway, open source is of course as strong a pillar of the technology sector here as anywhere.)
Just got back from my third viewing tonight. It took that many times for all that architect talk to sink in. A few thoughts...
First, AFAICT, they are definitely still in the Matrix. The architect is intentionally difficult to follow, but I think his point was, the 99% acceptance rate is nice, but something must be done with those who do not accept. And the answer is simply have the Matrix make them think they busted out. Also, there's no need for any meta-Matrix, as the first Matrix could easily simulate the escape. Think chroot vs. user-mode Linux. But that's a small point.
If you watch again, you will notice the Merelvengian (sp) say that Neo's predecessors had much more respect, and also that he has survived those predecessors, and he will survive Neo. But that's all said before you know what he means. But what I got is that eventually, the shit hits the fan, and they just reboot the whole damned thing every hundred years or so (not a bad uptime).
Also, unlike you, I think he made the choice. Neo chose not to go to the source. At first, I thought this was weird, because the Neos on TV did the same. I thought this was the previous recordings (i.e. all 6 made the same choice); but after watching again, it looks like the TVs are showing now, not the past. That makes sense. This is the first time Neo made the wrong choice. I'm thinking this fits the Hollywood formula pretty well. The previous 5 Neos were simply benevolent mankind-lovers; but this time, we get the predictable theme that love conquers all or such.
I thought it was pretty cool, but the plot is treading into dangerous ground. When you start blurring reality with dreams, you're walking on cheesy, overused deus ex machina storylines. It's easy to get lame and make crap. E.g. look at how dumb Existenz ended up being. But then, I liked Total Recall, so there is hope for a great finale.
So I think there's still a lot up for grabs. Since Zion and the war are still a computer simulation, for all we know, there might not even be a war going on at all! Although there probably is, since it wouldn't be very Hollywood to just handwave away two movies worth of bad guys.
Anyway, I'm thinking now that they know they're still in the matrix, perhaps the people in Zion will start breaking the rules and have some actual means of fighting the approaching machine army? Or maybe they'll all just pop up a level, leaving the machine army there to twiddle their thumbs.
Put it on your handheld and use Weasel Reader. IIRC, it was designed to read Gutenberg texts, and it was originally called Gutenpalm. Anyway, Weasel has all the usual features for ebook readers, and it uses zlib, so its texts are smaller than the PalmDoc native format. Very highly rated on palm.freshmeat.net.
Also, it comes with programs to convert.txt files, so you can also use ps2ascii and read postscript or even PDFs.
Sure I agree. But in my country, the Internet in general and the last mile in particular are very immature. I'd say they're maybe 4 or 5 years behind America in terms of deployment and cost.
I live in the most expensive city in Thailand (which is in turn a relatively expensive country WRT most of its neighbors), and cops here get paid less than $150 U.S. per month plus bribes. To everybody in the US, think about your friend who's dad was a cop and think about the nice middle-class house he probably lived in. The economies of scale just haven't hit here yet because $60 US per month is astronomical for your average joe. Hell, most don't even have computers yet.
If I were still in the U.S., sure I'd be getting ripped off. But not here. Also, most dialup ISPs here don't even give you an SMTP relay, and of course, due to my location, those ISPs are on every spam RBL on the net. So it's still an improvement, and I'm happy to use it.
If I belonged to that ISP in the UK, sure I'd be upset, but remember not to imbue your idea of the average standard of living on to the rest of the world, because it won't fit.
Those stories you hear about "Asia" aren't about Asia. They are about Japan, and probably only Tokyo. That's like saying you can get 10 Mbit connections in "the Americas." Try waving your ethernet card around in Uruguay and see what they tell you.
In Bangkok, Thailand, I'm paying just over $60 U.S. per month for 3GB up+down. First offense, and they cancel my account -- and this is the cheapest broadband ISP in town. That means 100MB per day, so I've got to go about a week with no internet to compensate for downloading just one CD image.
I just moved to Bangkok from the U.S. I must say, I was absolutely stunned at the low prices of VCDs. Not shady pirated copies, mind you: I'm talking real, shrink-wrapped-and-hologram-thingy Hollywood movies.
VCDs are Heaven. I absolutely love that I can sacrifice a little quality for a great price. (Where have I heard that before?)
Get this: Today, I just bought three more movies for $7! All perfectly legit. That beats the hell out of stressing over mencoder and your Netflix queue. And guess what? I can perfectly legally encode to mpeg4 to put on one CD, or on my home file server (I like to play music and movies with a wireless laptop.) Frankly, I'm having so much fun, I can't believe I'm not breaking any laws.
In two months, I've spent more money on legal movies in Bangkok than I did in the U.S. in probaly the last two years (and I make next to nothing at my job right now). Why? Because I don't feel alienated and villified as a consumer.
We have recently done just this using the Linux Virtual Server Project, and it has turned out very well. Just be prepared to read a lot of documentation.
Basically, you patch a stock Linux kernel and use a tool similar to ipchains to establish virtual services. These services forward requests to your back-end real servers according to a flexible ruleset that you design.
You can use NAT to hide the real servers from the Internet if you like. This allows you to use most any web server you like (such as IIS), but more fancy routing tricks can be done with Unix or Linux servers for even better results. We use NAT at our site (university EE department) and it can handle more load than we will ever receive -- our objective is high-availability. Also, you can use different methods for different server clusters on the same director (e.g. tunneling tricks for Linux apache servers, and less magic for IIS).
And LVS can be set up such that once a user connects to a particular server, his subsequent connections go back to the same server.
Also, you can use freely-available third-party tools like Mon to watch your real servers for failure and dequeue them, page you, etc. etc. The bottom line is, since you are using Free tools to do this project, you are limited by your imagination as to what you can do with your cluster.
I have been very happy with the result. And so have many others.
If you want to hear big names, LVS is used by linux.com, Sourceforge, zope.org, VA Systems, and RealNetworks, according to their deployment page.
I use KDE for everything but Konqueror. To use the web, I use Mozilla, and to do file management, I'd rather just drop to a shell.
Otherwise, I love all the integration I can (selectively) get from environments like KDE and GNOME. It's perfectly usable without Konq or Galeon/Nautilus/Etc.
I agree that it is fair to compare KDE with the Windows user environment. But then you see that KDE already does everything that these guys are fighting over; any software can be compiled out of the system, and it's already broken up into major componets for you.
Debian unstable will continue development as usual. If you want
cutting-edge software, go for it.
Keep in mind that virtually all free software programmers
release software in this fashion: people work on a development branch
and a stable branch, and users can decide which is more important to
them. For example, look at the Linux kernel.
In my case this is extremely welcome news, since we decided to use
Debian 2.2 on production machines a long time ago. They have always
been stable and secure, but the distribution is getting dated (no XFree
4.x, Linux 2.4.x, etc.) and I am catching pressure from above since Red
Hat now has all these features in its "production quality" distribution.
(I've got no religious issues with Red Hat, I just do not want to
administer it on production systems. I do still suggest it to
beginners, for example. And to hard-core programmers, I often find
myself suggesting BSD; but Deb is my favorite *nix.)
I know this thread is a troll, but I still want to express how relieved
I am that a new Debian stable will be coming down the pipe soon. I
administer Debian among a sea of Red Hat-leaning managers, and I've
recently been hard pressed to explain to the PHBs why we should stay
with the older Debian software. It's been difficult to suggest my
favorite distribution to anybody but Linux hackers or people who know about security. And Debian is more
than just a distribution for Linux hackers. In my opinion, if people put
their faith in a Free Software operating system, and an open source
development model, they should put equal faith in the same
development process on the distribution level. It's just as
powerful, but one level of abstraction higher. As they say, Linux done the Linux
way.
@Home has no liability. It does, however, have a responsibility toward its userbase.
Actually, if @Home has any responsibility, it is to make money. Generally, this goes hand-in-hand with treating customers well. A (n inevitable?) lawsuit from the RIAA for a few newsgroups is not exactly a good business risk.
@Home is simply picking its battles; and this one it would not win.
As others have stated, philosiphically and politically, this is very shitty; but @Home, as a business, doesn't have much choice. I don't blame them. I blame the best justice system money can buy.
Knowing when to apply a given technology to a certain task is a trait of an experienced geek. This applies to programming languages, operating systems, hardware, etc. And it certainly applies to realism on the silver screen.
I sure as hell wasn't impressed with Episode One's liberal CGI usage.
I am now in college for computer science, so of course high school CS classes were a breeze. But the thing that I realized right off the bat was that, especially in CS classes, not everybody is working on the same level and at the same rate. The key to a great learning experience (in any field for that matter) is something that the student finds interesting and personally challenging. In my class, static, huge, final projects were either cumbersome and boring for the advanced students or cumbersome and difficult for the slower students. Nobody had fun.
The key to a good project, from a teacher's standpoint, is well-guided flexibility. Interest, not assignment, drives good schoolwork.
Slashdot Mirror
Reduce the size by half and arrange the pages side-by-side and print duplex. It doesn't take much paper, the batteries never run out, and it is more portable (in the case of up to a few books).
If you live in the West, ask your local library what book binding equipment they have. Often, libraries bind books since the covers wear down over the years. If you can get your book bound, the result is, well, like a library book! Some countries even have shops that will do this for you for a few US dollars per book. Here in Thailand, getting eBooks printed is one of my favorite activities.
(Shameless plug!) Recently, to teach myself Rails, I made a site (from 100% free software) offering convenient eBook printing and delivery: Siam eBook Printers. We discount books about open source too. It doesn't make much money, but it was possibly the most fun project I've ever done. Contact me if you want to know how it works!
Obviously, you've never been to Thailand. Nobody codes for fun. If you go back and look at all the articles about the low open source participation from India, it is exactly the same here. But Thailand has only a small fraction of the educated population of India and a very tiny fraction of its technical expertise. In four years of heavy open source work, I have met three people who code for their own pleasure.
Technical jobs in Thailand are much more just something people do to get better pay. One benefit from that is the large proportion of women engineers in IT (I have seen well over 50% representation in the telecom sector). Westerners are fortunate to live at the tippy-top of Maslow's hierarchy, but ample free time and personal satisfaction is a luxury most people in the world can't afford.
(Anyway, open source is of course as strong a pillar of the technology sector here as anywhere.)
They do that in Spaceballs too. "Handprint identification please..."
And I think there is another movie where the hero uses a severed finger for a fingerprint scanner. Maybe Total Recall. I forgot.
Same situation in Thailand.
Then at least I won't get angry when obvious astroturfing for niche products get posted on my slashdot front page.
I swear there must be an ad company out there generating these via a web form and a cron job.
It's not that big of a deal.
HahahahahahA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!112341324OMFG
You mean, "my wife and me," of course. Nothing looks worse than over-applying a rule of English to avoid looking bad.
The Uncanny Valley.
It got moderated as interesting, not insightful.
But thanks for the history lesson.
Just got back from my third viewing tonight. It took that many times for all that architect talk to sink in. A few thoughts...
First, AFAICT, they are definitely still in the Matrix. The architect is intentionally difficult to follow, but I think his point was, the 99% acceptance rate is nice, but something must be done with those who do not accept. And the answer is simply have the Matrix make them think they busted out. Also, there's no need for any meta-Matrix, as the first Matrix could easily simulate the escape. Think chroot vs. user-mode Linux. But that's a small point.
If you watch again, you will notice the Merelvengian (sp) say that Neo's predecessors had much more respect, and also that he has survived those predecessors, and he will survive Neo. But that's all said before you know what he means. But what I got is that eventually, the shit hits the fan, and they just reboot the whole damned thing every hundred years or so (not a bad uptime).
Also, unlike you, I think he made the choice. Neo chose not to go to the source. At first, I thought this was weird, because the Neos on TV did the same. I thought this was the previous recordings (i.e. all 6 made the same choice); but after watching again, it looks like the TVs are showing now, not the past. That makes sense. This is the first time Neo made the wrong choice. I'm thinking this fits the Hollywood formula pretty well. The previous 5 Neos were simply benevolent mankind-lovers; but this time, we get the predictable theme that love conquers all or such.
I thought it was pretty cool, but the plot is treading into dangerous ground. When you start blurring reality with dreams, you're walking on cheesy, overused deus ex machina storylines. It's easy to get lame and make crap. E.g. look at how dumb Existenz ended up being. But then, I liked Total Recall, so there is hope for a great finale.
So I think there's still a lot up for grabs. Since Zion and the war are still a computer simulation, for all we know, there might not even be a war going on at all! Although there probably is, since it wouldn't be very Hollywood to just handwave away two movies worth of bad guys.
Anyway, I'm thinking now that they know they're still in the matrix, perhaps the people in Zion will start breaking the rules and have some actual means of fighting the approaching machine army? Or maybe they'll all just pop up a level, leaving the machine army there to twiddle their thumbs.
Also, it comes with programs to convert .txt files, so you can also use ps2ascii and read postscript or even PDFs.
Sure I agree. But in my country, the Internet in general and the last mile in particular are very immature. I'd say they're maybe 4 or 5 years behind America in terms of deployment and cost.
I live in the most expensive city in Thailand (which is in turn a relatively expensive country WRT most of its neighbors), and cops here get paid less than $150 U.S. per month plus bribes. To everybody in the US, think about your friend who's dad was a cop and think about the nice middle-class house he probably lived in. The economies of scale just haven't hit here yet because $60 US per month is astronomical for your average joe. Hell, most don't even have computers yet.
If I were still in the U.S., sure I'd be getting ripped off. But not here. Also, most dialup ISPs here don't even give you an SMTP relay, and of course, due to my location, those ISPs are on every spam RBL on the net. So it's still an improvement, and I'm happy to use it.
If I belonged to that ISP in the UK, sure I'd be upset, but remember not to imbue your idea of the average standard of living on to the rest of the world, because it won't fit.
Those stories you hear about "Asia" aren't about Asia. They are about Japan, and probably only Tokyo. That's like saying you can get 10 Mbit connections in "the Americas." Try waving your ethernet card around in Uruguay and see what they tell you.
In Bangkok, Thailand, I'm paying just over $60 U.S. per month for 3GB up+down. First offense, and they cancel my account -- and this is the cheapest broadband ISP in town. That means 100MB per day, so I've got to go about a week with no internet to compensate for downloading just one CD image.
1 GB per day! That would be heaven.
I just moved to Bangkok from the U.S. I must say, I was absolutely stunned at the low prices of VCDs. Not shady pirated copies, mind you: I'm talking real, shrink-wrapped-and-hologram-thingy Hollywood movies.
VCDs are Heaven. I absolutely love that I can sacrifice a little quality for a great price. (Where have I heard that before?)
Get this: Today, I just bought three more movies for $7! All perfectly legit. That beats the hell out of stressing over mencoder and your Netflix queue. And guess what? I can perfectly legally encode to mpeg4 to put on one CD, or on my home file server (I like to play music and movies with a wireless laptop.) Frankly, I'm having so much fun, I can't believe I'm not breaking any laws.
In two months, I've spent more money on legal movies in Bangkok than I did in the U.S. in probaly the last two years (and I make next to nothing at my job right now). Why? Because I don't feel alienated and villified as a consumer.
We have recently done just this using the Linux Virtual Server Project, and it has turned out very well. Just be prepared to read a lot of documentation.
Basically, you patch a stock Linux kernel and use a tool similar to ipchains to establish virtual services. These services forward requests to your back-end real servers according to a flexible ruleset that you design.
You can use NAT to hide the real servers from the Internet if you like. This allows you to use most any web server you like (such as IIS), but more fancy routing tricks can be done with Unix or Linux servers for even better results. We use NAT at our site (university EE department) and it can handle more load than we will ever receive -- our objective is high-availability. Also, you can use different methods for different server clusters on the same director (e.g. tunneling tricks for Linux apache servers, and less magic for IIS).
And LVS can be set up such that once a user connects to a particular server, his subsequent connections go back to the same server.
Also, you can use freely-available third-party tools like Mon to watch your real servers for failure and dequeue them, page you, etc. etc. The bottom line is, since you are using Free tools to do this project, you are limited by your imagination as to what you can do with your cluster.
I have been very happy with the result. And so have many others. If you want to hear big names, LVS is used by linux.com, Sourceforge, zope.org, VA Systems, and RealNetworks, according to their deployment page.
Check out this Newsforge article by Roblimo: Custom browser developer says it's easy to switch from IE to Gecko
I use KDE for everything but Konqueror. To use the web, I use Mozilla, and to do file management, I'd rather just drop to a shell.
Otherwise, I love all the integration I can (selectively) get from environments like KDE and GNOME. It's perfectly usable without Konq or Galeon/Nautilus/Etc.
I agree that it is fair to compare KDE with the Windows user environment. But then you see that KDE already does everything that these guys are fighting over; any software can be compiled out of the system, and it's already broken up into major componets for you.
For a while, MP3s weren't anywhere except on a few PCs.
Debian unstable will continue development as usual. If you want cutting-edge software, go for it.
Keep in mind that virtually all free software programmers release software in this fashion: people work on a development branch and a stable branch, and users can decide which is more important to them. For example, look at the Linux kernel.
In my case this is extremely welcome news, since we decided to use Debian 2.2 on production machines a long time ago. They have always been stable and secure, but the distribution is getting dated (no XFree 4.x, Linux 2.4.x, etc.) and I am catching pressure from above since Red Hat now has all these features in its "production quality" distribution.
(I've got no religious issues with Red Hat, I just do not want to administer it on production systems. I do still suggest it to beginners, for example. And to hard-core programmers, I often find myself suggesting BSD; but Deb is my favorite *nix.)
I know this thread is a troll, but I still want to express how relieved I am that a new Debian stable will be coming down the pipe soon. I administer Debian among a sea of Red Hat-leaning managers, and I've recently been hard pressed to explain to the PHBs why we should stay with the older Debian software. It's been difficult to suggest my favorite distribution to anybody but Linux hackers or people who know about security. And Debian is more than just a distribution for Linux hackers. In my opinion, if people put their faith in a Free Software operating system, and an open source development model, they should put equal faith in the same development process on the distribution level. It's just as powerful, but one level of abstraction higher. As they say, Linux done the Linux way.
@Home is simply picking its battles; and this one it would not win.
As others have stated, philosiphically and politically, this is very shitty; but @Home, as a business, doesn't have much choice. I don't blame them. I blame the best justice system money can buy.
What was the title? I'd like to read that.
Perhaps so. But it might fall under the "stuff that matters" umbrella.
Also, as evidenced from this Slashdot article and previous ones, it seems to be a hot topic among geeks.
Knowing when to apply a given technology to a certain task is a trait of an experienced geek. This applies to programming languages, operating systems, hardware, etc. And it certainly applies to realism on the silver screen.
I sure as hell wasn't impressed with Episode One's liberal CGI usage.
I am now in college for computer science, so of course high school CS classes were a breeze. But the thing that I realized right off the bat was that, especially in CS classes, not everybody is working on the same level and at the same rate. The key to a great learning experience (in any field for that matter) is something that the student finds interesting and personally challenging. In my class, static, huge, final projects were either cumbersome and boring for the advanced students or cumbersome and difficult for the slower students. Nobody had fun.
The key to a good project, from a teacher's standpoint, is well-guided flexibility. Interest, not assignment, drives good schoolwork.