Actually, you might not be entirely correct. I think it depends on how heavily trafficed the airport is. With QANTAS here in Australia (with comparatively small airports), almost all descents/landings are manual. It's only in case of severe weather that they activate the auto-landing feature.
Why? Because in my experience, the pilots do a better job at managing a smooth landing. The two (I think?) automated landings I've experienced have had a very noticable "touch down bump". I would liken the experience to being in a car with someone planting their foot on the brake in a car with ABS - it gets the job done quite safely, but it's not a smooth ride.
If you reckon Lutefisk is bad, you obviously have not yet had the "pleasure" of encountering the Swedish "delicacy" known as "Surströmming".
To make surströmming you take a perfectly good piece of raw fish, stick it in a tin can, and then let it sit there fermenting for at least a year (the longer the better, apparently).
After that, you open it, and eat it without any further preparation. Don't ask me what you normally have with it, because I don't know; 5 seconds after the can has been opened I am a few kilometers away, desperately attempting to escape the stench (generally together with everyone else in the neighbourhood).
So, just be thankful it's only Lutefisk on that map - had it been surströmming the martians would have accused us of chemical warfare!;-)
That's the Chomsky school of linguistics. There are other equally valid theories, so please don't just state it like it is an immutable fact.
I'll have to bite on this one.
As someone who has English as his second language (Swedish being my first, and German third), I do find it to be the case that the language I'm thinking in very clearly limits what I can think about.
This is not due to having an insufficient vocabulary, but simply because there are some things that there are no words or phrases for in one or the other language. For abstract things, it can make it extremely difficult to express it in the other language.
While I'll accept that it might take significant time to fully subvert a language, there is no doubt as far as I'm concerned that restricting a language would be highly damaging. To take a few concrete examples from an area all Slashdotters would be familiar with, consider the following Swedish words:
sajt (site, as in web-site)
mejla to e-mail
skanna to scan using a (flatbed) scanner
Call them slang, imported words, verbed horrifics, or whatever else you want. By now they are an integral part of the Swedish language, and without them it would be quite difficult indeed to think about the modern uses of computers. Language, as all things, is evolving.
So no, restricting language forcibly is a Bad Idea(tm) in my books. I'm all for increasing the general language skills, but that's what education is for. (Though I sincerely hope we never get to the point where leet-speek is taught in school!)
Think about it. We could have an entire society where everyone speaks perfectly clear, grammatically precise day-to-day English (or whatever language you speak in your country)!
And the language would never evolve.
Or alternatively, the language would evolve in the direction set by certain Large Corporations. Enter doublespeak plus good.
The language defines what we can think about, and how we think about those things. It is not a good thing to attempt to restrict it, since by doing so we are restricting people's thoughts.
Having said that, I'll continue to make fun of anyone using 1337 5p33k.
True, but to be fair, no other enterprise UNIX comes bundled with the corresponding proprietary compiler, either.
Are you sure? When I installed Tru64 on my AlphaServer a couple of months ago, I rebuilt the kernel to include a few different options. Wonder how it was doing that without using a compiler?;-P
Yes, maybe it was using gcc (the server isn't running at the moment - it puts out too much heat, so I can't check right now), but even so, it comes with a compiler, which is the least you could expect of a Unix system. I wouldn't mind if Solaris included a binary build of gcc on a separate CD, as long as there was a compiler included somehow. I'm cool with the fact that not every install needs or should have one (for security reasons, for example), but some installs most definitely do!
Hell, universes live and die in the time Gentoo compiles. And I like Gentoo!:)
(except when I realized that the hardening use flag resulted in a non-working X.org, and I needed a working X the next day...)
I think it's really good that FreeBSD is getting this amount of attention - the plunge from FreeBSD 4 to 5 is *huge*, and hence needs lots of testing to ensure we don't have a repeat of the 3->4 saga (if you weren't around back then, there were numerous issues in the early FBSD4.x releases, and the jump from 3 to 4 wasn't as big as it is from 4 to 5).
If you dislike seeing the BSD posts, don't worry, BETA6 is the last scheduled beta (though there will be RC1 shortly).
Great, now you have to add a Mac flamewar into an already flamewar-prone topic!
No no no, you're getting them confused now. It's Burger King (a.k.a Hungry Jacks in some places) that has the flame-grilled burgers - Big Macs are not flame grilled!;-)
For best stability, go for FreeBSD 4.10. For the latest features, wait for 5.3 to be released. At the moment I'd roughly compare the two to Linux kernel 2.4 vs 2.6 - pretty much the same deal.
For Linux compatibility, you should probably start reading chapter 10 in the FreeBSD Handbook.
But instead of music being written by a persons creativity, its now a result of a script.
Oh, you mean like all of Britney's stuff?
(Oh I know, my karma will burn for this one...)
Personally I reckon this sounds way cool - and what the poster above seems to not realise, is that the scripts are constantly updated/written by a person (something that I don't think can be said of Brit-doh, there I go again). Sounds like a really cool (geek) way of DJ'ing!
I was very very close to having a LASIK op done, when I discovered surgicaleyes.com,
and changed my mind rather quickly - NO WAY I was going to take such a risk!
As it happens, I posted there asking if there were any alternatives, and got pointed to Ortho-K.net. By chance, the optometrist who suggested it (Grant Mason) turned out to live and work in Melbourne/Australia, which is where I am.
Said and done, I scheduled an appointment, had the assessment, and got a "fully satisfied or money back" offer to try it out.
Now let me say this in caps: BEST DECISION EVER!
Not only is it cheaper than LASIK, it doesn't carry those huge risks, it's not permanent, so I'll be able to adjust it over the years as my eyes change shape, and it even has a good chance of slowing down the rate of change!
My advice: If your vision is within the range that Ortho-K can handle - try it! If you're not satisfied, you can still decide to get the LASIK done...
I've been running CRM114 for about a year now, and it's performing extremely well. Far better than my Mozilla filter. In fact, just the other week I scrapped Mozilla's junk filter completely and am now relying on CRM alone. It's very rare that I get any misses in either direction.
If I was to make an estimate, I'd say that the error rate is something like.1%, quite possibly less (say 1 miss/5 days, with 200 mails per day). This is having started with clean corpus files and train-on-error only.
Without having read the article (this is slashdot after all), what's wrong with ENUM? That already provides phone# to location/service mapping via DNS...
I haven't had any problems changing anything that I could myself via their web interface. However, the one time when I needed a human being to assist me, I was sorely let down.
If I was to hazard a guess, it might be related to the fact that I'm not a US resident. You didn't mention if you were?
As for emails being taken in the wrong tone; well, the first few were as polite as the next persons. Towards the end I'll happily admit I wasn't being particularly generous with the benefit of the doubt. My point however, is that it should never have gotten to that point. Whoever they've got answering emails obviously has no customer service training what so ever (at least not any of the ones I dealt with during that incident). For starters, half the time they didn't _listen_ to what I was saying, and were sending back canned responses completely inappropriate to the question asked. The other half of the time they appeared to be simply incompetent.
"One person's experience" does not constitute a habit.
Then maybe I should chip in with my experience too? I had my account disabled after I'd requested to have my name on file changed (as I legally had my name changed, and wanted my PayPal account to reflect that fact). They refused to change the name, even after I'd provided the various forms of documentation. Then once I told them to just forget I even asked (I was getting fed up with them - I have better things to do with my time, thank you very much), they disabled the account.
After quite some time of getting no response, I finally got told that to reactivate it, I needed to send in various documentation. Again. Same deal. Same stuff that I'd already faxed them a couple of weeks earlier (and I don't like faxing internationally). Alright, so I play along, give them their stupid papers. After another substantial wait, I get told they refuse to reactivate my account due to the fact that I have multiple accounts and that's against their policy, and that I'll need to close all of them except one. WTF? At this point I was getting seriously pissed off. Needless to say, I don't have multiple accounts. If I did I wouldn't be concerned about this particular one. And how in the blue f*ck am I supposed to close an account when I can't even log onto it?!
After another round of seriously narky emails, they reactivated it, but I've never used it since. I keep it for emergency use only, but as long as I have a choice, they're not getting my business any more.
This may be news to/.'ers, but nail clippers, nail files, hell, even knitting needles are not banned anymore.
Still banned in Australia and Singapore, at least as of last week... And in Singapore you get the short guys with the big guns looking at you funny if you try it.
Nevermind the noise from the actual PC - that's bareable! It's my CD drive that drives me insane!
I couldn't agree more! The noise is the reason I rip every single CD I get (and why I get pissed off with the latest and greatest copy protection that makes it a pain to rip - mind you, it hasn't actually prevented me from copying anything yet).
Once ripped, I use Daemon Tools to mount the image on a virtual drive. Works like a charm, and reduces noise by heaps.
I might lose a bit in access speed since I put the CD image on my fileserver, but on the other hand I gain in noiselevels since the server is at the other end of the house, and I don't care how much noise the disks make over there:)
we can take comfort in knowing that *most* hackers/spooks don't exactly have a 100 node server farm laying around just dying to crack your keys.
Of course, unless you're the NSA and measure their servers by acres...
Or if you grabbed the source for the latest windoze worm and modded it to bruteforce keys in addition to spreading...
I have a suspicion that doing that would give you a supercomputer that quite possibly ranked #1 on the supercomputer charts, and for free to boot*.
*) Comes with complimentary government provided lodging and meals.
Re:VI is everywhere.
on
JOE Hits 3.0
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I know what you mean. When I was dropped into doing system development on a Solaris based product I initially set out with the intention of finally learning emacs.
Well, long story short, I couldn't the sucker to compile/run/whatever (I've forgotten the details by now), so I decided not to waste any more time and instead improve my vi skills.
Best decision ever. Easily. Now I have an extremely powerful, usable, lightweight editor that is available on every *nix under the Sun (ha ha).
Not to mention that starting up emacs on my old 386 would not be a pretty sight, considering that just doing "vi/etc/fstab" takes ~8secs before I can start editing...
This is not to say that Joe is bad/useless. I wouldn't say that, especially since I haven't used it. However, for me, and many others, it's not the most practical choice:)
Slashdot Mirror
Nice to see someone else has good taste too! :)
Actually, you might not be entirely correct. I think it depends on how heavily trafficed the airport is. With QANTAS here in Australia (with comparatively small airports), almost all descents/landings are manual. It's only in case of severe weather that they activate the auto-landing feature.
Why? Because in my experience, the pilots do a better job at managing a smooth landing. The two (I think?) automated landings I've experienced have had a very noticable "touch down bump". I would liken the experience to being in a car with someone planting their foot on the brake in a car with ABS - it gets the job done quite safely, but it's not a smooth ride.
For those of you who don't remember the evil bit, it's RFC 3514.
If you reckon Lutefisk is bad, you obviously have not yet had the "pleasure" of encountering the Swedish "delicacy" known as "Surströmming".
;-)
To make surströmming you take a perfectly good piece of raw fish, stick it in a tin can, and then let it sit there fermenting for at least a year (the longer the better, apparently).
After that, you open it, and eat it without any further preparation. Don't ask me what you normally have with it, because I don't know; 5 seconds after the can has been opened I am a few kilometers away, desperately attempting to escape the stench (generally together with everyone else in the neighbourhood).
So, just be thankful it's only Lutefisk on that map - had it been surströmming the martians would have accused us of chemical warfare!
As someone who has English as his second language (Swedish being my first, and German third), I do find it to be the case that the language I'm thinking in very clearly limits what I can think about.
This is not due to having an insufficient vocabulary, but simply because there are some things that there are no words or phrases for in one or the other language. For abstract things, it can make it extremely difficult to express it in the other language.
While I'll accept that it might take significant time to fully subvert a language, there is no doubt as far as I'm concerned that restricting a language would be highly damaging. To take a few concrete examples from an area all Slashdotters would be familiar with, consider the following Swedish words:
- sajt (site, as in web-site)
- mejla to e-mail
- skanna to scan using a (flatbed) scanner
Call them slang, imported words, verbed horrifics, or whatever else you want. By now they are an integral part of the Swedish language, and without them it would be quite difficult indeed to think about the modern uses of computers. Language, as all things, is evolving.So no, restricting language forcibly is a Bad Idea(tm) in my books. I'm all for increasing the general language skills, but that's what education is for. (Though I sincerely hope we never get to the point where leet-speek is taught in school!)
Or alternatively, the language would evolve in the direction set by certain Large Corporations. Enter doublespeak plus good.
The language defines what we can think about, and how we think about those things. It is not a good thing to attempt to restrict it, since by doing so we are restricting people's thoughts.
Having said that, I'll continue to make fun of anyone using 1337 5p33k.
Are you sure? When I installed Tru64 on my AlphaServer a couple of months ago, I rebuilt the kernel to include a few different options. Wonder how it was doing that without using a compiler? ;-P
Yes, maybe it was using gcc (the server isn't running at the moment - it puts out too much heat, so I can't check right now), but even so, it comes with a compiler, which is the least you could expect of a Unix system. I wouldn't mind if Solaris included a binary build of gcc on a separate CD, as long as there was a compiler included somehow. I'm cool with the fact that not every install needs or should have one (for security reasons, for example), but some installs most definitely do!
I have not only that - I have my own XX!
(Okay, it's a really bad pun, I admit it...)
Or "eigth asterisks"... ;-)
(except when I realized that the hardening use flag resulted in a non-working X.org, and I needed a working X the next day...)
I have karma to burn, thankfully ;-)
Doh!
:/
There goes my nicely planned week-off-work-to-upgrade-everything-to-5.3-REL
Okay, I'll bite.
:-P
I think it's really good that FreeBSD is getting this amount of attention - the plunge from FreeBSD 4 to 5 is *huge*, and hence needs lots of testing to ensure we don't have a repeat of the 3->4 saga (if you weren't around back then, there were numerous issues in the early FBSD4.x releases, and the jump from 3 to 4 wasn't as big as it is from 4 to 5).
If you dislike seeing the BSD posts, don't worry, BETA6 is the last scheduled beta (though there will be RC1 shortly).
Also somebody mentioned that *BSD is dead...
No no no, you're getting them confused now. It's Burger King (a.k.a Hungry Jacks in some places) that has the flame-grilled burgers - Big Macs are not flame grilled! ;-)
For Linux compatibility, you should probably start reading chapter 10 in the FreeBSD Handbook.
Oh, you mean like all of Britney's stuff?
(Oh I know, my karma will burn for this one...)
Personally I reckon this sounds way cool - and what the poster above seems to not realise, is that the scripts are constantly updated/written by a person (something that I don't think can be said of Brit-doh, there I go again). Sounds like a really cool (geek) way of DJ'ing!
I was very very close to having a LASIK op done, when I discovered surgicaleyes.com, and changed my mind rather quickly - NO WAY I was going to take such a risk!
As it happens, I posted there asking if there were any alternatives, and got pointed to Ortho-K.net. By chance, the optometrist who suggested it (Grant Mason) turned out to live and work in Melbourne/Australia, which is where I am.
Said and done, I scheduled an appointment, had the assessment, and got a "fully satisfied or money back" offer to try it out.
Now let me say this in caps: BEST DECISION EVER!
Not only is it cheaper than LASIK, it doesn't carry those huge risks, it's not permanent, so I'll be able to adjust it over the years as my eyes change shape, and it even has a good chance of slowing down the rate of change!
My advice: If your vision is within the range that Ortho-K can handle - try it! If you're not satisfied, you can still decide to get the LASIK done...
I've been running CRM114 for about a year now, and it's performing extremely well. Far better than my Mozilla filter. In fact, just the other week I scrapped Mozilla's junk filter completely and am now relying on CRM alone. It's very rare that I get any misses in either direction.
.1%, quite possibly less (say 1 miss/5 days, with 200 mails per day). This is having started with clean corpus files and train-on-error only.
If I was to make an estimate, I'd say that the error rate is something like
Without having read the article (this is slashdot after all), what's wrong with ENUM? That already provides phone# to location/service mapping via DNS...
I haven't had any problems changing anything that I could myself via their web interface. However, the one time when I needed a human being to assist me, I was sorely let down.
If I was to hazard a guess, it might be related to the fact that I'm not a US resident. You didn't mention if you were?
As for emails being taken in the wrong tone; well, the first few were as polite as the next persons. Towards the end I'll happily admit I wasn't being particularly generous with the benefit of the doubt. My point however, is that it should never have gotten to that point. Whoever they've got answering emails obviously has no customer service training what so ever (at least not any of the ones I dealt with during that incident). For starters, half the time they didn't _listen_ to what I was saying, and were sending back canned responses completely inappropriate to the question asked. The other half of the time they appeared to be simply incompetent.
Then maybe I should chip in with my experience too? I had my account disabled after I'd requested to have my name on file changed (as I legally had my name changed, and wanted my PayPal account to reflect that fact). They refused to change the name, even after I'd provided the various forms of documentation. Then once I told them to just forget I even asked (I was getting fed up with them - I have better things to do with my time, thank you very much), they disabled the account.
After quite some time of getting no response, I finally got told that to reactivate it, I needed to send in various documentation. Again. Same deal. Same stuff that I'd already faxed them a couple of weeks earlier (and I don't like faxing internationally). Alright, so I play along, give them their stupid papers. After another substantial wait, I get told they refuse to reactivate my account due to the fact that I have multiple accounts and that's against their policy, and that I'll need to close all of them except one. WTF? At this point I was getting seriously pissed off. Needless to say, I don't have multiple accounts. If I did I wouldn't be concerned about this particular one. And how in the blue f*ck am I supposed to close an account when I can't even log onto it?!
After another round of seriously narky emails, they reactivated it, but I've never used it since. I keep it for emergency use only, but as long as I have a choice, they're not getting my business any more.
Still banned in Australia and Singapore, at least as of last week... And in Singapore you get the short guys with the big guns looking at you funny if you try it.
I couldn't agree more! The noise is the reason I rip every single CD I get (and why I get pissed off with the latest and greatest copy protection that makes it a pain to rip - mind you, it hasn't actually prevented me from copying anything yet). Once ripped, I use Daemon Tools to mount the image on a virtual drive. Works like a charm, and reduces noise by heaps.
I might lose a bit in access speed since I put the CD image on my fileserver, but on the other hand I gain in noiselevels since the server is at the other end of the house, and I don't care how much noise the disks make over there :)
Of course, unless you're the NSA and measure their servers by acres...
Or if you grabbed the source for the latest windoze worm and modded it to bruteforce keys in addition to spreading...
I have a suspicion that doing that would give you a supercomputer that quite possibly ranked #1 on the supercomputer charts, and for free to boot*.
*) Comes with complimentary government provided lodging and meals.
I know what you mean. When I was dropped into doing system development on a Solaris based product I initially set out with the intention of finally learning emacs.
/etc/fstab" takes ~8secs before I can start editing...
:)
Well, long story short, I couldn't the sucker to compile/run/whatever (I've forgotten the details by now), so I decided not to waste any more time and instead improve my vi skills.
Best decision ever. Easily.
Now I have an extremely powerful, usable, lightweight editor that is available on every *nix under the Sun (ha ha).
Not to mention that starting up emacs on my old 386 would not be a pretty sight, considering that just doing "vi
This is not to say that Joe is bad/useless. I wouldn't say that, especially since I haven't used it. However, for me, and many others, it's not the most practical choice