Well, to be fair, there aren't many Al Qaeda members with red hair and freckles who speak in an Irish brogue.
To be equally fair, statistically speaking there are practically no islamic arabs who are members of Al Qaeda either. Do a little division. It's like saying Finish people are kernel developers, or that people who are U.S. citizens work for Microsoft.
>Yes, there will. The "undo" button will be to reduce CO2 emissions after...
This is also an unknown. Somebody mentioned useing iron in the oceans. This may have the side affect of introducing red-bloom killing all life. Any number of actions that we take may actually introduce a number of side-effects that cuase more problems than they solve. Saying that we can do something on a QUICK global scale is truley the unknown and the ultimate in hubris.
Have you heard of plant life? Photosynthesis consumes CO2 and releases oxygen. And plant life, being far older than animal life, can survive any temperature change that's occured in the last many many millions of years, which far exceeds green house effects.
Left to itself, life will move toward equilibrium. Fears about the ecosystem being fragile make no sense. If it were fragile, would it even be here?
But what about its physical size? I mean, when you are dealing with monstrous astro-physical phenoms beyond human comprehension, isn't it important to be boggled by the density?
Because there IS no size. A black hole by definition is a singularity, and has no conceivable dimensions. The closest thing a black hole has to a size is what's called the Schwarzschild radius, or the event horizon. This radius is the distance from the center at which light can no longer escape (ignoring Hawking radiation, another topic entirely). The Schwarzschild radius is equal to 2GM/c^2, where G is the gravitational constant, c is the speed of light, and M is the mass of the black hole. So the radius is really nothing more than a constant times the mass.
If you know the mass, and you don't have rotation, you know everything that can be known about it.
So you're tired of./configure, etc... and you want an easy installer script for Linux that you can double click on to install programs? Here, I'll write you a general purpose installer program. Put this with any program you distribute as source and it will automatically install it by simply double clicking. You don't even have to click Next!:
Remember that Namesys is Hans Reiser company, so they like ReiserFS, but I don't think they cheat with the bechmarks.
Cheat, probably not, but accurate to common usage of a filesystem?
Be very careful interpreting those benchmarks, because the ones they consistently list first are the ones with a bunch of files that are 100 bytes in length, which is essentially the only area where Reiserfs really pulls ahead. Reiserfs is essentially tied with ext2 for all reasonably sized files that you would expect to find on a system. (Unless you're dealing with intense processing of millions of 100 byte files) When comparing ReiserFS to XFS and JFS, ReiserFS pulls way ahead for extremely small files, but the other filesystems perform notably better for reasonably sized files (10k) when synchronized.
For practical uses, neither filesystem seems to really pull ahead, so it's worth considering other features when deciding which to use.
One day a student came to Moon and said: "I understand how to make a better garbage collector. We must keep a reference count of the pointers to each cons."
Moon patiently told the student the following story:
"One day a student came to Moon and said: `I understand how to make a better garbage collector...
You neglected one very important fact in your calculations. Yes, there is more solar energy on an asteroid that is near the Earth, but this energy is useless. There's a lot of energy in the core of the Earth too, but that's also useless for the purpose of power generation. There is no convenient method of transporting the energy to a convenient location. (Especially when one considers that the asteroid will soon be many millions of miles from the Earth, even if it is close for a moment.)
First of all, in order to enable the special keys on my laptop, I went into gnomecc, Session Properties and Startup Programs, and added a Startup program to execute:/bin/sh/home/user/.xinitrc
Then I made an.xinitrc that reads:
xmodmap -e "keycode 66 = Caps_Lock"
xmodmap.xmodmaprc
Then I made an.xmodmaprc that reads:
keycode 66 = Caps_Lock
remove control = Caps_Lock
add lock = Caps_Lock
And if anyone is curious, mycdplay is a simple little shell script as follows (All it does is make my play button function as a pause button whenever the cd is being played, and a play button otherwise):
#!/bin/sh
if [ -e ~/.cdplaying ]
then
cdpause
rm -f ~/.cdplaying
else
cdplay
touch ~/.cdplaying
fi
As for ion, it appears to be a restriction on user ability, rather than an increase of user ability. I can already align my windows such that they don't overlap if I desire.
But I already have the flexibility of using my graphical interface almost entirely without my mouse. I'm running Gnome and Sawfish, and I can setup multiple desktops, indexable with alt-F#. Then if I keep the number of windows on my screen down to a reasonable number, no more than 3 or 4 (which is what ion would be limited to anyway for reasonable space consumption), then I can tab between them almost instantly with alt-tab. Then I can access them all immediately without the mouse, and without sacrificing the size of my windows, because they can all be close to full screen. As for organizing by graphical tabs, that's what the tasklist in the gnome panel is for, which is always an option when one feels the urge to reach for the mouse to find a window.
Every application I use regularly on my computer has an associated Sawfish shortcut. Mozilla, gnome-terminal, xmms, etc... Even shortcuts for common functions can be created in Sawfish, such as a shortcut locking the screen, shortcuts for raising and lowering volume, shortcuts for playing cd's (all using console-based tools, and the ability to bind a key combination in sawfish to the launch of arbitrary programs), shortcuts for closing a window, and shortcuts for bringing up frequently accessed files.
Excluding web browsing and copy/paste, I could go an entire day without having to reach for the mouse.
You could play Warcraft 2 strategically. Yes, it's a "simple" game compared to reality, but one thing I respect greatly about Blizzard is that they really took their time to balance Warcraft 2 in such a way that blitzing was not the best strategy. When good players played good players in Warcraft 2 team games, those who used "build lots of troops and attack with them" as their strategy simply lost.
The game was balanced such that proper use of magic, and using certain troops or structures against certain other troops or structures, was the only way to get an edge. The game was also balanced such that the number of troops you had usually said nothing about whether or not you would win, but instead, the infrastructure and resources you could corner determined your victory.
To do well in Warcraft 2, you needed to think ahead several levels. If your opponent is building demolition men, you need to build guard towers. But if you build guard towers, your opponent needs to build catapults or mages, so you need to find a way to defend against that, or to use recon. to find and destroy any catapults or mages. When you react to your opponent's strategy, you also need to begin planning for how your opponent will react to your reaction.
And of course, need I reiterate the importance of magic. It's very easy to make magic in a game work as another weapon of attack. But Blizzard didn't do that with Warcraft 2. Instead, they made magic a flexible way of implementing creative tactics. You could waltz an invisible mage into the middle of a town and cause a blizzard to fall on the central gold mine of your opponent, or you could have a death knight with haste and unholy armor walk up to a collection of opponent troops just standing around, and cast death&decay on them so they attack the death knight and just stand there dying because the spell is hasted so quickly. And strategies like that force defensive strategies to protect against them. You can't bunch your troops, or your opponent will destroy them. You need to constantly use recon. across the entire map to make sure your opponent isn't building up a secret collection of mages or demolition men somewhere.
And the actual battles themselves can be very strategical in warcraft 2. They are limited by the fact that the attention of the player is limited. A good team battle exploits this fact with distraction and deception.
I've been out of active gaming for a while, and don't know if anyone is still playing Warcraft 2. Perhaps someone could reply and point to where.
I want to be able to run Playstation 2 games on my Linux box. They have it all backwards. They need to release a Linux port of the Playstation 2. Now THAT would be something, even closed source and commercial, it would be a welcomed addition.
if you have to screw around for 20 hours on a linux box to get everything correct, you could have just bought all the software for a mac/win solution. choose your battles wisely..
Typically, I have to screw around for the same length of time on either system to get everything configured correctly. There are two differences. One, if I want to do something unusual on Linux, then I actually am able to configure it because it is more flexible. And two, once I finally get the system configured, the Linux one works consistently. Considering that I only configure a system once, and then use it thousands of times, that last point is of extreme importance.
I realize transmeta is a poster child company for the Slashdot community, but they really haven't made a notable contribution to the industry since their creation. I can't help but consider this another pie-in-the-sky agenda for them to attempt, because I can't come up with any reason for the embedded market to inflate that significantly that quickly. Yes, technologically we CAN embed technology in a lot of items, but what benefit do the consumers gain from this that makes it worth their money?
When it comes down to it, especially in a recession, average consumers aren't going to buy something that doesn't make their lives better.
It works on megastores, and it probably works better on them than the smaller stores. Your only problem was you 1, let him walk off without following him, and 2, then gave up and didn't complain to another employee about the faulty product and the unprofessional way you were treated by the first employee.
You're completely right that megastores don't care about individual customers, but you left it as an issue of an unhappy individual customer. It's a serious problem worth their time to deal with when you make a sufficient scene that other customers notice the way they're treating you.
As for your plan to rip off the shrinkwrap and bring the disc back to the store, most stores that I know of will only allow you to exchange a disc for another copy of the same disc. I guess you can stand there and argue about it with them.
You can stand there and argue with them, and that will fail. Then you can demand to see their manager, and that will fail. Then you can demand to see THAT person's manager, and by this point you are very loudly and defiantly demanding that they refund your money for selling you a piece of crap CD, of which none are even CD's because they don't even play in CD drives, and then I guarantee you will get your money back.
No business can afford to lose the amount of face they lose when an extremely irate customer is standing there shouting things that make perfect sense to all the other customers listening. Only the highest managers at a store are authorized to override store policy when they realize how bad their store looks for doing something stupid that all their other customers will look at as "unfair" to the customer.
Capitalism has its faults, but the desire of a company to make a profit can always put power in the hands of the consumer when you use it properly.
The best solution is to just add this to your/etc/hosts file. Then you can click on nytimes stories like stories from less annoying sites.
208.48.26.212 www.nytimes.com
Re:Not aliens, but robots
on
Review: A.I.
·
· Score: 2
Precisely. They talked about David as an "original" robot, which made it seem to me that the robots we were seeing weren't created directly by humans, but instead were created by other robots who were created by other robots, who somewhere down the line had been created by humans, but none of these original robots had survived, so there wasn't any lasting direct contact or knowledge of humans.
It's the same as the analogy of the ol' butterfly flapping its wings in SoCal and causing tsunamis in Japan.
I've heard this many times, but it's as ludicrous today as it was the first day I heard it. In general, a change in a system like the weather system will dissipate. If you run a computer simulation of the weather, and insert an extra butterfly, I guarantee you won't find a typhoon as a result. If you insert 200 butterflies, you still won't find a typhoon. It takes a good degree of coordinated energy to build up a sizeable structure, such as a typhoon. The second law of thermodynamics should tell you this. Entropy increases. If you put a butterfly in a closed box for a few minutes, have it flap its wings, and then take it out, the air in the box will settle to an equilibrium, it will not develop a whirlpool.
As for the ecosystem, it has survived for a hell of a long time. It won't be destroyed by a butterfly, or by a crop with a pesticide in it. The wonderful thing about life is its ability to adapt, so while we should take steps to make sure genetically modified food is precisely and only what we intend for it to be, there is no need to be fearful that a small change will blow itself out of proportion.
Seriously, this is just ridiculously stupid. There are some applications where a dedicated device is the most ideal device. Simple tools for a simple job, and there is much less chance of system failure.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that most current crypto algorithms are based on factoring primes
When you factor your first prime, I recommend publishing the result...
Well, to be fair, there aren't many Al Qaeda members with red hair and freckles who speak in an Irish brogue.
To be equally fair, statistically speaking there are practically no islamic arabs who are members of Al Qaeda either. Do a little division. It's like saying Finish people are kernel developers, or that people who are U.S. citizens work for Microsoft.
Since when did slashdot started announcing the DEVELOPEMENT kernel releases?! Go read LKM if you want this!
Did you read that third word in green at the top left of the page, right under "Slashdot"?
Yes, we're nerds, we care. If you aren't, go read a pop news site.
>Yes, there will. The "undo" button will be to reduce CO2 emissions after...
This is also an unknown. Somebody mentioned useing iron in the oceans. This may have the side affect of introducing red-bloom killing all life. Any number of actions that we take may actually introduce a number of side-effects that cuase more problems than they solve. Saying that we can do something on a QUICK global scale is truley the unknown and the ultimate in hubris.
Have you heard of plant life? Photosynthesis consumes CO2 and releases oxygen. And plant life, being far older than animal life, can survive any temperature change that's occured in the last many many millions of years, which far exceeds green house effects.
Left to itself, life will move toward equilibrium. Fears about the ecosystem being fragile make no sense. If it were fragile, would it even be here?
Uhm, granted, that post IS funny, but how the hell did the lameness filter not flag THAT?
But what about its physical size? I mean, when you are dealing with monstrous astro-physical phenoms beyond human comprehension, isn't it important to be boggled by the density?
Because there IS no size. A black hole by definition is a singularity, and has no conceivable dimensions. The closest thing a black hole has to a size is what's called the Schwarzschild radius, or the event horizon. This radius is the distance from the center at which light can no longer escape (ignoring Hawking radiation, another topic entirely). The Schwarzschild radius is equal to 2GM/c^2, where G is the gravitational constant, c is the speed of light, and M is the mass of the black hole. So the radius is really nothing more than a constant times the mass.
If you know the mass, and you don't have rotation, you know everything that can be known about it.
So you're tired of ./configure, etc... and you want an easy installer script for Linux that you can double click on to install programs? Here, I'll write you a general purpose installer program. Put this with any program you distribute as source and it will automatically install it by simply double clicking. You don't even have to click Next!:
#!/bin/sh
./configure
make
make install
But it's night time!!!
Not in Australia, mate.
Remember that Namesys is Hans Reiser company, so they like ReiserFS, but I don't think they cheat with the bechmarks.
Cheat, probably not, but accurate to common usage of a filesystem?
Be very careful interpreting those benchmarks, because the ones they consistently list first are the ones with a bunch of files that are 100 bytes in length, which is essentially the only area where Reiserfs really pulls ahead. Reiserfs is essentially tied with ext2 for all reasonably sized files that you would expect to find on a system. (Unless you're dealing with intense processing of millions of 100 byte files) When comparing ReiserFS to XFS and JFS, ReiserFS pulls way ahead for extremely small files, but the other filesystems perform notably better for reasonably sized files (10k) when synchronized.
For practical uses, neither filesystem seems to really pull ahead, so it's worth considering other features when deciding which to use.
One day a student came to Moon and said: "I understand how to make a better garbage collector. We must keep a reference count of the pointers to each cons."
Moon patiently told the student the following story:
"One day a student came to Moon and said: `I understand how to make a better garbage collector...
-- Jargon File
a continuous supply of mostly free solar energy.
You neglected one very important fact in your calculations. Yes, there is more solar energy on an asteroid that is near the Earth, but this energy is useless. There's a lot of energy in the core of the Earth too, but that's also useless for the purpose of power generation. There is no convenient method of transporting the energy to a convenient location. (Especially when one considers that the asteroid will soon be many millions of miles from the Earth, even if it is close for a moment.)
Ok.
/bin/sh /home/user/.xinitrc
.xinitrc that reads:
.xmodmaprc
.xmodmaprc that reads:
.sawfish/custom):
First of all, in order to enable the special keys on my laptop, I went into gnomecc, Session Properties and Startup Programs, and added a Startup program to execute:
Then I made an
xmodmap -e "keycode 66 = Caps_Lock"
xmodmap
Then I made an
keycode 66 = Caps_Lock
remove control = Caps_Lock
add lock = Caps_Lock
keycode 115 = XF86Start
add mod4 = XF86Start
keycode 129 = XF86AudioPlay
keycode 130 = XF86AudioStop
keycode 131 = XF86AudioPrev
keycode 132 = XF86AudioNext
Play with those, it's not hard to get most special keys working. (Find the keycodes by launching xev and pressing the keys.)
Then I added the following sawfish shortcuts (which is easiest with the gui, but here's the lisp code from
(custom-set-keymap (quote global-keymap) (quote (keymap
((set-viewport-linear 0) . "M-F1")
((run-shell-command "gvim -rv ~/todolist") . "S-XF86Start")
((run-shell-command "aumix -v+1") . "M-Prior")
((run-shell-command "aumix -v-1") . "M-Next")
((run-shell-command "mycdplay") . "XF86AudioPlay")
((run-shell-command "cdplay stop;rm ~/.cdplaying") . "XF86AudioStop")
((run-shell-command "cdplay -") . "XF86AudioPrev")
((run-shell-command "cdplay +") . "XF86AudioNext")
((run-shell-command "xmms") . "M-C-j")
((run-shell-command "mozilla") . "M-C-w")
(unshade-window . "C-SPC")
(shade-window . "S-C-SPC")
(delete-window . "M-C-ESC")
(iconify-window . "M-SPC")
((run-shell-command "gnome-terminal --login") . "M-C-t")
((run-shell-command "gnome-terminal --login -e mutt") . "M-C-m")
((run-shell-command "xscreensaver-command -lock") . "M-C-l")
(move-viewport-left . "M-C-Left")
(move-viewport-right . "M-C-Right")
(move-viewport-down . "M-C-Down")
(move-viewport-up . "M-C-Up")
((set-viewport-linear 2) . "M-F3")
((set-viewport-linear 3) . "M-F4")
((set-viewport-linear 1) . "M-F2")
(cycle-windows . "M-TAB")
)))
And if anyone is curious, mycdplay is a simple little shell script as follows (All it does is make my play button function as a pause button whenever the cd is being played, and a play button otherwise):
#!/bin/sh
if [ -e ~/.cdplaying ]
then
cdpause
rm -f ~/.cdplaying
else
cdplay
touch ~/.cdplaying
fi
As for ion, it appears to be a restriction on user ability, rather than an increase of user ability. I can already align my windows such that they don't overlap if I desire.
But I already have the flexibility of using my graphical interface almost entirely without my mouse. I'm running Gnome and Sawfish, and I can setup multiple desktops, indexable with alt-F#. Then if I keep the number of windows on my screen down to a reasonable number, no more than 3 or 4 (which is what ion would be limited to anyway for reasonable space consumption), then I can tab between them almost instantly with alt-tab. Then I can access them all immediately without the mouse, and without sacrificing the size of my windows, because they can all be close to full screen. As for organizing by graphical tabs, that's what the tasklist in the gnome panel is for, which is always an option when one feels the urge to reach for the mouse to find a window.
Every application I use regularly on my computer has an associated Sawfish shortcut. Mozilla, gnome-terminal, xmms, etc... Even shortcuts for common functions can be created in Sawfish, such as a shortcut locking the screen, shortcuts for raising and lowering volume, shortcuts for playing cd's (all using console-based tools, and the ability to bind a key combination in sawfish to the launch of arbitrary programs), shortcuts for closing a window, and shortcuts for bringing up frequently accessed files.
Excluding web browsing and copy/paste, I could go an entire day without having to reach for the mouse.
You could play Warcraft 2 strategically. Yes, it's a "simple" game compared to reality, but one thing I respect greatly about Blizzard is that they really took their time to balance Warcraft 2 in such a way that blitzing was not the best strategy. When good players played good players in Warcraft 2 team games, those who used "build lots of troops and attack with them" as their strategy simply lost.
The game was balanced such that proper use of magic, and using certain troops or structures against certain other troops or structures, was the only way to get an edge. The game was also balanced such that the number of troops you had usually said nothing about whether or not you would win, but instead, the infrastructure and resources you could corner determined your victory.
To do well in Warcraft 2, you needed to think ahead several levels. If your opponent is building demolition men, you need to build guard towers. But if you build guard towers, your opponent needs to build catapults or mages, so you need to find a way to defend against that, or to use recon. to find and destroy any catapults or mages. When you react to your opponent's strategy, you also need to begin planning for how your opponent will react to your reaction.
And of course, need I reiterate the importance of magic. It's very easy to make magic in a game work as another weapon of attack. But Blizzard didn't do that with Warcraft 2. Instead, they made magic a flexible way of implementing creative tactics. You could waltz an invisible mage into the middle of a town and cause a blizzard to fall on the central gold mine of your opponent, or you could have a death knight with haste and unholy armor walk up to a collection of opponent troops just standing around, and cast death&decay on them so they attack the death knight and just stand there dying because the spell is hasted so quickly. And strategies like that force defensive strategies to protect against them. You can't bunch your troops, or your opponent will destroy them. You need to constantly use recon. across the entire map to make sure your opponent isn't building up a secret collection of mages or demolition men somewhere.
And the actual battles themselves can be very strategical in warcraft 2. They are limited by the fact that the attention of the player is limited. A good team battle exploits this fact with distraction and deception.
I've been out of active gaming for a while, and don't know if anyone is still playing Warcraft 2. Perhaps someone could reply and point to where.
I want to be able to run Playstation 2 games on my Linux box. They have it all backwards. They need to release a Linux port of the Playstation 2. Now THAT would be something, even closed source and commercial, it would be a welcomed addition.
if you have to screw around for 20 hours on a linux box to get everything correct, you could have just bought all the software for a mac/win solution. choose your battles wisely..
Typically, I have to screw around for the same length of time on either system to get everything configured correctly. There are two differences. One, if I want to do something unusual on Linux, then I actually am able to configure it because it is more flexible. And two, once I finally get the system configured, the Linux one works consistently. Considering that I only configure a system once, and then use it thousands of times, that last point is of extreme importance.
I realize transmeta is a poster child company for the Slashdot community, but they really haven't made a notable contribution to the industry since their creation. I can't help but consider this another pie-in-the-sky agenda for them to attempt, because I can't come up with any reason for the embedded market to inflate that significantly that quickly. Yes, technologically we CAN embed technology in a lot of items, but what benefit do the consumers gain from this that makes it worth their money?
When it comes down to it, especially in a recession, average consumers aren't going to buy something that doesn't make their lives better.
It works on megastores, and it probably works better on them than the smaller stores. Your only problem was you 1, let him walk off without following him, and 2, then gave up and didn't complain to another employee about the faulty product and the unprofessional way you were treated by the first employee.
You're completely right that megastores don't care about individual customers, but you left it as an issue of an unhappy individual customer. It's a serious problem worth their time to deal with when you make a sufficient scene that other customers notice the way they're treating you.
As for your plan to rip off the shrinkwrap and bring the disc back to the store, most stores that I know of will only allow you to exchange a disc for another copy of the same disc. I guess you can stand there and argue about it with them.
You can stand there and argue with them, and that will fail. Then you can demand to see their manager, and that will fail. Then you can demand to see THAT person's manager, and by this point you are very loudly and defiantly demanding that they refund your money for selling you a piece of crap CD, of which none are even CD's because they don't even play in CD drives, and then I guarantee you will get your money back.
No business can afford to lose the amount of face they lose when an extremely irate customer is standing there shouting things that make perfect sense to all the other customers listening. Only the highest managers at a store are authorized to override store policy when they realize how bad their store looks for doing something stupid that all their other customers will look at as "unfair" to the customer.
Capitalism has its faults, but the desire of a company to make a profit can always put power in the hands of the consumer when you use it properly.
7 choices. You can't release it under no license. 2^3 - 1.
> Also, remember that your cell phone has a GPS chip in it, so you are carrying a "leaky" communications device with a tracking chip built into it.
I choose to carry my cell phone. What is most important about this, is that I have the freedom to NOT carry my cell phone to somewhere if I so choose.
The best solution is to just add this to your /etc/hosts file. Then you can click on nytimes stories like stories from less annoying sites.
208.48.26.212 www.nytimes.com
Precisely. They talked about David as an "original" robot, which made it seem to me that the robots we were seeing weren't created directly by humans, but instead were created by other robots who were created by other robots, who somewhere down the line had been created by humans, but none of these original robots had survived, so there wasn't any lasting direct contact or knowledge of humans.
It's the same as the analogy of the ol' butterfly flapping its wings in SoCal and causing tsunamis in Japan.
I've heard this many times, but it's as ludicrous today as it was the first day I heard it. In general, a change in a system like the weather system will dissipate. If you run a computer simulation of the weather, and insert an extra butterfly, I guarantee you won't find a typhoon as a result. If you insert 200 butterflies, you still won't find a typhoon. It takes a good degree of coordinated energy to build up a sizeable structure, such as a typhoon. The second law of thermodynamics should tell you this. Entropy increases. If you put a butterfly in a closed box for a few minutes, have it flap its wings, and then take it out, the air in the box will settle to an equilibrium, it will not develop a whirlpool.
As for the ecosystem, it has survived for a hell of a long time. It won't be destroyed by a butterfly, or by a crop with a pesticide in it. The wonderful thing about life is its ability to adapt, so while we should take steps to make sure genetically modified food is precisely and only what we intend for it to be, there is no need to be fearful that a small change will blow itself out of proportion.
Didn't we already have an April First this year?
Seriously, this is just ridiculously stupid. There are some applications where a dedicated device is the most ideal device. Simple tools for a simple job, and there is much less chance of system failure.