I asked the same question. The clue is in the description below. It is a "self-intersecting" pentagon. I.e., it can be drawn as five long lines which cross themselves.
I never thought that something like that could count as a pentagon, but I can see why it might be reasonable to treat it like that for some purposes. For example, it would be difficult to calculate the area, but quite easy to move the pentagon around by moving its five points and redrawing.
When I surf slashdot, it would be a nice feature to have mega-self-referential-jokes (ie several subjokes under the main joke). It would be very useful for an uber-troll.
It will be a long process to reunite that country, but the taliban did support a man and shelter a man who plots every day to kill people. In addition to this you could be killed if youre a woman and too much of your face is showing. I just hope we do right by them and stay there long enough for a govt to hold (be it a monarcy, a tribal republic, or whatever)..
Overture have a particular idea for a search algorithm: those that pay the most for a search term are most likely to have a useful search result. (The logic becomes clearer if you define "useful" as "something you are willing to pay for").
It's not entirely stupid. And nobody is going to buy the search words for "P=NP", so it'll just use plain old search technology for that.
There is something ridiculous about all those thousands of people who sit there thinking that the people around them are sheep (while they are radical, brilliant thinkers). Very often these same people have done absolutely nothing truly radical in their lives. And in fact, ordinary people are quite capable of thought and intelligence.
As for this scientist: see my comment above. IMHO he's a crank, and unpleasant to boot.
Maybe this guy is actually a genius, but he sounds like a crank to me.
1. He complains about the "corruption" of his discipline, but gives little evidence to back this up.
2. He complains about an "immigrant" doctor getting funding over a "native American" - a classic thing for a bitter man to say.
3. He exhibits contempt for most people - he seems to think that consciousness is barely a factor in their existence.
4. He appears to think that producing XML conversation templates is some kind of step towards AI. Hey, maybe if we had _loads_ and _loads_ of these XML schemas, we'd produce a really intelligent computer!* (As if intelligence was basically made out of regular expressions.)
* I thought this was satire, but he really does say it! Here is this guy's idea of the progress of machine intelligence:
Our territory of language already contains the highest population of sentences that people use. Expanding the borders even more we will continue to absorb the stragglers outside, until the very last human critic cannot think of one sentence to "fool" A.L.I.C.E..
Evidently, this is not a way to build a creative or intelligent computer. It's just a way to make an entertaining toy. The counter-argument, that 90% of human behaviour is predictable enough to be mimicked by ALICE, is misguided. We want to build Artificial Intelligence, not Artificial Average Human Unintelligence.
Some people have discussed ways to circumvent this spoofing, by using e.g. checksums to validate real mp3 files. The good news is, this isn't necessary.
P2P works because many different users share files, so you can often find files you want on a user close to you, or with a fast connection. But the other advantage is that P2P creates an ecosystem in which dodgy files get deleted. I have downloaded a lot of mp3s, and I actually very rarely get a bad mp3. (I get plenty of bad music, but that is a different matter.) The reason is simple - users delete bad mp3s. Good ones survive and are replicated.
Exactly the same thing will happen here. The music industry can put up 50 copies of a 20 second promo, but ultimately, if there is one copy of the original song, that copy will spread. The industry just doesn't have the bandwidth or storage space to compete with millions of users.
The real market for the Linux desktop is in corporations, not in home users. Of course a minority of hobbyists will use Linux at home, but the people most likely to move over are companies who can save six or more figures in licensing costs. Companies also have more predictable software needs: standard office software, plus some specific apps that they can code themselves - whereas home users have a multitude of different individual needs.
I don't see why Linux shouldn't take off on the corporate desktop. As soon as there is a usable office suite (and KOffice is coming along nicely, I don't know about OpenOffice), companies will have a big incentive to move over.
I could never get Noatun to work, so I ain't that impressed.
I think the underlying issue seems to be how "dictatorial" the open source process should be. My view is that for a highly integrated project like a desktop environment, where other people will rely on the libraries you code, it should be very dictatorial. KDE has prospered because it has had tough rules on code quality. Gnome - I have heard - is slacker and has had problems. (No disrespect tho, I am looking forward to 2.0) The same with Linux itself, Linus has admitted he is a bastard, and his tough, blunt management style has worked well. Open source gives you lots of free code, but it is important to select the _good_ free code. That in turn gives the coders more self-respect as part of a disciplined project.
Yes, but once that stuff starts, it's time to take your toys and go home. By remaining, you are a passive participant and in many cases, the sheep help fuel the fire with their presense and vocal rhymes. If a protest turns into a riot, you either leave immediately or you lick your wounds without complaint when it's all over.
Fair? Perhaps, perhaps not, but there is a greater good at risk for society.
Indeed. There is also the greater good that people should be able to protest peacefully without being beaten up, or forced to go home, whenever some drunk or agent provocateur throws a brick.
Without meaning to be rude, I do find it slightly scary that most Slashdotter's political analogies are drawn not from history or current events, but from sci-fi movies and cartoons. These are not good bases for understanding the world.
I'll lose a mod point to pull you up on this. The chinese government are disgraceful criminals who trample upon the desires and rights of their people. They send dissidents to Gulags. They conduct arbitrary executions. They put the tanks into Tiananmen square.
It's a different nation. Along with that they uphold different laws.
This is cowardice masquerading as cultural relativism. Do you think the Chinese want to have their news censored - their rights denied - to be unable to speak out in public - to be vulnerable to arbitrary arrest and detention? They do not, as the linked article tends to show.
Perhaps Deng Zhou Ping did a good thing in setting up the free market economy. We should never bow down to, or respect, fundamentally wicked rulers because of a few wise decisions. Ecrasez l'infame, now and everywhere.
(Heh. just noticed my totally inappropriate.sig. One of the silliest things the Manics have said... see Amartya Sen passim for why freedom of speech DOES feed your children.)
If you want to get elected, you are thinking about it the wrong way.
It should not be "how can I talk to people about the issues close to my heart (e.g. OSS)". People don't give a damn about the issues close to your heart. They want to hear you say something convincing about the issues _they_ care about. I bet you £20 that Open Source is not one of them.
Look at the polls, figure out what's important to people in this area, work out your communication strategy based on that. When you get elected, you can always push OSS or whatever.
This may sound cynical, but I reckon that if you aren't focused on the issues that matter to your electorate, then you don't deserve election - and you have a lot to learn as a politician.
I just last night installed Texstars KDE 2.2.1 for Mandrake 8.0: you can get it
here
It uses objprelink and is damn fast. In particular networking is much faster (don't know if this is to do with objprelink): sending mails, getting web pages etc. all blaze.
And Texstar has put it all together nicely. All the rpms you need in one place (except netscape-plugins which you can get from the standard Mandrake 8.0 locations).
My particular itch was that Ctr+Backspace/Delete didn't delete whole words. This has now been fixed, and once I've got used to it, it'll increase my productivity a hella lot... Sometimes it's the little things that count.
Check it out.
Re:i'm going to suffer for this but...
on
KDE Wins 3 awards
·
· Score: 1
KDE simply asks me when i drop it - copy, move, or link
FYI - the windows world also shows this popup with a right-click drag/drop.
You and others are slightly missing the point. KDE can open, save, cut,copy and paste files directly to and from ftp urls, samba shares etc. No more hassle with special ftp upload programs! This is an area where KDE is ahead of windows, and it's really useful: for example, I can edit text files on my server directly, just by clicking on them - they autodownload and open in
my favourite editor, then autoupload when I click Save.
Slashdot Mirror
I asked the same question. The clue is in the description below. It is a "self-intersecting" pentagon. I.e., it can be drawn as five long lines which cross themselves.
I never thought that something like that could count as a pentagon, but I can see why it might be reasonable to treat it like that for some purposes. For example, it would be difficult to calculate the area, but quite easy to move the pentagon around by moving its five points and redrawing.
ROTFL. Mod this up!
When I surf slashdot, it would be a nice feature to have mega-self-referential-jokes (ie several subjokes under the main joke). It would be very useful for an uber-troll.
I sure hope so too. Here's a quick interim briefing on the notable achievements of this process to date.
Let me be devil's advocate for a moment.
Overture have a particular idea for a search algorithm:
those that pay the most for a search term are most likely to have a useful search result. (The logic becomes clearer if you define "useful" as "something you are willing to pay for").
It's not entirely stupid. And nobody is going to buy the search words for "P=NP", so it'll just use plain old search technology for that.
I still use google though.
Ah, but Noah lived about 900 years...
... and poised to dominate the new mobile applications market.
I am just trying to hack out some perl code generation c++...
There is something ridiculous about all those thousands of people who sit there thinking that the people around them are sheep (while they are radical, brilliant thinkers). Very often these same people have done absolutely nothing truly radical in their lives. And in fact, ordinary people are quite capable of thought and intelligence.
As for this scientist: see my comment above. IMHO he's a crank, and unpleasant to boot.
1. He complains about the "corruption" of his discipline, but gives little evidence to back this up.
2. He complains about an "immigrant" doctor getting funding over a "native American" - a classic thing for a bitter man to say.
3. He exhibits contempt for most people - he seems to think that consciousness is barely a factor in their existence.
4. He appears to think that producing XML conversation templates is some kind of step towards AI. Hey, maybe if we had _loads_ and _loads_ of these XML schemas, we'd produce a really intelligent computer!* (As if intelligence was basically made out of regular expressions.)
* I thought this was satire, but he really does say it! Here is this guy's idea of the progress of machine intelligence:
Our territory of language already contains the highest population of sentences that people use. Expanding the borders even more we will continue to absorb the stragglers outside, until the very last human critic cannot think of one sentence to "fool" A.L.I.C.E..
Evidently, this is not a way to build a creative or intelligent computer. It's just a way to make an entertaining toy. The counter-argument, that 90% of human behaviour is predictable enough to be mimicked by ALICE, is misguided. We want to build Artificial Intelligence, not Artificial Average Human Unintelligence.
Some people have discussed ways to circumvent this spoofing, by using e.g. checksums to validate real mp3 files. The good news is, this isn't necessary.
P2P works because many different users share files, so you can often find files you want on a user close to you, or with a fast connection. But the other advantage is that P2P creates an ecosystem in which dodgy files get deleted. I have downloaded a lot of mp3s, and I actually very rarely get a bad mp3. (I get plenty of bad music, but that is a different matter.) The reason is simple - users delete bad mp3s. Good ones survive and are replicated.
Exactly the same thing will happen here. The music industry can put up 50 copies of a 20 second promo, but ultimately, if there is one copy of the original song, that copy will spread. The industry just doesn't have the bandwidth or storage space to compete with millions of users.
If only they were six words shorter.
If you want to influence your bank to support non-IE browsers, you don't have to do it alone: submit a report to this page.
The real market for the Linux desktop is in corporations, not in home users. Of course a minority of hobbyists will use Linux at home, but the people most likely to move over are companies who can save six or more figures in licensing costs. Companies also have more predictable software needs: standard office software, plus some specific apps that they can code themselves - whereas home users have a multitude of different individual needs.
I don't see why Linux shouldn't take off on the corporate desktop. As soon as there is a usable office suite (and KOffice is coming along nicely, I don't know about OpenOffice), companies will have a big incentive to move over.
I think the underlying issue seems to be how "dictatorial" the open source process should be. My view is that for a highly integrated project like a desktop environment, where other people will rely on the libraries you code, it should be very dictatorial. KDE has prospered because it has had tough rules on code quality. Gnome - I have heard - is slacker and has had problems. (No disrespect tho, I am looking forward to 2.0) The same with Linux itself, Linus has admitted he is a bastard, and his tough, blunt management style has worked well. Open source gives you lots of free code, but it is important to select the _good_ free code. That in turn gives the coders more self-respect as part of a disciplined project.
Just my uninformed 2c.
You can do the same thing using embperl, HTML::Mason, HTML::Template, Template::ToolKit (and a few others) in perl. And you get perl!
Indeed. There is also the greater good that people should be able to protest peacefully without being beaten up, or forced to go home, whenever some drunk or agent provocateur throws a brick.
Without meaning to be rude, I do find it slightly scary that most Slashdotter's political analogies are drawn not from history or current events, but from sci-fi movies and cartoons. These are not good bases for understanding the world.
The chinese government aren't criminals.
I'll lose a mod point to pull you up on this. The chinese government are disgraceful criminals who trample upon the desires and rights of their people. They send dissidents to Gulags. They conduct arbitrary executions. They put the tanks into Tiananmen square.
It's a different nation. Along with that they uphold different laws.
This is cowardice masquerading as cultural relativism. Do you think the Chinese want to have their news censored - their rights denied - to be unable to speak out in public - to be vulnerable to arbitrary arrest and detention? They do not, as the linked article tends to show.
Perhaps Deng Zhou Ping did a good thing in setting up the free market economy. We should never bow down to, or respect, fundamentally wicked rulers because of a few wise decisions. Ecrasez l'infame, now and everywhere.
(Heh. just noticed my totally inappropriate
You mean like
Fork this and fork that
Fork it all and fork the f***ing brat
?
(I don't want a kernel that swaps like that
She don't want a kernel that swaps like that...)
Aha... he's obviously used to Windows! Check his IP address! He's from Redmond! Burn him as a witch!
If you want to get elected, you are thinking about it the wrong way.
It should not be "how can I talk to people about the issues close to my heart (e.g. OSS)". People don't give a damn about the issues close to your heart. They want to hear you say something convincing about the issues _they_ care about. I bet you £20 that Open Source is not one of them.
Look at the polls, figure out what's important to people in this area, work out your communication strategy based on that. When you get elected, you can always push OSS or whatever.
This may sound cynical, but I reckon that if you aren't focused on the issues that matter to your electorate, then you don't deserve election - and you have a lot to learn as a politician.
No, that's just an unusual way of putting it. It's not incorrect. Cf:
A month-long VBA course does not a programmer make.
It uses objprelink and is damn fast. In particular networking is much faster (don't know if this is to do with objprelink): sending mails, getting web pages etc. all blaze.
And Texstar has put it all together nicely. All the rpms you need in one place (except netscape-plugins which you can get from the standard Mandrake 8.0 locations).
My particular itch was that Ctr+Backspace/Delete didn't delete whole words. This has now been fixed, and once I've got used to it, it'll increase my productivity a hella lot... Sometimes it's the little things that count.
Check it out.
You and others are slightly missing the point. KDE can open, save, cut,copy and paste files directly to and from ftp urls, samba shares etc. No more hassle with special ftp upload programs! This is an area where KDE is ahead of windows, and it's really useful: for example, I can edit text files on my server directly, just by clicking on them - they autodownload and open in my favourite editor, then autoupload when I click Save.