SETI@Home is hindering their own project There's no argument that it could be handled better. But my point remains: if you're not happy with what they're doing, don't help. There are plenty of other distributed projects out there that are worthy of your cycles. I want to help seti@home. I realise there are faster clients that are probably as accurate, but seti@home don't want me to use them. So I won't.
Yeah, I run seti@home. Yeah, I'd like it to be open source. But it's not. If you agree to help out, you do so on seti@home's terms. They say they want you to use this software, so you use this software. This is not about having the most units completed, or about being the one to find the signal, or about improving the software. It's about helping the project, and contributing to the body of scientific knowledge. If you want to help, use the sanctioned software. If you use anything else, then you're hindering. Go crack cyphers or calculate weather patterns or something.
Actually actually, if I remember my latin correctly, the plural of vir is vires. It's a fourth (or is it fifth?) declension noun, and it declines like rex. (vir, vir, virem, viris, viri, vire). So viri would mean 'to or for the man'.
What's the P? Please? Yeah; please. It's a term I've heard from a whole bunch of people, none of whom knows the others, and I've never met anyone who didn't know what it was. Until now.
There once was a man from Stab City Who was feeling remarkably shitty For the swing-shifting sap Caught the digital clap So they shut down the plant, more's the pity.
Note for tourists: if you're in Limerick, don't refer too it as stab city. You'll be stabbed.
Notice my email address; it's at ireland.com . I can pretty much forget about checking that for the next few hours. Bastards.
On a lighter note, last year I took a train from Dublin to Limerick for a job interview with Dell. The two techies told me I more or less had the job, but the HR guy equivocated. I got another train home, and never heard from them again. Not as much as a PFO (does that term enjoy currency outside Ireland?). Anyway: I can't condone the use of viruses (or viri, but not virii), but I did laugh. Hard.
They market these things only to 'kollektors' and I fucking hate that! Back in the good ol' days when I worked in bookshops and a couple of comic shops, I was continually astonished by the twelve-year-olds who'd buy any shit with a glossy cover and a #1 on it. When X-Men #1 came out with five covers, I was working in a cool shop called The Alchemist's Head (RIP), and watched a steady stream of kids coming in and buying three copies of each over.
On this side of the atlantic, you can get (relatively) cheapo British reprints of the US reprints of the japanese originals. They're not worth it. Really.
You might consider checking out Pulp, a mag that publishes a chunk of stories -- including the rather excellent and hilarous Heartbroken Angels for a (relatively) reasonable price. It's published by Viz; more details here.
A cool idea. I hope many emulate the spirit in which this was done.
However... For legal reasons, we can't host strong-encryption products with code that originated outside of the US
This is the sort of thing we're going to see more and more. As far as I can see, the US government has two options: 1. Get rid of this silly 'munitions' rule 2. Accept that US companies will perpetually be at a disadvantage in international projects. I'm beginning to see this 'no encryption' message with increasing frequency; one pops up about once a week.
Who are they letting in on the IPO? I feel I deserve a shot, since I scoop the darned stuff out of my pond every year... So you murder billions of they employees, and you expect them to give you shares?
Yeah; it's nothing new. Jon seems determined to get a book out of this, and frankly it ain't going to happen. Jon: I occasionally disagree with you, but I always read and mostly enjoy your stuff. But this is lightweight nonsense that isn't going anywhere. Give it up. Enjoy your holiday; you've already written more than enough to justify its tax write-off. But for god's sake drop it.
Anyone know whether the show will be visible from Europe, specifically the UK?
In Ireland, the fun should start at about 1am, but word around the campfire is that it's going to be too cloudy to see anything. This was the case last year, when I froze my ass of and saw nothing. I hope you've better luck in the Uk.
Um, if you read the story, it was posted on a Japanese web site. That's hardly informative. "The FBI have discovered what happened to Egyptair 990. It crashed."
As you state it, it would be Redhat's or suse's... Fair point. But both redhat and suse have at least attempted to make their systems secure. Apart from the ridiculously unpowerful and badly targetted poledit, there's nothing that you can do to windows to ensure that your systems has any pretentions to security, apart from removing the modem, floppy drive and keyboard. If you buy/download Linux, you can be sure that you've got a system that at least tries to be secure, and manages it most (in fact, nearly all) the time.
I don't want to sound like a master flame baiter, but I don't think I'll be getting this. I've got the original 75 comics at home, and they were great. But the spin-off comic is dubious at best, the short story anthology was just plain bad. Then there's the Dave McKean covers, and the Death statuettes... I could go on. Everyone applauded when Gaiman wrapped up the series without being tempted to stretch it on forever. Let it die. Looking for a comic? Preacher used to be the best, but that was before Warren Ellis brought out the too-wonderful-for-my-pathetic-words Transmetropolitan.
If the author sent it directly to the security boys 'n' girls, how did it get into the wild? Either the author isn't on the side of the angels after all or there's a trojan horse in the anti-virus world. Which would be ironic.
The other thing I noted in the story was that it's patchable if you go to the microsoft site. This places the onus on users to make sure they're not infected; Microsoft can say 'look, it's available; it's not our fault if you don't download it.' I don't want to start another anti-MS diatribe (I hate windows, not MS), but unless I'm over-inferring, this is another example of passing the buck; MS bring out the OS, it's up to the users to use it responsibly.
I was impressed with M10, and if M11 shows as much improvement as did previous milestones, I reckon I've found a new permanent browser. Yeah, it crashes. It's still buggy. But if I'm going to use software that crashes all the time, I reckon I might as well do so while serving the public. Is this another anti-netscape post? I prefer to think of it as a pro-mozilla post.
The problem with peer review is that you'd need a huge number of experts. You're not just looking at prior art, you're looking at practicality. It's a nice idea, and it'd be seriously cool if it worked, but I can't see it happening any time soon.
Anything that can pass the/. "laugh" or "scorn" test (using/. as a typical set of "peers" for software) would probably qualify as innovative If Klaatu were to return to Earth, send Gort out to destroy New York and then warn us all of impending doom, he still would't pass the slashdot 'scorn' test.
...that the school provide names and home addresses of all students with MP3 files hosted on the school's servers So they're threatening that if the school doesn't furnish a list to which the RIAA isn't legally entitled, they'll have to pay money that they wouldn't otherwise have to fork over. IANAL and my knowledge of US Law is limited to watching reruns of Night Court, but this sounds suspiciously like extortion to me. Which is illegal.
Just because someone thinks differently than you about a subject which YOU CANNOT prove does not make one a "dolt". Agreed. And I'm not about to say that I can prove that evolution is a fact. But neither am I going to give any credence to anyone who denies the overwhelming evidence that is all around us. I really don't want to start an offtopic flame war, but I'd be interested to hear from any creationists in the audience who can explain why it is that fruit flies, dogs and pretty much all domesticated animals can have traits bred into and out of them if not for the process of evolution.
Re:There's nothing bad ?!
on
The Broken God
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· Score: 3
Over the past ten years I've reviewed hundreds of books, and in about fifteen I've said "I can find nothing wrong with this book". I'll agree that there's no such thing as the perfect book, but that's not the same as a particular reader finding nothing. Excellence is in the eye of the beholder, and if you disagree, that's fine. It's been a long time since I read Zindell's books, and while I wouldn't say they're without flaws, they are very good.
I'd suggest a greater sin is to castigate a review without having read it.
A bit disappointing for a possible future leader of the country I lost what little respect I had for Gore after his lack of comment on Kansas' silly decisions recently. This is a man (not alone; all presidential candiates) who doesn't want to offend the superstitious, so he'd rather see a generation of Kansas kids brought up by these dolts, making them ill-prepared for the real world.
To the best of my knowledge, science today is not what it was in say 1900 It's probably not what you meant, but I suspect that science today has a lot in common with 1900. Specifically, the feeling that we're 'almost there'; in 1900 the only things that were pissing off scientists were blackbody radiation and the Michelson/Morley experiment. Apart from that, pretty much everything was explained. Today we see that we're fifty years from a TOE. An explanation of blackbody radiation resulted in quantum mechanics, and Michelson/Morley eventually gave us relativity. No-one could claim after 1920 that we were even close to covering everything. The LHC will, I suspect, throw up results that'll confuse us all. Fifty years from now, most of these will be explained and someone will say that we're fifty years away from a TOE.
Slashdot Mirror
SETI@Home is hindering their own project
There's no argument that it could be handled better. But my point remains: if you're not happy with what they're doing, don't help. There are plenty of other distributed projects out there that are worthy of your cycles.
I want to help seti@home. I realise there are faster clients that are probably as accurate, but seti@home don't want me to use them. So I won't.
Yeah, I run seti@home. Yeah, I'd like it to be open source. But it's not.
If you agree to help out, you do so on seti@home's terms. They say they want you to use this software, so you use this software.
This is not about having the most units completed, or about being the one to find the signal, or about improving the software. It's about helping the project, and contributing to the body of scientific knowledge. If you want to help, use the sanctioned software. If you use anything else, then you're hindering. Go crack cyphers or calculate weather patterns or something.
Actually actually, if I remember my latin correctly, the plural of vir is vires. It's a fourth (or is it fifth?) declension noun, and it declines like rex. (vir, vir, virem, viris, viri, vire). So viri would mean 'to or for the man'.
What's the P? Please?
Yeah; please. It's a term I've heard from a whole bunch of people, none of whom knows the others, and I've never met anyone who didn't know what it was. Until now.
My attempt:
There once was a man from Stab City
Who was feeling remarkably shitty
For the swing-shifting sap
Caught the digital clap
So they shut down the plant, more's the pity.
Note for tourists: if you're in Limerick, don't refer too it as stab city. You'll be stabbed.
Notice my email address; it's at ireland.com . I can pretty much forget about checking that for the next few hours. Bastards.
On a lighter note, last year I took a train from Dublin to Limerick for a job interview with Dell. The two techies told me I more or less had the job, but the HR guy equivocated. I got another train home, and never heard from them again. Not as much as a PFO (does that term enjoy currency outside Ireland?).
Anyway: I can't condone the use of viruses (or viri, but not virii), but I did laugh. Hard.
They market these things only to 'kollektors' and I fucking hate that!
Back in the good ol' days when I worked in bookshops and a couple of comic shops, I was continually astonished by the twelve-year-olds who'd buy any shit with a glossy cover and a #1 on it. When X-Men #1 came out with five covers, I was working in a cool shop called The Alchemist's Head (RIP), and watched a steady stream of kids coming in and buying three copies of each over.
On this side of the atlantic, you can get (relatively) cheapo British reprints of the US reprints of the japanese originals. They're not worth it. Really.
You might consider checking out Pulp, a mag that publishes a chunk of stories -- including the rather excellent and hilarous Heartbroken Angels for a (relatively) reasonable price. It's published by Viz; more details here.
A cool idea. I hope many emulate the spirit in which this was done.
However...
For legal reasons, we can't host strong-encryption products with code that originated outside of the US
This is the sort of thing we're going to see more and more. As far as I can see, the US government has two options:
1. Get rid of this silly 'munitions' rule
2. Accept that US companies will perpetually be at a disadvantage in international projects. I'm beginning to see this 'no encryption' message with increasing frequency; one pops up about once a week.
What now we use 5% instead of 8%. Why aren't we using like 12 to 15% by now?
5% is the average. Most of us are up to 15%, but the scientologists are dragging the average down.
Who are they letting in on the IPO? I feel I deserve a shot, since I scoop the darned stuff out of my pond every year...
So you murder billions of they employees, and you expect them to give you shares?
The company has 760 trillion employees. While each one works for peanuts (or methane), the potential for labour unrest is phenomenal.
$47 is way over priced for a company with only two products. Supposing we all decided to stop using oxygen?
Just because they're prokaryotic doesn't mean they're good businessbeings. Half of Microsoft's upper management are single-celled.
"We Didn't Make The Atmosphere, We Just Made It Breathable" - bullshit. It may be a major oxygen producer, but it's far from the only one.
Save your money. Buy andover shares. Or can I say that here?
Yeah; it's nothing new. Jon seems determined to get a book out of this, and frankly it ain't going to happen.
Jon: I occasionally disagree with you, but I always read and mostly enjoy your stuff. But this is lightweight nonsense that isn't going anywhere. Give it up.
Enjoy your holiday; you've already written more than enough to justify its tax write-off. But for god's sake drop it.
Anyone know whether the show will be visible from Europe, specifically the UK?
In Ireland, the fun should start at about 1am, but word around the campfire is that it's going to be too cloudy to see anything. This was the case last year, when I froze my ass of and saw nothing.
I hope you've better luck in the Uk.
Um, if you read the story, it was posted on a Japanese web site.
That's hardly informative. "The FBI have discovered what happened to Egyptair 990. It crashed."
As you state it, it would be Redhat's or suse's...
Fair point. But both redhat and suse have at least attempted to make their systems secure. Apart from the ridiculously unpowerful and badly targetted poledit, there's nothing that you can do to windows to ensure that your systems has any pretentions to security, apart from removing the modem, floppy drive and keyboard.
If you buy/download Linux, you can be sure that you've got a system that at least tries to be secure, and manages it most (in fact, nearly all) the time.
I don't want to sound like a master flame baiter, but I don't think I'll be getting this. I've got the original 75 comics at home, and they were great. But the spin-off comic is dubious at best, the short story anthology was just plain bad. Then there's the Dave McKean covers, and the Death statuettes... I could go on.
Everyone applauded when Gaiman wrapped up the series without being tempted to stretch it on forever. Let it die.
Looking for a comic? Preacher used to be the best, but that was before Warren Ellis brought out the too-wonderful-for-my-pathetic-words Transmetropolitan.
If the author sent it directly to the security boys 'n' girls, how did it get into the wild? Either the author isn't on the side of the angels after all or there's a trojan horse in the anti-virus world. Which would be ironic.
The other thing I noted in the story was that it's patchable if you go to the microsoft site. This places the onus on users to make sure they're not infected; Microsoft can say 'look, it's available; it's not our fault if you don't download it.' I don't want to start another anti-MS diatribe (I hate windows, not MS), but unless I'm over-inferring, this is another example of passing the buck; MS bring out the OS, it's up to the users to use it responsibly.
Before you start downloading, consider your libraries
He's having a go at the libraries now!
I was impressed with M10, and if M11 shows as much improvement as did previous milestones, I reckon I've found a new permanent browser.
Yeah, it crashes. It's still buggy. But if I'm going to use software that crashes all the time, I reckon I might as well do so while serving the public.
Is this another anti-netscape post? I prefer to think of it as a pro-mozilla post.
The problem with peer review is that you'd need a huge number of experts. You're not just looking at prior art, you're looking at practicality. It's a nice idea, and it'd be seriously cool if it worked, but I can't see it happening any time soon.
/. "laugh" or "scorn" test (using /. as a typical set of "peers" for software) would probably qualify as innovative
Anything that can pass the
If Klaatu were to return to Earth, send Gort out to destroy New York and then warn us all of impending doom, he still would't pass the slashdot 'scorn' test.
...that the school provide names and home addresses of all students with MP3 files hosted on the school's servers
So they're threatening that if the school doesn't furnish a list to which the RIAA isn't legally entitled, they'll have to pay money that they wouldn't otherwise have to fork over.
IANAL and my knowledge of US Law is limited to watching reruns of Night Court, but this sounds suspiciously like extortion to me. Which is illegal.
Just because someone thinks differently than you about a subject which YOU CANNOT prove does not make one a "dolt".
Agreed. And I'm not about to say that I can prove that evolution is a fact. But neither am I going to give any credence to anyone who denies the overwhelming evidence that is all around us.
I really don't want to start an offtopic flame war, but I'd be interested to hear from any creationists in the audience who can explain why it is that fruit flies, dogs and pretty much all domesticated animals can have traits bred into and out of them if not for the process of evolution.
Over the past ten years I've reviewed hundreds of books, and in about fifteen I've said "I can find nothing wrong with this book". I'll agree that there's no such thing as the perfect book, but that's not the same as a particular reader finding nothing. Excellence is in the eye of the beholder, and if you disagree, that's fine.
It's been a long time since I read Zindell's books, and while I wouldn't say they're without flaws, they are very good.
I'd suggest a greater sin is to castigate a review without having read it.
A bit disappointing for a possible future leader of the country
I lost what little respect I had for Gore after his lack of comment on Kansas' silly decisions recently.
This is a man (not alone; all presidential candiates) who doesn't want to offend the superstitious, so he'd rather see a generation of Kansas kids brought up by these dolts, making them ill-prepared for the real world.
To the best of my knowledge, science today is not what it was in say 1900
It's probably not what you meant, but I suspect that science today has a lot in common with 1900. Specifically, the feeling that we're 'almost there'; in 1900 the only things that were pissing off scientists were blackbody radiation and the Michelson/Morley experiment. Apart from that, pretty much everything was explained. Today we see that we're fifty years from a TOE.
An explanation of blackbody radiation resulted in quantum mechanics, and Michelson/Morley eventually gave us relativity. No-one could claim after 1920 that we were even close to covering everything.
The LHC will, I suspect, throw up results that'll confuse us all. Fifty years from now, most of these will be explained and someone will say that we're fifty years away from a TOE.