Why don't they just delete all the un-notable and un-encyclopaedic pop culture, tv show, movie and sci-fi trivia that's filling it up and starting to outweigh the rest. That ought to save a few terabytes, and help focus on what's unique about Wikipedia.
My old Toughbook CF-71 (300Mhz!) is still working great, with an upgraded HDD and RAM (though recent versions of Linux are having trouble with power management/hibernation), after all these years. It's got a big old handle, useful to carry along anywhere, gathering data, or to whip out to work on something (have to wrangle the GPS serial cables though). Been dropped and squashed and bounced. Hasn't yet been rained on.
Why get into another stupid global warming debate? Nasa's Earth science missions are among its most benefitial contributions to science in the US. Who cares if US CO2 is to blame, or about Kyoto, the fact is that the Earth's weather and geography are really complex and really interesting, and we should study them. It doesn't matter whether or not you think so called "global warming" is bogus or not, it's a fact that (a) weather and climate change over the years, and (b) it has direct consequences to human life TODAY.
One of the greatest effects that creation of NASA has had is to develop amazing Earth-observing technologies and sciences.
If the US government thinks that NASA has too big a budget, they should fund EO and other actual atmospheric and Earth science programs, and trim the Buck Rogers stuff.
How can understanding how our planet works and how we can better survive on it efficiently and effectively be some kind useless left-wing hippie treehugger nonsense? It's critical for the continuing survival of the massive and ever-increasing number of homo sapiens on this little rock in space.
To learn about real global climate and weather events with seriously real effects on human life TODAY, read some of the topics at http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/.
It's a really good idea to check out your credit report (at http://www.annualcreditreport.com/ by the way, sometimes it can just have dumb mistakes on it. For example, my report had another family member's credit cards in it, so I filed a dispute and it's now all correct.
They will also offer extra services along with the credit report (such as calculating and showing you a credit score, though that's only a few bucks so maybe it's worth it) that you have to make sure you don't ask for by accident.
The article is basically a big ad for Microsoft's robotics software (which actually is pretty interesting btw) and ignores most of the past and current developments in actual robotics and computer sciences.
They will also have converted about 28% (nearly a third) of their yearly lightbulb sales to somthing that is 8 times as expensive. First, that's not neccesarily profit.
But the main thing is that CF bulbs last far longer than incandesncent (6 years and counting on some of mine) and so people will be buying them much less often. Part of the reason Walmart is so successful is that the type, quality and price of their merchendise are set up for a lot of repeat business...
Or better yet, put up a big warning that it's using mixed alphabets?
In general, browsers ought to make users more aware of the parts of their current URL, and maybe also of link destinations (also mail client).
For example, seperate the URL into its parts (scheme, host, path). Display some of the WHOIS info below the hostname, and some info from the SSL certificate if it has one.
This would help people spot phishing scams or other suspicious activity.
... the dependency on ASCII which complicates text handling sooooo much even when Windows solved the problem soooo long ago... inefficient encodings like UTF-8 (THREE bytes per character?)
You don't want error prone or corrupt voting procedures... but you want to centralize voting?? That's nuts.
I live in a town of 300, about 150 people voted this election. I'd much rather have people I recognize and live with carefully counting those 150 paper ballots (with me watching) rather than my state or the US trying to run millions of ballots through counting machines, or mandating the same possibly corrupt electronic touchscreen machine for everyone, with almost NO transparency or accountability.
Here's a trick I leaned about either on/. or somewhere else: make a spam trap. It's a CGI script that adds the client's address to a blacklist. Put a hidden link to that CGI script at the beginning of every page. Then put that script in robots.txt. If we assume that most spam crawlers do not honor robots.txt then you can block most of them after they've only crawled a couple of pages. You should clear out your blacklist periodically since it will get really full fast. Also note that it may take a day or two for legitimate spiders like Googlebot to re-fetch your robots.txt.
Other ideas:
Use a contact form.
Use a different email address than your normal email address on a page. Change it frequently.
Incumbants are easy, go to thomas.loc.gov and your state legislature's website, and look up the voting records.
Challengers are harder. vote-smart.org includes a questionaire on issues they might have filled out, and endorsements by certain groups. At vote-smart or your state's website (it varies) find out where their campaign contributions came from. Then go to the candidat's website and read their promises with a very critical eye. Then compare to incumbant. In the end of course, all you have to go on with a challenger is their promises, so consider them always in comparison to the incumbant.
The difference between NASA's in-house code and M$ofts is that NASA is 100% sure about every line of code in there. It's been checked and rechecked, and tested to death.
Yes, NASA has a problem. But if your code had this bug, would you know about it now? Or only after an end of the year actually occured in production?
What replaces them? I dunno, when I started my job I was given the employee handbook, and time to read it. It's not long. It just says "company equipment is provided to you to do your work, and within the discression of your supervisors should only be used for such." Then it has a short paragraph about sexual harassment policy. Not a big long list of verbotens, just an understanding that (a) the primary purpose of company owned equipment is work, not personal use (though some personal use is of course OK), and (b) you must respect your fellow employees and not do stupid stuff that intimidates, harasses, offends, etc.
Creating a 5 page policy that nobody's going to read isn't really required.
Slashdot Mirror
Why don't they just delete all the un-notable and un-encyclopaedic pop culture, tv show, movie and sci-fi trivia that's filling it up and starting to outweigh the rest. That ought to save a few terabytes, and help focus on what's unique about Wikipedia.
My old Toughbook CF-71 (300Mhz!) is still working great, with an upgraded HDD and RAM (though recent versions of Linux are having trouble with power management/hibernation), after all these years. It's got a big old handle, useful to carry along anywhere, gathering data, or to whip out to work on something (have to wrangle the GPS serial cables though). Been dropped and squashed and bounced. Hasn't yet been rained on.
The real question is will it survive extreme cold. And will it survive sudden chilling or sudden heating.
The sad truth is that Verizon has the best (consistent) coverage in the northeast once you get outside of high population areas.
Hmm, that's funny, I update/upgrade my Debian 'stable' server periodically, and have never needed to edit a config file.
I update/upgrade my Debian 'unstable' workstation all the time, and only occasionally have to double-check it's update of my config files.
It basically just works....
Reed
Why get into another stupid global warming debate? Nasa's Earth science missions are among its most benefitial contributions to science in the US. Who cares if US CO2 is to blame, or about Kyoto, the fact is that the Earth's weather and geography are really complex and really interesting, and we should study them. It doesn't matter whether or not you think so called "global warming" is bogus or not, it's a fact that (a) weather and climate change over the years, and (b) it has direct consequences to human life TODAY.
One of the greatest effects that creation of NASA has had is to develop amazing Earth-observing technologies and sciences.
If the US government thinks that NASA has too big a budget, they should fund EO and other actual atmospheric and Earth science programs, and trim the Buck Rogers stuff.
How can understanding how our planet works and how we can better survive on it efficiently and effectively be some kind useless left-wing hippie treehugger nonsense? It's critical for the continuing survival of the massive and ever-increasing number of homo sapiens on this little rock in space.
Reed
PS. for some incredibly inspiring, beautiful, and interesting images, take a look at http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImag
To learn about real global climate and weather events with seriously real effects on human life TODAY, read some of the topics at http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/.
Good thing the east coast network is safe. Makes sense, since only us east coast programmers can write good code :D :ducks:
It's not really Jobs that wants the control (though he is into control), it's the cell phone provider.
The scenario you describe is pretty similar to what we want to do at http://www.interreality.org./
It's a really good idea to check out your credit report (at http://www.annualcreditreport.com/ by the way, sometimes it can just have dumb mistakes on it. For example, my report had another family member's credit cards in it, so I filed a dispute and it's now all correct.
They will also offer extra services along with the credit report (such as calculating and showing you a credit score, though that's only a few bucks so maybe it's worth it) that you have to make sure you don't ask for by accident.
Somehow MS convinced them...
The article is basically a big ad for Microsoft's robotics software (which actually is pretty interesting btw) and ignores most of the past and current developments in actual robotics and computer sciences.
But the main thing is that CF bulbs last far longer than incandesncent (6 years and counting on some of mine) and so people will be buying them much less often. Part of the reason Walmart is so successful is that the type, quality and price of their merchendise are set up for a lot of repeat business...
This sounds like a job for an Add-On (Extension). They're easy to write, once you take care of all the boilerplate XML crap.
In general, browsers ought to make users more aware of the parts of their current URL, and maybe also of link destinations (also mail client).
For example, seperate the URL into its parts (scheme, host, path). Display some of the WHOIS info below the hostname, and some info from the SSL certificate if it has one.
This would help people spot phishing scams or other suspicious activity.
Reed
What the hell are you talking about??
So, what exactly is the crime you're investigating?
And how is the FBI going to have *any* influence over authorities in Russia?
You don't want error prone or corrupt voting procedures... but you want to centralize voting?? That's nuts.
I live in a town of 300, about 150 people voted this election. I'd much rather have people I recognize and live with carefully counting those 150 paper ballots (with me watching) rather than my state or the US trying to run millions of ballots through counting machines, or mandating the same possibly corrupt electronic touchscreen machine for everyone, with almost NO transparency or accountability.
Here's a trick I leaned about either on /. or somewhere else: make a spam trap. It's a CGI script that adds the client's address to a blacklist. Put a hidden link to that CGI script at the beginning of every page. Then put that script in robots.txt. If we assume that most spam crawlers do not honor robots.txt then you can block most of them after they've only crawled a couple of pages. You should clear out your blacklist periodically since it will get really full fast. Also note that it may take a day or two for legitimate spiders like Googlebot to re-fetch your robots.txt.
Other ideas:
Use a contact form.
Use a different email address than your normal email address on a page. Change it frequently.
But who is "the government"? Is it the US government? State government? Town?
Maybe you should, in fact, read the article...
Forget the news.
Incumbants are easy, go to thomas.loc.gov and your state legislature's website, and look up the voting records.
Challengers are harder. vote-smart.org includes a questionaire on issues they might have filled out, and endorsements by certain groups. At vote-smart or your state's website (it varies) find out where their campaign contributions came from. Then go to the candidat's website and read their promises with a very critical eye. Then compare to incumbant. In the end of course, all you have to go on with a challenger is their promises, so consider them always in comparison to the incumbant.
Good luck
Sounds to me like you need to stop buying from Dell.
Yes.
The difference between NASA's in-house code and M$ofts is that NASA is 100% sure about every line of code in there. It's been checked and rechecked, and tested to death.
Yes, NASA has a problem. But if your code had this bug, would you know about it now? Or only after an end of the year actually occured in production?
What replaces them? I dunno, when I started my job I was given the employee handbook, and time to read it. It's not long. It just says "company equipment is provided to you to do your work, and within the discression of your supervisors should only be used for such." Then it has a short paragraph about sexual harassment policy. Not a big long list of verbotens, just an understanding that (a) the primary purpose of company owned equipment is work, not personal use (though some personal use is of course OK), and (b) you must respect your fellow employees and not do stupid stuff that intimidates, harasses, offends, etc.
Creating a 5 page policy that nobody's going to read isn't really required.